In the evening we rode on bicycles to Gyula’s parents’ house. Nóra had her own little bike. Feri rode in a sling attached to Gyula’s back. I was perched on a giant men’s ten-speed.
“I was worried that you would be cramped, with your long legs,” Margit said. “But luckily our neighbors’ son is just as tall as you are.”
Gyula’s father, an agricultural engineer, had become famous by crossbreeding chickpeas and wheat, though not with each other. Gyula was also an agricultural engineer but had lost his job when the Soviets stopped funding the village research center. We rode past the center: three long buildings, one corrugated metal, one rose-colored stucco, the third candy-pink. The surrounding sea of corn and tobacco was reflected so clearly in the windows, it almost seemed to be inside the building.
Gyula’s parents’ street had a suburban look, with sidewalks, lawns, and nonedible shrubs. Gyula’s mother, wearing a silk zebra-print skirt and blouse, ushered us into a living room and showed me her husband’s monographs, in Hungarian, German, and Russian. There was a trilingual pamphlet about winter precipitation and beets, and an English translation of the proceedings of a forum on irrigation. On the first page was a list of participants:
áBEL, GY., assistant manager, Szarvas State Model Farm, Szarvas.
áDáNY, N., deputy director, National Meteorological Service, Central Institute for Atmospheric Physics, Budapest.
BALOGH, Zs., academician, university professor, E?tv?s Loránd University, Department of Plant Physiology, Budapest.
BáRDOS, A. S., chief engineer, Borsod Chemical Works, Agrochemical Section, Kazincbarcika.
B?D?R, J., scientific head of department, Research Institute for Viti-and Viniculture, Kecskemét.
CSAPó, J., retired director, Research Station for Beet Growing, Sopronhorpács.
CSORNAI, Sz., production vice president, Lenin Cooperative Farm, Tiszaf?ldvár.
DEáK, B., research worker, Agricultural Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Martonvásár.
DUDáS, E., deputy minister, Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Budapest.
The questions, in boldface, were followed by the participants’ responses in alphabetical order of last name. It was impossible not to admire the clear, concise manner in which Gyula’s father differentiated between the irrigation needs of winter versus summer barley, questioned the neglect of rice in the Great Plain, and summarized the advantages of flooding irrigation for alkali pastures.
Gyula’s mother brought out an old yearbook. Gyula’s father and twenty other young men with combed hair and intent expressions looked out from the glossy black-and-white pages, and I thought about how, long before I was born, they had been memorizing the Krebs cycle, eating winter salami, and contemplating the future—their own, and that of Hungarian agriculture. “I brought you here because Gyula’s mother makes a very nice paprikás chicken with homemade noodles,” Margit whispered.
Conversation at dinner circled around the ambiguous nomenclature of seasonal barleys. Gyula’s mother brought out an apple strudel and poured us all brandy. I drank the brandy because it was less trouble than explaining about not drinking it. On the way out, she pressed something warm, heavy, and yielding into my hands. It was wrapped in foil but it felt alive. It was another strudel.
On the way back, I couldn’t keep the handlebars completely straight, and yet, coasting in arcs down the empty moonlit road, I realized that falling off a bicycle was far more difficult than I had previously imagined.
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In class we worked on the conditional tense. “If I were Picasso,” said Katalin, “I would love many women.” A less beautiful girl wouldn’t have said that, I thought. Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love.
For the lesson on directions, I drew maps of American towns. Take a left onto Main Street, and then your second right onto Elm Street. The firehouse will be on your right.
“On your right, Selin, or to your right?”
“Either is fine.”
“But which is more polite?”
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Nóra and I went for a walk. She told me the Hungarian names of things, and I wrote them down. I hadn’t brought the dictionary, so it was what the language philosopher Donald Davidson called “radical interpretation.” The street looked empty but was full of words: “puddle,” “mud,” “bottle,” “chocolate wrapper,” “gum,” “gum wrapper.” Nóra pointed sorrowfully at a dead bird and said, “Madár,” which I thought meant “dead,” but then she pointed at the sky and said “Madár,” again, and I realized it was “bird.” The grass was sometimes “gaz,” and other times “f?.”
“What’s this, gaz or f??” she demanded.
“Gaz?”
“No, Selin—f?!”
We came to the main road, with telephone and electric lines. “Telefon oszlop,” said Nóra. “Telefon oszlop, telefon oszlop, telefon oszlop. Elektromos oszlop.” I wasn’t sure what oszlop was, the pole or the line, until we came to a waist-height concrete column sticking out of the ground: “Beton oszlop,” Nóra said. I knew beton was concrete—Turkish used the same word. It seemed so funny to me that you could have a telephone oszlop, an electric oszlop, or a concrete oszlop. The whole world could be redescribed in terms of oszlop. I tried to tell Nóra that she was a Nóra oszlop. She listened with a serious expression. “Now we run,” she said, and took off for the hills. “Run, Selin,” she yelled. Despite her sturdy build, she could run really fast. We ran and ran, through increasingly suburban streets, arriving in the end at Gyula’s parents’ house. Gyula’s mother came out with a weary expression and gave us cake. Ten minutes later, Margit came with the car to get us. It turned out that Nóra’s tendency to run to her grandparents’ house was well-known. It was because of the cake.
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On Friday, I stood in front of the class singing “Hello, Goodbye” by the Beatles. It was like falling off a cliff: time stretched, there was so much time to think different thoughts. “You say yes, I say no,” I sang. “You say stop, and I say go, go, go.” I remembered a Turkish expression: “I say bayram haftas? [holiday week], he says mangal tahtas? [the wooden base of a brazier].” I thought about holiday week, and how today was Friday, and Ivan had said we could see each other on the weekends.
“Hello, hello!” I sang. “I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello.”
“Hello, hello!” sang the younger kids. “Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello!”