Flesh: A Novel

2

HE AND ÖDÖN WAIT IN THE COLD WOOD. It’s a winter afternoon and under the trees it’s already quite dark as they stand next to the car smoking cigarettes.

“Who’re we waiting for?” István asks.

“Just some guys,” Ödön says.

“Are we in Croatia?” István asks, a minute later.

Ödön shrugs.

“It’s fucking cold,” István says, a few minutes later.

“Yeah,” Ödön agrees.

After a while another car comes along the track, from the opposite direction. It’s a small Suzuki jeep with Croatian plates.

“Wait here,” Ödön says. “Keep your eyes open.”

He walks toward the jeep, which has stopped.

Two men get out and they talk. They seem to be speaking English but they talk in quiet voices and István can’t hear what they’re saying.

He can’t see them very well either in the dusky light.

He just stands there, with his hands in his pockets, feeling cold.

His feet, especially, feel very cold.

He’s wearing the wrong sort of shoes.

He looks down at them, and at the half-frozen mud of the track.

About a week ago he ran into Ödön in the town. He knew him slightly from the young offenders’ institution. Ödön seemed pleased to see him and asked did he want to earn some money. István asked him what he meant. Ödön explained that he had to pick up some stuff in Croatia and needed someone to go with him.

“Why?” István asked.

“To watch my back.”

“What stuff?” István asked.

“Whatever. That’s not important.”

“Why do you need someone to watch your back?”

“So that I feel safe.”

“Why wouldn’t you feel safe?”

“I’d feel safer with someone like you with me.”

“What do you mean, someone like me?”

“You know what I mean,” Ödön said.

And it’s true that István had made a sort of name for himself in the institution. Like everyone in there he had to look out for himself. There were some fights. He had an aptitude for fighting, he discovered.

That’s probably what Ödön was talking about.

When he told István how much he would pay him, István said he would do it.

And now he’s here, in the cold wood, hugging himself and trying to hear what Ödön is saying to those two men about fifty meters away in the half darkness under the trees.

Ödön comes back with a bag, a sort of nylon sports holdall. He puts it in the car and then reverses along the track, the way they came.

“What is it?” István asks, blowing into his hands. “Drugs?”

“Whatever,” Ödön mutters. He’s twisted around in his seat, reversing along the track, which is too narrow for him to turn in.

It’s nearly dark now.

When they reach the main road—which is itself just a quiet two-lane thing without any traffic—he puts the headlights on.

They drive back to the town and then to a part of it that István doesn’t know very well. A few years ago it was mostly vineyards and fields. Now there are more and more houses on the hillside. They stop at one of them and István waits in the car while Ödön rings the doorbell.

“Who lives there?” István asks him, when he returns without the holdall.

“I don’t know,” Ödön says.

He pays István his money and drives him home.

They do the same thing a few more times that winter, and for a while István has money.

He mostly spends it on going out, although the town’s nightlife is very limited. The main place is Jungle.

Sometimes he sees Ödön there. On one such occasion, when he’s drunk, Ödön tells him that he thinks it’s heroin in the bags they pick up. He says that one of the main heroin routes into Europe is through the Balkans, and that this might be part of it.

After they’ve had a few drinks they talk about taking one of the bags and selling the stuff themselves, if it is heroin.

They never do that, though.

They never even look in the bags.

They’re too scared of the man in the house, and also they’re satisfied with the money he pays them for delivering the stuff to him, whatever it is. It seems like a lot to them.

Then Ödön suddenly disappears and István is poor again.

He has struggled, since leaving the young offenders’ institution, to find legitimate work. It’s a time of economic depression and there aren’t many jobs available.

He spends a lot of time just hanging around in the apartment.

He watches daytime TV, sits on the balcony smoking cigarettes.

Sometimes the probation people find him a day’s work, unloading stuff from a truck or something like that, and when he does have money he still spends it in Jungle. It’s not unusual for him to see Noémi there. She’s his uncle’s stepdaughter.

