“Hello, I’m Margit, the English teacher from Kál,” she told Cheryl. “I think you are Cheryl.”
Cheryl nodded. “But I’m waiting for a family that speaks no English,” she said.
“Oh. Well, this is awkward, because I’m an English teacher.” Margit smiled at me. “Is it you who will be coming with me, then?”
“Are we waiting for another family?” Peter asked the mayor.
“Nobody is here from Apafalva.” The mayor glanced at his watch. “We must wait.”
“Is Apafalva near the mountains?” Cheryl was asking, as we left the room.
“Poor Cheryl,” said Margit, as we maneuvered my suitcase into her Ford Fiesta. “I don’t like to leave her there. I don’t understand why she is so particular that her family should not speak English.”
“She really wants to learn Hungarian. She thinks she’ll learn better if the family doesn’t speak English.”
“It’s a pity, because I don’t think she will find such a family. You see, a family that doesn’t speak English would be shy to host an American student. We want you to be comfortable.”
“Cheryl has unconventional ideas about comfort,” I said.
“I think your friend Peter also has unconventional ideas. Is it true he put you on a train from Pest at six in the morning?”
“Well, it was more like six-thirty.”
“This is unusual and difficult to understand, because there are many later trains. What were you doing here all morning?”
“Sightseeing.”
“Now, this is very interesting. You came from Budapest to Feldebr? at six-thirty in the morning to go sightseeing.”
“I think Peter wanted us to visit the crypt.”
“Oh, I see. Well, the crypt is interesting. It’s very old. Did you find it interesting?”
“Very interesting,” I said. “Only I think we stayed there a little too long.”
She asked how long we had spent in the crypt. When I told her, she almost died laughing. “You came from Budapest at six-thirty in the morning, to sit in a crypt for more than an hour! Now look at you! You have dark circles under your eyes.”
“I do?”
“You do. What would your mother think? She would think we are torturing you.”
“Oh, no, she would think I’m building up stamina.”
“Stamina! Two hours in the crypt!”
Margit turned off the rural highway onto a dirt road. The telephone and electric poles seemed unusually tall, maybe because the houses were so small—white plaster boxes with dark red roofs. Small plots of land had been given over to the cultivation of various tall leafy plants. As we approached in the car, the plants looked like a chaotic thicket, but at a certain angle they miraculously aligned themselves in rows. For an instant you could see all the way down, clear to the next house, before they dissolved again into disorder.
? ? ?
I would be staying with Margit and her family for only the first week of the program. There were so many people in the village who wanted an English teacher living with them that I would live with three different families. I would teach for nearly four weeks, and would spend one week with the children at a camp near Szentendre.
Margit’s household comprised Margit’s husband, Gyula, their children, Nóra and Feri, and Barka, a dog. There were a lot of cats, who weren’t allowed inside. Nóra had given them all names, which only she knew. Margit’s physical type was familiar to me, but Gyula didn’t look like anyone I had seen before. Sinewy, tan, with a golden mustache, he wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt tucked into denim short shorts and a blue cap with a visor. “Wilkommen!” he said, lifting my suitcase out of the trunk and carrying it upstairs.
The second floor of the house was a recent addition; the walls of the front room were still crisscrossed with wooden beams and pink insulation fluff, and a plastic sheet was taped over the window frame. But the back room was finished and beautiful, with a yellow carpet, a green sofa bed, a glass-topped desk with a vase of goldenrods, and, standing in the corner, a little snarling stuffed weasel. When Margit saw the weasel, her expression grew strained and she said something to Gyula, who replied at length.
“My husband thought that your room is very empty, so you might like a little weasel,” Margit said, turning to me. “We can move it downstairs now. He won’t be hurt.” It wasn’t clear to me who it was that wouldn’t be hurt—her husband or the weasel. In either case, it seemed clear to me that if you really wanted to be a writer, you didn’t send away the weasel.
“Are you sure you won’t be frightened when you wake up?” Margit asked.
“Oh, no,” I said.
I was frightened when I woke up.
? ? ?
Razor-sharp cucumber slices floated in ice-cold vinaigrette. The beets didn’t correspond to any ideas I had previously held. In the middle of dinner, Gyula went out the front door, returning with a 1.5-liter Coke bottle full of a kind of inky homemade wine that they kept in the toolshed. Gyula filled three heavy tumblers and raised one, and Margit translated what he was saying: that I should consider their house to be my house, and if I woke up hungry in the middle of the night, I should help myself to whatever they had.
Margit’s manner of speech reminded me of Ivan’s—the way she pronounced my name, and the questions she asked, like what languages I spoke and what other countries I had visited. Americans didn’t ask such questions. Margit had been to Paris and Vienna, and Petersburg when it had been Leningrad. She had studied Russian for twelve years under the Soviets, but had forgotten everything. “It’s a pity,” she said, “since it’s such a beautiful language.”
Every two years, Margit traveled to London with a group of her English students. On their last trip it had rained every single day and they had spent an entire afternoon drinking scotch in her hotel room. They couldn’t drink in the bar, because most of the students hadn’t turned eighteen yet. It was strange to Margit, because in Hungary there was no drinking age, and weren’t the students just as much her responsibility, whether they were in a bar or in a private room? The scotch in London was very good.
Margit asked what I thought of the television show ER, which had just come to Hungary. Margit thought it was less stupid than Dallas.
? ? ?
After dinner, it was time to check the fields. The whole family piled into the car. When Gyula opened the trunk, Barka jumped right in and lay down, like she rode there all the time. Margit climbed into the back with the children, and I got in the front and put on my seat belt. Gyula started shouting and waving his arms.
“He says you can trust his driving,” Margit said, laughing. “He’s a very safe driver and we’re not going far.”