

### The Forest

By David M. Antonelli

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

David Antonelli on Smashwords

The Forest

Copyright © 2011 by David M. Antonelli

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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There are a few people I'd like to acknowledge:

Paul Antonelli is thanked for designing the cover page. Marylu Walters is thanked for editing an early version of this manuscript.

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### The Forest

By David Antonelli

Andrássy út Trilogy Book 1

The kings of the world are grown old,

inheritors they shall have none.

R. M. Rilke

### I

John Martin turned his head and caught a glimpse of a black-haired girl who was sitting at a small table beside him at an outdoor café on Andrássy út called _Night and Day_ that seemed to cater to locals on their way back from work in the evening. She was talking with a friend as the traffic rushed down through the Budapest evening and a small flock of gulls carved a small circle overhead. There was a smell like metal or exhaust hanging in the air and the sky had the dull gray glow that came at the end of a hot day. She had long silky black hair and thin red lips with dark eyes that were sensual or aggressive in turns. Beneath her chin was a thin roll of fat, giving her face a soft, almost doll-like appearance. She pulled a small gold chain out of the pocket of her thin white nylon windbreaker and strung it around her wrist. Martin sat at his table playing with a piece of foil wrapping from a cigarette package. There was something about her that drew him in - a certain _transparency_ that opened him up and made him aware of everything about her. It was like he had once knew her, recognizing her eyes - but not her face - from some long-lost event in the murky depths of their mutual past.

He rolled the foil between his fingers, toying with the idea of going up to her to say something. Perhaps she knew English and they could have a harmless conversation about how nice the weather was or if she had ever been or wanted to go to America. But maybe she didn't, and the act of going up to her would only lead to a clumsy and awkward conversation, which would leave them both feeling silly and inadequate. The locals, or so it seemed since he had arrived here just a day before, had a way of looking at you that made you feel thoughtless and ashamed for so much as attempting to make eye contact with them. So, if he went to talk to her and she gave him an uncomfortable or even nasty look - regardless of its true intention - the beauty of his memory of sitting in the warm night hair watching her would be forever tarnished. Yes. For the time being it was best simply to look at her and admire the way her facial expressions changed as she talked, imagining she was talking about childhood friends or events of the previous evening as he followed the rhythm dictated by her voice and the subtle contractions of her lips and eyelids.

Martin looked down at his watch. It was getting late. He'd already had three glasses of Amstel and was starting to feel tired. His stomach felt heavy and his legs were still stiff from sitting on the airplane eight hours the day before. He pulled out his wallet and there was a loud and piercing shout. He turned his head and looked behind him. A small girl with short hair cropped around her forehead wandered aimlessly across the street in front of a rose garden as if she were enjoying for a moment the simple act of being lost. She had an expression on her face like she was attached to nothing, completely without responsibility or origin. She continued walking in a circle until a tall woman carrying a pink bag came out of a restaurant and yelled something at her. The girl stopped as if an inaudible whistle had just blown. The woman grabbed her hand and escorted her curtly down the street.

Martin stood up and took one last look at the girl at the table. She didn't seem to notice him as he dropped a five hundred forint note on the table and turned to walk away. He looked at her one last time before doing an about face and continuing down the street. In the spring light Andrássy út looked like a limitless tunnel of leaves gathered around rows of small and unassumingly elegant shops. At the end of the block a police car was parked at the curb. A small fat man with tiny eyes was talking to an officer who was leaning against the car while pointing at a small van across the street. Martin guessed they were arguing about a possible traffic violation and carried on. In an hour it would be dusk and a soft pink mist would fill the air as it had the night before. He knew because a forecast on an English television station in his hotel said that the weather would be the same all week. A deep azure sky all day with only the trace of a light breeze manifesting itself as an occasional cool feeling on the face or palms.

Martin was American. He was forty one and was born in a small town in Ohio where everyone who stayed ended up working in some capacity for the same rubber company, located just a few miles outside the town on the shore of small lake. He went to college in upstate New York and later moved to Manhattan to take up a career as a freelance advertising agent - something he liked for the creative challenge, flexible hours, and seemingly limitless opportunities to meet new people and take on exciting new projects from a huge base of employers - some regular and dependable, others more sporadic, while still others once-off contracts from companies looking for an ad campaign that would catapult their product line to instant immortality. Although he had dreams of one day becoming a writer he always felt when he sat down to try and start his first novel that he either didn't yet have enough life experience or simply just hadn't read enough to be able to say something that anybody else would be interested in reading.

He had come to Budapest on the pretext of work to see his ex-wife Gabriella, whom he hadn't seen for many years. For some reason over the last several months he had felt a strange and inexplicable urge to summon back into his life and regain whatever it was that he had lost in being apart from her for so long, if such a thing even existed and, if it did, was tangible and real enough to be conjured back into the present to become the basis of something new and equally meaningful. It wasn't that he wanted her back - there was no question of that - although perhaps once he saw her he might feel something so strong that he might actually want this, even though he knew nothing could ever happen between them again, but more that he felt an emptiness inside that stretched deep down inside him and all the way back into his past and seeing her one last time was the only way he could link himself together again and start to feel whole as he ventured forward into the rest of his life. Since he had just broken up with his last girl friend, a leggy blonde tennis teacher named Marleise with whom he had been living for the last three years, a sudden trip across the ocean in search of his ex-wife didn't seem like such a bad idea, especially since he hadn't been to Europe in almost two years \- something his job had once enabled him to do with more frequency than even your average young executive. His relationship with Marleise ended abruptly when she ran off with her flute teacher and revealed a long string of affairs with her students - one an apparent Yemeni prince who wore stacked gold wristbands and was often seen driving around SoHo drunk in a red Maserati. Martin tried to be as diplomatic as possible, blaming himself for several weeks for not being a better listener or a more passionate lover, but she returned his graciousness by laughing in his face one night at a French restaurant over a glass of Bourdeaux after he suggested he was willing to forget his past mistakes and try and make things work. _You just don't get it, do you...it wasn't anything you did, it's just the way things are!_ she said as he stared into the red velvet and perfume universe of his wine glass. Young women, it seemed, were always allowed to take on other lovers to help find themselves, while you were expected to patiently wait on the sidelines until they were ready to come back and get more serious. And if you objected you were accused of selfishly denying them the very freedoms you apparently once had when you were their age. There were times they were together when she seemed to believe he was her captivator, a cruel torture master trying to horde her youth and beauty while depriving the rest of the world of her infinite charms, and other times she complained that he was too nice, even fatherly, but in a sort of homey and avuncular Midwestern way, which she found completely unattractive - the sort of person that would be played by Michael Cain if anyone would ever be so foolish as to make a movie about his life.

Bowing his head into a sudden rush of wind, he continued down Andrássy út past a large bathtub and shower shop and then a small park until he reached a stationary store located at the corner of a block that also featured a post office and an Iranian bank, a seemingly alien establishment that only emphasized how far away he was from home. A light rain had started, contradicting the weather forecast as it formed a pattern of small glossy beads on the surface of a sign that hung over the front door. _Wurla_ , it read. Something in the sound of the word itself was suggestive of being _low_. He looked behind him. A man wearing tight green work pants walked by, grinding the heals of his tall leather boots into the pavement as if he wanted to let everyone know that he was _on his way_ to some destination, the essence of which was far less important than the act of his getting there. The man crossed the street against a no-walk light and just as he reached the opposite curb a teenager dressed in an orange windbreaker emerged from behind a parked car and crossed directly in front of the man. The teenager appeared to be in a hurry, yet also unwilling to run, keeping his hands stuffed tightly in his pant pockets as a means of making sure he couldn't break into a light gallop, rebelling against the fact that he was in a hurry, standing in firm objection to the very essence of his life at that instant. Martin turned and looked at his reflection in the window of a bookstore. He was surprised that he looked far younger than the jet lag was making him feel. Behind the pane of glass hung a poster for a new book. It showed black and white photos of three men that looked like people from the Hugo Ball era at Cabarét Voltaire in Paris dressed as art deco style buildings. One even had a hat that resembled the cornice of the Empire State building, reminding Martin of the view from his apartment back home in America.