They hang out together quite a lot that spring and summer. He likes talking to her. She’s one of the few people he’s talked to about what happened, about why he was in the institution and what it was like there.

She works at the new Tex-Mex place near the main square of the town and sometimes, when he has nothing else to do during the day, he hangs out there, talking to her and drinking coffee.

As the summer wears on he spends more and more time there.

He seems drawn to the place and he starts to wonder what that’s about.

Then he understands.

He’s sort of in love with her.

He thinks she might feel something similar, the way she looks at him sometimes.

It’s awkward, though, to make any kind of move, what with them being friends and everything. Even family in a way.

He sits on a tall stool at the bar and she asks him what he wants.

He says he wants coffee.

She turns to the machine, and he watches her while she makes him an espresso.

There’s a single, sad-looking shelf of spirits on the wall behind the bar. Most of the bottles are empty, they’re just there to fill it out. There’s a particularly large number of empty tequila bottles with tops that look like Mexican hats or cactuses.

“So what are you up to?” she asks him.

“Today?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t know,” he says, helping himself to one of her Marlboros and then dipping his head to light it. He’s not sure how she affords Western cigarettes. She won’t be paid much for working here.

She takes one as well.

He’s still holding her lighter. He only notices that he has it when he sees her looking for it. Without saying anything he lights the cigarette for her. He looks at her face while he does that, while her attention is focused on the cigarette in her mouth.

“Thanks,” she says, lifting her head and exhaling smoke.

“Sure.”

He puts the lighter down on the bar and tells her that his friend Riki is thinking of joining the army.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“It’s a job, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she agrees.

“He says you get everything—food, a place to live. You save all your pay.”

“Okay.”

They talk about that for a few minutes and then he fans himself with a laminated cocktail menu while she deals with some people who have finished their lunch and want to settle up.

When they have left the place is empty.

He should probably leave soon himself, he thinks.

He’s been there for nearly an hour.

“Do you want another coffee?” she asks, putting the money in the till.

He doesn’t want another coffee.

“Yeah, okay,” he says.

While she makes it he starts to tell her about this date he had the other night. It’s the sort of thing they talk to each other about these days. Over the summer they’ve increasingly talked about stuff like that.

“Oh yeah?” she says, working the machine. “Anything happen?”

“Not much.”

Still facing away from him, she laughs. “Not much? What does that mean?”

“We kissed,” he says.

“You kissed?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Where did it happen, this kissing?” she asks. She’s a few years older than him and sometimes talks to him like he’s still just a kid.

“At her place,” he says.

She turns to him, holding the coffee. It’s on the house, that’s understood. She knows that he doesn’t have any money. “You went back to her place?”

“Yes.”

“And you only kissed?”

“Yes.”

“You surprise me,” she says, throwing a few sachets of sugar onto the bar.

“Why’s that?” he asks.

“I thought you were more of an operator than that.”

“You thought that, did you?”

“Yes, I did,” she says.

“Well, you’re wrong,” he says.

She raises an eyebrow.

“You’re wrong,” he says again, and drinks some of the coffee even though his heart’s already going faster than it should be.

She has a drag on her cigarette and looks at him slyly through the smoke.

“Don’t pretend to be a nice person,” she says, smiling at him.

“I am a nice person.”

She laughs again.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing,” she says. “How many poor girls have you… bedded this summer?” she asks.

“Don’t know,” he says.

“Yes, you do. How many?”

“Five or something. I don’t know. Depends what you mean.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Not exactly. What about you?” he says.

“What about me?”

“How many? This summer.” When she doesn’t say anything, when she just looks at him with a narrow expression, he says, “You’ve lost count?”

Still looking straight at him, she laughs.

“So?”

“Less than you,” she says, turning away.

“I doubt that.”

“I’m not like you. I’m a romantic,” she says. She’s washing the empty coffee cup in the small stainless-steel sink.

“Yeah, right.” He knows that since she split up with Gábor, nearly a year ago, after they’d been together since they were at school, she’s been “making up for lost time,” as she put it herself once when he asked her why she slept with so many guys. She’s starting to get a reputation, in the small world of the town’s nightlife, as a bit of a slut.

