The house was empty when we got back. I started to head upstairs, but Gyula led me to the table and pulled out a chair, and the next thing I knew he’d brought out the whiskey again. “Marlboro?” he suggested, taking a pack from his pocket. But the idea of smoking cigarettes with an adult was too strange, and I declined the Marlboro as well as the whiskey. Gyula looked thoughtful, then went outside to the shed and came back with an orange tackle box and removed two stacked trays from the upper compartment. They were full of ammunition, bullets and cartridges and birdshot, neatly arranged in compartments.
He took out several cartridges and stood them upright on the table. “German,” he said. “American—like you.” Even the bullets here had nationalities. There were Czech, Finnish, Yugoslavian, and Chinese bullets. “Soviet bullet,” he said in Russian, tapping a domed cartridge with a red band.
Holding up one of the German cartridges, Gyula twitched his nose and made scampering motions with his hands. Then he beat his palms against his legs in a way that sounded just like wings, and expelled a stream of air, ffff, through his teeth. From these gestures I understood, eventually, that the little German cartridge was for shooting rabbits and pheasants.
Standing a larger, American cartridge on the table, Gyula closed his eyes for a moment, then placed his index fingers, pointing upward, against his temples, opened his eyes wide, and turned his head sharply from side to side. “?zbak,” he said. That turned out to be a roebuck.
He took out a third cartridge, really different from the other two, brass-plated, reminiscent of a pen. He looked at me for a moment. “Mensch,” he said, lowering his voice. Then, in Hungarian: “Man.”
Gyula told a hunting story. There was a roebuck in it, and Barka, and the police, and a confrontation, and barking. He repeatedly praised Barka, and said she was a vizsla, and imitated the way she pointed with her foot. He produced some papers from the bottom compartment of the box. “Biztosítás,” he said. “Do you understand? Biztosítás.”
I looked up biztosítás. It meant insurance. When he saw I had a dictionary, Gyula told me some other words, for gun registration, hunting license, and gun license. The most important point seemed to be that you needed two licenses—one for you and one for the gun.
“Two licenses,” I repeated.
He nodded and said that I was clever.
The Ford Fiesta pulled up outside, and the children ran in, followed a moment later by Margit. “Oh dear,” Margit said, taking in the bottle of whiskey, the open tackle box, and the array of bullets and licenses. “It seems there has been a lecture.”
? ? ?
The next afternoon, Margit and Gyula were both busy, so the school principal gave me a ride home. When we got to the house, Gyula was running out the door wearing a powder-blue suit. He waved in passing, shouting something about the bus. The principal tried to offer him a ride, but he was already halfway to the main road. He was a really fast runner, even in that suit, which was reserved, I later learned, for his weekly German lessons in the city.
I found myself alone for the first time in days. Remembering that they had said I could eat whatever I wanted, I cut a big slice of apple cake and ate it while reading Dracula. It felt amazing to eat anything without having to listen, nod, smile, or do anything with my eyebrows. Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. “These wolves seem upset at something,” he observed. The next morning the cage was all twisted out of shape and the gray wolf Berserker was missing. Dracula had temporarily inhabited its body. Dracula had a totally different experience at the zoo from that of other people.
Someone was knocking on the glass door. The main door was open, and behind the glass stood a small blond girl.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she said. “I am Reni. We will go on an excursion.”
I opened the door. She came in but wouldn’t sit down, and only glanced at her tiny watch, its face no bigger than a nickel. She didn’t seem interested in cake, either. She just kept saying we would go on an excursion.
“Okay,” I said. I got up and started to clear the table.
“We will go on an excursion now.”
“Now? Like, right now?”
“Yes, of course!” I noticed then that she was wearing a tiny backpack with both straps on. I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn’t get to decide. At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.
? ? ?
As soon as we left the house and reached the main road, Reni’s expression brightened.
“After ten minutes, the bus,” Reni said happily, when we reached the main road. “We sit.”
We sat on the edge of the asphalt, facing the forest. Reni tilted her head and looked at the clear sun-filled sky. “I love outdoors!” she said, then added, “I don’t like Margit’s house.”
“No?”
“No. It’s many animals.”
“You mean Barka?”
“No. The kill animals, that Margit’s husband, with the gun. I hate hunters. Of course, I don’t talk this to Margit’s husband.”
The bus came, a high coach bus with plush seats and tinted windows. We climbed up the stairs and sat near the middle. Reni explained that she had been one of Margit’s students—the worst one. Now she studied agricultural engineering, and had a boyfriend. Reni was twenty, and her boyfriend was only sixteen, but he was usually very adult. Only now they were having a fight, and he was behaving like sixteen.
“What’s the fight about?” I asked.
“Many things,” she said. “He is not lovely.”
“Not lovely?”
“Not at all.”
I glanced over at her—hearing about her boyfriend made me curious about her appearance. She looked cute and businesslike, with chin-length blond hair, a plain white T-shirt, and wire-rimmed glasses. We talked about crop rotation. The bus left us in Gy?ngy?s, Hungary’s second-largest city. In an hour, another bus would take us to a Christmas fortress in the mountains. (This later turned out to be a spruce and fir forest. “Christmas trees,” Reni said, pointing out the window.) Meanwhile, in Gy?ngy?s, we would visit Reni’s favorite place, the natural history museum, where they had a very special animal. The animal was large, and didn’t exist.
“You mean it’s imaginary? Like a unicorn?”
“No, no, it’s very old. We look at bones.”
“Oh, a dinosaur.”
“No, not a dinosaur.”