We were supposed to return to the village at eight in the morning. By 7:40, all the children were lined up outside the bus. Nonetheless, the bus didn’t leave until 8:40. It wasn’t clear to me what was happening between 7:40 and 8:40—why we weren’t just getting in the bus, which was sitting right there, as was the driver. Fábián stared at me for almost the whole time. At one point I met his eyes, and immediately looked away.
Fábián and his friends spent the whole bus ride scuffling, singing, and thinking of different ways to exploit the fact that the bus had an emergency exit in the roof. Now it was the bus driver who stared at Rózsa and me, by means of a mirror over his seat.
Rózsa looked in the dictionary for words that she thought described her, and wrote them on a paper: uncharitable, unquestionable, unforgettable. I told her I agreed with “unforgettable.”
“Me?” she gasped. “Why?” Her eyes, gazing into mine, looked frightened. I wanted to tell her: You’re doing it right now.
I watched the scenery go by, wondering whether Ivan was already at the airport, whether he felt sad to leave Hungary or only excited to go to Thailand. It seemed weird how he cared so much what country he was from, but also cared so much about going to other countries. Or no, that wasn’t weird—he just cared about countries. He thought they were meaningful concepts, and that it really mattered which one you were from and which ones you visited.
After leaving everyone else at the school, the bus driver drove Rózsa and me home, and even carried our bags to Piri’s door. We had dinner at Rózsa’s parents’ house. Her parents were unwell and didn’t eat with us. We ate from trays in her bedroom, which she shared with her sister: a person she had never mentioned to me ever, not once.
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On Sunday, I went to a horse show with Juli, the girl with whom I would be living for the last week of the program. I wasn’t sure what a horse show was going to be. Even once we got there I wasn’t sure what it was. There was a lot of dust. Some of the horses were pulling carriages. Then there was a raffle. Juli, who was in training to be an English teacher, was convinced that she was going to win a horse. Juli’s father repeatedly offered to buy me a piglet. At first I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t laughing, and there really was a man selling piglets.
Juli said there was a beautiful horse we had to see. She led me to a wooden stall. Inside was the most delicate-boned horse with crazed eyes, completely surrounded by flies. It smelled terrible. Exactly one week ago, Ivan and I had been on a canoe. The raffle winners were announced. Juli was unshakably confident that she would win a horse—right up to the minute that they called her name and she won a goat. She tried to give it back. The raffle people laughed, then became menacing. That goat caused Juli no end of trouble. In the end, she had to hire a man with a pickup truck to drive it to a nearby village and put it up for several days, as a sort of guest, until she could find it a more permanent position with some different people.
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“Did you like the horse show?” Rózsa demanded when I came back for dinner, covered with dust and sweat.
“It was stressful,” I said. Rózsa couldn’t conceal how happy she was that I had been stressed out by the horse show.
“I know you saw the horses, but what about the gorilla?” asked Piri’s daughter, Emese. “The gorilla” turned out to be what they called Juli’s boyfriend.
Things seemed to be going okay until dinner, when I didn’t finish my potato puree. “How many ice creams have you had with Juli?” Rózsa asked, slamming down her fork. According to Rózsa, Juli hadn’t wanted to host me but had had no choice: they all had to put up with me and take their turn.
It was strange to keep meeting people after Ivan left. I had come to Hungary because of him, and now that he was gone, my reasons for being there felt increasingly unclear. The reasons had been unclear even before, but now it was somehow more glaring.
Juli and her family lived in a six-room apartment upstairs from the Elefánt Diszkó, which Juli’s father managed. A figure corresponding in both appearance and demeanor to my idea of “a broken man,” Juli’s father slept in the spare room; his work at the disco often kept him busy till four in the morning. I stayed in Juli’s sister Bernadett’s room, while Bernadett slept in the living room, on a water-sofa. The water-sofa had a dead fox draped over it.
Juli’s mother, a beautician, was very thin, with unusually bright eyes. For dinner she made a soup called “boy-catching soup” and a cake called “mother-in-law cake.” These two dishes seemed to sum up a whole worldview of entrapment and placation.
Bernadett, who was also going to be a beautician when she grew up, never did any beauty treatments at all, and thought they were stupid. She spent hours in the bath and often walked around the house wearing no clothes. “Béna,” Juli hissed. When I asked what this word meant, Juli read from the dictionary: “A paralytic—ungainly, awkward, unsightly, misshapen.”
“Don’t compliment me!” shouted Bernadett.
Juli’s dog, Blanka, a silvery pale-eyed husky, walked around the living room, dining room, and kitchen, bumping into the walls and furniture. Sometimes she climbed onto the water-sofa and sat there looking disinterested and confused, like a visitor from another planet.
Every night, Juli and Bernadett filled their pockets with rocks, and we all went out to walk Blanka. “Wolf! Wolf!” boys shouted as we approached, and they would throw rocks—not directly at the girls or the dog, but a few inches in front of them. Then Juli and Bernadett would throw rocks straight at the boys’ heads.
It was interesting: Rózsa always said that people hated her, but I never saw any sign of it, whereas Juli and Bernadett, who really lived in this state of warfare with the local boys, barely seemed to notice anything unusual, and didn’t even interrupt their conversation when they were throwing rocks at people’s heads.
When we got to the fields past the train station, Juli took off the leash and let Blanka run. Blanka was utterly transformed, her elongated body hurtling across the field, close to the ground, her tail puffed out behind her like a plume of smoke.
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We went back to the apartment through the empty disco. A mirrored ball glinted in the near-darkness. Juli poured out three tiny glasses of her favorite liquor: Charleston Follies. Bernadett lay on her back on the pool table and rolled around with her legs in the air. Juli looked at her. “Mexican bean,” she said disdainfully.
“Did you just call her a Mexican bean?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “There is a worm inside.” Juli said that Bernadett loved “to jump like goat shit on a boat.” She said this was a Hungarian expression.