“A romantic?” he says.

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t care what you think,” she says.

“Oh, it’s like that, is it?”

“Yeah, it’s like that.”

“Okay,” he says.

With his arm he wipes the sweat off his forehead. His arm, after he has done that, is surprisingly wet. “A fan or something might be an idea,” he says.

She shrugs.

She’s also sweating. He hasn’t failed to notice the sheen of sweat hanging above her upper lip and shining in the hollow of her throat.

“It’s not up to me,” she says, stubbing out her cigarette.

“Have a word with Péter, then,” he says.

“He’s too tight.”

“It’d be an investment.”

“He won’t do it.”

“Won’t buy a fan?”

“He’d be a pain in the ass about it.”

“Can I have some water?”

She fills a glass and puts it on the bar.

“So will you see her again?” she asks, while he thirstily drinks.

“Who?”

“This girl you kissed or whatever.”

“Don’t know.”

“Do you want to?”

He shrugs.

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“It means—” He shrugs again.

“Don’t you like her?”

“She’s a bit boring.”

“Still kissed her.”

“Yeah,” he admits.

“Sure you only kissed her?”

“Well.”

“You did more than that, didn’t you?”

“Maybe a bit,” he says. “Her parents were at home,” he explains. “It’s a small panel apartment.”

“That’s why you didn’t fuck her?”

“Not only that.”

“I’ve been wondering, actually,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“You live in a small panel apartment,” she says. “You and your mom.”

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“How does that work?” she asks.

“How d’you mean?”

“You know what I mean. When you bring people back.”

“What makes you think I bring people back?”

“Don’t you?”

“Not really,” he says. “Sometimes.”

“Well, when you do.”

“What?”

“Well, I’m sure your mom doesn’t want to hear what you get up to.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t.”

“I know what the walls are like in those apartments.”

“Yeah?” he says.

“So?”

“Usually she’s out,” he says.

“Okay.”

“What about you?” he asks.

“What about me?”

“D’you take people back to your parents’ place?”

She still lives with her parents too—or at least with István’s uncle and her mother.

“Gábor was there all the time,” she says. “You know that.”

“No, I mean since then,” he says. “That was different. I mean Gábor was like part of the family, wasn’t he.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she says, taking another cigarette out of the packet, using two of her long, fake nails to pry it free of the others in there. She has fake eyelashes too. A lot of makeup.

“What happened with him, actually?” István asks.

“What happened?” She lights the cigarette.

“Why d’you split up?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” he says. “I was just wondering.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.”

She lights the lighter and stares at the flame.

“Busy, isn’t it,” he says, looking over his shoulder at the deserted space under the vaulted ceiling and beyond it the brownish glare of the street on the other side of the glass.

She sort of smiles, though obviously she doesn’t find it funny, or maybe her thoughts are just on something else.

He pinches his damp T-shirt front and flaps it to try to get some air onto the skin inside.

“You had a vacation this summer?” he asks.

“You know I haven’t,” she says.

“Want to go to Balaton?” He’s been planning to ask her that for a while.

She doesn’t seem particularly surprised.

She doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic either, though, which is disappointing.

“When?” she says.

“Whenever. Just for the day. Have a swim, whatever. When’s your next day off?” he asks her.

“Sunday,” she says. “Or Monday.”

“How about Sunday, then?”

At first she doesn’t say anything. Then she says, “Wouldn’t that be a bit weird?”

“Wouldn’t what be weird?”

“Us going to Balaton together.”

“Why?”

“I just think it would be a bit weird,” she says.

“Why?” he says again.

“Wouldn’t it?” she says.

“Why?”

“Can you stop saying why,” she says, with a laugh.

He laughs too. “I don’t know why you think it would be weird,” he says.

“I just do,” she says.

“I don’t know why.”

“Yeah, you’ve made that clear.”

“Seriously,” he says, “why?”

“It’s just how I feel.”

“Okay.”

