“No, there are two phonetic alphabets. One is just for foreign words.”
As they talked, Ivan sounded grouchier and grouchier, while Peter smiled more and more blandly. The doorbell rang. Two boys came in: Frank, whom I remembered from orientation, and Gábor, a person unknown to me, who had dense eyebrows and was carrying a plastic bag full of shoes. “I’m trying to sell some shoes,” Gábor snapped.
“Well, let’s put those by the door for now,” Peter said.
Ivan and Gábor nodded at each other—they were already acquainted. “How about you, Frank?” said Peter. “Do you know Ivan?”
Frank and Ivan had been in a Dostoevsky class together. They started criticizing the professor—the same one who taught the class I’d taken on the nineteenth-century novel. Gábor sat next to me, stared into my face, and made a sneezelike, four-syllable utterance. I wondered for a moment if it was about the shoes. But when he said it again, I realized it was “Hi, how are you?” in Hungarian.
“Good, thanks,” I said.
“Gábor! Don’t overwhelm my teachers!” said Peter.
“They have to learn sooner or later,” Gábor said. “To survive.”
? ? ?
When the other teachers had arrived, we all headed to the hostel where we would be staying. Peter and the others took the tram, while I, and the luggage, went with Ivan in his car. The river came into view with its array of bridges, and the Gothic fa?ade of the parliament rose up from the shore, looking as intricate and organic as a coral formation, or something that had been elaborately eaten by termites. A bronze woman seemed to hover over the distant treetops, holding a leaf over her head: a monument, Ivan said, to the Soviet “liberators.”
The hostel was a dormitory during the school year. In the gloomy lobby, an old man sat in a booth with a lamp. He lugged a logbook from under the counter. Ivan leaned over and pointed at one of the pages. The man said something gruff. Ivan replied in a charming voice. It didn’t work—the old man shut the book and folded his arms.
“He won’t give us the room keys until Peter comes,” Ivan told me.
Together we carried all the bags from the car up the half flight of stairs that led to the elevator, in a dark hallway near a cafeteria. It smelled of life—of some people’s whole life. Ivan leaned against the wall. I sat on my suitcase. Ivan looked at his watch. “I wonder what’s taking them so long,” he said. “I’m supposed to meet my high school friends on the Danube.”
“Oh,” I said.
“They’re having a barbecue, with a bonfire. They grow cherries there, and plums. One of my friends, his girlfriend speaks Russian. At least, she supposedly studies Russian literature, so she should speak Russian. We can find out. And all of them at least sort of speak English. My friend Imre will be there, from Harvard, so of course he speaks English just like I do.”
“Cool,” I said, mystified by why he was telling me these things. I was really surprised when he asked if I wanted to come. “Sure,” I said.
“You do?” he said.
“Only if it wouldn’t be inconvenient.”
“No, don’t be crazy. I’m really happy.”
Ivan said we might as well leave the bags there and go: the others couldn’t be lost because Peter was with them. I asked if I should leave my suitcase with the others.
“Somehow I don’t think the others will be so happy about carrying your suitcase upstairs,” Ivan said. “I’ll take it back to the car.”
Outside, the sun had reappeared. The air was hot, bright, and motionless.
? ? ?
“So,” Ivan said as we drove out of the city. “How was Paris?”
“It was okay,” I said. “Parts of it were kind of tense.” I explained how I had been supposed to keep Svetlana from feeling like a third wheel with Bill and Robin, which Bill hadn’t always seemed to appreciate.
“Bill is the one she was with on the airplane? I thought he was her boyfriend, the way they were asleep.”
“No, he’s Robin’s boyfriend.”
“And where was she?”
“She was in the row ahead.”
“She was on the plane, also?”
“Yeah, in the next row.”
Ivan frowned. “Was this Bill kind of an ass?” he said.
I felt glad when he said that, because it surely meant that Ivan wasn’t like Bill, that he wasn’t behaving with me as Bill did with Svetlana. “We didn’t really get along,” I said. “Then Svetlana’s aunt came and started saying how when she was our age she was throwing parties for Marina Tsvetaeva’s doctor’s niece. Then she made Svetlana get a six-hundred-dollar haircut and a two-thousand-dollar dress. So Svetlana was having anxieties about femininity and dresses.”
“Uh-huh. Were you also having anxieties about femininity and dresses?”
I flushed and became unable to speak. He waited awhile, then gave up. “So tell me about Svetlana,” he said. “I suppose she’s incredibly smart.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She thinks really differently from me. She never sees anything as an isolated event—she always puts it into a framework. Anything you do is a symptom of your whole personality and a result of the history of Western civilization, or a metaphor for Western civilization, or something related to Western civilization. Whereas, to me, everything seems so much like an individual case, and I have a hard time thinking about Western civilization. Sometimes I’m really impressed by how she makes all the parts fit together. But other times it doesn’t seem true.”
Ivan nodded, as if he knew just what I meant. “My best friend in high school, Dávid, he’s like that,” he said.
I tried to think of something to ask him about Dávid, to prolong the feeling that we were actually talking to each other. But I couldn’t think of enough questions, and the moment quickly passed. Outside the window was a lot of white light, and some billboards, one with a picture of a giant Magnum bar, and another, a Benetton ad, that showed a gaunt blond woman and a gorgeous African man wrapped in a blanket together. I couldn’t imagine what their lives were like.
“What was your favorite part of Paris?” asked Ivan.
I thought over what I had and hadn’t liked in Paris. I said I had liked going running by the river with Svetlana. “We went almost every night,” I said.
“You went running while you were in Paris? That was your favorite thing?”
I nodded. “I liked to see the lights.”
“Hmm. Okay.”
“What was your favorite thing in Paris?”
“Montmartre,” he said immediately. “It seemed like the most intense part of the city. Did you like Montmartre?”
“I liked it. But, I don’t know. We went to Sacré-Coeur at night, and I got spooked.”
“What was spooky?”
“I guess the crypt . . .” I was thinking about the boy we had seen crying.
“The sacred heart? You were spooked by the sacred heart?”
“I guess I was spooked by the sacred heart.”
? ? ?
Some distance outside the city, the engine stopped running right in the middle of the road. Ivan pulled over to the shoulder and the car dipped into a sandy ditch.