I always tried to go to bed early, so I could read in English—real, dense English, with lots of sentences back-to-back, totally unlike “Simon says touch your knee to your elbow,” or “I would like to see this lathe more closely,” or “Somebody a little more clever than most has said that I am special.” I finished Dracula, and started The Magic Mountain. I found a lot to relate to in The Magic Mountain, particularly how they ate breakfast twice a day. Sometimes, after a whole day of eating, I would rush upstairs and devour a few squares of the chocolate I had brought from Paris to give as gifts.
Sooner or later, Rózsa’s footsteps creaked up the stairs and stopped outside my door. “You said you were tired, but I see your light on.”
Rózsa wanted to sit up late in the living room, having meaningful conversations.
“There isn’t anything you want to know about me?” Rózsa asked, when we were sitting in the living room. “I’m so boring?”
The ocherness and clock-ticking seemed to intensify with each passing second.
“It’s not that I don’t want to know about you,” I said. “I just can’t think of the questions.”
Rózsa gave me a burning look. “You can’t ask me questions,” she said. “But I could ask you many questions.”
I didn’t ask what the questions were, but she told me anyway. First she wanted to know what I thought about Hungarian people. I said I thought they were friendly and hospitable. She said I had to tell her my true thought.
“That is my true thought. Everyone I’ve met has been really friendly and hospitable.”
“They only try to seem this way with you because you’re the guest!”
I sighed. “Why do you want me to say something negative?”
“I want an honest confession,” she said. “I want the whole truth, both good and negative.”
I tried to think of a confession. “Tünde gets on my nerves,” I said.
Rózsa snorted. “Of course you don’t like Tünde. Who likes Tünde?”
“You don’t like her, either?”
“Of course not! She is proud. I don’t know why, since she is neither beautiful nor clever. But I asked about all Hungarians. Not just Tünde.”
“I’ve been here like two weeks. I’m only ready to talk about Tünde.”
“Tünde is not interesting! What about me? What do you think about me?”
She looked so much like Lucy from Peanuts that I felt a wave of tenderness toward her. “I think you have a passion for truth.”
“And you are different? You do not love truth?”
I thought about it. “Truth is okay,” I said.
“I hate lies. This is what I hate most about Hungarians: they say one thing but think something else.”
“I’m pretty sure everyone does that—not just Hungarians,” I said.
“I don’t,” she said. “I say what I am thinking or I say nothing. I don’t lie.”
“But civilization is based on lies.”
Piri came in with a plate of cylindrical wafers and asked what we were talking about. Rózsa told her that I’d said civilization was based on lies.
“But that’s true, Rózsa,” Piri said. She set the plate on the table and left the room, nodding to herself and saying, “Igaz, igaz.”
“I have another question,” Rózsa said. “How old is your Hungarian friend?”
“What friend? Reni?”
“No, not Reni! Your boyfriend. The Hungarian boy from America.”
“He’s not my boyfriend. He’s twenty-two.”
“Oh, gracious! He’s very young. My friend is twenty-five. But he is like your friend. He is separate. He is not anymore my boyfriend.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“You?” Her eyes flashed. “Why are you sorry?”
“Because you . . . had a disagreement.”
“We had a disagreement.” She tilted back her head. “Hungarian men are very interesting. They know how to say what you want to hear. They are very clever. But they do not mean these words. Five or six months later, when it is enough, then they will say the really awful things.”
Those words, “when it is enough,” stayed with me for a long time.
? ? ?
Rózsa and Piri took me on an excursion to the primitive man’s cave.
“The primitive man’s cave?”
“The cave of the primitive man.”
“What is he, like a hermit or something?”
“Maaaybe,” said Rózsa.
On the narrow-gauge railway, Rózsa and Piri sat with the picnic basket. I stood at the railing, watching the forest.
“Do you see the loco?” Rózsa pointed at the engine.
“I do.”
“We call it the coffee machine.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s small and makes steam!”
I waited what I hoped was a decorous interval, then put on my headphones. All I wanted was to stand there, listen to the Beatles, watch the trees go by, and think about Ivan. Speaking more loudly, Rózsa said I couldn’t stand by the railing because I might fall. I pretended not to hear. “Selin,” she said. “Selin.”
“What?”
“Why don’t you sit?”
“I like the view.”
“What view? There is nothing. The primitive man’s cave is not here yet. Here are only the trees. You don’t have to stand up to see them.”
“But you can see more of them if you stand up.”
“But you aren’t really looking!” she exclaimed. “You are—” She flipped through her dictionary. “Wool, gathering!”
“That’s true,” I said. “I am woolgathering.”
“You are thinking about your friend,” she said. “That’s why you don’t want to listen to me.”
“But Rózsa. Don’t you ever like to . . . to do woolgathering?”
“No! I am not a dreamer.”
? ? ?
The primitive man’s cave was at the top of a steep hill. I was wearing men’s Birkenstocks, which were so ugly that I thought they would be good for hiking, but they weren’t.
“Why are you wearing your slippers?” Rózsa asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The primitive man didn’t live in the cave anymore. His presence had been established by the things he had left behind, like some hundred-thousand-year-old flint spearheads. Bones had been found, from animals that lived before the last Ice Age: cave bear, cave hyena, tundra deer.
Rózsa took my hand and led me into the blackness. It was my first time in a cave. It smelled terrible. The farther we went, the colder, darker, and more malodorous it became. Spiderwebs attached themselves, like long trails of agglutinative suffixes, onto our arms and faces. When our eyes got used to the dark, we could see the spiders. “They’re tired,” Rózsa said. Indeed, I had never seen a more sluggish lot of spiders.
I tried to think about the primitive man—to picture him getting up in the morning. How did the primitive man know it was the morning? I wondered whether Ivan had been here. It didn’t seem like a highly trafficked cave.
It was harder to walk down the hill than it had been to climb up. The Birkenstocks kept slipping.
“You must take small steps,” Rózsa said. “You needn’t hurry, or you will fall.”
But small steps seemed to present more opportunities for slipping, so I took big steps and ended up running, gaining so much momentum that it took a lot of effort to stop at the bottom without trampling any picnickers.
“I know why you did that,” Rózsa said, when she had caught up with me. “It’s because you were afraid.”
? ? ?
In the evening, when nobody was looking, I crossed the street to the train station. Rózsa had said I must never go there: the café was frequented by Gypsies.