“Do you need some help?” he asked after a moment.
I turned again. He was fully clothed. “I don’t think so,” I said, wondering why I would need help putting on my own clothes.
“You might need help holding up the towel,” he said.
“Holding up the towel,” I repeated. I deduced that he was proposing that I take off my bathing suit while he held up a towel as a screen. I tried to imagine it. Would he be holding the towel around me somehow, or only in front? Which way would I be facing? Which way would he be facing? What about the other directions? And what was the point, when there was nobody there besides him and the ducks?
I told him that I was just going to put my clothes on over my bathing suit.
“I don’t think you should do that,” he said, in such a definitive tone that I felt shocked.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s wet, it’s windy. You’ll be cold.”
I wondered why I felt so much resistance to letting him hold a towel in front of me while I took off my clothes. After all, I was the one with the crush. Later, when he was gone, wouldn’t I wish to be back here again, just as we were now?
“Just think,” he said. “What would your mother say?”
Tears welled to my eyes. My mother would be sorry for me.
“I mean—she wouldn’t want you to catch a cold. Maybe she would be mad at me if she thought I made you catch a cold.”
“I—” I tried to answer, but couldn’t. I looked at the ground.
“Okay, okay, Selin, it’s up to you,” he said.
Silently I collected my jeans, T-shirt, and plaid shirt, and put them all on over my damp bathing suit. I sat on a log to put on my shoes. The sun broke through the clouds, staining them orange. It became a little warmer. We walked back to the entrance, so I could use the bathroom. A sign said not to flush paper towels down the toilet. The toilet was just a board with a hole in it—there wasn’t any flush.
“Do you want to head back now?” Ivan asked, back outside.
“Do you have to head back?” I asked.
“Not right now. We have time to watch the sunset.”
We climbed back over the fence and walked for a comically long period of time, without being able to find the sun. “Don’t worry, we’ll find it,” said Ivan. “At the latest, by tomorrow morning.”
I thought how wonderful it would be to walk around with him until the following morning. I really felt that way, even though he stressed me out so much, and all we ever did was mishear each other and say “What?” all the time. Just then the pond came into sight, and suspended over it the quivering molten yolk of the sun. We sat on a log and watched it sink toward the horizon.
“Did you know I brought you a book?” said Ivan.
“No.”
He took a slim green library book out of his bag. It was fairy tales, in Russian. The first tale was called “The Something Goat.” Neither of us knew what kind of goat it was. Clearly, there was no avoiding goats. Leaning over the first page we established that a merchant had three daughters. He built a new house. The eldest daughter went to the house and something came to her. The youngest daughter also went to the house. She was sad, Ivan said—pathetic.
“Pathetic?” I echoed. Ivan knew more Russian than I did now—he had skipped a semester and started going to Slavic 102, because there weren’t enough students and otherwise it was going to be canceled.
Ivan nodded. “Maybe not pathetic exactly, but sort of pitiful.”
It grew too dark to make out the print. Ivan said he thought the Hungarian word for goat was borrowed from Turkish. The words were indeed similar. Then we compared “grass” and “cow” and “pig.” They were different. “Apple” was the same, and so was “boot.”
“How many words do you think we can come up with, if we keep going?” asked Ivan.
“A lot, right? I mean, we know a lot of words.”
“Well, we would count only the hits.”
“Oh! Then I don’t know.”
We walked back to the parking lot. It was getting dark faster and faster.
? ? ?
There was no self-serve island at the gas station, so we stopped at the full-service one and got off the motorcycle. A skinny freckled boy ambled toward us. Ivan was looking at the gas prices. The boy’s eyes met mine. I understood right away that he was the same age as me, and I knew that he knew the same about me. Ivan unscrewed the gas cap. The boy unhooked the nozzle and handed it to him. We watched Ivan fill the tank.
“Cool bike,” said the boy.
“Thanks.”
“Yamaha?”
“Suzuki.”
It said SUZUKI right on the tank.
“Huh.” The boy took Ivan’s money and sauntered back to the station building.
“That full service was amazing,” Ivan observed, starting the ignition.
Back in Cambridge, the bank clock read 8:40. We went to Ivan’s dining hall. The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered. In a corner, a girl was staring at a stack of flash cards with incredible ferocity, as if she were going to eat them.
On a table near the hot-water machine lay the greater part of a wrecked cake, with still-legible cursive letters reading HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAY BABIES! There was a basket of bananas next to the cake. We sat at a table with two cups of tea and some bananas. Ivan told a story about how he had been at a café in Budapest with his girlfriend and an arrogant waiter wouldn’t let him, Ivan, order in Hungarian.
“He insisted on speaking to my girlfriend in English. He was so proud of his English. She couldn’t understand a word he said, but still he wouldn’t give up.”
We sipped tea and looked out the window.
“One thing I don’t get about you,” Ivan said, “is to what extent you feel American or Turkish. How is it for you when you’re in Turkey? Do you feel different?”
“I feel like a kid.”
“Like a little girl, huh? It must be really terrible for you.”
“I learned Turkish when I was three, so I don’t know enough words. I can’t talk about anything,” I said. “How about you? Do you feel differently when you’re in Hungary?”
Ivan pushed his paper cup in various directions, as if it were a king under check. He said that in Hungary people were more honest. If they thought you were doing something stupid, they let you know right away. Americans were polite and remote, as if there were bubbles separating everyone. “You can’t tell if someone really likes you,” he said. “You can’t get close. There are all these blocks.”
“Blocks,” I echoed.
“I know that’s the cliché about America: ‘Oh, it’s so impersonal! Oh, I feel like a number!’ That’s not what I mean. I’m not saying the Hungarian way is better. In general, I think isolation is a good thing. With most people I’m so thankful not to be really close to them. In Hungary they would immediately start to tell you all this shit.” He paused, apparently thinking about different shit he had heard in Hungary. “Of course,” he continued, “it’s also possible to feel too protected. In Hungary I feel more vulnerable.”
“I see,” I said. “So here you feel more invulnerable.”