But he caught the moth and cupped it in his hands and said to open the window. I jumped out of bed and raised the sash, and he stood beside me and let the moth fly away. I remembered that I was wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, and got back into bed.
Ivan stood at the foot of the bed, casting a long shadow. “It’s past five,” he said. “It might not be a bad idea for us to get some sleep.”
“It’s probably not a bad idea,” I said.
He stood there another moment, then picked up the beer bottle, turned out the light, and left.
? ? ?
I dreamed I was sitting in a tiled bathhouse. Late afternoon light poured through a high window, and water was seeping under the door, slowly filling the room, mounting higher and higher. Then the door opened and a wall of water gushed in, and through the same door my brother also came, but it wasn’t my real-life brother, it was Ivan, and I stood up and we embraced. The water was up to our knees. We held on to each other really, really tightly.
“I love you so much,” I said.
“I know—so do I,” he said.
I woke up with tears in my eyes. Sunlight streamed through the window, sparkling off the gilded teacups. I found a disposable camera in a side pocket of my backpack, and snapped a photograph of the teacups, with one handle facing left. At least I would know I hadn’t dreamed the thing about the teacups.
? ? ?
At breakfast there was ham. You read those rhymes as a child, and they seemed so abstract—and then you grew up and there they were, the eggs and the ham, the goats and the boats, the logs and the dogs, and the cars and the bars. We would not, could not, on a plane. We would not, could not, in the rain. We would not, could not, here or there. We would not, could not, anywhere.
I met the last two sisters: the one who had been at a folklore camp in Transylvania, and the one who had been in the hospital with her boyfriend’s father. Ivan’s mother showed me a chart they used to use when everyone still lived at home—a grid with the days of the week and the different chores, cocoa and dishes and setting the table, with markers for each of the five kids. You could see how much those days meant to Ivan’s mother.
“It’s very rare now that we’re all together again,” she said. “Luckily, tomorrow will be one of those occasions.” The older sister explained that they were all going on a canoeing trip in western Hungary.
? ? ?
Before Ivan could drop me off in Szentendre, we had to stop at the Thai embassy in Budapest. He explained in the car that today was the last day he could pick up his Thai visa: “We’re going away tomorrow, we get back Friday, and I leave for Bangkok on Saturday morning.”
“I see,” I said.
“So you picked a good time to call.” That was when I realized that I wouldn’t see him again—not for a long time, and maybe not ever.
The Thai embassy was on a leafy side street with unmarked lanes and no sidewalk. Ivan parked on the shoulder, almost in a bed of ivy, and walked up to the gate. I sat in the sun-filled car listening to the birds. When he got back, Ivan apologized for taking so long. But I would have liked to stay there all day.
The Thai visa took up a whole page in his passport. Printed on rainbow-colored paper, it incorporated a hologram, a red eagle-man in a flaming circle, and a xeroxed passport photo. Unsmiling, underexposed, Ivan looked as sooty and grim as a coal miner from ancient times.
? ? ?
When we got back to Szentendre, the campground was deserted. Rózsa had told Ivan that if we were late we could find them at the beach. Ivan drove to a big white hotel at the end of the street. He said it had the biggest beach. The beach wasn’t visible from the parking lot—it was downhill behind some trees.
“Do you want to go down and make sure they’re there?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I bet they’re there,” I said. We got out of the car and stood facing each other.
“So,” he said. “You’re going away.”
I felt my eyebrows tense. “You are,” I said.
“My email account will be active a little while longer,” he said. “And yours will be active for a long time. So we could be in touch.” Everything hurt, especially “could,” and “a little while longer.” “You should try to have a nice time,” he continued. “Even here.”
I nodded.
“You should visit me in California.”
“Okay.”
“Come here.” I stepped forward and he drew me toward him, holding me so close that I had difficulty breathing. Standing on my toes, my face pressed sideways against his chest, I was unable to see over his shoulder and found myself instead looking down, toward the gravel path that led to the beach. I patted his back, which felt so solid and present under his T-shirt. I felt at a loss—for words, breath, thought, everything.
I said bye first, to be brave. I still thought bravery would be somehow rewarded.
“Bye,” he replied.
It seemed to take hours just to reach the beginning of the gravel path. Then I started downhill toward the shore. After a few steps, I stopped. I hadn’t heard the car door close. I hadn’t heard the motor start. I thought about turning back. Was that one of the things that could be done? Well, of course it was. Here I was in this world, with the same rights as anyone else—I could turn, walk in circles, stamp my foot. But none of these things would change the fact that he was going clear around the Earth, with no plan and no reason to come back to where I was.
I kept walking toward the river. I could hear the tears welling up. They made a creaking sound. I felt too worn out to blink them back, and anyway there was nobody there to see. I felt my face changing, my cheeks getting soft and hot. I came to a tennis court. Two couples my parents’ age were playing doubles. One of the men, who had a beard and was standing very close to the net, let out a yell—“és!”—with every volley. Nobody seemed to notice or care that there was a weeping person there in a Dr. Seuss shirt. Invisibility felt like a blessing.
Behind the court lay a few green-tinged tennis balls among some green gravel. The beach came into view. I felt a flood of relief and realized it was because the beach was empty and the campers were elsewhere. I wasn’t ready to join them. I went back to the tennis court and watched the game for a few minutes, to give Ivan time to clear out. Then I climbed back up the hill. He was gone.
I lit a cigarette as I started walking along the main road. The cigarette magically and unequivocally stopped the flow of tears. It was impossible not to feel that it was a benevolent force, the way it protected you like that. Passing the restaurant in a boat, I followed the shady path along the river to the ferry dock. White fluff resembling milkweed fell from the trees, silently and in great quantities. It hadn’t been there last time. I had never seen anything like it before. The whiteness kept falling and falling, like in a sentence from linguistics or the philosophy of language. I thought about the winter—how I used to run into Ivan sometimes walking through the snow-covered quad, a satchel strap crossing the front of his black puffy jacket. I remembered how we’d had so much time ahead of us.