“Take it off?”
“I’ll wash it for you at my house. They might not have washing machines in the villages. I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”
“That’s really not necessary.”
“It’s the least I should do. Anyway, your stuff is in my car, you can change your clothes.”
We had already turned back toward the car. The dog followed. Ivan ate the last cookies, stuffed the box in the plastic bag, and pretended to kick the dog. The dog ran away.
Ivan opened the trunk, walked around the car, and stood with his back to me, leaning against the hood. I opened my suitcase. All my clothes were there, where I had put them in Paris. I stepped out of my sandals and pulled on a pair of jeans under the dress. Then I took out a T-shirt. As fast as I could, I took off the dress and pulled on the shirt.
“Are you decent?” asked Ivan.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Ivan handed me a plastic bag, for the dirty dress. I would rather have thrown it in the river, but I wadded it up and put it in the bag. “I’ll give it back to you tomorrow,” he said. We walked back through the swamp and came out on the edge of a damp beach, where a group of boys and girls were playing volleyball. Ivan called something. The players waved and one of them came over. Wiry and cherubic, with bright blue eyes, he wore white shorts and a stained white shirt.
“Imre, have you met Selin?” Ivan asked.
“No,” said Imre, looking at me with his bright blue eyes. “But I think I know all about her.”
Imre said something to Ivan in Hungarian, and Ivan said something back.
“So,” Imre said to me. “You came to visit.”
“Right,” I said.
“How long are you staying?”
“Five weeks.”
“Five weeks?”
“Not in Budapest. It’s a program, to teach English in villages.”
“You mean you’re in Peter’s program? Have you ever been to a Hungarian village?”
“No.”
“There will be a lot of sheep. Do you like sheep?”
I shrugged. “Sheep are okay.”
“What I should have asked is, do you like shepherds? That’s the goal of the program, to teach English to shepherds. Do you like shepherds? Have you ever taught English to shepherds? Have you?” he demanded when I didn’t answer. “Have you ever taught English to shepherds?”
“There is a first time for everything,” I said. A girl with curly black hair called something to Imre, who rejoined the game.
“Do you like volleyball?” Ivan asked.
“No,” I said. “But you can play, I have a book.”
“Nah, I don’t really like volleyball, either.” Ivan sat on the ground, placing beside him the long-sleeved shirt he had been carrying. I sat next to him, automatically picking up the shirt. The ground was damp. I realized that I had probably been supposed to sit on the shirt. It was a soft wine-colored shirt—I remembered it from school. I held it in my hands and we watched the volleyball game. Imre dove on the sand, but the ball flew off in the wrong direction, nearly into the water.
“What the hell is he doing?” said Ivan.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He laughed. “Hey, do you want to run along this river?”
“What?”
“We could run along this river. Like you did on the Seine.”
“Oh. No, that’s okay.”
“Why don’t we just go for a walk then?”
We stood up. I handed him back his shirt, then regretted it. Why hadn’t I held on to it a little longer?
We walked some distance to a pier. Ivan told me about his high school friend who explored Neolithic caves and collected rocks, only one day it turned out he had collected some radioactive rocks, and his parents made him throw them out. Another friend liked scuba diving and visited a Viking shipwreck in Finland. The day before the underwater archaeologists did their inventory, he dove down and put a statue of some Hungarian gymnast inside the ship, and it was listed in the inventory. Then there was a story involving a taxidermy closet at their school.
Feeling that I had to say something, I told him about the time my biology teacher had woken me up by throwing a dead sea lamprey at my head.
“A what?”
“A sea lamprey.”
“What’s that?”
“Sort of an eel. They swim upstream, like salmon.”
“Oh,” he said.
That seemed to do it for zoology.
“Everyone says Paris is so expensive,” Ivan said. “I didn’t think it was so expensive. Did you?”
“I guess not.”
“The wine is cheap, bread is cheap. Cheese is cheap.”
“Bread is cheap,” I agreed. I hadn’t bought wine or cheese. “Once, there was a sale on kumquats.”
“Speaking of cheese: one day we fell asleep on a bench and somebody stole our camera case . . .” Ivan started to cough.
“Oh no,” I said.
“. . . but inside it,” he said, and I saw it wasn’t coughing but nascent laughter, “was only some cheese! Ha!”
“Aha,” I said. “Funny.”
“We laughed for a long time, thinking of the thief who will open the camera case, and inside is only some cheese.” After a moment, Ivan stopped laughing and cleared his throat. “Here is that dog again.”
He was right. It was the dog.
“It has such soulful eyes,” he said. “They’re somehow Dostoevskian.”
“Are they?”
“I think so. Do you like Dostoevsky?”
“So-so.” I glanced at him. “You like Dostoevsky.”
“Yes,” he said.
I started petting the dog, stroking its brow and its silky ears. It sat, closed its eyes, and swept the ground with its tail. I turned its ears inside out. It shook its head and turned them the right way again. “He doesn’t like his ears to be inside out,” I said.
“Is it so strange?” Ivan brushed against my ear with the back of his hand. I felt my body stiffen, I was filled with dread. And yet, I knew I wanted him to touch me—didn’t I? Wasn’t that my general policy?
“Would you like it if someone decided to turn your ear inside out?” he asked, lightly pulling at my ear. The horror intensified and sank into my gut. I knew from Shakespeare class that ears were sexual. Was he making fun of me—of my general policy? And wasn’t he right, that I had been tormenting the dog?
“No,” I said.
He withdrew his hand. The floor seemed to drop, and was actually dropping—the pier we were sitting on wasn’t a pier at all but a wooden float bobbing on the water. The dog took a little step to steady itself and wagged its tail.
“Should I throw the dog into the river?” Ivan asked.
“Why do you want to throw the dog into the river?”
“Seeing a river makes me want to throw something into it. And I can’t throw you into the river.”
Though I could tell this was meant to sound playful, I felt insulted and humiliated. “Oh,” I said.
He sighed. “I think you don’t like to throw the dog into the river.”
? ? ?
Ivan was telling another story. He and his girlfriend were trying to get to Verona, but when they got in a car and said, “Verona,” the Italians said, “Ah, Roma!” and they had to repeat, “Verona, Verona.” That was the whole story.
“Did you ever get to Verona?” I asked.