Trying not to show how disappointed he feels, he flaps his T-shirt again—it’s from a secondhand shop, one of the ones that sells stuff from the West, and the picture of the baby swimming after the dollar on the front of it has already half faded away.

“Do you really not see what I mean?” she asks.

“Not really.”

“Whatever,” she says. “Just, we’ve never done anything like that.”

“So?”

“So nothing. I’m just saying.” She laughs. “Are you sure you want to spend an entire day with me?”

“No,” he lies, smiling at her.

She laughs again. “I’m not sure I’d want to spend an entire day with you.”

He isn’t sure to what extent she’s joking, if at all. He laughs anyway.

It’s only yesterday that he saw her last so why does it feel like he hasn’t seen her for weeks? He walks into town, through the warm evening. The Tex-Mex place is a garish cluster of lights in an otherwise dreary side street. He pushes open the glass door. She isn’t there. He sees that straightaway. That other waitress is there. “Hi,” she says to him. It’s still quite early and the place isn’t full. He just stands there for a few seconds and then says, “Noémi not in?”

The other waitress shakes her head.

“I thought she worked Wednesdays,” he says.

“She asked to swap,” the other waitress says.

“Yeah?”

The other waitress nods.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” the other waitress says.

From the phone box on the corner he tries her parents’ house. Her mother answers. “She’s out,” she tells him when he asks if Noémi’s there.

“I don’t know where she is,” she says in answer to his next question.

Starting to sweat in the hot phone box, he asks her if she knows when she’ll be back.

“No,” her mother says.

He leaves a message for her to phone him when she gets in.

She doesn’t phone until the next morning.

“Where were you last night?” he asks her.

“Where was I?”

“You weren’t working.”

“I know.”

“So?”

She laughs. “What’s it got to do with you?”

“Just wondering.”

“I was out.”

“Okay.”

“Seeing someone.”

“Who?”

“A friend.”

“A friend?”

“Yeah, a friend.”

She says what she actually phoned to tell him was that she asked her stepbrother Miki if she could borrow his car to drive to Balaton on Sunday, and he said yes.

On Sunday morning the sky is partly overcast. Enough that he worries she’ll phone and say she doesn’t think it’s worth going after all.

He worries about that until, looking down from the kitchen window at about ten o’clock, he sees Miki’s old red Škoda arrive.

“Why don’t you ask her up for coffee?” his mother suggests, joining him at the window to see what he’s so interested in.

“We should get going really,” he tells her.

When the entry phone sounds his mother invites her upstairs anyway.

He stays in the kitchen fiddling with the coffee percolator while his mother lets her into the apartment.

They talk in the entrance hall for what seems like a long time.

Eventually Noémi appears in the kitchen doorway and without even looking at her he says, “Want coffee?”

“Actually no,” she says, smiling. “I’ve had too much already. I’m shaking like a leaf.” She holds out her hand.

“Yeah?” he says, washing a spoon.

She laughs.

“What’s funny?” he asks her.

“I don’t know,” she says.

They leave ten minutes later.

István offers to drive.

“Miki specifically said that wasn’t allowed,” she tells him.

“Fuck Miki.”

She hesitates and then throws the keys across the roof of the car, its red paint starting to come away in places to reveal something paler underneath, like skin after sunburn. “You better be careful,” she says.

“I’m always careful.”

“That’s such shit,” she says. “How long have you had your license anyway?”

“Few months,” he says, adjusting the seat.

“If you have an accident I’ll have to say I was driving,” she says.

“Fine.”

“No, it’s not fine.”

He’s poking around with the key, trying to find the slot in the steering column. “I won’t have an accident,” he says, and turns the key.

The Škoda immediately lunges forward and stalls just short of the car in front.

“Fuck’s sake,” Noémi says.

“I didn’t realize it was in gear.”

“You should’ve checked.”

“You should’ve told me.”

“You sure you want to drive?”

“Yes.”

Partly it’s just that he wants something to do, something to occupy him, to absorb his nervous energy.

He puts it in neutral and turns the key again.

“There,” he says when it starts without mishap.

