Ivan took my shoulder bag and Owen’s internal-frame backpack and strode ahead of us, pulling my suitcase along on its wheels. His car, a gray Opel, was parked on a windswept roof. Owen and the guitar went in the back. Ivan presented me with a tiny book called Just Enough HUNGARIAN. The cover illustration showed three women or dolls, with long skirts and no feet, balancing beakers of red wine on their heads. Ivan started the car and backed out of the space, his arm across the back of my seat.
I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.
“I’d like something for (snake bites, dog bites, burns, sore gums, bee stings). I’d like some (antiseptic, gauze, bandages, inhalant). It’s a (sharp pain, dull ache, nagging pain). I feel (sick, dizzy, weak, feverish). I have (a heart condition, rheumatism, hemorrhoids). It hurts. It hurts a lot. The pain occurs (every day, every hour, every half hour, every quarter of an hour). It hurts all the time. I’m ill. My child is ill. It’s urgent. It’s serious.
“The toilet is blocked. The gas is leaking. The boiler is not working. I have a toothache. I have broken my dentures. I have lost (my contact lenses, a filling, my bag, my car keys, my car, everything). Someone has stolen (my car, my passport, my money, my tickets, my wallet, everything). I’ve had an accident. I’ve run out of gas. My car has broken down. My car won’t start. My car is (one kilometer away, three kilometers away). I have (a puncture, a broken windscreen). I think the problem is here.
“Don’t hang up. There’s a delay. I’m sorry I’m late. I don’t understand you. I think this is wrong. No, not that. That’s enough, thank you. I won’t take it, thank you. Please stop.”
“Oh, thanks!” I remembered to say.
“I hope it’s useful,” Ivan said. “I looked at a lot of books and this was the best one. It doesn’t tell you a lot of useless grammar and the pronunciation guide is really good.”
I looked at the pronunciation guide. “Meg-kairem, hodj vaagh-yoh le aw feyait aish aw for-kaat,” it said.
“May I take a look?” asked Owen. I passed the book back to him. “This is great,” he said. “Really useful. I have to get myself one of these.”
Ivan told Owen where he could find such a book. His right thigh swayed in the space between our seats. He was too tall for the car. Was it only to me that he seemed so much more present than other people, or was it an objective fact? He was wearing shorts now, and evidently had been for a while, because his legs were the same even tan as his arms.
At the highway entrance ramp, my left knee and his right leg came into contact. I shifted my knees to face the door. Ivan glanced at me, then back at the road.
“I’m sorry it’s such shitty weather,” he said. “I wanted there to be decent weather when I show you my city.”
“I think your city looks nice,” I said. Ivan laughed. I noticed then that the sky was almost black and we were passing through a wasteland of warehouses and factories.
“My uncle designed that factory,” Ivan said.
“Which one?”
“The largest and ugliest one.”
Ivan asked Owen questions about his life. A doctoral student in history, Owen was writing a dissertation with “hegemonic” in the title, about the Ukraine. He said we had to start calling it just “Ukraine,” without the definite article, because in Russian “Ukraine” meant “borderland,” and to call a whole country “The Borderland” was insulting. Apparently if you called it simply “Borderland,” people would think it was a proper name, semantically unrelated to its other instances.
Ivan pointed out a blue-gray car that was being pursued noisily by a blue car-sized cloud of smoke: this, he said, was a Trabant, powered by the same motor as a chain saw, manufactured in East Germany out of cardboard.
“Well, not cardboard,” Ivan conceded a moment later, though nobody had challenged him. “But the body is made of plastic.”
“Doesn’t it melt?”
“No, and that’s the problem. You can’t even burn it. Well, you can burn it, but the fumes are toxic. So it was indestructible, until . . .” He started to laugh. “Until the West Germans developed a bacterium to eat it!”
? ? ?
We walked along an open-air passageway in a suburban apartment building. The sun came out, and it suddenly got really hot. Then the sun went back behind the clouds. “I think this is where Peter’s grandmother lives,” Ivan said, stopping in front of one of the doors and ringing the bell. An old man opened the door. He and Ivan talked in Hungarian. Ivan knew so many words that he never used with me! I was used to seeing people have to decipher what he was saying, but the old man laughed immediately and shot back some remark.
“It’s number eleven,” Ivan told us, after the man had gone back inside.
We rang the bell at apartment eleven. The door opened. There was Peter. We followed him to a dim living room with drawn velvet curtains, a grand piano, houseplants. There were two women there: Cheryl, one of the other English teachers whom I remembered from orientation, and a Hungarian woman about Peter’s age.
We all sat, Owen and I on an overstuffed sofa, Peter and Ivan in facing armchairs, and the Hungarian woman, Andrea, on a wooden chair with a lot of angles. Cheryl sat on the carpet under the piano.
“Hey, you—are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a chair?” Peter asked.
Cheryl shook her head. “I have my bag here,” she said softly.
Andrea had just moved back to Budapest and was giving English lessons. Peter’s grandmother was out playing canasta. Daniel, another teacher in the program, had a Hungarian mother, but didn’t speak Hungarian.
“Why doesn’t he speak Hungarian?” asked Ivan.
“I suppose it’s because there’s nobody for him to speak Hungarian with in Vermont,” said Peter.
“He could speak with his mother,” Ivan said. I felt implicated when he said that, because I usually talked to my mother in English. This now seemed childish—like everything American.
“How is Eunice?” asked Peter, who had a way of fiercely enunciating people’s names, as if correcting a mispronunciation.
“She’s fine,” Ivan said, sounding both proud and rueful. “She’s the same.”
“Did she stay at all in Budapest?”
“No, we met in Paris and hitchhiked for a while in Italy and Switzerland, and then she went home. She’s spending the summer in Cambridge, studying with Vogel.”
“The ‘stern old tyrant’?”
“They seem to get along.”
“Oh, they get along, do they? Well, I’m sure she’s learning a lot.”
Ivan frowned. “I don’t know how long she will keep hiding like this, before she can become a scholar. She’s always hiding behind these obstacles, behind Harvard.”
“She likes Harvard.”
“She likes it, she likes it. She never wants to leave. She already knows classical Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, but still she found another reason to put off starting her own work.”
“Classical Chinese is very different from modern Chinese, no?”
“Completely different.”
“But her Japanese should come in handy.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She’ll already know some of the Chinese characters.”
“Kanji are a small part of Japanese,” said Ivan. “The whole grammar is with katakana.”
“Yes, I know they have a phonetic alphabet for foreign words, but the roots are basically Chinese characters.”