What is man that thou art mindful of him, I thought over and over, until the lump in my throat subsided.
I got up and rummaged in my suitcase—the lump momentarily resurged when I encountered the bag of Blow Pops I had bought, as instructed by Peter, to give as rewards to the Hungarian schoolchildren—until I found sweatpants, socks, a long-sleeved shirt, and a towel. I got dressed, lay down, draped the towel over my legs, and listened to a discount cassette of Brahms’s four-handed piano compositions until I fell asleep.
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When I woke up, the sun was blazing. Svetlana was gone. I was lying under the bath towel and the quilt. I followed the sound of voices into the kitchen.
“Hey, Selin,” said Svetlana. “I tried to wake you up to ask what you wanted, but it was impossible. So I just got you a croissant.” It bore no resemblance to any croissant I had ever seen in America. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but you have a very different personality when you’re sleeping. In waking life you’re Miss Easygoing, but at night you kept stealing the blanket. I pulled it back, and you were really aggressive.”
The croissant was crisp and soft and flaky at the same time. Just biting it made you feel cared for.
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The Louvre caused Svetlana terrible anxieties, which she was able to control by focusing monomaniacally on one painting per visit. In general we both thought you got more from staring at one picture for twenty minutes than from looking at twenty pictures for a minute each. For nearly half an hour, we stared at a tiny fifteenth-century illumination of a Madonna in a lime-green robe confronting a silver whale, apparently indoors. Svetlana said that she identified with that Madonna more than with any other woman in any other painting. She kept asking me what painting I identified with. I didn’t identify with anyone in any paintings.
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I finally identified with a painting in the Picasso Museum. Titled Le Buffet de Vauvenargues, it showed a gigantic black sideboard scribbled over with doors, drawers, pigeonholes, moldings, and curlicues. Two roughly sketched figures, one big and one small, flanked the sideboard. The sideboard was the thing between them.
Svetlana said I had to take a more proactive view of my personhood. She said it wasn’t okay to identify with furniture. Indeed, Sartre had illustrated “bad faith” using the analogy of thinking of oneself as a chair—quite specifically, a chair. Objective claims could be made about a chair, but not about a person, because a person was in constant flux. I said the buffet was also in flux. I said its existence preceded its essence. Of all the museums we saw, I thought the Picasso Museum was the most interesting, because it was all about one person, and because it reminded me of Ivan. At the same time, if you looked at it a certain way it seemed like a monument to destroyed women—their ossified bodies and shattered psyches.
In Versailles we shuffled through room after room filled with gold and mirrors. After a while, the number of gold-encrusted rooms began to seem not just extravagant but actually insane.
We walked to Montmartre. The white dome of Sacré-C?ur, glimmering in the twilight, resembled a giant alien egg. Inside, women were weeping and lighting candles. No men were weeping—only women. Two tables away from us at the outdoor café, a small boy in an orange puffy vest was sobbing with no restraint. A man sat across from the boy, methodically eating an omelet.
At the Pompidou Center we saw an exhibit based on Georges Bataille’s concept of “the formless.” There was a Turkish film festival in the cinema downstairs. Svetlana and I ran into the screening room just as the lights were going down. The movie was in Turkish with French subtitles, so we could both understand, by different means. The whole action took place in a bar, with only two characters—the bartender and a man with an annoying smile fixed on his face. Sometimes, the man would dream about a woman, who would appear through a mist, dressed in pink. The rest of the time the man just talked to the bartender about God, wine, and love. Periodically, he asked if somebody called Mahmut Bey had arrived yet. The bartender always said no.
Near the end, the bartender asked who Mahmut Bey was. “Mahmut Bey is . . . coldness,” said the man, through his annoying smile. “Mahmut Bey is wetness. Mahmut Bey is friendlessness, winelessness.”
It was a truly terrible movie. Still, we were glad we had seen it, because of Mahmut Bey. We thought of him often after that.
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“The boy who convinced you to go to Hungary, he must be very handsome,” Svetlana’s aunt Bojana told me. “You can find an excellent coffee in Budapest. I see that you are looking at my tea tray. Do you like it? It’s quite a good tray. I will make it a gift to you. But not now—only when you get married.”
We had left Jeanne’s apartment, and were drinking tea in Bojana’s cavernous penthouse. Robin and Bill were staying in the guest suite, while Svetlana and I were in the spare room, which had two futons, a silk carpet, and French windows that gave onto a long stone balcony facing the Musée d’Orsay. Hanging on one wall was a small oil painting of a beige man pushing a wheelbarrow.
“I have put you with the Goncharova,” Bojana told us.
I didn’t know who Goncharova was. Svetlana told me later that she was a Blue Rider and Pushkin’s great-niece. The painting had been a gift from Bojana’s husband. I asked what Bojana’s husband was like. Svetlana said in a matter-of-fact tone that he spent most of his time in Stockholm with his other family. Bojana visited them every Christmas, bringing vitamins for the children. “She says they all look terribly anemic. They must take after their mother, because Uncle Gunnar is very robust. Well,” Svetlana sighed, “it’s time for the aunt-niece chat. I’ll come get you for dinner.”
I lay on one of the futons and flipped through a chess book I had borrowed from Bill in an attempt to make friends. There was a Hedgehog Defense and a Budapest Gambit. From the chapter on computers I learned that the first chess-playing automaton, known as “the Turk,” had been built in the 1760s by a Hungarian, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. Outfitted with a turban and mustache, the Turk could roll his eyes, bang his fist, and say, “échec.” He checkmated Benjamin Franklin in Paris and Frederick the Great in Prussia. I thought it was funny that the Turk said échec, because it sounded just like the Turkish word for donkey. Basically, the Turk had called Benjamin Franklin a donkey in Turkish.