“Well done,” she says.

“Fuck off,” he says.

She laughs.

She has her feet up on the tough plastic of the dashboard. They’re a serious distraction, as are her legs in his peripheral vision.

He tries to ignore them as he directs the car out of the housing estate and onto the main road.

“How are you?” he asks, as he does that.

“What d’you mean?”

“What d’you mean what do I mean?”

“It’s a weird question,” she says.

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is it a weird question?”

“I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing grown-ups ask each other.”

“Aren’t we grown-ups?”

She laughs again. “Maybe,” she says.

They leave the town and the car reluctantly picks up speed.

The wind booms at the open windows.

Dry fields of sunflowers and maize pass slowly on either side as they get stuck behind tractors and trucks on the two-lane road.

The weak engine struggles with overtaking, especially uphill.

They don’t talk much, partly because the wind noise means they’d have to shout, and if they put the windows up it would be unbearably hot.

Just for something to do, Noémi rummages in the mess of the glove compartment and finds some of Miki’s tapes.

She puts one on and they laugh at his shit taste—it’s Hungarian metal, some deep-voiced guy yelling about death and the devil.

When they get sick of it she stops the tape with her big toe.

“Thanks,” István says.

“Want a smoke?”

“Yeah.”

She lights a cigarette, hands it to him, and then lights another for herself.

There’s an intermittent stench of farms and, sometimes, on straight stretches of road, a table under a faded sun-umbrella and someone selling peaches or melons. Sometimes as well, in the shade under trees, there’s a bored-looking woman in a tank top and a miniskirt waiting where the entrance to a dirt track provides somewhere to pull over.

“Have you ever done that?” she asks him.

“What? Sold my body?”

She laughs. “Used a hooker.”

“No,” he says. And then, when she doesn’t say anything else, “Seriously.”

“It’s okay,” she says, laughing again, though more drily this time. “I believe you.”

“I’d never do that,” he says. “I don’t need to pay for it.”

“Listen to him,” she scoffs.

“I don’t.”

“How many people have you slept with, then?” she asks.

“What? Ever?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean slept with?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know. Do you mean like… fucked?”

“Whatever.”

“Does a hand job count?”

She thinks for a moment and then says, “Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” he says.

In fact he does, he knows the exact number. It is, he thinks, an embarrassingly small number. The three years he spent in the young offenders’ institution were wasted from that point of view, and in the year since then it hasn’t been difficult to keep a tally of the number of women he’s had sex of some sort with.

“I don’t know,” he says again.

“Yeah, you do,” Noémi says.

He asks her what her equivalent number would be.

She thinks for quite a long time, sort of marking things off on her fingers, and then says, “Twenty-three.”

He tries not to sound surprised. “Yeah?”

“I think so,” she says. “Unless I’m forgetting someone.” She laughs.

“Twenty-three?” István says.

“Yes.”

There’s a sort of similarity in their situations in that they’ve both accumulated most of their experience, numerically anyway, in the past year, in her case because until about a year ago she and Gábor were together. That’s why the number she said seemed surprisingly high to him. He knew she’d been sleeping around. Still, it seemed like a lot for one year. He says, “There was no one before Gábor?”

“Yes,” she says. “There was.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He was the second.”

“Okay.”

“And then there was no one else for… five years,” she says.

“No one?”

“No.”

“So,” István says, trying to stay focused on the road ahead, “in the last year you’ve slept with twenty-one guys?”

“I guess so,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Are you shocked?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says.

She laughs. “You’re shocked.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he admits.

They park in a street of gloomy bungalows near the lake.

After more than two hours on the plastic seat the back of his T-shirt is wet and stuck to his skin. He peels it off over his head, and then, standing on the pavement next to a chain-link fence, lights a cigarette.

It’s fairly quiet—the summer season officially ended a week ago. Not that it’s deserted or anything. People creak past on bicycles or walk toward the lake with towels and stuff. After locking the old Škoda they do that themselves.

