“Well, see you tomorrow.”
“Bright and early,” he said gloomily. He lurked in the shadows next to the shed while I knocked on the door. Margit let me in.
“Is that an animal?” she asked, peering into the storm.
“No, it’s Zoltán.”
“Zoltán!” Margit called, stepping onto the porch. But he was gone.
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A bolt of lightning lit up the whole bedroom, as if the gauzy curtains didn’t even exist, illuminating every cubic inch, unto the weasel.
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I had told Margit not to get up early with me the next morning, but was happy when she did anyway. “The rings under your eyes are worse than ever,” she said. “Try to sleep in the car.”
In the car, sleep was out of the question. Mr. Nagy drove, Zoltán sat in the front, and Csaba and I sat in the back with Mrs. Nagy between us.
“COW, Selin,” she said urgently, shaking my shoulder. “COW. COW. COW. In Hungarian we say COW.”
Zoltán asked if he could turn on the radio.
“I love the radio!” I said.
A disco beat filled the car. “Trust me, and I will never ever let you down,” a man sang unconvincingly.
“BRIDGE,” shrieked Mrs. Nagy, gripping my leg.
Sunflowers filled the window, stretching to the horizon. I preemptively shouted the Hungarian word for sunflower. It didn’t work. “SUNFLOWER. SUNFLOWER. SUNFLOWER,” Mrs. Nagy repeated piercingly, patting my knee and pointing out the window.
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It took a long time to even get to the Great Plain, and once we got there it was still a long drive to our destination: an open-air market, crowded, yellow, dusty, and already hot. Mr. Nagy needed new pants. We strolled through the stalls of tracksuits, rayon dresses, and nightgowns. Mrs. Nagy picked out various pairs of pants, and Mr. Nagy would go into a corner, take off his existing pants, and try on the new ones. Then Mrs. Nagy would tug at the waist and the crotch and make him walk in circles. The pair she liked best was bright green.
“What do you think?” she asked me in Russian.
“Remarkable,” I said.
They bought the green pants. Mr. Nagy put them on immediately and carried his old gray pants bunched up under his arm.
Next we shopped for a plastic gun for Csaba and a soccer jersey for Zoltán. Zoltán tried on several of the jerseys over his shirt, and his mother yanked at the hems, stood at a distance, knelt on the ground, and asked my opinion. Sweat streamed down Zoltán’s temples. They ended up not buying a jersey.
Mrs. Nagy said it was time to buy me a gift. “A GIFT. A GIFT. A GIFT.” Every time we passed a floor-length dress, she pulled it off the hanger and held it in front of me and asked Zoltán if he thought it looked nice. The sun climbed higher in the sky. We were all drenched in sweat. Csaba was shooting everyone with his gun. Suddenly Mrs. Nagy decided to buy me a hat.
“A HAT, A HAT, A BEAUTIFUL HAT,” she said, pulling me to the stands that sold baskets and other straw goods.
I felt some irrational primal resistance toward letting her buy me a hat, even though it was clear, or should have been clear, that this was the only way we would ever be able to move on with our lives. She picked up a wide-brimmed child’s hat with a ribbon, set it on my head, and started yanking down on the brim, trying to make it fit. “Hat,” she murmured under her breath in Hungarian.
Panic mounted in my body. “I DON’T NEED A HAT!” I shouted in Russian. Everyone turned to look at me. “You know what I like very much, is this,” I said, picking up a tiny misshapen basket.
“I didn’t know you liked baskets,” she said, a bit accusingly. She bought me the basket, and then a little stuffed basset hound that fit inside. The basset hound wore a tragic expression; a plastic heart glued to its front legs read I LOVE YOU in white script.
“Did you like the market?” Zoltán asked on the way back to the car.
“It was interesting,” I said. “Do you guys come here often?”
“No,” he said. “This is the first time.”
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On Sunday morning, I took the bus to the nearby city of Eger, to meet with Peter and the other English teachers. The bus was like paradise. For an entire hour, nobody taught me anything or wanted to be taught anything, and I listened to “All My Loving” and thought about Ivan. I got to Eger almost an hour early for the meeting, and immediately ran into Dawn. “Thank God you’re here,” she said. “I really need a drink, and I didn’t want to go to a bar alone.”
We went into the first bar we saw. There were already a few guys inside drinking. Dawn ordered apple juice, vodka, and Sprite; I got a Diet Coke. We sat in the back by the pool table. Dawn explained that she had been assigned to a family of non-English-speaking teetotalers, and hadn’t spoken to anyone or had a drink all week. “I wish I’d known before I gave them the Southern Comfort,” she said. “They locked it in a cabinet and I don’t know how to ask for it back.”
When we had finished our drinks, we walked to the designated meeting point: a monument representing the sixteenth-century battle in which István Dobó led two thousand Hungarians to victory over a hundred thousand Ottomans. When Peter came into view I felt a terrible jolt, and realized it was because Ivan wasn’t with him.
There were a lot of weddings in Eger that day, unless it was one huge wedding snaking through the city. You kept catching glimpses between the buildings: a band, a table heaped with flowers, a stern family assembled for a photograph. Statues and yellow-gray buildings stood out against an overcast sky. Peter took us to climb Eger’s famous minaret: the northernmost Ottoman building in Europe. The mosque had been destroyed in 1841. Standing alone, the minaret looked hopelessly skinny and out of place, like it had wandered out there on a dare and gotten lost.
The dungeons of the Eger fortress had been converted into a torture museum. It was sort of an architectural embodiment of the triviality-dungeon of conversation. You could have your picture taken with a turbaned and mustached man wearing pajamas and a scimitar.
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Whenever I tried to tell Hungarian people about the amazing similarities between Turkish and Hungarian, they refused to believe that the grammars had anything in common, and invariably brought up the presence in Hungarian of Turkish loan words, like those for whip and handcuffs. In fact, although the words for whip really were similar—k?rba? and korbács—the Turkish word for handcuffs (kelep?e) was actually the Hungarian word for trap, whereas the Hungarian word for handcuffs (bilincs) was the Turkish word for consciousness. I didn’t really know what to make of this, though it was certainly true that consciousness could be a trap.
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