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I went back to bed and woke at eleven-thirty. I parted the curtains and looked outside at the tree-lined street, the tram, the pale candy-colored buildings. After taking a long shower in the empty shower room, I went downstairs to the canteen and bought a package of hazelnut wafers. I spent the rest of the morning on the sunniest part of the bed, eating hazelnut wafers and reading Dracula. Dracula had turned into a fragmented multivoiced narrative, which was my least favorite kind of book. A cowboy turned up from somewhere and said things like, “Miss Lucy, I know I ain’t good enough to regulate the fixin’s of your little shoes.” Well, I knew perfectly well that fixin’s were what you served with a turkey, and I didn’t appreciate that cowboy implying otherwise.
The author hadn’t been able to make up his mind about Dracula’s powers and limitations—whether there were circumstances under which he could sometimes venture from his coffin during the day, or harm somebody wearing a crucifix; whether his control extended to all animals, or only some of them; whether every person he bit automatically became a vampire.
Van Helsing showed up from Amsterdam to explain everything: “Thus, whereas he can do as he will within his limit, when he have his earth-home, his coffin-home, his hell-home . . . still at other time he can only change when the time come.” I had never met a Dutch person who talked like that. They always spoke amazing English.
I flipped to the author biography. “A student of pure mathematics, Stoker was also an active speaker with the Philosophical Society,” it said. I thought it was weird that a mathematician had created such an internally inconsistent world.
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In the afternoon, I got on a random tram to see where it went. The tram passed Peter’s grandmother’s apartment and veered onto an unfamiliar, increasingly residential street. A few people got off at each stop, and nobody got on. Soon there was no one left but old people. Chain-link fences gradually outnumbered the wooden ones and sand replaced the gravel under the rails. After another five minutes even all the old people had left, except for one man who was either passed out or dead.
I disembarked on a narrow tree-lined street in front of a chain-link fence. A Doberman pinscher started barking its head off on the other side of the fence. A sign read HARAPóS KUTYA. I looked it up in the dictionary. It meant “biting dog.”
Nearly every house on that street had a BITING DOG sign, and the dog to back it up. I walked around the block. The barking didn’t let up for one minute. I saw only two humans, elderly women, sitting in lawn chairs. They swiveled their heads as I approached. “Good day,” I said as I passed. “Good day,” they said. When I looked over my shoulder, they were still watching me.
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I took the tram back and walked in a straight line until I came to a phone booth. All around the booth were stone buildings with plaster fa?ades in every different kind of yellow. I took out my Van Gogh address book and thought about calling Ivan. Instead, I called Svetlana in Belgrade. Aunt Bojana answered. She said Svetlana had come back from Italy that morning, and was still asleep.
“I think that boy exhausted her,” she said. “She will be sorry she missed your call. Is there a number where she can find you?”
There was no such number.
I looked at my watch and realized it was already morning in New Jersey. My mother answered the phone on the second ring. “Yes?” she said coldly.
“It’s me. Selin.”
There was a pause. “Selin—sweetie! Where are you? You sound like you’re in the next room.”
“I’m still in Budapest,” I said. “It’s a very good connection.”
“Are you calling from the hotel?”
“No, from a pay phone. Just a phone on the street.”
“Is anybody with you?”
“No.”
“You’re all alone on the street? What time is it?”
“It’s broad daylight. It’s three in the afternoon.”
“Oh, okay.” She sighed. “I just can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine you on the other side of the world, at a pay phone on the street.” She asked what the street looked like. I told her about the yellow buildings. I said there were begonias in a flower box.
“It sounds lovely,” she said. She asked about Ivan. I told her I had met his mother.
“He has a mother? I can’t believe it. What was she like?”
“She was nice,” I said. “She gave me a book.”
“What kind of a book?”
“A book about Hungary. Everyone here is obsessed with being Hungarian.”
“What about the rest of the family? Did you meet them, too?”
I explained that I had met everyone except the sister in Transylvania and the sister at the hospital.
My mother sighed. “He will want to marry you,” she said. “I’m very concerned. That’s what it means when men want you to meet their sisters.”
“Don’t worry, nobody wants to marry me,” I said. But somewhere inside, a tiny part of me felt a thrill.
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In the evening we went to the opera house to see Rigoletto. Rigoletto turned out to be about a poor girl being dishonored and then murdered. It was supposed to be really sad for her father.
We got back to the hostel at midnight. The TV was on in the lobby—the summer Olympics were starting soon. We were leaving for the villages early the next morning.
After we had packed our bags, Dawn said she was going to write in her journal. She took out a three-ring binder, a pile of brochures and tickets, a pair of scissors, and a glue stick. I got out my notebook. A clock somewhere tolled two. Dawn decided to call her parents in Texas, where it was still only seven. I thought of calling Ivan, except that at his parents’ house it was two.
Dawn paused on the threshold. “Look—there’s a note for you!” She handed me a folded paper, a worksheet, with answers in milliliters. Kovács Csaba had gotten them all right. I turned it over. Dear Selin, I read. Maybe this is the last one of the long series of missing you. I’m going back home now. I was trying to locate you the whole day. If you want you can call me till late tonight. Iván.
The door closed behind Dawn. I imagined the stairs to the lobby, the pay phones in the dark, the coins against my thumb, his voice. The scramble to think of things to say, with only little reprieves, during which I would have to listen to whatever things he had thought up to say. Then the dial tone again, higher-pitched than in America—it was always there, like the sea inside a shell—and the empty dull feeling in my chest, like now, only worse.
At the same time, it seemed certain to me that someday I would really want to hear his voice and wouldn’t be able to, and I would think back to the time that he had invited me to call him, and it would seem as incomprehensible as an invitation to speak to the dead.
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