The wind picks up as they near the water. The road they’re walking down just stops, the asphalt disintegrating and giving way to sandy grass with some people lying on it and then the dark blue water of the lake and the strange outline shapes of the hills on the other side.

They swim and afterward she squeezes out her hair as they lie on their towels on the grass.

“Nice, isn’t it?” he says.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” she admits.

They talk for a while about other times that they’ve each been there in the past, family vacations and school trips, and where they were and what happened, and when they feel too hot they swim again. The water is murkily shallow, a silky green soup of living things and dead things. Reeds mass along the shore. In one place there’s a jetty that sticks out among them. It might be a private one. They lie on it anyway. The wind from the lake raises gooseflesh on their skin, and makes the reeds thrash sleepily. The wooden planks of the jetty have a hot, dry smell. For quite a long time they don’t talk at all.

After a while he lifts his head and sees that she’s sitting up and nervously twisting a stalk of grass with her fingers as she looks at the hills on the other side of the lake. He sits up and looks at them too. They look like furniture with sheets draped over it so that it’s not possible to see exactly what’s underneath, he thinks. For a minute they just sit there and he wonders whether to put out a hand and touch her. He wonders whether she might be waiting for him to do that.

And then the moment passes, and she’s standing at the end of the jetty looking down into the water.

She turns and sees him watching her.

“What is it?” she asks.

He shrugs.

“I’m hungry,” she says.

There are some makeshift eateries along the shore, and sitting on the terrace of one of them they eat greasy fish off paper plates with plastic knives and forks.

“How about a beer?” he suggests.

“All right, just one,” she says.

Still in only his trunks and flip-flops, he goes to the counter and asks for two Sopronis and the woman takes them out of the fridge.

“Thanks,” Noémi says when he sits down at the table with them.

He opens his and has a drink from it and then asks her if she’s seen anyone recently.

“Seen anyone?” she says.

“You know what I mean.”

“Like dates or whatever?”

“Yeah.”

“No, not really. Nothing serious.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means nothing serious,” she says, prizing the last slivers of flesh from the soft skeleton of the fish in front of her.

He’s hardly touched his.

He lights a cigarette and says, “You never answered my question, the other day.”

“What question?”

“If you bring people back to your parents’ place.”

“Oh, that.”

“Well?”

“No,” she says. “Well, I did sometimes.” She says she hasn’t slept with anyone for a few months though.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Months?”

“Yeah.”

“Why not?”

She shrugs.

“Don’t you like miss it or whatever?” he asks.

“Miss it?”

“You know.”

“Sex?”

“Yeah.”

“There are other ways,” she says, not looking at him.

“Other ways? You mean…?”

“I mean masturbation,” she says.

For a moment he looks so embarrassed that she laughs.

“I’m sure you know a bit about that yourself,” she says, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin.

“Yeah, a bit,” he admits.

A few minutes later they’re talking about porn.

She says she mostly looks at lesbian stuff because she finds the men in the films so off-putting.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“They just seem to be such assholes,” she says.

“The men?”

“Yeah.” For a moment she imitates one of them—“Take that, bitch, suck that, bitch.”

He laughs at the accuracy of her imitation.

“It’s awful,” she says.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“That that actually appeals to men. I mean, do you like that sort of thing?”

“Not particularly,” he says, tapping the ash off the end of his cigarette. “And you find the lesbian stuff turns you on?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Okay. Have you ever actually done that?”

“What, had sex with a woman?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” she says.

“Do you want to?”

“Not really.” She laughs herself at the hint of ambivalence.

“Not really?”

“No. I don’t think so.” Seeming slightly embarrassed now, she turns it back on him. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, as I understand it you’ve actually had sex with another man.”

He told her once, when they were drunk, about what happened in the institution that one time.

He sort of wishes he hadn’t now.

He says, “That was nothing.”

“That’s not how you made it sound.”

“We were desperate,” he says.

“You sure that’s all it was?”

He thinks she’s just teasing him and laughs. “Yeah. Another one?” he asks, indicating her can of Soproni.

“We can’t both have another one,” she points out.

“No?”

