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Before that summer, I knew almost nothing about the Beatles. I didn’t know why it was important to be a mop-top, or what a mop-top was. Whenever I heard older people talking about them, I just tuned it out. There were never any bad consequences. I really thought I could go through my whole life that way. But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death. “Wouldn’t it be fun to teach the children some Beatles songs?” Margit asked, on the very first day. When I said I didn’t know any, she got one of the girls in the class to loan me a greatest hits compilation: two ninety-minute Maxell cassettes with the song titles carefully written on the liner in ballpoint pen.
I was troubled by the Beatles, by the contradiction between their jaunty, harmoniously innocent warbling, and the calculating cynical worldview that seemed to underlie it. All the time they had been pleasing that girl, the Beatles had been keeping tally, resenting her for making them show her the way, waiting to be pleased in return. They went on about how they worked like a dog to make money to buy her things, and in exchange she had to give them everything. What if she didn’t? What if she didn’t know how?
“Seventeen” was daunting because of the line that I expected to go “And the way she looked was way beyond her age,” but which instead went, or so it seemed to me, “And the way she looked was way beyond her man.” I was deeply struck by the inequity between the girl and her man—the way it made her vulnerable to the Beatles, even as it indicated that she had already been defeated and humiliated, suckered into going with someone so far below her. At the same time, the fact that she was just seventeen, and had a man at all, meant that youth was no excuse for me, for how I was incapable of making anyone drive my car, or of telling the Beatles things they wanted to know, or of evoking in them or anyone else the feelings they described, the feelings that Ivan must have felt for his girlfriend, eight days a week.
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Margit took me to visit her former student Judit, who now spoke English as well as Margit, but persisted in asking for lessons. “Judit is a very clever girl,” Margit said, looking discontented. “She has read very much—in English, in German, in many languages. She is too advanced for me. I have nothing more to say to her.”
“That’s a success story,” I said. It was what my mother would have said.
“Yes,” Margit said uncertainly. “She has a real appetite for learning. She will enjoy talking to you. But I will not stay.”
We found Judit reading on a sofa, next to a window that overlooked the vacant lot separating her parents’ house from the train tracks, right at the edge of the village. There were books everywhere—stacked on the coffee table in front of the sofa, on top of the TV, in the bay window, on the floor between the sofa and the wall.
Judit stood when we came in. She was taller than me, over six feet, wearing a baggy jogging suit that hid her body but exposed her extremely thin wrists and ankles. Her remarkable eyes—pink-rimmed, gray, almost quivering—were magnified by thick glasses.
Judit’s mother, who somehow strongly resembled Judit, though she was ordinary-looking and Judit wasn’t, brought lemonade on a tray. Judit moved aside some books, including the one she had just been reading: The Mill on the Floss.
“Is it good?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s interesting. But I have to look many words up in the dictionary.” She picked up a glass of lemonade with a strikingly long, thin hand.
“Are you reading it for school?”
“Indirectly. You see, I dropped out of my program in the spring.”
Judit had been studying at a flight academy, because her childhood dream had been to be a pilot, though in fact this was impossible, because she was one centimeter too tall—even for a man, she was too tall. I made an expression of sympathy. She turned her huge, watery eyes toward me. “It’s the way cockpits are designed,” she said.
“Is that why you left the program?”
“No. I was not in the pilot training program. I was studying to become an air-traffic controller.”
“Was it . . . it wasn’t fun?”
“Fun?” She frowned slightly. “I left because of my eyesight. I have always had problems with my eyes. Every few years I need a surgery. Since my surgery last winter, even with glasses on it’s very difficult for me to pass the eyesight tests.”
I wondered what to say to someone whose situation was so different from mine, and seemed so much more difficult. The phrase that came to my mind was “rotten luck,” like people in English novels said about war tragedies. “That’s unlucky,” I said aloud.
“I don’t look at it that way,” said Judit. “It’s better I should drop out of the program now than that I should graduate, become a flight controller, and crash a plane because I didn’t see it in the fog.” I acknowledged that, when viewed in this light, things had indeed worked out for the best. “In the fall,” she continued, “I will begin working for my uncle’s import-export business. My languages may be useful then.” In addition to English, she knew French and German, and was studying Italian.
“Have you been to any other European countries besides Hungary?” she asked.
I said that I went to Turkey every year to see family, and that I had just been in Paris.
“Do you have family there, too?”
“No, I went with a friend.”
“Was it your boyfriend?” she asked. Again with the boyfriends.
“No,” I said. I told her about Svetlana, about Robin and Bill. It seemed to me as I spoke that I was alienating her, and in fact this turned out to be the case. “I don’t understand why your friend was invited on this trip,” she said. “If my boyfriend was interested in somebody else, or if another girl was interested in my boyfriend, I would not invite this girl to join us on our vacation.”
“But Svetlana and Robin are friends. They were friends for years, before they knew Bill.”
“I don’t agree. If she had really been a friend, she would not have gone to Paris, and she would not have told you these things.” When she said that, I felt ashamed and wondered where I had made my mistake. Had it been by going to Paris, or knowing the story, or telling it to a stranger?
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I was relieved when I heard Gyula’s car outside. Margit had had to take the children somewhere, and he had come to pick me up.