“It’s a modern-day sundial,” said Bill. He said it worked by the Earth’s magnetism.
“Oh, neat! So you can use it now, even when it’s cloudy?”
Robin asked a lot of questions about the modern-day sundial. When Bill finally told her he had made it up, they had a huge fight.
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The modern-day sundial swung and creaked, drawn by the magnetism of the Earth. Mahmut Bey was pulling it with his long friendless arm.
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Leaving Robin and Bill to reconcile, Svetlana and I went to the English bookstore. Svetlana bought the collected works of Saki, and I bought Dracula and Flaubert’s Three Tales. We spent the rest of the day on Bojana’s enormous balcony eating cherries and reading.
Svetlana, who was good at reading aloud, read me Saki’s story “Esmé.” “All hunting stories are the same,” it began. Esmé turned out to be a hyena.
One of the Flaubert stories, “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller,” was also a hunting story. Julian was obsessed with hunting, and a stag told him he would kill his own parents. Then he stopped hunting, but the minute he started hunting again, he did kill his own parents.
I really wanted to write a story about hunting and human behavior, and asked Svetlana if I could use Bojana’s typewriter. “Of course,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She set everything up for me on a little table. I had learned touch-typing in grade school on an electric Smith Corona. Comparing those huge Smith Coronas with Bojana’s cute Olivetti was like comparing the All-Soviet Bread Factory to a toaster oven. Microsoft Word was for kids, but the typewriter was God, the desk shook with each keystroke.
To practice the AZERTY keyboard, I tried typing out the sentence with the hedgehog from Madame Bovary. I kept slipping up.
Often some prozling nocturnal animal; a hedgehog or a zeasel; would rustle through the foliage; and occasionally they heard the sound of a ripe peach dropping from one of the trees along the zall.
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On my last day in Paris, Svetlana and I went to the gay pride parade. High above a sea of bobbing heads, gilded people glided by on floats. Soon we got elbowed off the sidewalk into the street, where the crowd was no longer a sea of heads but a solid jostling wall that reminded me of the phrase “a wall hewn out of living rock.” The wall hewn from living rock pushed us toward the center of the street. We were right up next to the float, eye level with stiletto heels. The drag queens’ feet were enormous, way bigger than my feet. I wondered where they had gotten such large-sized women’s shoes.
When I turned, Svetlana was gone. No matter where I looked I saw only men. I remembered Svetlana was wearing a pink cardigan over a white T-shirt. I saw a flash of pink, but it turned out to be a shirtless baby riding on a man’s shoulders.
After what felt like years, a small hand grabbed mine. “Selin! I thought I lost you.”
“I thought I lost you.”
Hand in hand, Svetlana and I fought our way back up to the sidewalk. Sailors glided by, distributing condoms with pictures of anchors, followed by ten Jackie Kennedys on a floating stage, and then by a papier-maché penis the size of a missile launcher. The penis float was playing the Macarena and at “Hey Macarena” it discharged white paper streamers.
Finally, we got to a side street and Svetlana let go of my hand. “I guess there’s no point in flaunting gay pride that we don’t even have,” she said. My hand felt bereft.
We went back to the apartment so I could pack. I felt nervous because Ivan and I had been out of contact for two weeks. I didn’t understand the Internet. I didn’t understand that it was possible to check university email from a computer outside the university.
“If you’re worried, you should just call him,” Svetlana said.
“But I’m not worried.”
“Yes, you are.”
Svetlana and I sat on the edge of Bojana’s bed. I held the receiver and read the number from my Van Gogh mini address book, and Svetlana dialed it on the rotary phone.
There was a foreign-sounding ringtone, and then a lady robot spoke rapidly in Hungarian. “Respected something! Something something something,” she said. Then she recited some numbers. I understood the numbers. They were Ivan’s phone number. Filled with horror, I slammed down the receiver.
“Please tell me you did not just hang up on his mom,” Svetlana said.
“I think he gave me a disconnected number. It was a robot.”
“What did the robot say?”
“I don’t know—she spoke Hungarian. But she said his phone number.”
“And then what?”
“Then I hung up.”
“You didn’t even listen to the whole message?”
“Why should I listen? It’s in Hungarian.”
“I really wonder sometimes how you manage.” Svetlana picked up the phone, redialed the number, and listened. After a minute, she handed me the receiver. “She’s speaking English now.”
“. . . has been changed,” the robot said, in a British accent. “The new number is . . .” I wrote the new number in my address book and then hung up and we dialed it.
“Hal-loo?” said a man.
“Hello,” I said. “May I speak to Ivan, please?”
“Eh. Just a minute,” he said.
“Hello?” said Ivan.
“Hi,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Paris.”
“In Paris, still? But your plane is from Brussels?”
“Yeah, there’s a connection in Brussels.”
“Aha, okay.”
There was a pause.
“Well,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure that we’re still on.”
“You wanted to make sure that we’re still . . . what?”
“On.”
“Are we still on?”
“Right.”
“In other words, did I forget you’re coming?”
“Well, or if something came up.”
There was a pause. “I didn’t forget you’re coming,” he said. “I may forget lots of things, but I didn’t forget that.”
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The flight the next morning was at seven, so I reserved a car for five. I called the car service myself without asking Svetlana. Then, even though I wasn’t done packing yet, Svetlana and I went running by the river. It was ten-thirty at night, the sky was pinkish gray. We saw a Ferris wheel all in lights, and it reminded Svetlana of a childhood friend she used to torment. She used to write about it in her journal: Sanja is coming over in twenty minutes. I wonder how long it will take to make her cry. And then later: It took exactly three minutes and forty-three seconds. “I was conducting a scientific experiment to see how much Sanja could take,” she explained.
It was the last time we could run together along the Seine. Svetlana said we could try running along the Danube at the same time, when she was in Belgrade.
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