“One of us has to drive back,” she says.

“Well, not necessarily. We could stay the night,” he suggests, and he’s pleased how natural and spontaneous it sounds.

“Where?” she asks, not dismissing the idea out of hand anyway.

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“I’m not sleeping in the car,” she says, laughing.

“I know.”

“I’m not sleeping under a bush.”

“I know,” he says. “I was thinking a hotel.”

She takes a moment to absorb that idea. “You’ve got money, have you?” she asks.

“Sure,” he says.

“What money?”

“Money.”

It’s some money from his mother for his birthday. He doesn’t tell her that.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Why not?”

She seems to think about it again, looking at him while she does. Finally she says that if they’re going to do that they should sort out the hotel now, while they’re still more or less sober, in case they can’t find anywhere later.

“Sure,” he says, trying not to show how excited he feels, and anyway the feeling wavers when it turns out that most of the hotels near the lake are in fact full, and he starts to worry that maybe they won’t be able to stay the night after all.

It’s already early evening. Shadows stretch across the road as they approach the last hotel on that part of the shore, which is a brownish rough-looking concrete thing. The lobby is humid and dimly lit. “Yes, we have a few,” the man says in answer to István’s nervous question about rooms.

When the man tells him the price he takes Noémi aside and says, “I don’t have enough for two.”

“Rooms?”

“Yeah.”

“So?” she says.

“Up to you,” he says.

They take one room, a twin.

It’s a concrete box with brown carpet and bobbly orange covers on the low beds.

Taking turns in the bathroom, they hang up their damp swimming things and then go back out and have another drink on a terrace next to the water.

They’re not talking as much as they did before.

The sun is setting.

They sit there in the soft horizontal light.

“What?” she says.

He’s looking at her.

“What?” she says again.

“Is it okay if I kiss you?” he says.

The moment he thinks of saying it, he says it.

He knows how it is. If he hesitates he won’t do it.

So he doesn’t hesitate.

He just says it.

And then, even though some foreign tourists are singing noisily at a nearby table, there seems to be total silence until she says, “Yeah it’s okay.”

Moths are attacking the lamps. The foreign tourists at the nearby table are still singing.

They stop kissing and just sit there looking at the other people.

They don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say now, it seems.

“Another?” he asks. He means a drink. He’s holding her hand, which is hot and damp, sort of kneading it with his fingers. There’s something wonderful about the fact that he’s allowed to do that now.

“No I don’t think so,” she says.

“Should we go back?”

She nods.

It’s only a few minutes’ walk to the hotel. They walk back through the warm darkness. It seems obvious to him that they’re going to sleep together now, and he’s in a heady state of nervousness and excitement as they mount the stairs. They arrive at their floor and make their way along the silent, brown-carpeted corridor. His trembling hands take a moment to insert the key. As soon as they’re inside the room he tries to kiss her again.

“No,” she says quietly. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing’s going to happen tonight,” she tells him, sort of holding him at arm’s length.

“Why not?” he asks again.

“Just like that,” she says.

“Okay,” he says, after quite a few seconds.

“All right?” she says, making sure he understands.

“Yeah.”

She lowers her arms.

“Which bed do you want?” she asks.

“Whichever,” he says, still not sure whether this is a definitive development, or whether there might be some way around it.

“I’ll take this one,” she says.

“Okay.”

“I’m just going in there.” She points to the dark brown door of the bathroom.

“All right,” he says.

He lies on the bed that seems to be his and lights a cigarette. His hands are still shaking.

From the bathroom, a minute later, he hears the splattering of the shower.

She’s having a shower in there.

The urge he has to open the door and look is almost too strong for him to resist.

He resists it, though.

He still hopes that what she said about nothing happening tonight will turn out not to be the final word on the matter. When he thinks about how she kissed him, about how they made out on that terrace in a way that may not have been entirely appropriate in a public place, he can hardly believe that she doesn’t want anything more herself.

He’s on his second cigarette when she emerges from the bathroom.

A few minutes after that he takes his turn.

