I saw an ashtray a few tables over. When I got back to the table, Gábor was still looking at me expectantly. “It’s probably like the Hungarian attitude about being a republic the size of South Carolina.”
“Ha!” shouted Gábor. “Trianon! Touché!”
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We got back to the hostel at three. Dawn talked nonstop, even while brushing her teeth. The pillows were the same size as the ones in Ivan’s attic. Dawn was testing her clock radio, causing a Hungarian woman to talk in our room. I fell asleep in the middle of trying to figure out how to position my body with relation to the enormous pillow.
The next thing I knew, Louis Armstrong was singing “What a Wonderful World.” “I see friends shaking hands, saying, ‘How do you do?’ / They’re really saying, ‘I love you . . .’” I thought of the times Ivan and I had shaken hands, and tears welled in my eyes.
The women’s shower room in the dormitory was a big tiled box with no stalls—just a row of showerheads. “It looks just like in a movie about a concentration camp!” Dawn exclaimed, pulling her shirt over her head and stepping out of her panties. I swallowed back a sigh. The hits never stopped coming in adult life. I took off my clothes and hung them on a metal hook.
“I hope it’s really water that comes out!” Dawn said cheerily, turning on the shower. I turned to look at her, then remembered we weren’t wearing any clothes and looked away.
The shower was marvelous—forceful and almost unbearably hot. “The water’s really hot,” Dawn said. “The floor is slanted. I don’t know why I waste time shaving my legs.” After a minute, a cascade of foam rushed from Dawn’s shower to the drain. A similar cascade rushed down my shoulders.
“Isn’t it sad that girls are so much more self-conscious about their bodies, compared with boys?” Dawn said. I agreed that it was sad.
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At eight we met at the commuter rail station to take a day trip to Szentendre, which Peter said was a picturesque historic town on the Danube. Andrea had brought kifli: crescent-shaped rolls first baked by Hungarians to commemorate the Turks’ defeat in Vienna, and later introduced by Marie Antoinette in Paris, where they became known as croissants. At the station in Szentendre we climbed two broken escalators through a concrete chute covered with graffiti. I read my first complete handwritten indigenous sentence in Hungarian. It read: János was here.
We came out into a sunny, strangely familiar plaza. In the next moment I recognized the modern-day sundial, the Chinese restaurant, and the sandy place where Ivan’s car had overheated. So this was Szentendre. This time, instead of continuing along the river, we took a winding road up to the old town, which was full of Serbian churches. We passed a Marzipan Museum with a marzipan Elvis in the window, and listened to a blind accordionist. Peter clapped along, making eye contact with each of us and smiling. The Orthodox cross incorporated an impaled crescent, to symbolize victory over the Turks. Owen could read the Old Slavonic inscriptions. Some Serbian merchants had thanked God for the end of the plague.
The church interior smelled unmistakably of church interior. An artists’ colony had painted frescoes in the choir. Christ and the apostles were sitting in rows, staring straight ahead, with highly specific, human-looking faces. They looked like some guys you might see while returning to your seat from the airplane lavatory. The cathedral had been “built by Dalmatians.”
At the top of the hill was a paved square with a parapet, filled with artists’ stalls. At one stall, a German couple was yelling at a painting of some cowboys. They were just pointing at the painting and shouting. The artist, looking bored, leaned on the parapet and lit a cigarette. He had his back to the view—the whole town spread out like some fantastic salad.
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One painting showed a family with vivacious smiles; in my mind I titled it: Now We Will Tear Each Other Limb from Limb.
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The three other girls in the program, Cheryl, Dawn, and Vivie, kept taking group photographs. The problem of a group photograph was who was going to take it. Andrea and I always volunteered, but the rules of etiquette dictated that the camera owner had to try to get a stranger to take the picture so everyone would be in it.
While posing with the others next to a cannon, I wondered when I would see Ivan again. He had said, “You should give me a call.” Had that been yesterday, or long ago? How close were Ivan and Peter—how often did they talk? Did Ivan know we were here? I looked at my watch. Practically no time had passed for the last twenty minutes.
The German woman was holding another canvas at arm’s length, glaring at it over her glasses. The painting showed sheep, a herdsman, and some kind of autonomous mop.
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Peter went somewhere for some reason. We were waiting for him on a parapet overlooking the Danube, across from a traffic circle with a statue of a bear.
“Is that the bear who ate István’s son?” I asked Andrea. I had meant it to be a polite question, but it came out somehow abruptly.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“It just reminded me of the story you told us about how István’s son was eaten by bears.”
“Oh! I suppose it’s possible that it is one of those bears. But I don’t think that the sculptor planned it to be any particular bear.”
“How do you say bear in Hungarian?” asked Cheryl.
“Medve,” said Andrea.
“That’s similar to the Russian word,” said Owen.
Andrea explained that in olden times, when Hungary was shamanistic, the bear had been a sacred animal. Over the centuries the original Hungarian word became taboo and a Slavic word was adopted in its place.
“Wow! What’s the real, taboo word?” asked Vivie.
Andrea laughed. “Who knows?”
Vivie’s eyes widened. “Ohhh—you’re not allowed to say it.”
It was cold for swimming, but there were two people in the water: a barrel-chested man and a tiny little girl in a blue bikini. The girl was almost exploding with delight. The man stood awkwardly, like the first guest at a party, shifting his weight in the knee-deep water and rubbing his arms. Then he squatted so that only his head stuck out of the water. Then he vanished altogether, reappearing nearly a minute later with a perplexed expression. The girl clapped and shrieked, turned the man around by his shoulders, and climbed onto his back. The man stood up, his torso plastered with leaves. Overwhelmed by happiness, the little girl began to sing. She was so happy—but she didn’t know what anything really was. She didn’t know what anything meant. She knew even less than we did.
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