“Of course it’s simple. Buy a ticket and get on a train! Who can force you to spend five weeks in a Hungarian village? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
When our first courses arrived, I discovered that I had ordered a cantaloupe filled with port. Everyone else had ordered asparagus. I had no idea how to eat a cantaloupe filled with port. It was a whole cantaloupe with just the very top cut off, filled to the brim. The patterns on the rind resembled ancient hieroglyphs.
“I have met some very attractive Hungarian men,” Bojana said. “Tall, attentive to women. I’m speaking about Budapest. In the villages, I can’t say. They may be tall but I think you might get bored.”
I saw I had been given a giant soupspoon. I dipped the edge of the spoon into the melon, causing the trembling liquid to overflow.
“Selin already has a tall, attentive Hungarian,” Svetlana said.
“Oh yes, Don Juan from the airplane! How could I forget? Maybe you will not be bored after all. The boy sounds like he could entertain you.”
I said I was easy to entertain. Bojana said it was clear I had never spent five weeks in an Eastern European village.
? ? ?
“You don’t know how miserable I was,” Svetlana was telling Bojana. “I barely left the house except to go between the apartment and the Sorbonne. I was so petrified of those thin, well-dressed French women. I already feel like a lump without you tormenting me.”
“All I want is to give you a gift, a new dress, maybe a haircut, something fun. Why is this torment? Maybe I suggested you lose five or ten pounds. Is that a crime? Me, I should lose fifteen pounds.”
“You don’t understand. When you were my age you were throwing parties for two hundred people, including Tsvetaeva’s niece and half the Polish nobility. As you keep telling me.”
Svetlana pushed back her chair. After a minute I followed her. The bathroom was up a narrow red spiral staircase. I went through the door marked DAMES.
“Don’t be sad,” I said. “Think of how you kicked a piece of wood in half.”
There was a silence. “Like—a bulldozer!” Svetlana wailed from inside the stall.
? ? ?
The next morning, Svetlana went out with her aunt. It was the first time since the airplane that she and I had been apart for any length of time. I went to a newsstand and bought a map—un plan, as though you wanted to build Paris instead of walk in it—and a pack of Gitanes. I didn’t really smoke, I had done it maybe ten times before, mostly with Lakshmi, but the blue cardboard boxes were so beautiful, with the picture of the ghostly woman leaning into a cloud, and something about being alone made me want to mark the time in some way. Lighting a match felt exciting and a little bit dangerous, and when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player—like the music was about to start. Cigarettes never made me feel sick. I had grown up around smokers, and anyway I never inhaled too deeply.
I walked around all day. Around five I stopped at a café where I ate a smoked salmon sandwich and read two chapters in Teach Yourself Hungarian. I was increasingly struck by the similarities between Hungarian and Turkish—not the actual words, but the grammar. Both languages were agglutinative, meaning that the syntax was conveyed by strings of suffixes that were tacked onto the ends of words. Both had vowel harmony, and neither had grammatical gender. Both used a single word for “he” and “she”: ? in Hungarian, o in Turkish.
? ? ?
At dusk I found myself in the Place de l’Opéra. Everything was lit up: Café Opéra, Métro Opéra, the Opéra itself, hulking cakelike in the middle. Rows of white taxis gleamed in the dark like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.
“Excuse me,” said an Asian woman, gently touching my arm. “I am looking for this building.” She showed me a guidebook written in Japanese, open to a picture of the opera building.
“That’s it,” I said, pointing.
She thanked me and started taking photographs.
At first I thought it was weird that she hadn’t recognized the building when it was standing right in front of her. Then I thought the weird thing was that anyone ever did recognize a giant domed green and gold building from a tiny flat gray picture.
? ? ?
All the lights were on in Bojana’s kitchen. Mozart’s Requiem played at low volume on a tinny stereo. Svetlana was sitting with her back to the door. Her hair was layered in a way that brought out all the different shades of blond, like neatly composed tailfeathers. The haircut had taken almost two hours, which she had spent explaining in French to her aunt’s stylist that external appearances are meaningless. The stylist had disagreed, maintaining that truth was beauty and beauty truth.
“Have a kumquat.” Svetlana slid the bowl toward me. “I’ve been craving extreme sensations. I wonder if Bojana has any of that mustard.”
In the brightly lit refrigerator, black champagne bottles lay on their bellies like black dogs with wire muzzles. Two oblong root vegetables gleamed palely through a plastic drawer. Then Svetlana opened the drawer and we saw that they weren’t root vegetables at all, but enormous eggs. This was the kind of mystery we could talk about for hours. Were they goose eggs? Svetlana said the eggs could never have fit inside a goose, let alone come out. She thought they were ostrich eggs. But how had Bojana managed to acquire ostrich eggs during just nineteen hours in Paris?
Svetlana’s new dress lay nestled in tissue in a striped shopping bag. It was black and trapezoidal—broad in the shoulders, tapering toward the legs.
“Nika picked it out,” she said. “We’d been there for two hours. Bojana kept choosing these clingy little numbers, and then Nika would bring out something big and black, like, ‘C’est sexy, mais c’est plus androgyne.’” Svetlana replaced the dress in the bag. “Nika had changed. She was hysterical. In February she went back to Belgrade for the first time since the war, because her mother was sick. She stayed there until her mother died in April, and then came back to Paris like this. At one point she laughed so violently that she dislocated her jaw. You could see it was something that happened to her regularly. She was in a lot of pain, but we couldn’t tell at first because her jaw was stuck in a laughing position. Fortunately she knew how to fix it by herself. It made a horrible noise. Bojana says that she needs to develop a more sober outlook.”
? ? ?
Bojana had also bought Svetlana a womanly perfume, called Feminité du Bois. It was so woody and musky and strong that one spritz of it gave us both a headache. We opened the windows. It didn’t help.
“Hey Svetlana,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“‘All is syphilis,’” I said, and we dissolved in laughter.
? ? ?
The next day, we all went together to La Villette. It was about to rain. Walking through the gardens, we came upon an orange metal sculpture with a bar on a pivot. Every time the wind gusted, the bar swayed and made a squeaking sound.
“What is that?” Robin asked.