The shower is a sort of hose thing and he uses it and then wraps the small towel that’s there around his waist and returns to the bedroom, where she’s pretending to be asleep. She must be pretending. It’s only been a few minutes. And indeed as soon as she feels his weight on the mattress, she sits up.

“What is it?” she says.

He’s sitting on the edge of her bed. When he puts out a hand to touch her face she stops him.

“Please,” she says.

From the way she says it, sort of almost frightened and almost angry, it’s obvious not only that there isn’t any hope of anything happening tonight, there isn’t much hope of anything happening ever.

“Please,” she says again.

“I don’t understand,” he says.

“What?”

“I thought…”

She waits for him to finish the sentence and when he doesn’t she says, “I’m sorry. It’s not that simple.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

There’s another long silence.

He says, “Is it because…?”

He doesn’t finish that sentence either.

“Is it because what?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer and then she says, “I wasn’t totally honest with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am sort of seeing someone. I’m sorry.”

Sitting there almost naked in the dim light he just looks at her for quite a long time. “Who?”

“You don’t know him.”

“Who is he?”

“What does it matter?”

“I want to know.”

“His name’s John,” she says, after apparently taking a few moments to decide whether to tell him or not.

“John?”

“Yes.”

“A foreigner?”

“He’s English,” she says.

“English?”

“Yes.”

“A tourist or what?”

She tells him that he lives in the town.

“Why?” István asks.

“He works for British American Tobacco,” she says. “They own the cigarette factory now. He’s a manager there.”

There’s another long silence, and then he says, “How do you know him?”

“He drinks at Tex-Mex sometimes,” she says.

“Does he?”

She nods and it occurs to him that he might even have met this man, that there was a foreigner there a week or two ago when he dropped in to see her. An older man, maybe thirty or something, sitting up at the bar drinking expensive tequila and talking to her in English. He left soon after István arrived.

“You mean the one with the beard?” he asks.

“He has a beard,” she says. “Yes.”

“That small guy?”

“He’s not small.”

“He is.”

“Whatever,” she says.

“That’s him?”

“Yes, that’s him.”

“You’re seeing him?”

“Yes. I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have told you.” She seems to be about to touch him on the arm. Then she has second thoughts perhaps and doesn’t.

He doesn’t sleep well, or much at all.

Sometimes he drifts off for a while and then wakes up again.

And then it’s light when he opens his eyes.

It’s weird to wake up there, in that concrete hotel room, especially knowing that the motionless shape on the other bed is her.

She still seems to be asleep.

He tries to sleep again himself but it’s hopeless.

He steps out onto the balcony—there’s a small balcony that he didn’t really notice the night before—and sits on the white plastic chair that’s out there and lights a cigarette.

From the quality of the light and from the silence all around it’s obviously still very early in the morning.

The weather seems to have changed.

There’s a ledge of gray cloud hanging over the turquoise lake and the air has an almost autumnal coolness to it.

He’s even a bit too cold, sitting there in his T-shirt and shorts.

He’s been sitting out there for quite a while when her voice startles him.

“Morning,” she says, from the balcony door.

He turns. She has the orange bedcover around her like a cloak, as if to hide the minimal clothing that she has on underneath it.

“Morning,” he says.

“How are you?” she asks, and the question seems to have a more-than-normal significance.

“I’m all right,” he says.

He isn’t, though.

They drive back mostly in silence. The drive seems strangely short, it seems to take almost no time at all. She drops him at the housing estate where he and his mother live.

As he walks up the stairs he understands that the worst part is just starting.

For the next few days he hardly eats or sleeps.

He spends a lot of time on the balcony, smoking cigarettes.

It feels like autumn suddenly.

It’s windy and leaves start to come off the trees.

It rains all night.

“You need to get a job,” his mother says in the morning. They’re sitting opposite each other at the small square table in the kitchen while the rain falls outside. “Are you listening?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“You’re thinking about something else, aren’t you?” she says.

“No,” he says.

“You need to get a job,” she says again.

And a few months later, still unable to find anything else, he joins the army.