“Where does he work?”
“At the discotheque. He gets up very early, and works very hard.” I had seen the discotheque—it was called the Elefánt Diszkó—across from the train tracks. I wondered what work was done there early in the morning. “He is not interesting for me,” Rózsa said. “But it’s okay. Emese loves. I don’t love. I don’t split hairs.”
? ? ?
Piri’s house was so close that we could walk to school. Rózsa was carrying a cake she had baked, for Tünde. It was part of a plot to induce Tünde, who turned out to have influence in the matter, to let Rózsa come to Szentendre with me the following week.
Margit came to drop off Nóra, but she wouldn’t stay for class anymore; she said Rózsa wouldn’t like it. With Margit gone, Tünde was constantly underfoot, ordering the children to pronounce silent vowels and telling Rózsa to tell me that I ought to talk more myself, instead of making the children talk.
“She says your job is to speak very much,” said Rózsa, “so they hear an American.”
“I do speak very much,” I said.
Rózsa shrugged. “I do not say this. Tünde néni says this. She loves to split hairs.”
? ? ?
The new class was bigger and met in both the morning and the afternoon. Rózsa had made really detailed lesson plans in Hungarian; if I didn’t interrupt her, she was ready to talk for the whole time, without giving the children a word edgewise. For most of the first day I sat in the window and listened to her, while eating the peanuts that Tünde had brought on a silver tray. On the second day I suggested to Rózsa that she could teach her plan in the morning and I could do my own plan in the afternoon.
“No, this is Selin’s class,” said Rózsa. “You must teach all of it. I’m just your translator.”
“That’s not true, you should get to do your plan.”
“I made it for both of us!”
“Well, I think since it’s your plan, you should get to teach it. And I’ll teach my plan.”
“Oh, have you a plan? Then I needn’t translate. From now on, I am quiet. I sit in the corner.” She really went off to a corner, sat on one of the tiny chairs, and glared at me for the rest of the day.
We were supposed to be learning body parts, so I drew a person on the board and we talked about her body parts. Then we played Simon Says. After I had been Simon for a long time, I said that one of the kids should be Simon, and whoever did it would get a Blow Pop. A boy named Attila raised his hand. He did a good job at first, but then he must have run out of ideas, because he kept saying, “Simon says touch your knees. Touch your knees. Simon says touch your knees. Touch your knees.” We played Hangman. I gave Blow Pops to the winners.
“This is your plan?” Rózsa asked afterward in a voice full of outrage. “Candies and games?”
“That’s basically the American way.”
“I think that you are very . . .” She consulted her dictionary. “Inexperienced.”
“We have different systems.”
“Yes—I am serious, and you are not!”
As we were walking back to Piri’s house, we ran into Reni, who was wearing canvas gloves and an oversized sweatshirt that hid her shorts. She said she had been gardening.
“Do you know Rózsa?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, just as Rózsa said, “Of course.”
We stood there for a while, and then Reni kept walking.
“I am not popular here,” Rózsa said.
“No?”
“No. Somebody a little more clever than most has said that I am special.”
“Special how?”
She checked the dictionary. “Conceited,” she said. “Particular, fussy. Fastidious.”
“They think that you split hairs.”
“Yes.”
? ? ?
We went to Tünde’s house, so that Rózsa could ingratiate herself some more. Tünde gave us Coke and Reese’s Pieces, then she sat her son, Miki, on her knee and had a long talk with Rózsa. I ate almost the entire bowl of candy, and made faces at Miki, who squirmed and smiled at the floor.
“What’s the matter with you?” Rózsa snapped at me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Selin likes children,” Tünde said in Hungarian.
“Selin is a child,” said Rózsa.
“Oh, no, she’s a teacher,” said Tünde, with her obsequious smile.
Afterward I asked Rózsa how it had gone, and what Tünde had said.
Rózsa looked into the distance. “She said many stupid things,” she said. “But I am a persevering girl. Steadfast.”
? ? ?
Emese was playing something by Liszt on the piano, bending over the keyboard to coax out the quiet passages, and pouncing on the loud ones like a cat on a mouse. Her white tracksuit rustled. The piano, a stained upright, was amazingly out of tune, considering that Piri was a piano tuner.
András came for dinner with his knife and a yellow melon. I asked about the melon’s Hungarian name. Its Hungarian name was “yellow melon.” Piri made batter-fried meatballs, rice with raisins, stewed apples, and a cucumber salad. A full day of near-continuous eating had left my appetite strangely undiminished.
Piri urged Rózsa to eat more. Rózsa said she didn’t see the point of eating when one wasn’t hungry. I offered to do the dishes. András, who had been silent all evening, said that I was different from Emese—I was a house-loving woman.
“Is it true?” Rózsa asked, looking into my face. “Are you a house-loving woman?”
I started to wash the dishes. Rózsa stood over my shoulder and said I was using too much water and soap. I tried to be more sparing, but still she poked my arm and complained. Finally I told her to do the dishes herself, so I could learn how to use less water.
“I see that I am the only real house-loving woman here,” Rózsa said, pulling on the rubber gloves.
Instead of soaping and rinsing each dish individually, Rózsa put them all in a tub of soapy water, then replaced the soapy water with regular water. She really did use less soap and water.
? ? ?
We went outside to give the leftover rice to the neighbors’ dog. The dog, a little spaniel, stood on its back legs and yelped. I knelt to pet it between the slats of the fence. Its eyes shone with emotion—with desire and what looked like love. Rózsa let me put the rice in its dish. The dog gobbled it up. I stroked its little brow. When we went back to the house, the dog yelped piteously behind us. Looking back, I saw its head bobbing urgently over the fence.
“It would not be sad if you did not love it,” Rózsa said testily.
? ? ?