It was only a month ago that he was sitting in his New York apartment reading a crime novel and enjoying, at least for the moment, the fact he didn't miss Marleise as much as he thought he would. He put the novel down on the side table and looked across the room at a picture of himself when he was ten. There was a white fishing cap hanging over his eyes and was standing in a boat holding a trout the size of his forearm. As he looked at the picture he was immediately seduced by a strange sensation that life was disappearing from him. Not only had he completely forgotten that the picture was there and had been so for the last five years, but all the people and things which had gone towards making him who he was had receded from his being. His memories of the events surrounding the picture seemed to be memories from a movie pertaining to the main character rather than memories attached specifically to him. It was as if he was a new building, the scaffolding of which had been discarded leaving no trace of the process of construction, which was just as much a part of it existence as the reality of its material presence. He was in his forties and had only been married once. But the same could be said for many people. He was tall and thin with mid-length brown hair and had large green eyes and a bold but narrow chin. He worked in a lively Manhattan office with other freelancers, some artists, and had enough money and freedom to travel as much as he wanted to. But many people in New York also had this privilege. So, he wondered as he set the crime novel down on the dark pink sheet on his bed, what was it exactly that made him who he was? He was at a position in life that could have been occupied by anybody. That meant that it was only his path in getting there that mattered and made him who he was. A mountain peak was a point on a landscape open for anybody, but there were a thousand ways of getting there. The only difference being that everything pertaining to his so-called _path_ was no longer real, and that was where this metaphor broke down. And for a long lingering moment all of life seemed that way - a cheap sideshow that could never fit whatever grand ideal we could come up with. Whatever we did was forever lost in the past and whoever we thought we were was just some fake image we had been clinging to give ourselves prestige and permanence when no such things actually existed.

He stood up and looked out his window at the Manhattan streets below. Everything looked as if it were immersed in a thick oil, moving more slowly than he thought it should, glowing with a numb green light. Cabs moved more slowly. People walked - or so it seemed - with no sense of rush or desperation. It was true, he reassured himself, that nobody else on Earth was standing there that moment looking out at the street from that particular point in space, but it was also true that anybody at that moment could barge through the door and push him aside to assume that self same position. But whoever would be crazy enough to barge into his apartment and assume his position would obviously have emerged from a completely different background and history. Yet if this was true, why was it that everything that constituted this particular path of history had now vanished and ceased to exist? The feeling took the form of a great darkness, weighing down his entire being, defining it.

He put the novel back on his bookshelf and walked outside, continuing down Fifth Avenue past a jewelry store with a silver necklace displayed in the window. It was wrapped around an artificial neck covered with red felt. An older woman that had the gentle and knowledgeable look of an art gallery curator walked out the door and stopped to look at the necklace. In all its antique beauty, it seemed to posit the existence of something higher, something pure and beautiful, a distillate of an old romance film, that now to him seemed like only an illusion. An impossibility. As he stepped back from the window the image of Gabriella suddenly appeared in his head. Although he hadn't given much thought to her in years, there was such a freshness and immediacy to her face and eyes that he felt she was almost standing there in front of him. He didn't know much about her now, although he had heard from a mutual friend that she was leading a frugal and pure life in a small apartment in Budapest, an existence which no doubt contrasted starkly to the overblown luxury of his own. She had always hated anything that smacked of material pleasures and had prided herself on being a person who was able to extract more meaning out of life's vagaries than anyone else. She was the sort of person who would spend a weekend in a city in which he had spent months or even years and then claim to understand it at a much deeper level than he ever possibly could and proceed to convince him how wrong he was for viewing it the way he did. But this was why he had always loved her. Only Gabriella knew what was important in life and how little he really knew about anything.

Over the days that followed the feeling that he should visit her and somehow regain her dominated his emotional life. At first he tried to ignore it, as he was never one to pay any attention to fanciful thoughts or fleeting notions. Yet as the weeks unfolded he became increasingly convinced that he was living a lie and could no longer be the person he was before his first feeling of incompleteness came over him. So, after almost three weeks of confusion and sweaty, sleepless nights listening to the hum of the fan in his living room, he finally came to the conclusion that he had to cross the Atlantic and see her. It was the only solution. In order for his life to continue in a normal and integrated way he had to recapture what it was that she had become for him. Not that he wanted to be her lover again - but perhaps he would, as living with Marleise for three years convinced him that he could only truly love Gabriella - but rather that he wanted to see what it was in him that had made him who he was now, this complete and autonomous being conceived from his parents yet strangely no longer in existence. The next day he wrapped up a project he'd left hanging a few weeks earlier involving an advertising campaign for a new brand of yogurt with time-release anti oxidant beads blended in - a kind of macrobiotic caviar - and then postponed all upcoming business until later that month. The only way he could dispel his newfound darkness was to go to Budapest to see her.

That night he tracked down her phone number by calling Joe, a mutual friend that had tried for several years unsuccessfully to be a painter but ended up selling real estate in Nebraska, something he admitted to being surprised at how fulfilling he had found it in retrospect. After some idle chitchat about sports and the stock exchange he got her phone number and called her immediately. He knew it would be morning where she was and maybe she would already be at work. Her voice came over the answering machine calm and controlled like an operator's. It was strange to hear her voice like this, emanating from a circular black plastic device and sounding only like the voice of a thousand people, seeming to lack any character of its own. He let the message tape run to the beep and, instead of leaving a message, he let the receiver drop and fixed himself a Martini. It was enough to know that he had located her in Budapest in a place that he could find her whenever he wanted and maybe even surprise her. He imagined himself in a brand new wool suit standing at her door with a wise and glowing smile as she opened it and faced the man she once had said was the only man she would ever love.

But that was four weeks ago and now he was in Budapest where it was his sole life's mission to see her. He heard a bell strike in the distance and continued down past a sweet shop. There was a group of three pigeons gathered in a circle in front of the door staring at a vase inside filled with small chocolate roses decorated with what looked like pink and green frosting petals. Hungarians seemed to revel in beautifully detailed shop window displays in a way that struck him as almost Japanese. He walked by the opera house, a heavy stone building replete with tiered arches and intricately carved pillars decorated with gold-leaf designs, to an intersection that looked like something from the image of Warsaw or Berlin that he had built up in his head without ever having been to either city. He stopped and lifted his head, noticing for the first time that it was dark. He stuck his hands in his pocket and walked under the yellow glow of the street lamps back to his hotel \- a functional nineteen fifties communist construction located in the heart of a small square in the center of which stood a statue of France Liszt - where he was paying a modest seventy DM per night for a small furnished room. He went up the stairs past two old women who were speaking German. At the top of the staircase was a dangerous-looking metal box. There was a large yellow sticker on the front that read _Vigyaz! 380 V_. He walked down the hallway to his room and opened the door. He pulled off his shoes and opened the window to looked outside. There was a deep blue haze hovering over the city. It spoke to him at once of darkness and promise. He closed the curtains and turned of the light.

That night he fell asleep early, descending into a light and dreamy world in which he floated above the earth like a transient reflection or early morning shadow. For what seemed like hours he was riding a small bicycle around a large blue lake enjoying the clear sandy beaches. Small peninsulas stretched like flattened fingers into the still blue waters and the fields made no effort to rise above the level of the water, giving the impression that there was nothing preventing the lake from flooding the shores and spreading further inland. He looked out at the horizon, but saw nothing but the flat black border that separated the water from the sky. As he rode further along the shore and away from wherever it was he started - which he assumed was near Budapest - he was overcome by a feeling of weightlessness and joy, a feeling he immediately recognized as being intimately connected to the black-haired girl he had seen that day in the Café. The bicycle sped up until it almost seemed to fly over the beaches and waters, which glittered with a soft silvery light. He looked across the water and thought he could make out a mass of land, defined only by a rise in the black line that made up the horizon. A ridge of small mountains became visible in the distance, rising like tiny fir trees on the far horizon.

He continued riding along the lake until he realized he had gone its full circumference and he was back where he had started. The mountains were no longer visible and the waters suddenly receded. Then he found himself on an empty street - like those in England that looked like a thousand streets with virtually identical brick row houses, a line of uncomfortably small cars parked in front of them. He looked at the first house to his left. A woman with blonde hair was waiting for him beside a door. She was wearing a red shirt and a look as if he had done something wrong, but something which could be easily be overcome and forgotten about if he simply wizened up and listened to what she had to say. She turned away and laughed dismissively as if anything he might say would only strengthen her position and make him look ridiculous.

