Back at the house, Rózsa was waiting for me. “Now we will have our talk,” she said, pulling me to the living room. “How is your friend—what was his name? Was it Iván?”
I didn’t know who had told her Ivan’s name. “I don’t know how he is.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t talk to him! I talked to someone else.”
Rózsa fell silent. “I am sorry,” she said. “I am sorry, and I am ready.”
“For what?”
“I am sorry,” she repeated, “and I am ready.”
“What are you ready for?”
“?rület,” she said, pointing to the entry in her dictionary: “mania, frenzy, madness.”
“You’re ready for madness? What does that even mean?”
“While you were at the station, I also talked on the telephone. Tünde called. I can come with you to the camp.”
? ? ?
The bus to Szentendre left early in the morning. Piri gave me a pill at breakfast that she said would prevent me from getting sick. When I said I would prefer to wait until I was actually sick to take any pills, both Rózsa and Piri started talking heatedly at the same time. “Malsano!” Piri shouted in Esperanto, mime-vomiting. “Malsano, blechhh!” Eventually I put the pill under my tongue and pretended to swallow.
When the bus passed the station, I saw that the window of the Gypsy café was crisscrossed with duct tape. I fell asleep with my head against the window, and woke up just as we came to the intersection where Ivan’s car had overheated. There it was again: the Chinese restaurant, the commuter train station, the modern-day sundial.
? ? ?
Rózsa and I were stalled at the gate of the campground. She was holding our bags and I couldn’t figure out how to work the latch. The caretaker’s dog bounded slavering in our direction, then stopped short as if a ghostly hand had grabbed its collar. The caretaker came out of his cottage and started yelling at us. Rózsa and I stood there, watching him.
“He said you’re stupid,” Rózsa told me after a moment.
“I see,” I said.
The caretaker was still yelling.
“Not stupid,” Rózsa said thoughtfully. “Idiotic.”
? ? ?
The children were being organized to walk to the cafeteria for lunch. One of the gym teachers brought me a can of corn and most of a watermelon. I came to understand that I wasn’t going to the cafeteria with the others, but would remain at the campground, eating corn and watermelon. It seemed like an odd arrangement—I think it seemed odd to all of us—but we went along with it. Safety concerns were hinted at. “You can open the can yourself, nobody else has touched it,” Rózsa said.
A delegation of gym teachers brought me a glass of tap water, then immediately took it away and poured it in the sink. One teacher went outside and seized a can of Coke from a small child who had been about to open it, and gave it to me. I tried to return it, but everyone protested vehemently, including the child.
? ? ?
I sat on a bench, drinking the Coke and watching the children being corralled out of the campground. Once everyone had left, I decided, I would go to the train station and call Ivan. While I waited, I ended up eating the whole can of corn, as well as most of the watermelon.
? ? ?
Ivan picked up on the third ring. “Hallo?”
“Ivan?”
The silence at his end was so long that I thought we’d been disconnected. “Where are you?” he said finally.
“I’m in Szentendre. I’m at the modern-day sundial.”
There was another silence. “Do you want me to come get you?”
I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Yes.”
“Okay,” he said, and something seemed to relax between us. “What the hell are you doing there anyway?”
I tried to describe the camp. I thought it might be the kind of institution that would make sense to him as a Hungarian, but as I spoke I could tell it didn’t.
“Is it an English camp, do they study English?”
“No.”
“So what are you doing there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m on vacation.”
Ivan said that if they didn’t need me to teach English, I should bring a toothbrush and stay the night at his parents’ house. He said he could pick me up in an hour—we could meet at a restaurant he knew. The restaurant was on a boat. “It’s easy to recognize,” he said, “because it’s the only restaurant that’s on a boat.”
Even for him, it seemed a diabolical choice of landmark. “How will I find it, if it’s on a boat?”
“The boat is stationary. You know,” he added, “I think you owe me some kind of a present.”
It was true that I had never given him anything, and he had given me two books and a cassette tape. After we hung up, I stopped by the newsstand. They sold cigarettes, flowers, newspapers, and lottery tickets. But Ivan didn’t smoke, girls didn’t give boys flowers, hideous photographs of politicians were plastered on all the newspapers, and it didn’t seem right to get a lottery ticket for someone doing a Ph.D. in probability.
? ? ?
Back at the campground, I put a toothbrush, contact lens case, and change of underwear in my backpack. I could wear the same jeans tomorrow, but I would need an extra T-shirt. I couldn’t decide between two shirts: the one with the most flattering neckline or the one that was cleanest. The clean shirt, actually unworn, featured an ample smocklike body, a tight crew collar, and a picture of Dr. Seuss’s Sam-I-Am balancing a plate of green eggs and ham on a pole. It was a gift from my five-year-old half-brother—he had chosen it himself. Some part of me felt that it wasn’t what the occasion called for. And yet I knew, I held it on principle, that I couldn’t change Ivan’s feelings for me by appearing before him in one shirt rather than another, and so I brought the one that was clean and that had been a gift from my brother, who was innocent.
I looked among my belongings to see if I had anything that could be construed as a gift. All I found was an agricultural journal with an article by Gyula’s father. At first it seemed inappropriate, but then I noticed that the whole issue was about winter barley. It seemed to me that Ivan would understand this allusion to our correspondence about cereal crops—about grains that slept in the ground and were awoken. I put the journal in my backpack.
? ? ?
When the camp director, Ildi, returned from lunch, I told her that I was going to visit a friend and would be back the following day. This news wasn’t received calmly—not by Ildi, and not by any of the gym teachers. “Who is this friend?” one teacher asked, and then everyone started talking at once. Some teachers seemed to be advancing one point of view; others, another. It would have been interesting to see how it turned out, but when I checked my watch I saw that it had been forty-five minutes since I had called Ivan. When nobody was looking at me, I shouldered my backpack and ducked out the gate.
? ? ?
Walking along the riverbank, I examined every boat for signs that it could be a restaurant. A guy on one boat was eating a sandwich, but it looked like just his own personal sandwich.
“Restaurant on a boat?” I eventually asked a cheerful-looking man with a fishing kit.