“Restaurant on a boat,” he said. “One kilometer.”
I recognized it right away—it was almost comical how much it looked like both a boat and a restaurant. Compact, blue, it had a bar downstairs and a restaurant on the upper deck. Ivan wasn’t in either the bar or the restaurant. I sat on a bench in the entryway, rising and falling gently with the current.
From where I was sitting, below the level of the ground, all I saw at first were Ivan’s legs. I recognized them immediately and ran out of the boat. “What happiness,” I said.
“What happiness,” he said, and we beamed at each other. I noticed then that Ivan’s mother was there, and also their car, the Opel, with a canoe tied to the roof. It took me a while to understand the plan, which was that Ivan and I would paddle the canoe back to Budapest while his mother drove back in the car. First, we all went into the boat restaurant to get something to drink.
“Would you like a beer?” asked Ivan’s mother.
“She doesn’t drink beer,” Ivan said.
“Really? Is there a reason?”
“I guess I’m not used to it,” I said, adding that America had a drinking age and it was a pain to get a fake ID.
“Oh, then it’s because of the American law,” she said.
“Well, I don’t know if it’s because of the law.”
“Of course it is!” She sounded so sure that I wondered if she was right. “Soda water for me, I suppose,” she told the waiter, sounding a bit regretful, when I had asked for Coke and Ivan had ordered lemonade.
Ivan’s mother asked about the village. I told her about Margit and Gyula and Rózsa. The parts about Rózsa were supposed to be funny, but neither Ivan nor his mother laughed, and his mother looked a little concerned. When I tried to pay for the soft drinks, she touched my hand and said it was her pleasure. “It’s not every day I get to spend time with Ivan and meet his friends.”
The idea that I was Ivan’s friend, or that meeting me would tell her anything about his life, was so outlandish that I burst out laughing. She laughed, too. She asked whether the people at the camp knew I would be staying out overnight. I said that when I left they had been discussing the subject in a lively fashion.
“Good, so they know,” Ivan said. But I felt relieved when his mother said we should go back to the camp so he could talk to them himself.
Ivan’s mother got into the back of the car, Ivan drove, and I sat in the front and pointed out the way. When we pulled up in front of the gate, the caretaker’s dog started barking its head off. The caretaker glared at us, grabbed the dog’s collar, and went into his house, slamming the door. A second later we saw the curtains of the front window jerk angrily together.
“That guy thinks I’m idiotic,” I explained, a little proudly.
Rózsa came out of the main cabin, wearing a sailor tunic. I introduced her to Ivan, who towered over her, and whom she addressed in a courteous and reserved manner, strikingly different from the baleful aphoristic tone she used with me in English.
Ivan’s mother and I waited by the car. “You’re not very lucky, going straight from Rózsa to Ivan,” she said, putting her arm around my waist. “It seems you are always under some captain.”
It took me a while to process this novel grouping of ideas—Rózsa, Ivan, and my luck.
Ildi came out of the cabin. Her glance passed over Ivan, Rózsa, me, Ivan’s mother, the parked car, and the canoe on the roof, before returning to Ivan. “This must be Selin’s friend,” she said. Ivan talked to her in his warm voice, the one that hadn’t worked on the concierge at the hostel. Soon he and Ildi were both laughing. “See you tomorrow,” she told me, and waved to Ivan’s mother, who waved back.
? ? ?
I stepped first into the canoe, which was shaking and felt like life. Ivan waded into the water, pushed the canoe off the shore, and climbed in behind me. He demonstrated how to hold the paddle, the angle to put it in the water. Because I was in the front, I didn’t have to steer, or set the rhythm. I just had to row at the pace that he set, to keep us from going in circles. As he spoke, I felt how I liked following instructions, and it made me ashamed. Following instructions was what had led to the Holocaust. And yet it turned out that shame was a separate thing. If you enjoyed something, you enjoyed it, whether or not you were also ashamed.
At first it bothered me that I couldn’t see Ivan. But gradually he felt more and more present to me, just as if I were facing him. It was amazing to be so close to the water, to see the world rising up all around us like some crazy plant. Sixteen-wheel trucks glided by on barges, looming over us, temporarily blocking the sun. Ivan explained that trucks weren’t allowed on the streets on Sundays, and so were transported by barge. We bobbed in the wake of a motorboat, gently but vigorously, and all at once.
Ivan was working really hard, as usual. He talked almost the whole time. He told me the story of Saint George. He said there were two versions: one truer, the other less true. In the truer version, they killed Saint George eight times, once by hammering nails into his skull in a prison in Palestine, but he always came back to life. The less true version was the one about the dragon.
Once upon a time, Ivan said, a town was invaded by a dragon. For years, the townspeople were able to placate the dragon by giving it two goats per month. Then they ran out of goats, and had to switch to humans. The governor organized a lottery, “a sort of raffle,” to choose the victim. One day, the lot fell to his own daughter. The governor was beside himself. But the daughter said that rules were rules.
“Why the long faces?” asked Saint George, who happened to be passing by. They explained the situation. He said he knew just what to do: he would kill the dragon.
The daughter, who had been having a long day, said, “Oh, go away, Saint George”—though in fact he wasn’t a saint yet, so what she really said was, “Go away, George. You’ll just get eaten, too. Your plan is shitty.”
Just then, along came the dragon. George raised the wooden spade he had for some reason, instead of a sword (“something just like this,” Ivan said, holding up his canoe paddle), and the dragon fell. George put his belt around the dragon’s neck—I was somehow interested by the part where he took off his belt—and led it into the town.