Dawn came in and said the phones were out of order. I was pretty sure she had used the wrong coins.
There was a knock on the door. It was Peter, carrying a plastic library bag—the kind that said A WET BOOK IS NOT A DEAD DUCK. He was locked out of his grandmother’s and needed a place to crash, and had remembered that we had an extra bed. “Is it okay?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Dawn.
Peter looked at me. “Sure,” I said.
Peter’s plastic bag turned out to contain a toothbrush, which didn’t really support his story about having been locked out. But I was glad he was there. Even though he was Ivan’s friend, he somehow stood for a world in which all that uncertainty and anguish wasn’t real.
JULY
Someone somewhere was eating raw garlic from a bag. We had our own compartment. Raindrops sat on the windowpane. Every now and then the fattest drop would trickle down like an insuppressible tear. The train started moving. Gradually the drops went rigid and started charting jagged lines across the panes, like a graph of some unknown process.
Everyone fell asleep. Peter looked smaller than usual, a doll of himself, but Andrea’s head on his shoulder looked life-sized. Cheryl slept sitting upright, her pale hands on the armrests and her eyelids fluttering. Vivie, who had a gift for comfort, made a pillow out of her jacket and snuggled up against the window. Dawn’s head bobbed closer and closer to my shoulder, finally coming to rest and becoming heavy. The train went underground. I closed my eyes.
? ? ?
The second train was more crowded, and smelled of the human condition. A man was lurching up and down the aisles with a shopping cart full of alcohol. It wasn’t yet eight in the morning, but he was doing a lively business by both the bottle and the glass. The glass was a clouded tumbler attached to the cart with duct tape and string. When we passed an uneven stretch of rails, the man and his cart capsized in one of the compartments, breaking several bottles, which added their vapors to the already robust bouquet.
I looked out the window at the unfurling ribbon of sunflower fields and yellow churches, trying to prepare myself for different scenarios that might arise in the villages, like what if a child ran at me wearing antlers. I thought about it a lot, but didn’t make any headway.
? ? ?
The mayor of the central village picked us up at the station and brought us to a municipal building. In the conference room, posters represented various aspects of rural Hungarian life: a medieval castle, a grape arbor, a guy roasting an ox. The mayor gave a speech, and Peter translated. The mayor thanked us for coming to share our culture and language, and hoped that we would take something away in return. Then he asked whether any of us knew HTML, because his village needed a Web page. Owen knew HTML. The mayor shook his hand and said that he, Owen, would live with him in his home.
The mayor’s teenage son, Béla, took us sightseeing. He was wearing bright yellow headphones around his neck, the cord disappearing into his puffy jacket. When Vivie asked what he was listening to, he took a Sports Discman out of his pocket and passed it around, so we could listen to Hungarian rap music. I had never actually listened to a Discman before. There was a faint hissing sound, and then some boys were yelling in Hungarian with perfect clarity. They were right there, yelling in your ear.
We followed Béla down a muddy gravel road, past pink wooden houses and little plots sown with corn and sunflowers, to a twelfth-century church. The church was locked. In the back, by the graveyard, stood a cottage with a sign that read CARETAKER, SZEKERES JáNOS. Béla banged on the door and windows, until Szekeres János came out, rubbing his eyes. Unlocking the church, he proceeded to talk for an hour about pillars and naves and Cain and Abel.
Part of a great king’s body might have been buried in the crypt at some point. The king had originally been buried in Budapest, then canonized, then exhumed and dispatched, in pieces, to reliquaries across the country. The remains of the remains were reinterred. During the Ottoman invasion, they were dug up again and sent away for safekeeping—maybe to this very crypt, although then again maybe not; the caretaker meticulously weighed the evidence pro and con. In any case, nothing was here now, it had all been sent back to Budapest after the Ottomans left. I expected the crypt to be dark and gloomy, but it was pale and light, with yellow vaulted ceilings and archways, so maybe death would be that way, too.
? ? ?
We visited a folklore museum. János was there again, as in some tiresome dream, describing the different ways of turning cotton into string. In the back room of the museum a woman served us pork chops. I had never eaten a pork chop. My parents rarely ate pork. Almost nobody in Turkey did, not even atheists. At first, tears came to my eyes and swallowing took a lot of effort. But eventually it was just like eating anything else.
Everyone kept asking Béla questions. I listened carefully, so I would learn how to talk to Hungarian village teenagers. I didn’t learn anything useful. At some point, Owen asked Béla if he had ever been to Budapest: a city two hours away by train.
“To Budapest?” repeated Béla.
“You see, we just came from there,” Owen said.
“Sometimes my friends and I go to Pest on the weekends,” Béla said. He gazed at Owen with unconcealed wonder, and said that they would be brothers.
When Vivie apologized for eating slowly, Béla said that eating slowly was good: “If you eat slowly, you can feel the food.”
“You don’t feel food,” Owen said, “you taste it.”
“Yes,” Béla said. “But I also mean more than to taste it.”
“You enjoy it,” suggested Daniel. “If you eat slowly, you enjoy the food.”
“You enjoy,” repeated Béla.
“You relish it,” said Owen. “You savor it.”
“Savior?”
“Not savior—savor. It’s like enjoying something, but more slowly.”
“I don’t know this word,” Béla said, his eyes shining.
I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said “you can feel the food.” That was how Owen would end up with students who said “savor,” while I would end up with students who said “papel iss blonk.”
After lunch we went back to the conference room. Representatives from each village came to collect their new English teachers. First a weary-looking doctor came from the village where a kid had tried to impale Sandy with antlers. “We need athletic boy,” said the doctor. Frank went to the antler village.
The other village representatives were English teachers, all women. They approached Cheryl first, but Cheryl just shook her head and said that she was waiting for a family that spoke no English.
After Owen and Frank, the next to be chosen were Dawn and Vivie, then Daniel. That left me and Cheryl. There was only one village representative left, a woman with feathered hair and a kind expression.