Cheryl’s sad tale: for three nights she had camped on the mayor’s sofa. On Wednesday she had been sent to a more remote village two hours to the south, to live with the local handyman.
“He treats me like an idiot,” she said softly. “He thought I didn’t know how to turn on a light switch or a faucet. I tried to say that we have electricity and plumbing in America, but he wouldn’t listen. He kept turning the switch on and off. To show me how the toilet worked, he flushed it seven times in a row. Now the toilet doesn’t work.”
“Isn’t he a handyman?” asked Owen.
“I don’t think he’s very good at his job,” Cheryl replied.
“We’re doing our best to get you out of there,” Peter said.
Cheryl didn’t say anything.
? ? ?
We took turns meeting with Peter, who was leaving for Mongolia in two days; we wouldn’t see him again until September 12 at noon in front of the Science Center. Cheryl went first. The rest of us sat by a fountain watching part of a wedding procession between two buildings, exchanging tales of village life. Daniel’s whole class consisted of teenage girls, some of them really hot. Their fathers all made the same joke, he heard it at least once a day: “If you ever touch my daughter, you will have to marry her!” Then they laughed and laughed.
Everyone wanted to take a trip together at the end of the program. They wanted to go to Romania to see the beautiful forests. Brigands lived in the forests, and if you didn’t know what you were doing you would get yourself killed, but Peter had some Romanian friends who would drive us around in their car. The whole setup sounded totally unappealing to me, what with nobody but Peter’s friends to protect you from the brigands, and nobody but the brigands to protect you from Peter’s friends, but I didn’t say anything. I would be in Turkey, anyway.
When it was my turn to talk with Peter, he asked me if I had spoken to Ivan. I said I hadn’t.
“Why not?”
I thought about it. “They keep sending me on excursions.”
He laughed. “You should call him,” he said. “You should call Ivan.”
“I guess so.” I realized I had pulled a fistful of grass out of the ground. “I don’t know why I’m pulling out Eger’s grass.”
“Oh, don’t pull out the grass,” said Peter.
“It’s a destructive habit,” I agreed.
“Well, all right then. Don’t pull out any grass, and call Ivan. That’s our plan for you.”
? ? ?
Vivie, Owen, and I were on the same return bus—our villages were in the same direction. At a newsstand, Owen read a German newspaper while Vivie and I paged through the Hungarian fashion magazines, and discussed how the models looked less tormented than models in American magazines.
“Maybe it’s like how, in cultures where everyone is starving, the standard of beauty is less skinny,” Vivie said. We both looked for a moment at the confident Hungarian women, each of whom knew tens of thousands of the words closest to Ivan.
On the bus, Vivie said that her host father referred to sunflowers as “the five fingers of God.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
? ? ?
In the shower that night, after I had rinsed the shampoo from my hair, I trained the jet of water between my legs, which was something you could do with a handheld showerhead, though it had never occurred to me before. The sensation was both new and familiar, like a song I’d heard incompletely a long time ago. As I felt my whole body contract and tighten around something that wasn’t there, I felt like I understood for the first time what the point of sex would be, and I thought about all the ungrounded longing I had felt around Ivan, and it seemed to me that I couldn’t live another moment without feeling him inside me, filling that terrible emptiness. And yet apparently I could live, and had to live, and did live. Upstairs, the goldenrod and the weasel were waiting. I thought for the thousandth time of calling Ivan, and for the thousandth time was unable to think my way around the problems of how to get to the phone and of what to say. Nonetheless, the fact that I could theoretically call him continued to torment me until I fell asleep, and dreamed that I went to a little house where I was supposed to live, and Ivan was inside and shouted at me to go away; then he changed his mind and showed me how to turn the faucets on and off.
? ? ?
Nóra was sobbing with the terrifying abandon of children, as if she would never be consoled. One of the cats had had kittens.
“We have at least fifteen cats now,” Margit said. “There may be others. Nóra says they will eat the mice, but I don’t think there are fifteen mice left here.”
“Couldn’t they eat the neighbors’ mice?”
“They have already eaten the neighbors’ mice.”
I was packing my suitcase, though I didn’t know where I was going. Nóra followed me from room to room, weeping, a kitten in her arms. She leaned her body against me, warm and damp and snuffling. Even the top of her head felt damp and tearful when I patted it. The kitten was really wet. It looked mildly surprised. So that’s what life is, it seemed to be thinking.
When Gyula came back from his German lesson, Nóra set the kitten on the table and jumped into his arms. Gyula lifted her up and dried her eyes. The kitten approached the edge of the table, looked at the floor, and mewed. Then it jumped off and skirted the corner, disappearing in the direction of the bedrooms.
Gyula deposited Nóra on the sofa so he could carry my suitcase to the car. Margit and I got in. Nóra was sitting at the round table on the porch, head buried in her arms. Gyula picked up some kind of a scythe and started sharpening it on a stone with a grinding, whining sound. Margit put the car in reverse. In the mirror I watched Nóra zoom farther away, then closer, then farther again. Her face was still cradled in one arm; with the other arm, she was waving tragically.
? ? ?
A red bus was speeding toward us from the left, a blue bus from the right. “We have a choice,” said Margit. “We can be killed either by a red bus or by a blue one.” We crossed the train tracks, then drove alongside them for a few minutes, stopping at a small pink house that faced the station. Margit said I was going to spend the next week there with a girl named Rózsa, who was my age and was in training to be an English teacher. She said she wasn’t going to stay long because Rózsa didn’t care for her.