When he awoke he looked around his room. At first he felt disoriented as he looked at the cheap wood furniture, which hid the cracked plaster ceilings and dull yellow walls. After a few seconds it all came back to him: the black-haired girl, the bicycle, and the ocean. He got out of bed and looked out the window, expecting the memory of the dream to give way to whatever it was that might be happening outside. But the feeling from the dream persisted. The tree-lined sidewalks of Andrássy út only reinforced it. Something new was going to happen in his life, something involving Budapest - or possibly even the black-haired girl - and this even would be completely unrelated to his desire to see Gabriella or anything in his past. He pondered over the fanciful notion that his sudden urge to see Gabriella while he was back in New York was just God's way of pointing his life in a fresh new direction at a time it was beginning to stagnate. He dressed and walked out of his hotel. The sun cast a golden hue over the street and a light breeze blew through the air. Everything in his life was new and nothing could be taken for granted. All he had to do was find whatever it was he was looking for and only then would he know why he was _really_ here and what new course his life would take.

### II

When Martin rounded the corner to the point on the street corresponding to the small cross he marked on his map to designate Gabriella's house it was almost eight in the evening and the sky was already starting to darken. He hadn't eaten since lunch and he was starting to feel a small cramp in his stomach. He had hoped to find a small restaurant on the way where he could stop and have a long and leisurely meal, but most of the places he passed were either too full or almost totally empty in a way that made him feel uncomfortable. Getting there was more difficult than he thought. First of all, he had to take the tram from Oktagon to Racoczi and then walk several blocks through a row of apartments where people sat outside their houses staring at him with suspicious trepidation as though he was a tax inspector or debt collector. Then he had to catch a bus that meandered for twenty minutes through a run-down shopping district before arriving at the opposite end of City Park, which was about a ten-minute walk from the museum, two blocks and a small wooded park away from where she lived.

He walked up the steps to the front door and stopped before knocking. It felt strange that he was far more at ease than he had imagined he would be. After all, it had been more years than he could count and he was showing up completely out of the blue with no warning at all. Who knows how she would react or what she even looked like? But maybe this unexpected sense of confidence was just one more sign that he had done the right thing in crossing the ocean to see her. He stood back to examine the house and its neighborhood, savoring for a moment the short interval before the impending surprise, after which anything - good or bad - could happen and he would either feel brave and gallant for chancing his luck to come and see her, or like a complete fool. The walls were constructed from white stone and there was a Hungarian flag suspended from a pole just above the left window on the main floor. Across the street was a large park surrounding a central square in the middle of which stood a tall column that was topped by a statue of an angel holding a golden staff. To the left of the square a swimming pool shimmered in the light of dusk. Further on, beside a small lake, an unusual building rose from the grass. It might have looked like a boathouse if it were not for several large domes, which bulged slightly at the top and flared out at the bottom into a ring of small curved rooflets framing the tops of a series of oblong windows.

He pulled his hand out of his pocket to knock, but stopped when he heard a voice from inside. At first he wasn't sure if it was male or female, but when he heard the low-pitched murmur a second time he knew there was a man standing on the opposite side of the door. He hadn't heard that she was seeing anybody, but anything was possible. He had always imagined that she remained single over all these years. There was something about the deep solitary quality of her eyes the last time he saw her that didn't suit his image of a woman trolling for a new relationship. He stepped back about ten feet to a point just in front of a bush. If the man came out and found him standing there he might think that he was a voyeur and then run back inside to call the police. And there was always the chance that it was somehow the wrong address. And even if it wasn't, Gabriella might not recognize him (or just claim she didn't out of some convoluted act of spite engineered to get back at him for something he did to her years ago but had long since forgotten) and in that case he could even end up in jail. He had heard of such things happening in eastern European countries and had to be on guard. Everyone knew the police were corrupt and liked to detain tourists in sometimes abominable ways until they came up with enough money to satisfy their captor's conditions for release.

Martin retreated further from the house and crouched behind a bush watching the front door and window carefully. If he detected even the slightest turn in the knob he would have to spring up and pretend to have been just walking along down the street. A minute later a middle-aged couple passed from behind on the sidewalk. He turned and smiled, pretending that he was a gardener tending the shrub so as not to arouse their suspicion. What was he doing there? What kind of people trimmed their front yard at night? Was there something in his look, a subtle glint in his eye that he was completely unaware of but would expose him as a person in search of his ex-wife?

As the minutes ticked by he started to feel impatient and, for a moment, even somewhat ridiculous for being there in the first place. The last time they met she vowed never to speak to him again and had even shouted insults at him as he ran off through the rain to catch a taxi. It was the perfect ending for a long and miserable day. Earlier that same afternoon - sitting in the sunny luxury of a Victorian tea garden near the Metropolitan Museum of art - she accused him of destroying their marriage and called him the sort of man that the world would do best to lock away and study as an example of the perfect asshole. "A textbook case," she proclaimed as she brushed away a crumb of a scone that had somehow made its way onto her cheek. But his story was different, and maybe it was even _more true_ than hers, if such a thing really existed and one could blend truth and falsity like ingredients of a soufflé - as he believed beyond a shadow of a doubt you could - into a great continuum marked off in tiny little increments like a great cosmic measuring stick.

When he first fell in love with her he was convinced there was no other woman in the world made for him like she was - and he was still sure to this day that there never would be again. She had deep brown hair with a dark mahogany tint and slender hips with long thin arms and a pale, but attractive skin tone that gave the impression she was - at least for the moment - fragile, having just come out of a long convalescence from an rare and normally fatal ailment. It was a quality he found attractive and distinctly feminine. They were living in residence at college and although he had seen her often walking alone on campus it wasn't until they met at a quiet party at one of the less prominent fraternities that they hit it off. She was a Hungarian American from the Back Bay in Boston. Her father ran a sports card collectors shop in Sommerville while her mother was a career student whose ambition seemed to be to get as many degrees as she could while living away from her husband for as long as possible while somehow keeping him happy enough to stave off divorce. In her mother's mind, Gabriella always said, the perfect marriage was one in which the two parties never had to see one another more than a few times a year. That way they could always hold up an ideal of one another without ever having to see it tarnished by the harsh realities of life. So, she could go on thinking of her husband as the swarthy young man she had kissed at the altar rather than the rounded middle-aged chump with late afternoon body odor who ran a sports card shop out of the back of a gas station.

In the days Martin first starting seeing Gabriella, she had all the signs of a budding success story, a young and vibrant woman who would some day make it big in some area of life that used her wit and cunning rather than her force of will or connections, which she openly admitted to having very few if any at all. She didn't seem to have any one talent or area she excelled in and seemed to know something about everything and do well in whatever course she took. So it was no surprise that she scared many men off with her refined sense of humor and free-spirited nature, but Martin saw beyond this into what he thought was the true Gabriella, a tender and vulnerable woman who was thrown into an unusual family situation and was trying to fight her way out with nothing but those long, frail arms and deep green eyes, almost otherworldly in their tonal saturation, to defend her. Indeed, when he was alone during the first few months after they met, he would often her as a young girl holding a teddy bear in a room by herself wishing she was somewhere else, some old Victorian manor or country inn where life rolled by without a worry and everything was brimming with a sense of healthy propriety and polite humor - although he was never really sure she imagined herself this way.

After two years of bliss in upstate New York, the most memorable part of which was spent in damp unheated college residences sleeping under two or three thin blankets, they got married. Three years after their marriage they had already graduated and were living in a small apartment in Manhattan. By this time they were both busy pursuing their careers and things were already starting to change between them. More and more frequently she would show signs of a certain remoteness that Martin found unsettling and completely impenetrable. Sometimes she would take long walks by herself, leaving in the morning and coming back at eight or nine in the evening well after most couples had already eaten. But then she would put on a perfect face, shower and dress and by ten they were on their way out for a night on the town, her day's mysterious absence forgotten in the rush and excitement of the Manhattan nightlife. By the fourth year of their marriage they were hardly speaking. They stopped sleeping in the same bed and she decided to turn the room he had always regarded as his office into a sort of private lair in which he was expected to knock before entering. She had numbed up inside and only went out to work at a library sorting books, something that betrayed his impression of her as someone who would _take the world on with her youth and intellect_ , as he once had said to her. It was after two years of this life (long, dull years that rolled by like grain stones in a mill) that he gave up and stared seeing another woman on the side. It wasn't that he was a cheat or womanizer by nature, but that all his efforts to get close to her had failed and he was starting to feel like a beggar locked out in the cold. He wondered if she had inherited this attitude from her mother and if so, whether there was anything he could do to change her. Sometimes he was sure she was having an affair and had driven him to do the same, but every time he asked her or pleaded for a change she would throw it back at him by saying that he expected too much, was jealous, clingy, and even weak, but in spite of his obvious flaws still loved him as much as she ever had and wished he would just accept things the way they were. But this would only drive him back to his mistress, who matched almost exactly his first impression of Gabriella, only she was thinner and not as smart or pretty, a b-division Gabriella, he thought one rainy afternoon as she was sitting across from him chewing on a piece of cold tempura in a Japanese restaurant. The affair lasted just two months before the two women found out about each other. Both women quickly became friends and joined forces to eliminate him from their respective social circles, downgrading his reputation from a devoted husband and promising freelance artist to a reckless womanizer and artistic sell out to the corporate world of advertising.

