Svetlana closed her eyes, released my hand, and curled up against Bill. With an escalating, deafening roar, the plane finally lifted off.
Outside the window, the city lights grew tiny. It was exactly midnight. Then there was nothing below us but clouds. The person in front of me reclined his chair until he was lying in my lap. I felt almost tenderly toward him. Time passed. A flight attendant asked if we wanted the American or the Pakistani meal. I asked for the Pakistani meal.
“There isn’t any,” said the attendant. “Here’s an American meal.”
I opened the foil lid and looked at the American meal. I couldn’t tell what it was. The man in the seat ahead of me started tossing and turning. His pillow fell into my dessert. The pink whipped foam formed meaningful-looking patterns on the white fabric. I saw a bird—that meant travel.
I turned on the light and tried to read Madame Bovary. One sentence made a particularly strong impression on me: “Often some prowling nocturnal animal, a hedgehog or a weasel, would rustle through the foliage, and occasionally they heard the sound of a ripe peach dropping from one of the trees along the wall.” It reminded me of the video for “Human Behavior,” where Bj?rk was chased through the forest by a giant hedgehog.
? ? ?
Around two o’clock, Ivan appeared on the opposite side of the plane, peering at the row numbers. He stopped at 44. He was looking very closely at the grandfatherly Pakistani man in 44K.
I unbuckled my seat belt and stuffed Madame Bovary in the seat pocket. The way to the aisle was completely obstructed by the intertwined sleeping forms of Svetlana and Bill. Ivan had turned away from the Pakistani guy and was rubbing the back of his neck.
I waved, but he didn’t see me. I flashed the overhead light on and off a few times. Finally, he walked over. “My friend switched my seat,” I said. He glanced down at Svetlana. I tried to squeeze by without waking her, but her eyelids flew open and her eyes focused on Ivan.
“What?” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just trying to get out.”
She turned her head to face me. “Oh,” she said, and drew her knees up to let me pass.
Ivan and I walked around the plane, looking for somewhere to talk. There wasn’t anywhere. We stopped outside the toilets, leaning on opposite walls.
“I thought you were home already,” I said.
“You forget I had to graduate,” he said. “I have a degree now.”
I held out my hand. After a moment, he took it. I looked down. Was this really his hand—the hand that he wrote with, the hand he did everything with? How was it possible? Then I worried I had held his hand for too long, and let go.
“What have you been doing since graduation?”
“I had to get to New York,” he said. “I rented a car. I almost stopped in New Jersey. I thought, Maybe I’ll see what’s going on with this place. But I wasn’t on good terms with you.” He met my eyes.
“I see,” I said.
“So I went straight to New York. I played basketball with some Hungarians in Brooklyn. They were really Hungarian, even for Hungarians—they made me feel like an outsider. It was pretty boring. Also I don’t like basketball. People always expect me to be good because I’m tall.” He glanced at me. “Are you good at basketball?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
There was a pause. I asked how long he would be in Paris. He didn’t answer. “One day I almost got beat up,” he said. “Downtown. I was buying a CD player for my little sister’s birthday, and the guy was trying to rip me off. I tried to hit him, over the counter, and then he was going to jump over, but some other guy stopped it.”
“When is your sister’s birthday?”
“I just missed it,” he said. “I really wanted to be there. I miss her birthday, every year.”
“But you got the CD player in the end?”
He nodded. “I got one from somewhere else. It’s underneath us.” He pointed at the floor. “With my copy of the literary magazine.”
“Will you be in Paris for long?” I asked.
He seemed not to hear. “Stuff like that can really bring out the sadist in you,” he said. “I’m standing there thinking of all the different ways I’ll rip out this guy’s guts.”
I fell silent. Why did he have a sadist in him? And why didn’t he want to tell me how long he would be in Paris? I decided to try again. “How long will you be in Paris?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” he said. “Three or four days. But aren’t you supposed to be really pissed off at me? And I’m supposed to be really hurt—isn’t that how it is?”
“What?”
“I’m supposed to be really hurt by your last email. And you’re supposed to be really pissed off. You’re not supposed to be making small talk.” I knew “small talk” was a phrase he had learned from me. And I knew he was right—I was supposed to be mad. But I felt so happy to see him. It was impossible to hide how happy I felt, and even if it had been possible, I wouldn’t have wanted to.
“I wasn’t hurt,” he said. “I was like, pfff . . .” He waved at the floor.
When he said that, I felt hurt for a moment. “Well, then what’s the problem?” I said.
He sighed. “So you’re not pissed off?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“But you were, earlier.”
I nodded.
A flight attendant bumped my shoe with a mop. “The restroom is empty,” he said. “This is a waiting area for the restroom.”
“Our seats aren’t together,” said Ivan. “We’re standing here so we can talk.”
“I ask you to return to your seat,” said the attendant, raising his mop.
We walked along the shadowy aisles, among rows of sleeping blue bodies with gaping mouths. We stopped in an alcove in front of an emergency door. Ivan sat on the flat part of the door, where DO NOT SIT HERE was printed in red. I leaned on the wall, where it read DO NOT LEAN. On the movie screen, a tank blew up and a woman in fatigues dove into a ditch.
“Where are you going from Paris?” asked Ivan.
“What do you mean? Budapest.”
“I remember that part,” he said. “I meant before.”
“Nowhere else—just Paris. Where are you going?”
“I think to Lake Geneva, to visit Tomi. He’s in Montreux in the summer. His wife is Swiss.” Something about how he said “his wife” sounded racy. “I’m already going to hitchhike to Budapest, so why not stop in Geneva? Maybe also in Venice.”
I nodded. I had never heard of anyone hitchhiking anywhere as their first-choice mode of transportation. Ivan asked whether I was going to travel around Europe after I left Hungary.
“I’m going to Turkey,” I said. I didn’t really like to think about after I left.
“Oh, that’s good. It’s good that you’re getting back to Turkey. I’ll be in Tokyo then. I finally got my ticket. I really wanted a stopover in Bangkok, and I finally managed it. I’ll be there three days. I’m really happy to get back to Thailand.”
I wondered what it was about different places that made him want to go there, or get there, or get back there, and why it was good that I was getting back to Turkey.
“What’s Thailand like?” I asked.
“Hm? I didn’t hear you.”
“Never mind,” I said, because I didn’t actually care what Thailand was like.