“She was an eighty-year-old grandmother! Was she supposed to go to the post office every day for Radu’s sake?”
“I guess not.”
“Of course not. She just waited for her granddaughter to come back in September, and then she handed her the postcards all at once, in a plastic bag.” He seemed particularly impressed by the plastic bag, and indeed a moment later he repeated this detail. “Ninety postcards in a plastic bag.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, though I was laughing again, too.
“What’s so terrible? The girl got the cards in the end. Her grandmother could have just thrown them out. He was lucky.”
“No he wasn’t!” I said. “They must have seemed so boring and repetitive, when she read them all in a row like that. One day at a time it would be much less boring.”
“Hmm,” said Ivan. “You’ve got a point. Reading ninety cards in one day is different from reading one card per day for ninety days.” He leaned back in his chair and stared into space, apparently satisfied with the conclusion we had reached.
“So what happened in the end?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“With your roommate and the girl.”
“Oh—nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, they met, they took a long walk, there was some kind of a river, or maybe it was a moon. I forget the details. Then she said to him, ‘Radu. Do you know how to make somebody fall in love with you, if they aren’t already?’” He paused and looked at me. “Do you know the answer?”
“How to make someone fall in love with you?” I flushed. “No.”
He was already laughing—it almost prevented him from uttering the joke. “‘You have to improve your soul.’ That’s what she told Radu. Ha! Ha!”
I suddenly became unable to laugh. “Improve your soul,” I repeated, and I felt my voice shake. “I’ll try to remember.”
Ivan stopped laughing. “I didn’t mean that,” he said.
But it was no use. Everything he said seemed to reach me so directly—everything, starting with Radu and his postcards, seemed to bear some bad omen. I could barely speak, and he kept up the whole conversation all by himself. He said funny, surprising, and charming things, all of which distressed me deeply. He said that when he was home in Hungary he felt that he would have to entertain his parents and his sisters and take them out; two years ago they had all gone to Florence in his mother’s very small Mazda, him and his mother and his sister and his friend Imre, and they had lived in that car for three days. All that time he had been taking some kind of class, there in the car, to fulfill his Social Analysis requirement. Harvard had given him core credit for driving around Italy with four people in his mother’s tiny Mazda.
“You’re always sad when you leave Rome,” he said at some point. “You’re always depressed until you go back.”
He talked about learning to ride a motorcycle, about getting the license. His youngest sister had visited him and they took road trips to New York and to Annapolis. His sister wasn’t supposed to mention the motorcycle to their parents, only then she did. But she went back before he did, so she was the only one who got a hard time. Periodically Ivan would say I should talk more and keep him from bullshitting. It wasn’t clear to me in what sense he meant “bullshit.” I had the uneasy feeling I was being warned about something. I said no, it was interesting. He said he just didn’t want to feel that he was telling me all this bullshit.
He talked about his Czech dentist, how she came to Budapest and he was excited to show her around, except that she came with her grouchy husband, who didn’t like anything. The figure of the dentist’s grouchy husband seemed to hold some dire portent.
When the waiter brought the bill, I reached for my combination keychain/wallet.
“You didn’t honestly think I was going to let you pay for this, did you?” said Ivan. He had a men’s leather wallet. We left and started walking. We ended up at a bridge to the Business School. Ivan said there was a church there, or a garden, something we looked for but never found.
“There are two bridges you can take,” he said as we crossed over the highway.
“Oh,” I said.
“This is the less romantic one.”
We were walking on a winding asphalt path through manicured lawns. There were lots of shrubs and, here and there, a brick or stone building. People were playing Frisbee. At one point, in my alacrity to keep the right distance from Ivan, I stepped on a Scotch terrier. It yelped. I registered a woman’s surprised expression. “I’m so sorry!” I exclaimed. We had passed before she had time to answer.
“You sounded really sorry, about that dog,” said Ivan.
I tried not to look stricken.
“Do you like animals?” Ivan asked.
I thought about it. I had no idea if I liked animals. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“You don’t?”
“Well, I always feel resentful that they don’t really like me. But I’m still sorry to step on them.”
“Animals don’t like you? Why not?”
“Well, I mean they can’t really like you—like a person can.”
“Aha. You can’t forgive them for not being people.”
“I used to have a dog, and I had a recurring nightmare that he could talk, all along. He said, ‘All you do is patronize me, you talk to me like an idiot, you give me a stupid name.’”
“What was the dog’s name?”
Before I could answer, Ivan pulled me by the elbow so I stumbled off the path, out of the way of a heavyset man who whizzed by on Rollerblades, brushing my arm. The man was wearing knee pads, elbow pads, and a helmet. Just ahead of us he hit a small bump in the asphalt, wobbled, and regained his balance.
“Ah, I was really hoping he would fall,” Ivan said. “I would have laughed a lot.”
I felt utterly crushed. How could he want to see somebody fall? Was that why he had agreed to see me? As we walked on, I stared at my feet, pondering the likelihood that I would misstep. I noticed that Ivan was also regarding my feet with a preoccupied expression. But when our eyes met, he smiled. “Cool shoes,” he said.
We walked to the river, to the edge of a highway, and came to a supermarket and went inside. It was so strange to see normal people buying groceries. There was a promotion on strawberries. Boxes of strawberries had been stacked into a castlelike formation, flanked by cans of whipped cream.
“I wonder what we could do with that,” Ivan said, somehow almost angrily, looking at the whipped cream. I felt my face flush. We decided to buy some strawberries. In the checkout line, we both noticed a magazine called Self. Ivan said he didn’t think they could tell him anything he didn’t already know.
? ? ?
We were walking on some sort of highway, alongside multiple lanes of whooshing cars and trucks. We came upon a grassy island in the road. There were some chairs on the grass, and a rusty shovel, like props in some depressing play.