At first he was angry with Gabriella, but eventually he came to realize that he still loved her and fully conceded that it was ultimately his own intolerance and infidelity that had driven her to strike back at him with such force and besmirch his reputation. Within weeks of the affair coming to the surface she demanded a divorce - even after his many attempts (feeble, wining pleas, angling through the eddies and backflows of a seemingly endless night on the telephone after far too much bourbon) to patch things up. Eventually he gave in to her wishes and wrote her and her family a formal apology for his behavior and sent her a bouquet of flowers to wish her well. A few months later they met for lunch out of what he thought was a mutual hope to smooth things over and just be friends, and that was when she shouted insults at him as she ran out to catch the cab. He hadn't seen her since.

As the years passed, even though he knew he should forget about her and go on, something inside of him (perhaps related to the fact that he never really found out why she changed) always felt he was cheated out of a happy life with her - not by Gabriella, but by life itself - and that one day they might regain what they once had shared, although deep down inside he knew that it could never really be the same, since you didn't have to be Heraclitus to know that if you crossed the same river twice, different waters flowed by you.

Martin heard a sudden noise from behind and turned his head. A tall man garbed in a thick wool hat and a leather jacket walked by followed by a dog that barked and rushed up to a spot about three feet behind Martin, stopped and looked at him with tense cautious eyes before wagging its tail and darting off to follow the man past a red truck with a broken mirror jutting out the passenger side and then further on into a dense thicket until at last Martin could see nothing but a dark spot that for a mere instant seemed darker than its surroundings, like some kind of trace or ripple left in a pool of molten tar after a stone had dropped beneath its surface and into a region completely out of reach and beyond the range of human detection.

He stood up and started walking towards the door to knock, but at the last minute decided against it. If she behaved anything like she had the last time they met an argument might ensue and the mysterious male figure inside might end up attacking him in her defense or even calling the police. It would be better if he came at a more safe neutral time - perhaps a gleeful Sunday afternoon when the park across the street would be filled with laughing children and proud smiling grandmothers - when he knew that she was alone and there was no possibility of an uncomfortable situation becoming even more uncomfortable through the lack of privacy. He turned around and ventured out into the night.

On his way back to his hotel he took a short cut, avoiding Dozsa Gyorgy, a major boulevard, which passed in front of City Park, crossing instead through an intimate shopping area speckled with jewelers shops and specialty clothing stores. The narrow streets with colored gables decorating their gray stone buildings relaxed him and for a moment his mind turned to more positive things like the sheer wonder of being in the same city that Franz Liszt once wooed huge audiences with his flowing hair and daring attacks on the conventions of the piano. But as he made his way back to his hotel he started thinking about Gabriella again and how she was always able to convince him that there was something wrong with him. That was her style. She always had a way, a certain look in her hard flat eyes that made him doubt the value of his own life. Leaving him years ago wasn't enough. She always had to stick the knife in even further and make fun of him for having a heart and following his dreams, something she clearly had never been able to do. But maybe that's why he had loved her so much. She was the only one who knew how good or bad he really was. And this much was important.

It was eight PM. He walked past a blue-trimmed synagogue capped with cream-colored onion domes. It looked almost Asian in its excess. A thin bent man wearing a black hat paced back and forth in front of the door. He was holding a bell in his left hand and looked lost in thought. When Martin crossed the street a young woman with dark red hair and green eyes drove by on a rust-colored bicycle. He was surprised that the light of the overhanging street lamps was enough to discern the exact shade. The woman gazed at him as if she found him interesting - not quite attractive, but certainly interesting and worth looking at. With her Alpine smile, dark blue sweater, and green backpack she looked like a woman from a Eurail Pass ad in a NY travel agent's. As she passed he turned his head and watched her weave through a line of cars that had slowed for a red light. When she disappeared behind a red bus pock marked with rust spots, he was taken by the urge to go back to the Café and see the black-haired girl he saw the night before. Perhaps she would be there again and he would have a chance to see if there really was a powerful and meaningful attraction between them. He crossed Bajcsy Zsilinski út and started walking down Andrássy. When he passed an Italian ice cream kiosk that sold something called _spaghetti ice_ he suddenly felt weak and ridiculous for wanting to pursue a woman he had never met and for all he know might never see again. What was he, a successful American working in highest echelons of the advertising world, doing standing in front of an ice cream store six thousand miles from home thinking about a woman he had only seen once and didn't even have the courage to approach? Maybe if he had spoken to her or at least exchanged a meaningful glance or telling smile it would have legitimized the act of his standing at that spot at that very moment in time. Unless she worked at the café his chances of seeing her again bordered on the impossible. But was he wrong for following his own nature and going to see her? Was anybody wrong for the simple act of following themselves? Perhaps even murderers were really only being true to their innermost self in fulfilling their most sadistic or desperate fantasies. Perhaps such a thought was repellent, the kind of thing that would lurk in the darkest corners of the mind of a stalker or rapist. Yet, maybe it justified his position, while at the same time tainting it, lowering his dreams to the level of a crime or perversion. Whatever the reality, he wasn't really sure. All he knew was at that very moment Budapest was stretching out in every direction like a plum and perilous world rife with as much possibility as there was disaster.

On his way back to his hotel he passed a small café with a cheap chrome-and-mirror interior. There were two angry-looking men with bow ties and cell phones standing in front trying to look inconspicuous. He guessed they were pimps or bodyguards. He stopped for a minute to watch them before continuing down to the end of the block to a souvenir stand. It surprised him that is was still open when a postcard with a map of Budapest caught his eye. He took it off the rack and looked more closely at it, trying to orient it in such a way as to line up Andrássy út with the street in front of him. He ran his finger along the path he supposed he had taken back from City Park - but wasn't completely sure. Then he located Oktagon - an intersection in the sixth district - the location of the café where he first saw the woman the night before. Maybe she worked there and was just on her break when he saw her or maybe it was her local hangout. In a city of several million people that was all he had to go on.

When he got back to his hotel a doorman was waiting, a small and official-looking cap covering the bald spot on his head. Martin smiled inconspicuously, not wanting to attract the kind of attention that might prompt the man to perform some unsolicited service that required a substantial tip, and went upstairs to take a shower. He dried himself in front of the mirror \- something he rarely did back in New York as he preferred to dry himself outside of the bathroom - doing his best to fluff-up his hair with the towel without leaving it too messy. Normally he didn't comb. Gabriella always told him it made him look like a daring investigative reporter slumming it in a third-world country, although she had - or at least once had said she did - found this attractive, a sign of something wild and unruly in his character, while most other women took it as a sign of some sort of eccentric behavior that was a curiosity but ultimately more of a liability than anything else. As he parted his hair with his hands, he came to the conclusion that it could only hurt him to look anything less than quietly composed. If he met the black-haired girl and she was unable to speak enough English to see into his true character - something he imagined she would be naturally attracted to - she would only have looks to go on. This was a danger. If she took him for an eccentric it would only drive her away. But, if he looked more conservative - even slightly old fashioned - it would always leave her guessing what he was like beneath the surface. Women always liked mystery, his mother had always advised him. Swinging through the window of the café like some kind of modern age Errol Flynn, for example, might turn a few heads and inspire a chorus of oohs and ahhs, but ultimately would only end up backfiring by making a false impression and leaving far too little up to the woman's imagination.

At nine he put on his jacket and left the hotel. The sky was completely dark and it looked like it might start to rain. On his way towards Oktagon, he passed a strange building, two stone monkeys with vacant grins sitting on grapefruit-sized blue glass globes poised over the entrance. The schedule posted outside beside one of the windows suggested it was a theater or movie house. When he got to the café he stopped and searched his pockets for change. The outer wall was painted in a gaudy green color and had a picture of a big roulette wheel with _Játékterem Casino_ printed in big block letters above it. It looked more like something you'd find in Atlantic City than one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. He took a table on the patio between a young couple seated by the wall and the white metal fence that separated the dining area from the street. Was the black-haired girl sitting inside that very minute? He imagined her seated at the bar with a group of seedy-looking men pressing their cell phones flat into their tiny little beards as they spoke to their Mafioso friends on the other side of the city.

