“This happens a lot,” he said. “I have to get some water. Do you think the Chinese restaurant has water?”
He was looking at a red building with a pagodalike roof. Yellow brushstroke letters on a red sign spelled out CHINESE RESTAURANT in Hungarian.
“I think even in China they drink water,” I said. I had been hoping that this would sound funny, but it didn’t.
“What?” said Ivan.
“Never mind,” I said.
“No, tell me.”
“Nothing.”
“But what did you say?”
“I think the Chinese restaurant will have water,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Ivan said. “We’ll see.”
Taking a jug from the trunk, he crossed the street, which shimmered in the heat. Just ahead of us was a square with a commuter rail station, a newspaper stand, pay phones, and a yellow abstract statue, the kind Svetlana and I now called a modern-day sundial. The sun glared off the windows of the Chinese restaurant, but inside you could make out red vinyl booths and bottles of soy sauce like tiny women, one on each table. Ivan disappeared into the building and reappeared in the window. He talked for a while to a Chinese woman, who eventually took the jug from him, went to the back of the restaurant, then returned, now carrying the jug with both hands.
“They had water,” Ivan said, popping the hood. “At first I thought she didn’t want to give it to me, but it turned out she didn’t know Hungarian. She knew German, though, for some reason.” There was something tolerant and amused about how he said “she.”
He unscrewed something and poured in the water. Steam hissed angrily. He got back in the car and turned the key. The engine growled three times, then started running. But when Ivan tried to pull back up onto the road, there was an awful impotent enraged sound, and the car didn’t move—it was stuck in the sand. The wheels were turning and turning.
“Should I get out?” I said, getting out. I felt sure that my weight was holding down the car. But still the wheels spun with no resistance. Ivan shifted the car to neutral and got out to push it.
“I can push, too,” I said.
“It’s more helpful if you go back in the car and steer.”
I sat in the driver’s seat and reflexively put on the seat belt. Then I took it off again, blushing. I put my right arm on the passenger seat and looked out the back windshield. Ivan stepped back and threw his weight against the rear bumper. The car rocked forward. Ivan braced his arms against the trunk. His muscles stood out, sweat formed a triangle on his shirt, and the car pitched to and fro, until finally with a scraping noise the tires engaged. I steered toward the road. The car had manual steering, like my mother’s old Volkswagen. In the rearview mirror I saw Ivan half running behind the car, and I felt despair and envy. Of course he couldn’t love me, not when I lived through so many layers, when I was spooked by Montmartre, and wore a seat belt in order to steer a car out of a ditch.
The car lurched onto the asphalt and I straightened the wheel. Ivan stood up straight, so his head disappeared from the mirror.
I considered climbing over the gearshift box to the passenger seat, but instead got out of the car and walked around. Ivan sat in the driver’s seat, rubbed his oil-streaked hands, and looked around, maybe for a napkin. I opened my bag and took out one of the alcohol swabs my mother had given me from the hospital. Ivan’s frown intensified.
“Wow,” he said darkly. “Thanks.”
I registered this information with an inward sigh: so, you weren’t supposed to carry around alcohol swabs.
Ivan stuffed the wrapper and the blackened tissue into the ashtray, started the car, turned on the blinkers. “I was watching you steer,” he said. “I could tell you drive really well. You probably drive a lot.”
“I’ve had a license for almost two years,” I said.
“There must be a lot of other things you do really well that I don’t know about,” he said. I didn’t say anything.
? ? ?
We parked in an unpaved lot in front of a grocery store. “It’s a barbecue, so we’d better bring something,” Ivan said. The word “we” gave me a sinking feeling, as if I had already done something wrong—like I was already freeloading. I started to get out of the car. “You can wait here if you like,” Ivan said. I watched him go into the store, and turned over in my mind why he had said that. Why would I want to wait in the car? I got out, but couldn’t make up my mind to go into the store. I saw a phone booth and remembered I’d promised to call my mother from Budapest. I went in and tried to dial AT&T, but you needed a coin deposit.
I got back in the car, sitting sideways with the door open. Just Enough HUNGARIAN was on the dashboard. I looked at the chapter about food shopping, at some of the phrases Ivan might have been using at that moment. The “butcher” vocabulary included a drawing of a cow divided into thirteen numbered sectors. How remarkable that you were supposed to be able to name thirteen cuts of beef, after you had been bitten by a snake and your car was stolen.
“Did you learn anything useful?” Ivan had returned with a heavy-looking plastic bag.
“Tenderloin,” I said in Hungarian, showing him the book.
“Hm?” He looked at the picture. “Ah, you could work in a meatpacking factory.” One of his friends was dating a Slovenian girl who didn’t speak any Hungarian, who had moved to Hungary just to be with him, and had gotten a job in a meatpacking factory. Ivan had mentioned her more than once. In Slovenia she had been an engineering student.
? ? ?
We were walking through a swamp, among ferns and skimpy trees. Ivan was eating coil-shaped cookies from a plastic box.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some cookies?” he said.
“No, thanks,” I said.
A stray dog showed up. Its shaggy and vigorous tail reminded me of the palm frond of an Egyptian slave in a movie, fast-forwarded.
“This looks like a pretty fun dog,” said Ivan. He held the cookie box at arm’s length over the dog’s head. The dog danced on its hind legs and cried.
“You don’t like to tease the dog,” Ivan observed, looking at me. He tossed the dog a cookie. The dog snapped it up. Ivan was trying to get something out of his pocket. “Could you hold this for a second?” he asked, handing me the cookie box. The minute I accepted it, the fun dog jumped up on me, scrabbling with its paws on my dress.
I held the box farther from my body and threw one of the cookies a few feet away. The dog ran off to get it.
“Ah!” Ivan exclaimed with chagrin. At first I thought he was upset I had wasted another cookie on the dog. Then I looked down and realized that my dress was covered with mud. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s washable.”
Ivan frowned at the ground, then looked up. “You know, I didn’t do that on purpose.”
“Sorry?”
“I didn’t give you the cookies to hold on purpose.”
The sense of hurt took my breath away. It would never have occurred to me that he had done it on purpose.
“You’d better take it off,” he said. “The dress.”