Pale fibrous clouds lay on the surface of the sky, which resembled a dark blue inverted bowl. The moon was a perfect white disk. In the window of the café, the men, tables, bottles, and a piano stood out as sharply as a scene in a movie. Some distance away, on the other side of the station entrance, stood a glowing phone booth.
I went inside and pulled the door shut. The overhead light came on. I started to dial Ivan’s number, but couldn’t go through with it, and instead called Svetlana in Belgrade. She answered on the second ring and almost immediately launched into a description of the Italian trip with Bill.
“We were each overwhelmed by the ecstasy of the other’s presence,” she said.
“That’s a great sentence,” I said.
“I admit I prepared it beforehand. I’ve been waiting for somebody I could use it on.”
“Oh—I thought you made it up just for me.”
“Well, probably I did, on some level. I can’t imagine who else I would say it to. Maybe my shrink, but he gets crotchety when I talk about Bill. But I knew you would understand. When you think about all the infinitely many galaxies and combinations of DNA, and against all those odds you met this person—it’s a miracle. I wanted to prostrate myself in every church.”
“Right,” I said. I couldn’t imagine viewing Bill’s presence on Earth as any kind of a miracle, but wasn’t that itself the miracle—that love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up according to how quantifiably lovable they were?
I told Svetlana about Piri’s house. “I know that living room,” she said. “There’s always one fly buzzing around, and nobody can catch it. Why hasn’t Ivan rescued you yet?”
“I haven’t called him.”
“Why not? Wasn’t that the whole point of going to Hungary?”
“I don’t want him to think I’m complaining. Anyway, I should probably be solving my problems myself.” I told her how he had told me to make friends with the other kids.
“Do you even realize how crazy you sound? You should call him, before those ticking clocks make you even crazier.”
Svetlana had had coffee with her friend Sanja—the one she used to torture when they were little girls. Sanja was having an affair with the married thirty-five-year-old father of two young children. He was a news announcer on the national radio station. Svetlana knew his voice intimately—all Serbs did. “I learned about Radovan Karad?i?’s resignation from the married man who is sleeping with my old school friend Sanja,” Svetlana reflected.
“He must have a pleasant voice,” I said.
“Actually, he speaks in a really irritating monotone. Sanja says his voice is totally different in bed. I hope for her sake it is. Can you imagine hearing sweet nothings in the voice of a newscaster?”
“Did you make her cry?”
There was a pause. “I did, actually. Not on purpose. I was just trying to figure out, from scientific interest, whether she had any ethical problem with having an affair with a married man.”
“Did she?”
“No! Not at all! First she joked about it, and then she became defensive, and then she started to cry. But not out of remorse—just to make me feel sorry for her, and change the subject. My father says that surviving a war makes you either very bitter or very frivolous. I think it made Sanja frivolous.”
“But it made you bitter?”
“You bet. But I’d rather be bitter than frivolous. Okay, my sexual experience might be limited to kissing my cousin’s boyfriend in the Belgrade zoo at age thirteen, whereas Sanja is having an affair with a thirty-five-year-old married newscaster. But even so, I think I have a deeper understanding of love than she does.”
At that point our conversation was interrupted by a terrific crashing sound. Looking up, I saw a man straddling the broken window of the station café, one leg inside, the other in some bushes. He was shouting at another guy who was still inside the café, and then they both jumped out the window and started rolling on the ground.
“I thought Rózsa was being racist about the Gypsies,” I said.
“No, Hungary has a Roma problem,” said Svetlana. “I can’t believe you’re there, watching them throw each other out of windows.”
“I can’t believe you’re there, driving people’s mistresses to tears.”
“I know. I thought about making an anonymous call to his wife, but I figured it wasn’t really my business. I feel like it’s my business, though, because it’s part of the story of my trip to Belgrade. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Do you know what I mean?”
“About what’s part of the story of your trip?”
“Yeah, exactly. Talking to you on the phone now is part of the story of my trip to Belgrade, and so is the fight in the café. And when you tell yourself the story of your trip to Hungary, Sanja will be part of it.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“For a while now I’ve been conscious of a tension in my relationship with you,” Svetlana said. “And I think that’s the reason. It’s because we both make up narratives about our own lives. I think that’s why we decided not to live together next year. Although obviously it’s also why we’re so attracted to each other.”
“Everyone makes up narratives about their own lives.”
“But not to the same extent. Think about my roommates. Fern, for example. I don’t mean that she doesn’t have an inner life, or that she doesn’t think about the past or make plans for the future. But she doesn’t compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. She’s in my story—I’m not in hers. That makes her and me unequal, but it also gives our relationship a kind of stability, and safeness. We each have our different roles. It’s like an unspoken contract. With you, there’s more instability and tension, because I know you’re making up a story, too, and in your story I’m just a character.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I still think everyone experiences their own life as a narrative. If you didn’t have some kind of ongoing story in mind, how would you know who you were when you woke up in the morning?”
“That’s a weak definition of narrative. That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.”
“But I don’t think that’s because of our personalities,” I said. “Isn’t it more about how much money our parents have? You and I can afford to pursue some narrative just because it’s interesting. You could go to Belgrade to come to terms with your life before the war, and I could go to Hungary to learn about Ivan. But Fern has to work over the summer.”
“You’re working.”
“But my mom paid for my plane ticket. I’m not going to make money, to like give to my family.”
“I don’t think that’s the point. Fern is just an example. Valerie’s parents are engineers, she doesn’t have to work, but she’s still more like Fern than she is like us.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it feels elitist to look at it that way.”
“Don’t you think you pretending not to be elitist is disingenuous?” Svetlana said. “If you really think about who you are, and what you value?”
? ? ?