A few minutes later a woman with red hair and large green eyes came out and walked up to his table. He ordered a beer and a small coffee on the side. Five minutes later she came out and set a full glass of beer and a white porcelain coffee cup with matching saucer on the table. Although her body was long and lanky she moved with an almost Oriental sense of antique grace. He pulled out his wallet and paid.

"Köszönöm szépen," she said. Then she turned and walked back inside.

Over the next half hour the tables on the patio filled up with groups of young men and women, most of whom looked like students or travelers. Sometimes people would stop and chat with the customers at the outdoor tables, the men kissing the woman's hands in an overt show of admiration. He finished his beer and then stood up to go to the bathroom. He pushed the door open slowly, pretending to be interested in the image of a moon with a face on it that was etched on the front. If anyone were watching him he had to appear intelligent and contemplative, a far cry from the boisterous and happy-go-lucky American tourist most of the natives were probably far too familiar with and, worse even, just plain sick of. He stepped inside and looked around the room. His heart almost stopped. In the back the black-haired girl was standing behind the bar talking to the red-haired waitress. The black-haired girl looked over and squinted with a look of sudden and suspicious recognition as if she somehow knew that he had come back only for her. He walked past her and smiled. She started at him blankly before turning her head away to resume her conversation with his waitress.

He walked past a set of white plastic tables and looked up at the ceiling. It was painted like a tropical night sky complete with canopies of palm trees and a seemingly infinite bed of stars. In the corner stood a large television set in front of three men watching a football match. He looked at the screen for long enough to see that it was England playing Tunisia and then walked past a row of black jack tables to the bathroom. He washed his hands, the image of the girl's face lingering on in his head. He was sure she had recognized him. Although she looked at him in a way that suggested she didn't quite trust his intentions, he was certain that something meaningful had just transpired. Whenever he met women back in America they always commented that they knew who he was before hand and had seen him around. That meant he was the sort of man that left an indelible impression on women without even saying anything. As evidence of this, one woman - a large breasted brunette who worked for a New York art magazine - even told him that his name was scribbled on the door of a woman's toilet in a lounge in a Midtown bar.

He walked past the bar and towards the door without looking back at her. As he made his way out onto the patio a wonderful expansive feeling came over him like he had just swallowed a cloud and woken up to breakfast in bed in an upscale Parisian hotel. It was clear she worked there. And it was also clear that she had recognized him and that if he came back to Budapest again, perhaps in a month or two, he could spend long afternoon hours watching her serve tables while getting to know her, not as simply the _black haired girl_ , or even the _black haired waitress_ , as she had now become for him, but as the person she really was underneath those dark arctic eyes. He collected his coat from the table and walked out onto the street. Everything around him was clear and crisp. The air was filled with an unnatural glow and cars sped by with new sense of urgency as if everyone was rushing off to meet some new turn of luck or fortune. In a few days he would be back in New York with the knowledge that at some as yet unspecified time he would be back standing exactly where was standing that very instant inhaling the air of Andrássy út as he watched the people walk by.

### III

As soon as Martin woke up the following morning he resolved to go back to Gabriella's house and try to see her no matter what the situation. He had two more days before his flight back and had to make best use of his opportunities while they were still there. It would be nothing less than cowardly of him to come all the way to Budapest to see her and then back out at the last minute just because he heard a strange male voice from behind her door. It could have been anyone and there was no reason for him to assume the worst and concoct some outlandish and totally unfounded scenario in his head in which she was married to an angry and jealous man who would fly off the handle if he found out her ex-husband was in town. And even if this _was_ true, and the man was a complete maniac capable of seriously harming both Gabriella and himself, it would still be irrelevant since he had a new romantic interest and so his quest to see Gabriella was suddenly less important. Not that it _wasn't_ important, but that it was _less_ important. Before he crossed paths with the black-haired waitress the possibility still existed, no matter how remote, that he and Gabriella would fall in love all over again and she would move back to New York with him. Anything and everything happened in the world of relationships and everybody knew it. And it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a divorced couple remarried years later. But such a buttonhook in the trajectory his life was now an impossibility, or at least it seemed that way since the very moment he had gone to _Night and Day_ and the black-haired waitress first looked into his eyes.

After a quick breakfast he hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him directly to Gabriella's house. As he shuffled through his wallet he was happy to find he still had the address scribbled down on a small piece of paper. When he stepped out of the black-and-white checked Lada - an obvious leftover from the communist period - he noticed that the sky had darkened somewhat and a light drizzle had begun. He paid the driver and walked up the sidewalk. Just as he was about to knock, he heard a child scream and turned his head and looked behind him. Across the street was a park with a gang of teenaged children playing with an inflated plastic bag, using it as a soccer ball. It moved slowly and precariously through the air as they kicked it back and forth, bending this way or that depending on the spin or subtle wind currents. A dark-haired boy threw his arms in the air to signal that he had scored and Martin felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around to see Gabriella standing there at the door. She was wearing a long blue dress that along with her straight brown hair falling past her shoulders made her look like a figure from of a medieval triptych. It was a look he had never seen from her before, but one that somehow fitted the situation.

"Hello, Martin," she said as though she were not even remotely surprised to see him. But the tone of her voice made him think she was somehow frightened. "What are you doing here?"

"Hello," he said, deliberately mirroring her greeting. He looked at her and suddenly he felt as though he had never stopped looking at her and the last ten years was just a few seconds in the grander scheme of their mutual involvement. "I hope I didn't catch you in the middle of something." He went to hug her, but she stepped back before his arms were more than halfway around her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Are you sure you know what you're doing? When Joe said you might be coming I was shocked. I mean..."

"It's not what you think," he said, letting his shoulders sag. He wondered what Joe might have told her.

"I'm not sure _what_ to think." She paused for a moment. "Well, now that you're here you might as well come in," she said before he had a chance to gather his thoughts and make up a plausible story that didn't involve some bizarre sequence of dreams and nebulous revelations while wandering through the streets of Manhattan. He followed her through a narrow front corridor decorated with old black and white photos of men standing beside steam engines as they leaned on their coal shovels. It reminded him of Kansas, although he had never been there and just had an impression of the state built up from old westerns. She gestured for him sit down on a worn green sofa in the living room. There was a pair of slippers on the floor beside it. He brushed the back of his pants, becoming suddenly afraid that the seat of the taxi might have been dirty, and sat down. She always had a way about her that made him feel as if he was lacking in sophistication.

"My husband is away for a week in Berlin," she said in the way of a solemn declaration or legal statement. He wondered if she had meant something more by it.

"You're married?" he asked.

"Two years," she said. Her face relaxed and she let her shoulders drop.

"I'm here on business," he said. He didn't want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that a week ago he was in New York desperate to see her. He crossed his legs with slow deliberation and then uncrossed them when he noticed she was carefully watching him and seemed to be aware of his nervousness.

"You're hiding something," she said.

"What makes you say that?"

"When men are concealing something they always wear it on their sleeve. That's why women always know when their husband is cheating on them." She got up and went to the kitchen. "I just know. You live with someone for years and you know when they are lying or telling the truth."

"So you think I came all the way over here just to see you."

"Maybe," she said. "But just remember, you said it, not me."

She came back into the living room. She had tied her hair back like a woman ready to step into the shower. She sat down on the couch beside him.

"It must be quite different. I mean, living here."

"Yes," she said delicately. Then she went on to describe her life in Budapest. Hungarians, she explained in a way that seemed overly cynical to Martin, were a modern socialist people captive in an ancient past that no longer fit them. Their language was one of the few remaining in Europe that wasn't derived from Sanskrit and they claimed to be more civilized than any other eastern European country yet had nothing material, no defining historic or artistic movement and only a few great composers to their credit, to prove it. So, apart from their unusually rich and spicy cuisine and obscure ancestry that stemmed from somewhere in Mongolia, they were really a nameless and faceless people. In spite of this they were still always angered when lumped together with the Poles, Czechs, and the Romanians, the latter of which they considered to be almost cannibalistic in comparison to themselves.

"But it's always changing. The people here are changing. Especially since the communist regime fell to pieces."

