He is waiting for his exit permit—it would come through eventually. He has a job in London beginning January and wants to practice his English with Sophie. “I don’t quite believe it myself as I look at you that you’re here, that I am looking at Sophie Landsmann. And you still speak Hungarian. We were playmates when you were six and I was five—do you remember that?” He speaks now in English, now in Hungarian, and keeps offering her American cigarets. “We have Scotch too in Budapest if you like. I know where to get the best black-market Scotch—or don’t you drink?” He laughs when she confesses her preference for vodka. “Here we have only red vodka,” he jokes and asks about life in America, what she did, is she liked to dance, liked jazz. There were two or three first-class night clubs, maybe not as good as in America, or would she rather see the old sights, the baths—an excursion to Castle Hill. She said she liked gypsy music. If it was true gypsy music. Then she was ashamed. Most of the gypsies they knew were exterminated or sterilized. She was ashamed to have asked if some were left to entertain her. But Peter finds it amusing. “So you like gypsy music. I have a weakness for it myself.” He knows the one place that is open till dawn; you just bribed the gendarme. But they still had all afternoon—didn’t she want to walk across the bridge to Buda to see her old house?
They stood before the tall padlocked iron gate; she took a brief look at the red stucco house set in the hillside at the end of an alley of walnut trees, then stared at his hands that gripped the iron bars; she didn’t touch it. He was giving her a history of the different occupants since she left. Government people owned it now. She expected to be disappointed, or a little moved, but felt nothing. The house she noticed was squeezed behind a great old mansion surrounded by bushes on the left and flanked by a smaller house with a tall apartment building behind it on the other side; they obtruded on her view of the house now so oppressively, it was surprising that she had entirely forgotten them.
On their way back to Pest, walking past the Field of Blood toward the new bridge, Peter kept saying how odd it was the way they played as children; they spent so much time together without knowing each other at all.
“Children can play together for months and have absolutely no relationship to each other,” he said, “don’t you think that’s true?”
She wasn’t sure what he meant; she remembered that the little boy Petie was very important to the little girl she was. His face hadn’t changed much; the same skinny boy grown very tall; she is still surprised by the wide shoulders and his big feet; he is another person now and just like any other young man with whom she does not know what she feels or should feel. The same strangeness with Peter as with every other man, waiting for something to happen, to change in her, or change between them; never having known any other feeling; asking herself, “Can I love this man?” waiting for some impossible revelation or simply for a man to take hold of her and make her will-less.
They danced around the deserted square in the early dawn after the tavern closed, a little drunk; he told her, “I hope we’ll meet in London.” He was just breaking off a very complicated affair with an older woman and he was very impressed by someone like Sophie, so serious and a virgin—she must forgive him, this was a crazy place—he was hoping they’d meet when he wasn’t in this crazy place. “I can’t believe anything will ever make sense; but I’m going to London and who knows...”
•
The ten days over, on the night train to Geneva, the numbness that had settled on her in Budapest begins to lift. She recalls the flight from Prague: ten days ago, early in the morning, as the plane crossed over the foothills of the Carpathians where the Danube bends south, seeing the Danube loop, the sense of homecoming swept over her; she stared through the thick slab of glass, resisting the onslaught of sensations, of summer days of long ago, unprepared for tears. It was not the moment in her life to remember the smell of the Danube across Visograd; and she walked through ten days guardedly, as in a dream where it is useless to pick up gold coins scattered over the street because you wake up in a room in another country without those lovely coins, feeling terribly deceived.
“I DON’T know why I’m sitting here,” Kamilla says. “We have nothing to do with each other, do we?”
“You called,” she reminds her mother breezily, starting to prepare tea.
“I called you because father asked me on the phone if I know how you are. I didn’t even know you were back in New York. You don’t write me. We haven’t been on speaking terms for years. I have accepted that I don’t have a daughter. But your father is a funny man. It worries him that we are not in contact. I don’t understand and the truth is that we have no relationship. Why am I sitting here? You are a stranger to me. I am a stranger to you.”
“Because father wants it. It’s very simple. You have just explained: you came to please father. He does the same to me. Every time he calls he asks me, ‘Have you spoken to your mother?’ ‘Do you know how she is?’ We’re sitting here together to please father. So let’s have a cup of tea and a nice conversation.”
“What funny people you both are! You and your father!” she laughs, wagging her head. “I’m going to have tea with my daughter,” she
