“Maybe this is where we should sit,” Ivan said.
We sat on the chairs and opened the box of strawberries. I took a strawberry. I saw now that it was covered with dirt. We didn’t have any water, so I brushed it off as best I could with my hand and ate it. It was crunchy with dirt. I took another. It looked just as dirty as the first. I held it for a long time. Ivan was talking about his friends who were going to visit him that evening: a high school friend and his girlfriend, who was in a wheelchair. Apparently this friend dated only disabled women. He had started with one disabled woman, and then started dating her friend, and then a third unrelated woman—all three of them in wheelchairs. They were all really cool girls. Cars roared past, a few feet from our faces. Each contained some person or persons. None of those people had to sit on these chairs like we did. Then again, maybe they were going somewhere even worse.
Ivan and I both stared at the strawberry I was holding.
“I can’t,” I said.
He nodded. “We’ll have to bury it.” He stood, picked up the rusty shovel, and stepped on the blade to penetrate the hard earth. He dug a small hole and we put in the strawberry.
“This is the best place for it,” I said.
“I know,” Ivan said. “Should we just bury all of them?”
We buried all the strawberries and resumed our walk.
Several times I tried to talk, so he wouldn’t have to do it all himself. The words were always wrong. I said someone was die-hard, and he thought I was saying something about their heart. I described someone else as “starting to crack.”
“Crack?”
“Like fall apart. This perfect—she starts out all perfect and then suddenly starts getting upset at all these little things.” I sounded like the aphasics in our linguistics textbook: “Write, writed, not today, but yesterday.”
Ivan asked what I was doing over the summer. I didn’t know. He seemed surprised and somehow displeased. “You should try to go somewhere,” he said. He said I should apply to Let’s Go, the student budget travel guidebook series. If they chose you as a writer, you could go for the summer to any country in the world.
Ivan was going home to Hungary for seven weeks, and then to Japan with Radu for a math conference. He said mathematicians never got any vacation so they were always having conferences, for example in Honolulu. He talked about mathematicians as if they were somehow fundamentally different from other people. The conference was on environmental science, a subject about which Ivan knew nothing. But his thesis was on random walks so he made up a story about the random walks of foxes and rabbits, and the environmental scientists believed him and bought him a plane ticket to Tokyo.
I had the uncanny sensation that this conversation had been prefigured by the story of Nina: Nina, who had pretended to study the locomotion of reindeer, and whom physics kept pushing east.
? ? ?
At some point in our conversation, Ivan mentioned that strawberries grew on trees. I said I thought they grew on little plants close to the ground. No, he said—trees.
“Okay,” I said. I knew that in my life I had seen strawberries growing, on plants, but this didn’t seem like irrefutable proof that they didn’t grow on trees.
“You’re easy to convince,” he said.
We walked for three hours. On the way back we got lost and had to climb down a steep hill. I really didn’t want to climb down the hill. I actually walked into a tree and then stayed there for a minute.
“What are you doing?” Ivan asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He nodded. He said there were lots of possible ways down the hill, but probably the best way was one where you didn’t have to go through a tree. Then he started talking about the execution of Ceau?escu and his wife.
? ? ?
Ivan’s dorm room was in the corner of the eleventh floor of a concrete tower overlooking the river. The room was completely enclosed by windows, it was twilight, and being there felt like floating in a blue box. Bicycles and sculls streamed by far below with their blinking lights, like a galaxy. I saw the traffic light Ivan had written about—the one that kept changing all night like his heart. When we sat on the floor, I placed my hands next to me to feel less adrift. Ivan said that the reason his room was so clean was that he was loaning it to the friend whose girlfriend was in a wheelchair: the building had been built in the seventies and was not only riot-proof but also completely wheelchair-accessible. I hadn’t asked why his room was so clean.
Ivan’s computer was on. The sentence “What are the sparks?” was scrolling across the screen. He said it was to remind him of something, but he didn’t remember what.
“I have the same lamp,” I said, noticing his human-sized halogen lamp—the one they sold at the bookstore. Hannah and I had chipped in for it. I had never had a halogen lamp before, or seen one. I loved that lamp.
“Everyone has that lamp,” Ivan said. He said he didn’t like it, because he preferred for things to be unique, otherwise it was like eating at McDonald’s when you could be eating at some random place. He didn’t go to Baskin and Tombins, in fact he didn’t even know what it was—was it ice cream?
“It’s ice cream,” I said.
Ivan described some of his friends. One explored caves. Another was Indian, and gay. “He’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life,” Ivan said, and I felt a pang that took a moment to identify: So he’s more beautiful than me. A third friend was a typical Jewish intellectual who idiosyncratically also did crew. I had only a distant idea what crew was, and no concept of what made it an idiosyncratic pursuit for a Jewish intellectual. Ivan was also friends with Rupert Murdoch’s son, who dressed like a slob. Who was Rupert Murdoch? I knew I knew, but I couldn’t remember. A famous foxhunter?
Ivan asked what kind of music I liked, and put a Vivaldi record on a record player.
“I haven’t seen one of those since I was little,” I said.
“Yeah,” he sighed, “apparently now I have to show off to you my record player.”
We listened to the whole record. Ivan’s friends still hadn’t arrived. Ivan asked if I wanted to get dinner.
The cafeteria was like a scene from a different movie—the hexagonal trays, the workers’ paper hats, the air heavy with institutionalized chowder. I trailed behind Ivan. It was insane to me that he even ate every day, and that he was going to do it now.
I ate two forkfuls of rice. Ivan talked about the asparagus in Frankfurt. I peeled an orange, using a knife, the way my father did, so the peel all came off in one piece—the only trick I knew. Suddenly I remembered about the play.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Right now?” Ivan looked at the scroll of orange peel and the uneaten orange.