"Yes, but I'm no longer the person I was two days ago and two days ago I was convinced I was no longer the person I was two weeks before that."

"That's so profound," she said with a narcissistic sense of pleasure.

"You were always convinced you were right," he said. "That much hasn't changed."

"That's why I had to leave you," she said. She stood up and walked to the other side of the room. Her voice prickled with authority.

"I thought you left me because..."

"Do you think I'm so trivial as to give up on a man just because he slept with someone else? Come on, Martin, love is deeper than that. You slept with her for a reason, and it was that reason alone that made me doubt you, not the woman. It said something fundamental about your character that changed the way I looked at you."

"Maybe so, but the only reason I changed when we were married was because you did. You fell away from the world and then you fell away from me."

She shook her head and looked at him. There was both anger and pity in her eyes.

"You're always analyzing every component of your life and trying to extract meaning from that which has no meaning," she said. "I could take off my clothes and we could make love right here on the floor." She pointed to a bare spot of linoleum between two throw rugs. "Afterwards I would be sitting here thinking that it was fun but that it was time to make supper while you would be sitting there meditating on how it had just effected the overall direction of your life. One has to learn to _walk in the direction of the river_."

He didn't know what she meant but her words reminded him of his dream. He looked down at the coffee table. She was clearly angry and uncomfortable. It was a bad idea to come after all. Martin turned his head and focused his glance on an antique mirror behind her.

"So, what about you?" she asked in a kind and open way as though she was deliberately avoiding any further confrontation. She picked a small statue of a dog up and started dusting it with a cloth. "Who are _you_ seeing?"

"I've been with a woman for three years," he said as he crossed his legs. He went on to explain how well things were going with Marleise and how they had even discussed marriage. He didn't want to give her the pleasure of knowing that they had recently split up and he was now single. "I feel so different these days," he said, not knowing exactly what he had meant, if anything, by the word "different".

"You don't look that different."

"That's not what I meant." He exhaled deeply. It was a gesture of defeat that he knew she would pick up and possibly feel guilty for bringing on. At least that was what he had hoped it would do.

"I'm just kidding," she said more lightly. "You have crow's feet, but apart from that you look fine. Men are always so obsessed with their looks. If they only knew how unattractive it made them to most women. When I see a man with jewelry or a fancy watch I think _ick_!" She frowned in such a way that the corners of her lips bent all the way down to the base of her cheek. "I can just imagine them standing in front of the mirror fixing their hair thinking about what kind of entrance with what kind of woman they might make at the next party."

"That's so old fashioned. Just because you think women should be the only ones who care about how they look. Why should men be exempt from beauty?"

"They're beautiful only when they don't care about beauty."

"But why should they spend their whole life conforming to what a woman thinks they should be?"

"Why should a woman spend hers conforming to what a man thinks she..."

Just then the teakettle whistled. Gabriella backed out of the room and into the kitchen. "If I recall you don't take milk."

"Tej nelkul," said Martin. He had learned something since leaving Manhattan.

"Not bad," she said from the kitchen. "Where did you pick it up?"

"The airplane," he said. "They had a menu in Hungarian."

She came back in the room with two deep blue ceramic mugs that reminded him of places like Santa Fe and Marin County and set them at the table. They looked out of place in the otherwise more traditional setting.

"So, you're married," he said as he lifted the mug closest to him to his lips. The tea was so hot he blew over the surface without taking a sip before setting the mug down again. "Let me guess...French."

"No. German." She looked off into space as if she was thinking about someone else, a man, perhaps imagining his naked body in scandalous detail. Martin imagined he was tall with hard blue eyes and hair so short he was almost bald. He was the daring, firm and composed man Martin could never be for her, the type of man she ultimately would have married just to get back at him.

"I ceased to love you or even think of you years ago," he said. "But I just realized how much of me was really a part of you. It seemed strange that we could ever be separated. But now..."

He looked over at her, expecting to see a look of sympathy and contrition, but instead she was staring at him as one would a person that they had only met once or twice and didn't like enough to talk to for more than a minute or two at a street corner. Suddenly he felt ridiculous, almost clown-like, as if the mere act of sitting across from her was enough to completely undermine the very foundations of his life.

"I was thinking the other day," she said as she stirred her tea loudly with her spoon. "Is something that is hidden in life worth more than that which is open and accessible?"

Martin wasn't sure what she meant. "I think so," he said uniformly. Then he turned his head away and looked out the window. The children were no longer playing in the park with the makeshift soccer ball. A silence dropped between them that lasted until they both finished their tea. As if on cue from a hidden bell, Martin stood up. "I think I should go," he said.

"How long are you in town?"

"Until the day after tomorrow."

"Coming back?"

"Who knows...maybe," he said as though to leave open a door he knew was more closed than it had been half an hour earlier.

"I guess I'll see you next time you're in Budapest," she said.

He felt suddenly more at ease. There was something about her comment that made things between them seem more casual and less important, but in other ways more fulfilling, ways he could not yet fully define. Europeans had a way of knowing what was important. They had lived through wars, invasions, and oppressive regimes that gave them a sense of value for the right things in life.

"I've got a lot of packing to do."

She nodded her head as if it was the response she knew he had wanted and smiled. She walked him to the door. He kissed both of her cheeks and let his head drop. After he turned away he heard a soft "good-bye" and then the sound of the door closing. By the time he was crossing the street all he could hear was the sound of wind rustling through the trees. In all his years with Gabriella she had never kissed him like that. It seemed at once a pretentious exhibition of continentalism and a sign that she had not viewed their reunion in the same way that he did. For her there were no revelations or epiphanies, but just the hard bare facts that she was married and living in Budapest, and he had flown all the way across the ocean for some bizarre reason, the depths of which she had some inkling of but was either incapable or unwilling to plumb any further, and had just stopped by to see her.

### IV

Martin's trip back to New York was long and exasperating. His flight was delayed in Schiphol for almost three hours, most of which he spent sitting in an expensive bar with a sheet metal roof quietly watching a group of loud Norwegian soldiers laughing and gesturing dramatically as if they were proudly recounting some heroic but treacherous helicopter rescue mission in which they had all taken part. Although Martin had a KLM gold card, no matter who he asked from the KLM information booth - every last one of them blond with unnaturally white teeth and a Prussian blue suit - he was always told that it wasn't enough to gain entrance to the more distinguished private airline lounges where men, obviously much more important than himself, seemed to sit around in floppy leather couches smoking huge cigars and drinking Martinis while they talked about the daily news events.

His first night back he struggled to stay awake, sitting on his couch drinking Pernod and water - a distinctly European concoction, like tiny cups of espresso, he didn't usually drink but gave some lingering continuity to his recent experiences in Budapest - as he stared at the yellowed walls of his apartment until well-past sundown. A map of Asia he had purchased as a student with the still unfulfilled intention of one day going to Thailand almost seemed to vibrate to the rhythm of the traffic outside. He didn't even have the energy to watch television or listen to the radio, and he knew if he fell asleep too early he'd wake up in the middle of the night unable to fall back asleep until morning. At eleven he gave in and stretched out on his couch. He watched the greenish crescent of the moon as it slipped out from behind the Chrysler Tower and into full view against a background of hazy white stars and the limitless black of night, images of the black-haired waitress and Gabriella flowing through his head in a way that made him think he'd already entered the realm of dream. In this state he was able for the first time to look at everything that had happened in Budpaest with the eye of an objective observer. It had been foolish of him to expect anything more than an awkward reception from Gabriella, especially in light of what happened the last time they got together. But now that the black-haired waitress was in his life everything was going to be different. Not that he had even met her, as he clearly hadn't, but more that he had _found_ her. That was the important thing. She was there, living in Budapest, and however silly it seemed, she was the new focus of his love life. Of course it would be nice to turn the clock back and spend some time with Gabriella, maybe even sleep with her a few times just for old-times sake - perhaps she would even tell him why she went cold on him, miracles actually did happen - but what he had really wanted from her was something much deeper and far more abstract and platonic, but if she was going to make it difficult for him there was little he could do to stop her, although something inside him was still determined to try and change things nonetheless. There was always the chance that the black-haired waitress would end up not liking him and he would end up with nothing, and since he was at heart a practical person it was best to hedge out his bets, even though to many it would seem overly complicated to have emotional involvements with two women in Hungary, both of which were only halfway in his life. So, he reasoned as he let out a final yawn to end the day, that one in the hand was better than two in the bush, but two in the bush was certainly better than one in the bush as it prevented to highly undesirable state of having _none_ in the bush.

