“I didn’t think of it,” I told him. “I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be sorry,” Ivan intervened. “The concierge definitely had a spare key, he just didn’t want to be helpful. We were probably supposed to bribe him.”
“Did you give him Andrea’s name?” Peter asked Ivan.
“I gave him your name.”
“But I told you that Andrea made the reservations.”
“No, I don’t think you told me that.”
Peter smiled at Ivan, then patted my shoulder: “Well, the important thing is that you’re here. Let’s put those bags where my grandmother won’t trip over them and break her neck. Excellent. Are we ready to go?”
“Peter is taking you guys sightseeing,” Ivan told me, as the others stood up. “I have some stuff to do.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You have my number,” he said.
We all filed out of the apartment and along the balcony toward the stairs. Ivan hung back from the group. “You should go ahead,” he told me. “You should make friends with those kids. After all, they’re the ones you’ll have to call if you have any problem in the villages.” When he said that, the world seemed to stop. “I mean,” he added, glancing at my expression, “after I’m in Tokyo.”
“Right,” I said, opening my eyes wide to keep tears from overflowing.
? ? ?
Talking with Dawn felt so different from talking with Ivan that Ivan seemed almost not to exist anymore. Dawn asked how I knew Peter. I said he was a friend of a friend. Dawn had met Peter earlier that year at the London School of Economics. London was great, especially the cider. The downside was that your snot turned black. It was totally democratic—even Princess Diana’s snot was black. Luckily it was a temporary condition.
“This is just my second day in Budapest, and already when I blow my nose it’s hardly black at all. The air here must be really unpolluted. Speaking of nose blowing, I hope Peter takes us somewhere where we can buy tissue, because there’s no toilet paper in the hostel. I think they use newspaper instead. There were stacks of old newspaper in the toilet stalls. You can so tell that only boys live here most of the time. I haven’t asked Peter, but I’m sure they sell toilet paper in Budapest. Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yeah, Budapest is a totally modern city. I bet it’s just the college boys who use newspaper. And college boys are slobs in every country. Still, I’m going to stock up here, in case they don’t have toilet paper in the villages.”
When I looked back at the parking lot, I didn’t see Ivan. I didn’t see his car.
? ? ?
Peter took us first to the American Express. Everyone was exchanging either traveler’s checks or dollars, just like I was—nobody was using an ATM card. The next stop was a bookstore, where people bought phrase books. There was one shelf of English books. I picked up a book called Favorite Hungarian One-Minute Tales. The first tale, “On the triviality of conversations,” was written in dialogue form:
“How are you?”
“I’m wonderful, thanks, and you?”
“I’m okay, but why are you dragging that rope after you?”
“That’s not a rope—those are my intestines.”
That was it—that was the whole story. I was dumbfounded. Was it possible that the concern over the triviality-dungeon of conversations, which I had taken to be one of Ivan’s particularities, was actually part of the Hungarian national character? How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?
I leafed through a book called The ESL Miscellany. It was full of awful-sounding advice. If you had a particularly shy and nonparticipatory student, it said, you should have the other students move their desks in a circle around the “nonplayer” and conduct the whole rest of the class that way. Any time anyone raised their hand to ask or answer a question or make a comment, they should address the question or comment not to you, the teacher, but to the nonplayer, who should do his best to answer.
“This book looks pretty useful,” said Owen, leafing through another copy. “It has a lot of good exercises.”
I turned to the exercises. “The dog kicked by the boy is red. Circle the picture that applies.” The pictures showed a red dog kicking a boy, a dog kicking a red boy, a red boy kicking a dog, and a boy kicking a red dog. It was the kind of test used to diagnose Wernicke’s aphasia.
“I think I’m going to buy it,” Owen decided. “Do you want to split the cost? One of us can read it here in Budapest, and the other can take it to the village and leave it there as a gift.”
I didn’t want to read the book, not in Budapest and not in a village, but I didn’t want to seem snotty so I said okay and paid for half of it. It wasn’t expensive. It was, however, big, and Owen didn’t have a bag, so I ended up carrying it all day.
We spent the afternoon sightseeing. We saw a church with an eight-hundred-year-old king and queen in its crypt. It had been a mosque under the Turks. A stained glass window represented various scenes from the life of Saint István, including the death of István’s son in a bear hunt.
“The geometric patterned tiles are supposedly based on Islamic designs,” Peter told me. “Do you see a resemblance?”
“I guess so,” I said doubtfully.
“Oh, you guess so?”
We visited a theater that had once been a Carmelite monastery and had been renovated by Kempelen Farkas, a.k.a. Wolfgang van Kempelen, inventor of the chess-playing Turk. We saw a colossal Incredible Hulk–colored monument representing seven Hungarian conquerors riding bionic-looking horses. One horse had antlers. Saint István’s right hand was in a box somewhere. The Chain Bridge had been reconstructed after each world war. The sculptor of the lion statues was said to have drowned himself out of shame because the lions didn’t have tongues—though others said that if you looked closely in their mouths, you could see the tongues right there.
Margit Island used to be called Rabbit Island, either because the Turks who built a harem there used to screw like rabbits, or because the early Hungarian kings, who loved hunting but didn’t have any forests near the city, sent all the rabbits to this island and hunted them. During the Tatar invasion, Béla IV promised that if the Tatars were vanquished he would give his daughter Margit to God. Then the Tatars were vanquished. Béla built a convent on the island and sent Margit there. She was nine. She became a nun, never washed herself above the ankles, and died at twenty-eight.
“Nobody really knows why it’s called the Fisherman’s Bastion,” Andrea said at the Fisherman’s Bastion. “Some say because the guild of fishermen defended the castle. Some say because here used to be a fishermen’s village. Some say because here used to be a medieval fish market.”
“Those don’t sound mutually exclusive,” Owen said. “I mean, couldn’t they all be true?”
Andrea gave him a mysterious look. “Who knows?”
“The square isn’t named for a blanket, is it?” I asked Andrea in Batthyány Square. Battaniye was Turkish for blanket.
“The square is named for Count Batthyány,” Andrea said.