“Look,” George told the townspeople. “I’ve tamed your dragon, and now if you all convert to Christianity, I’ll kill it.”
That was the punch line—the part when Ivan, who had started laughing at “Go away, George,” completely lost his shit, so I thought the canoe would tip over. I laughed too, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t see why George had to kill the dragon, once it was already tame, or why he had tamed it by hitting it, and not by love. As I moved the canoe paddle again and again, in the same motion every time, it began to seem to me that I was the dragon, and that Ivan had tamed me, for reasons having nothing to do with me at all. The sun bore down on us—it was the hottest part of the afternoon. I didn’t identify at all with the governor’s daughter. I didn’t identify with any of the girls in the stories that Ivan told. Their sassiness, their spirit, felt wholly alien to me.
? ? ?
Another canoe slowly overtook us. Ivan greeted the rowers—a cheerful, tanned, wiry couple in their sixties—and they chatted for a minute.
“They just retired,” Ivan told me, when the couple had passed us. “For the first time ever, they can canoe as much as they want. They went from Budapest to Visegrád this morning, and now they’re going back. This is the easy part because now it’s downstream.” For a moment it felt like we weren’t in the Danube at all but in the river of time, and everyone was at a different point, though in another sense we were all here at once.
We reached the city limits, passing under the first of the six bridges. The second bridge seemed to come almost immediately. Ivan pointed out the bridge between his house and his high school. “I used to cross it every day. Twice a day.”
We passed a boat called COH—that was Sonya—and another called STEAUA, which was Romanian for star, or something like star. “Basically, every Romanian ship has ‘star’ in its name,” Ivan said.
The plan was to land near the sixth and last bridge, find a pay phone, and call Ivan’s father to pick us up. It seemed like a weird plan to me, but apparently Hungarian people had a high tolerance for last-minute arrangements and driving around the countryside. But as we neared the sixth bridge, Ivan suddenly said that he wasn’t sure where exactly we would be if we landed there—he wasn’t sure if his father would know where we were. He said there was actually a seventh bridge, a new one, built for a World’s Fair that hadn’t actually taken place. Near the bridge to the nonexistent fair was a village that his father definitely knew.
“What do you think?” he said. “Should we keep going to the seventh bridge?”
We kept going to the seventh bridge. The traffic and city noises fell away, and for a few minutes we stopped rowing and drifted. The only sounds were the splashing of water against the canoe, the distant chirping and whirring of tiny animals, and the even more distant roar of an airplane. The sun sank toward the water. The air was soft and golden.
Soon the seventh bridge appeared above us, modern and strange, with some kind of red steel pylons. But there had been a lot of rain lately, and the landing place Ivan had been thinking of was flooded. You could see the tops of young trees and bushes sticking out of the water. It was impossible to reach the shore. We kept going until we came to a little promontory. Ivan got out first and dragged the canoe aground. I handed him our bags and shoes. He helped me out.
“I’m so hungry I could eat the first thing I see,” he said.
“That sounds like a curse in a story—like, you say that and then the first thing you see is your favorite sheep.”
“I don’t have a favorite sheep. When I’m hungry, it’s just sheep and non-sheep. Food and non-food. By the way, are you food?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t eat you. You’re my favorite sheep.”
We came to a footpath running alongside an embankment. Ivan said he would go find a phone and would be back in twenty minutes. He said I should stay behind and watch the canoe.
I sat on a log and watched the canoe. The leaves on the plants looked big and prehistoric. The whole world slowly turned blue. I heard footsteps—a lot of them. A man came into view leading two goats. The goats had gentle, foolish expressions. They didn’t seem interested in the canoe.
It grew harder to make out the numbers on my watch. I shivered and wished I had brought a jacket. After a minute, I unzipped Ivan’s backpack. It was bigger and more masculine than mine, black with red trim. He hadn’t brought a jacket, either. I heard a motor, and worried that the brigands had finally come for the canoe. Instead, two policemen rode up on motorbikes. I stood perfectly still and hoped they wouldn’t notice me, but they did. They got off their bikes and started asking me questions. The only question I understood was whether I was homeless. “Do you have a house?” they said loudly, and one of them put his hands over his head in the shape of a pointed roof.
“House, yes,” I said. The police looked relieved, said some more things, and looked at me expectantly, apparently waiting for an account of my situation.
I thought for a moment about how best to summarize the circumstances. “My friend,” I said, “went to the telephone.”
This explanation seemed to completely satisfy the police. “Good, good,” they said, then got back on their bikes and drove off. After they had left, I felt a tiny bit abandoned.
? ? ?
I couldn’t stay there one more minute. I decided to start walking in the direction Ivan had gone, and to continue until I found either him or a phone. It was already almost impossible to make out the canoe, but I dragged a couple of leafy branches in front of it, just to be safe. Then I took out my notebook and sat on the embankment to write a note, in the dark, explaining to Ivan that I was incapable of further watching the canoe.
Dear Ivan, I had written, when I heard the approach of pounding footsteps. They grew louder and louder and then Ivan flopped onto the ground beside me, out of breath, his shirt torn and muddy.
“I thought I wouldn’t be able to find you,” he said. “I never feel like I’ll be able to find you.”
I wanted to touch him, to hold him somehow, but I just touched his sleeve. “I was writing you a note,” I said. “I was about to go look for you.”
Ivan recounted his experiences. He had been chased for several kilometers by a wild dog. At some point he had lost the dog, and then the dog had reappeared with a giant dead rabbit in its mouth. Eventually Ivan climbed over a fence—that’s how he lost the dog. But then he had to find a phone on the other side of the fence.
“I really wanted to not screw up,” he said. “After last time.”
“Last time?”