The next day he woke up at eight and went into work. He felt lively and refreshed as he walked through the doors of his office building. He sprang up the stairs to the fourth floor and opened the door of his office lobby.

"Hello, sir," said the secretary, who just started a week before he left. She adjusted the collar of her loose white blouse.

"Hello," he said. He poured himself a cup of water from the water dispenser and told her about his trip and how beautiful he thought Budapest was.

She cleared her throat and smiled. "I'd love to go. Maybe you can put me in your suitcase next time you head out that way."

He smiled and walked through the main corridor to his office, a sparsely furnished room with a simple wooden desk and a few paintings on the wall. It was comfortable to be amongst Americans again. They had a healthy and sincere way about them, like newscasters or insurance salesmen, that always gave the impression they were genuinely interested in you and whatever you had to say.

Over the next few days he caught up with work and called a few friends whom he hadn't seen for months. His fourth day back he went out with a new client from a nut company that was looking for a way to make Gen Xers buy more peanuts at movie theaters. They went to a new French restaurant, an intimate crushed red-velvet Martini and lobster hideaway somewhere in the meat district, and he listened while the man, a short Asian named Roger who had deeply concerned eyes and spoke with a lisp, quoted figures that indicated Gen Xers bought a third less nuts than any generation in post-war American history. Martin ordered an expensive lamb dish which, from the description on the menu, he expected to be so big and special that it would be brought out on a cart with an extra chef to sprinkle on some secret spice in the final stages of preparation as the maitre d' transferred the hulking rack to the table while others in the restaurant looked on in hushed anticipation and amazement. Half an hour later the waiter came out of the kitchen and set a regular-sized plate down in front of him. There were three lamb chops, the amount of meat on each no bigger than a cat's paw.

"Neuveau cuisine," Roger joked. The waiter went back into the kitchen and came out with a much larger plate and set it in front of him. "That's why I always order the meatballs."

As they ate the man explained his ideas on how to sell peanuts to a generation of youth that didn't seem to care about anything, least of all peanuts. "You have to make peanuts hip again. They probably associate them with things their parents did before they were born. Maybe it's the old image of the Planters man that created this misconception. It was so successful an ad campaign that it defined an entire generation, but unfortunately one that no one wants to have anything to do with anymore! I think we need a commercial with rap music and skateboards."

Although the overtly fatuous nature of the project made Martin wonder why he had even bothered to come back to America at all, over desert he agreed to take on the project and promised Roger that he would come up with something sometime in the middle of the summer. Gen Xers were the easiest marketing group because they were the first generation whose label was created by the media in an attempt to target their market, once considered by advertising experts as vague and ultimately unknowable.

Over the next week Martin woke up every day with a feeling like something great and irreversible was about to happen to him, something that was intimately connected to his meeting with the woman in Budapest yet something that hadn't yet manifested itself so as to become even the slightest bit tangible. Perhaps some hidden and latent aspect of their meeting would set him off on a new path that would ultimately bring him what he had always been waiting for in life but had never quite reached or even knew existed.

"We are all waiting for something," he cried out loud one night to an unseen listener it as he walked past a woman carrying a bag of bread and milk near the Lincoln Center. She looked at him with hard questioning eyes.

"Sorry," he said. "I was just talking to myself."

She shook her head and continued walking down Broadway. He felt embarrassed and turned to walk in the opposite direction.

As the weeks passed his memories of Budapest began to fade and the image of the waitress in his mind became more and more tenuous until he could barely remember what she looked like. His life slowly slipped into a pattern of bland normality. He got up, went to work, and came home in almost exactly the same way every day. He felt dry inside. One night when he was unsuccessfully trying to plan a strategy for his ad campaign for peanuts that might be something so big as to one day be considered a defining moment in the popular history of Generation X and would make people forget the Planters man ever existed, he became convinced that he had lost all his creativity and would never be able to work in advertising again. He wondered what had happened and why his feelings of luck had not materialized into something truly life-altering as they had promised only a few weeks before.

One morning, six weeks after his return from Europe, when the skies were a deep Egyptian azure and Central Park was alive with joggers and street musicians, he decided he had no other choice but to go back to Budapest and try to reawaken whatever it was he had experienced there before. There was no point sitting in New York waiting for something spectacular to come along and change his life. Furthermore, the longer he waited the greater the chance that when he got back the waitress would have moved on to a different job or, if she was single, found a new boyfriend. He had been around for long enough to know that women in the service industry were said to change jobs frequently and they probably met more men than woman in any other line of legitimate business. It wasn't that he was in love with her (although sometimes late at night he admitted to himself that maybe he was), as she was a total stranger and it was impossible to have anything but an infatuation for such a person, but more that she was connected to something deeper, or so he felt, that was intimately connected to his life on the highest and most esoteric of all levels. And it was this connection, which may or may not be sexual in nature, he really wasn't sure, that he knew he couldn't afford to lose.

The next morning he told the now not-so-new secretary that he had to go to Budapest for the last week in August to consolidate an advertising deal with a Hungarian film company. That afternoon he found a company over the internet that rented furnished flats over the internet in central Budapest. By dinner he had secured accommodation for a week and made arrangements to get picked up at the Budapest airport by a driver from the letting agency on the day of his arrival. He pushed all his meetings ahead to the middle of September. He wanted to give some leeway in case something transpired and he had to extend his trip. Perhaps he would meet the waitress again and they would sleep together. Maybe they would even fall madly in love and get married, fulfilling the promise of luck that her presence had inspired in his dream. But possibly she was only there to lure him back so that something else, maybe even more important would happen to him. And then there was Gabriella. For the last several weeks she had hovered in the back of his mind like a dark cloud. Was it even possible to extract something meaningful from an encounter with her and come back to America knowing that she had become a renewed person in his life, someone he could rely on and even call or visit some time, rather than an embarrassing scar on the underbelly of his existence that she sometimes seemed to be?

At four thirty he walked out of the local travel agents with his ticket in hand watching the clouds as they gathered around the tip of the Empire State building. On his way home he passed a gang of skateboarders and was suddenly overcome by the dark thought that he would be murdered on his trip and that life was just playing a vicious joke on him by making him think that something amazing was about to happen to him. He imagined himself curled up in a body bag while groups of frenzied reporters and camera men gathered around to get a piece of the action. Just as he was about to cross the street to his apartment he turned around and started walking back to the travel agents to cancel his trip. Only bad things could happen to him in Budapest, the Russian Mafia only the tip of the iceberg. But a block later, he stopped and decided to go back to his apartment instead. The wheels had been set in motion and there was no turning back. Only a coward would stay in New York and hide from his destiny. He gestured both hands outwards like a conductor as he passed an outdoor café where groups of brief-casing men in drab suits talked to women wearing post-menopausal dresses splattered with loud floral patterns. At the very least he would get a chance to get to know Budapest, one of the world's great cities, at a deeper and more intimate level than he had before.

### V

Three weeks later he landed at Ferihegy Airport in Budapest. The driver from the letting agency was waiting by the baggage area holding up a sign with _Mr. John Martin_ written on it. He had blond hair, a small chin, and small extortionate eyes. On the way the man drilled Martin with questions about the quality of life in America and the price of certain models of cars he had never heard of. But Martin reassured the man that Hungary was more beautiful than America and that there were certain things money just couldn't buy. The man seemed pleased with this comment and nodded his head in approval.

Martin was dropped off on the street outside the rental apartment where the owner was waiting for him beside an elaborately painted red and green post box with a golden horn painted on it. "Hello," she said with a near-perfect English accent. She was old and rotund and was wearing a light polyester jumper with a print of Van Gogh's Starry Night on the back and an old-fashioned dress that fell down to her ankles. He guessed she was in her late fifties by the wrinkles on her forehead and the gaudy blue mascara smeared under her eyes. After exchanging niceties about traveling and the weather she took him upstairs and showed him the apartment. There was a main room with a large oak table and a sofa bed in the corner. The bathroom and toilet were separate and there was a small kitchen with a stove and refrigerator. She drew the curtains and showed him the view out onto Aránykaz út, a small side street off Vaci utca, which she explained was the main shopping boulevard in Budapest.

"There was a bomb a few weeks ago," she said. "This window was shattered. I guess that means statistically you're better off than anyone else in the city. Since capitalism everything has been crazy."

