? ? ?
At the dock I sat on a bench under a willow tree, trying to make a plan. The first, main thing was not to start crying again—to be a good sport. That thought itself made my throat ache, because hadn’t I been a good sport, the way I had listened to all those stories about bullets, and sung the Beatles, and guarded the canoe? I ate so much pork, I thought, and blinked back a tear.
I found a phone booth and tried to call Svetlana. “All the lines to this country are busy,” said the operator. I didn’t understand how that was possible. After some hesitation, I called my mother. She wasn’t at home, but I found her at her lab. I didn’t know at first how to explain the situation, but then I just told her that Ivan was going to Thailand, and she seemed to understand just how I felt. She told me to go see some beautiful things. Beauty encouraged the production of endorphins, which helped make you feel better and prevented inflammation. I was in the phone booth for a long time. An Italian woman kept yelling “Telefono!” and banging on the glass. I pretended not to notice.
I walked around looking for beauty. I saw a ruined bridge, crumbling towers, sunlight, a garden, closetlike buildings, buildings inside other buildings, plaques with skulls and crossbones, and a ceramic Madonna in the shape of a pound cake. I sat in a church for a long time writing in my notebook.
Five nuns were chanting in the back. People kept coming into the church, seeing the nuns, and leaving respectfully. Nobody made me leave. I spent the whole day alternately walking around and writing.
At sundown, I headed back to the campground. Rózsa met me at the gate.
“Where have you been?”
I told her about the Thai embassy, and about how I’d gone looking for them at the beach. I tried to make these things sound complicated enough to have taken the whole day.
“You have been loafing,” she said. Rózsa was no dummy.
? ? ?
I made friends with the children. Two little girls, Zsófi and Cica, followed me everywhere. Zsófi perched on the arm of my chair and smiled down at me, while Cica sat in my lap smiling up. “Your hair clip is beautiful,” they said softly. “Your bag is beautiful. You speak Hungarian very well.” They loved to hit the badminton bird back and forth. Sometimes they asked me to brush their hair. I was their favorite and I was proud.
There was another little girl, Erzsébet, who also always tried to sit on people’s laps and make eye contact. She was slightly older, lumpen, potatolike. Nobody wanted her to sit on their lap. At first, I felt sorry and tried to pet her. “You needn’t pretend to love Erzsébet,” Rózsa said testily. And in fact I soon found Erzsébet unbearable, and would go to great lengths to avoid her. I was scared by how repulsed I felt, by her simpering and coyness, by her abjectness that seemed somehow aggressive, by the way she repeated my name and tried to climb onto my shoulders.
The boys also wanted to interact, though they went about it differently. They liked to run up, say something, and run away fast. Sometimes they asked about song lyrics that they didn’t understand. “‘I would never break your heart,’” ádám read from a paper folded up in his pocket—he wanted to know what it was to break someone’s heart.
“What is ‘Tokyo ghetto pussy’?” asked another boy. A few of them nodded—they had all wondered this.
Fábián, who was fourteen, was always up on the roof, or jumping out of a tree. I saw a lot of him because the first aid kit was in our cabin. One afternoon, when I was sitting on the cot reading and Rózsa was putting ointment on his bee sting, he looked right at me and said something I didn’t understand. Rózsa spoke to him sharply. I figured he had been making fun of me. But after he left, Rózsa gave me a significant look. “He wants something from you,” she said. “I told him that you already have a friend and you’re too old.”
Did it never end? Where did it end? The next time Fábián came running into the cabin like a crazed revolutionary, a bloodstained T-shirt wrapped around his arm, I felt a little jolt.
“Can’t the American girl understand anything I’m saying?” he asked Rózsa as she got out the iodine.
“Nothing,” said Rózsa.
“But I’ve heard her speak Hungarian.”
“She imitates like a parrot.”
“Parrot,” I echoed.
Fábián’s eyes widened. He lingered another moment, staring at me, then ran outside.
? ? ?
Rózsa told the cafeteria server not to give me too much of anything because I wasn’t hungry. This was untrue. It turned out to be a ploy to get me to go to the supermarket with her, which I would have done anyway.
The supermarket had everything. I had never felt so happy to see Whiskas, the cat food. I bought almond cookies and Rózsa bought sanitary pads. I had my period, too—we had ended up synchronized. In the beauty aisle, Rózsa gazed at boxes of hair dye. “I want to paint my hair, but oh, it is expensive,” she announced in a mechanical tone, like someone reading a teleprompter. Outside, I offered her a cookie, but she said she was on a diet.
“You don’t need to be on a diet,” I said, which I thought was both truthful and polite. But she gave me a passionate look and said, “Needless eating is horrible—I can’t understand it. When you eat needless things, you will get fat.”
We walked for a while in silence.
“I’m not happy,” Rózsa said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you worried about school?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Because I’m alone.”
I felt a wave of exasperation and despair. Was that what all of life was going to be like—you had to be sad when you didn’t have a boyfriend?
“We have each other,” I said tensely.
At the train station, Rózsa started haggling with one of the old women who sold flowers. She picked up a twenty-forint bouquet of carnations and wildflowers with one red rose in it, all tied tightly together with a rubber band. Rózsa wanted to buy just the rose. She got it in the end, for five forints. “This is your rose,” she said. “You will put it in your glass and then we are not alone.”
She said we didn’t have to be back at the camp yet—we could take a walk, wherever I wanted. There wasn’t anywhere I especially wanted to go. I suggested we go where she wanted. “No,” she said. “Where you want.”
“But I want to go where you want.”
“No, I must suffer. We must go somewhere I don’t want.”
I thought it over. “Why don’t you think of somewhere that will make you suffer and we can go there?”
“Selin doesn’t want anything,” Rózsa said in a mocking voice. “Is it true?”
“I wish.”
“Why?”
“There is no suffering if you don’t want anything.”
Rózsa’s look got even more smoldering. “That’s balderdash,” she said.
We sat on a parapet. A cool wind rushed under the blackening sky, a baby somewhere was crying, and a big yellow umbrella with a beer logo tumbled down a hill.
“I was there—where you want to go,” Rózsa said. “I was there on Monday.”