“We got there,” he said. He didn’t seem to want to talk about Verona. “So what don’t you like about Dostoevsky?”
I thought it over. “He makes me embarrassed and tired.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you think?”
“He invents these supposedly complicated problems and then gets so worked up about them—like, it’s hell, it’s intolerable humiliation, it’s the mathematically highest point of abasement. But to me, none of those things seem particularly hellish or humiliating or complicated. When I can’t get worked up myself, I feel embarrassed. And tired.”
“Wow. Even Crime and Punishment makes you feel this way?”
I nodded. “It’s like he does this shoddy, depressing thing, killing an old lady—and instead of shoddy and depressing, it’s supposed to be an earthshaking philosophical crisis.”
“But don’t you think there is a philosophical conflict? Don’t you think in some sense Raskolnikov is justified to kill her? If it was the only way he could study?”
“I guess so,” I said. “But how could that be the only way? Why couldn’t he do something else?”
“But then there would be no story.”
“I guess.”
“Isn’t it a real question—what’s so bad, practically, about killing an old woman who nobody likes? Personally, that old woman makes me really mad. I see women like that on the tram all the time. They always expect you to give them your seat. Sometimes I’m reading, and it really makes me mad that I have to give her my seat so she can just sit there and think nothing.”
I wondered why he had told me something so terrible about himself.
“Did you feel a raindrop?” I asked.
Ivan frowned. “Yes.”
We went back to the car and sat inside to wait out the rain. “What were we talking about?” asked Ivan.
“How it’s okay to sacrifice old women if it enables your intellectual development,” I said.
He laughed. “I’m not saying I would kill anyone. I just have violent thoughts on the tram, and it helps me relate to Dostoevsky. You never have such thoughts?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Definitely there are times when I’m tired and don’t want to give up my seat on the bus to an old person. But I get depressed, not angry—like about how I’ll be an old woman someday, and even more tired than I am now. I never think I deserve the seat more because I’m reading a book.” Worried this might sound self-righteous, I added, “Maybe it’s just because I don’t read on the bus, it makes me carsick.”
? ? ?
Ivan’s classmates, now grown more numerous, were sitting around a bonfire, stripping the bark off of sticks and using them to skewer pieces of bacon fat. They held the fat over the fire, then dripped it onto bread, and ate the bread. They never actually ate the bacon, just dripped it on the bread. Ivan sharpened a stick for me. When the raw bacon fat came my way in a Styrofoam tray, I took a piece and made some effort to impale it on the stick. The thing is, I didn’t really want a piece of bacon impaled on a stick.
“You’re being too gentle,” Ivan said. He took the bacon and impaled it on the stick. I held it over the flames for a while, but I couldn’t imagine eating it or dripping it onto anything, so I gave it back.
“I think you have to eat this from earliest childhood to like it,” he said apologetically, cutting a slice of bread.
Some of Ivan’s friends asked about where I was from. They perked up when I said my name was Turkish but immediately lost interest when I said I had grown up in America. Soon they gave up talking to me and switched to Hungarian. I could actually understand a lot of the words they said, because so many of them were numbers. They would make these utterances full of Hungarian numbers and laugh riotously. They had all gone to a special math high school.
“They’re talking about how much ballast to throw from the hot-air balloon,” Ivan explained. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some bread? At least have a tomato.”
It had gotten dark. I stared into the fire and counted the different colors: orange, yellow, white, blue. I ate a tomato.
Someone nearby was repeating a word that sounded like “Sonya.” “Sonya, Sonya!” I wondered what it meant. “Sonya—Selin!” I realized it was Imre, calling me Sonya, and I felt so betrayed I could barely talk.
“Yes?” I managed.
“The bread,” said Imre.
I looked at him. “What?”
“Behind you, in the bag.”
I turned. Sure enough, there was a bag of bread. I handed it to him. He didn’t take it.
“You have to apply a knife,” he said, smiling.
“Excuse me?”
“You have to apply a knife to the bread.”
“He means, to cut it,” Ivan said. “You have the knife.”
They weren’t wrong; the bread knife was right next to me. I looked from the knife to Ivan to Imre and back to Ivan. After a moment, Ivan took the bread and the knife, cut a slice, and handed it to Imre.
“Thanks,” Imre said.
I stood up.
“Are you going somewhere?” asked Ivan.
“I’d better call my mom,” I said. “To tell her I got here okay.”
“Now? I don’t know if there’s a telephone around here.”
“I saw a pay phone, near where you parked. Outside the store.”
“You did? Why didn’t you call her when we were there?”
“I didn’t have any coins.”
He frowned. “You could have asked me for a coin.”
I didn’t reply.
“So now you still don’t have any coins, right?”
“Right.”
“So how are you going to call?”
“I’ll buy something from the store and get change.”
“The store might not be open anymore. Do you have any forints?”
“I have traveler’s checks.”
“Traveler’s checks? Why do you have traveler’s checks?”
I felt very miserable. Why did anyone have anything? “Because I’m traveling,” I said. My mother had gotten me the traveler’s checks. I had signed them at our dining table.
“It’s much better to use your ATM card. You can go right to a bank and you get a better exchange rate.”
“I didn’t bring an ATM card. I didn’t know it would work here.”
“It would work better than traveler’s checks.” Ivan dug through his pocket. “I don’t have change, either. I’ll go with you to the store.”
I sat back down. “Never mind, I’ll just call tomorrow.”
“But does your mother expect you to call today?”
“Well . . . she might have forgotten the exact day.”
“Uh-huh. And if she didn’t forget, it seems to me she will be worried. Right?”
I didn’t say anything.
Ivan cleared his throat and said something to his friends, nodding in my direction. I recognized the word for mother, which was echoed around the campfire in different diminutives: anya, anyu, anyus, anyuska.
? ? ?
The store was still open. “I’m sorry about the food,” Ivan said. “Would you like anything to eat? Some cookies?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
He bought some cookies anyway and gave me a coin. “But you need some kind of an access number,” he said. “Do you know what it is?”
“Yeah.”