He took out his wallet and paid in cash. The woman counted the money and handed him the keys. Then she pointed to a number written beside the telephone. "Call us if you need anything." He smiled and showed her to the door.

After she left he undressed and took a more relaxed look around the apartment. It was spacious and well decorated, if not a bit old fashioned. There were a few folk art hangings on the wall and the place mats on the table looked like they were made from dresses cut from the kind of small dolls he'd seen decorating the walls of Ukrainian restaurants back in New York. He looked down to the street where people were busily walking by in expensive looking suits carrying shopping bags. On the whole he was happy with the place. It was classy enough to be comfortable without being expensive or ostentatious. He shut the curtains and put a pillow over his head to block out the light. Within a few minutes he was asleep.

When he woke up it was still light. He could hear shouting in the distance as if there was a football match going on nearby. He opened the curtains and looked down on the street. It was virtually empty. He stretched and took a quick stroll around the apartment, once again familiarizing himself with everything. It was as though his nap had wiped out all memory of the layout and furnishings. The toilet was an unusual design featuring a continuous flush mechanism he had never seen before. After rummaging through the kitchen drawers he found that there was no corkscrew. He made a note on a piece of paper. If for some reason he were to meet the waitress and bring her back to his apartment he wanted to be able to open a bottle of wine without having to push the cork through, a trick he had learned from one of his classmates at college.

He put on some clothes and grabbed his coat. By the looks of the sky he only had half an hour before sun down. There was a pinkish glow on the edges of the already-blackening thunderclouds. On his way down to the elevator he passed an older man wearing a gray wool coat and carrying a cane. The man looked hardened, but introspective and dignified, like the American stereotype of eastern Europeans. When Martin got to the elevator he pressed the "down" button. The doors opened and Martin stepped in. A young girl was leaning against the back wall. They avoided glances until the door opened on the main floor, which was alight with glorious marble and glass decor. The woman stepped out of the elevator.

"Viszlat," she said in a frail but strangely self-assured voice. Before he had a chance to gather himself and respond she was already ten feet ahead of him. He shuffled past her and up to the main door. He held it open for her as she walked past. It was his way of making up for whatever _faux pas_ he might have committed by not responding to her greeting. Goethe had once said you make enough enemies in the world being yourself so it was of utmost importance to be kind to everybody.

The streets outside were still crowded, but people seemed more dressed for the evening than for work. Directly across from the apartment building stood a jewelers store and to the left was a _sörözo_ with a big green Heineken sign above the door. It was obviously their word for beer garden. He walked to the end of the block to a McDonalds with elegant brass doors he had never seen at a McDonalds in the US and turned left towards a record store at the vertex of what looked like a small square. In the far distance a tall sand-colored building towered above the skyline with its blue-gray pointed roof and neoclassical pillars. It looked like it was possibly a post office or some other building that housed a mixture of grim communist throwovers and stale bureaucrats. When he got to what he thought was the square and was standing in front of the record store, he realized that it was actually Vaci utca, a street he recognized visually from his last trip and coincidentally also the main shopping area mentioned by the woman. The geography of Budapest was falling into place. There was a building across the street that had intricate ironwork decorating the windows and a black metal winged horse hanging over the door. A block away the street opened up to a large square with a beer kiosk in the middle. On the other side of the square was the white and gold Gerbeaud Café, apparently famous for its old-world brilliance and charm. Just as he was about to walk towards it, he heard the ominous sound of a bell tolling in the distance as if an execution had just taken place. He stopped and listened until the echoes faded into the background din of the random conversations of the passers by.

For the next half hour he walked around the square and all its connecting arteries trying to familiarize himself with the neighborhood and all its amenities. A sign on the side of a building read _Vörösmarty ter_. There was a delicatessen behind his apartment where a group of bald fat men in baggy pants gathered around a table. There was an English bookstore. There was a small square made all the more alluring by the colorful Cinzanno umbrellas that hung over the tables, which were all neatly arranged in the center. There was a neon sign depicting a man that looked like a robot carrying with a tray. At the end of every block he could always see the tall sand-colored building looming over the streets like a sentry. While it could have served as a useful marker, it only ended up getting him lost, as it seemed to be at the end of every street and looked the same from every view.

As the sun was setting he was convinced that he had made some headway and was finally getting familiar with the labyrinthine outlay of streets. He came to an intersection with a beauty salon and a wine bar, certain that to the left would be a street leading directly to the Gerbeaud café, but instead he found an entirely new street, a cul de sac that led to a post office and a row of parked Mercedes. In frustration he gave in to the darkening sky and went back to his apartment. By nine he had already fallen asleep.

The next morning he woke up, opened the curtains, and turned on the television. It was already half past noon. After flicking through a few German and Hungarian stations he found a British news network with a continuous news loop. The headline story had something to do with a weather balloon that had somehow gone loose and was floating over Iceland, interfering with transatlantic flights. Apparently a squadron of Canadian jets had tried unsuccessfully to shoot it down. The authorities were worried because it was big enough to engulf an entire 747 and four flights to and from Europe had already been rerouted. After getting dressed, he put on a light jacket and went downstairs to the street. He felt new and refreshed as only someone can after more than half-a-day's sleep. He went to the elegant McDonalds at the corner and ordered a coffee. After he sat down he noticed two teenaged girls looking over at him with sultry curiosity. This was a good sign, he thought. It meant that the waitress would possibly find him equally appealing. Deciding that it was best to take advantage of his sudden confidence before it slipped away, he finished his coffee and left. After ten minutes of wandering he finally found Andrássy út, noticing that it was just three blocks away from the big sand-colored building that he had seen the night before.

The sidewalks of Andrássy were thick with trees, their rich green boughs hanging over the sidewalk as he walked towards the _Night and Day_ café. He walked past a candy store called _Bonbon Hemingway_ , wondering if it was named after the writer - the only Hemingway he could think of - who he had heard used to stay in some of the finest hotels of Budapest with Fitzgerald while working on some of his greatest pieces. As he walked on he amused himself by trying to think what they would have done in his situation. After some thought he guessed that Hemingway would have already done the manly thing by confronting the waitress and asking her out while Fitzgerald would probably have been too drunk to care. He passed a pen store and the Goethe Institute before reaching the opera house he recognized from his last trip. He admired its gargoyles and heavy stone pillars intricately carved with criss-crossing patterns as he passed. Around the corner there was a movie house fronted with two art deco style columns painted in gold and azure. He continued until he could see the verandah of _Night and Day_ in the distance, only two blocks away. He quickened his pace and passed a modern café that was still under construction. A nervous feeling came over him. His stomach began to churn as the various possibilities flew through his head. What if the waitress had moved on to a different job? What if she hadn't, but failed to acknowledge him when he tried to introduce himself? What if she was sitting in the café that very instant with an angry-looking Hungarian man that turned out to be her husband?

When he got to the café he took a seat outside. He wanted to order a beer or two to settle his nerves before venturing inside in the hope that she was there and he could throw caution to the wind and introduce himself. After about a minute of tapping his fork nervously on the table waiting for a waitress to serve him he turned his head. To his surprise and pleasure he saw the black-haired waitress taking an order from a man seated directly behind him. He was almost breathless. She was even more beautiful than he had remembered. She was wearing a red sweater, black shoes with thick soles, and tight-fitting black pants with white vertical stripes. Her hair was tied back in a traditional knotted arrangement, giving the impression that she was from a more rural background, although her stylish pants and shoes suggested she could also be from the city and might even like going out to night clubs.

When she walked back past his table he raised his hand to catch her attention. She stopped and raised her eyebrows to prompt his order, broadcasting nothing that might have said she recognized him from before. It was the look of an almost robotic lack of concern that most Hungarians seemed to have mastered.

"One cappuccino," he said. He waited for her response while still holding up his hand in a way that suddenly made him feel foolish. He let his arm drop to his side and looked down at the table.

He looked up again and tried to make eye contact, but she quickly turned her head. She stepped backwards and shouted something through the door, presumably back to the kitchen. There was a certain gargling or throaty quality in her voice, almost motherly in its warmth and sense of earthy stability. She walked back through the door. A few minutes later she came back with the cappuccino. She set it down on the table and straightened her posture as she pulled out her black wallet. Martin stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a five hundred forint note.

"How much?" he asked.

"Szazhuszenöt forintba," she said. He looked into her eyes. She took a step back as if she was aware of his advance and wasn't certain of his intentions.

"Take it all," he said. An impatient look came over her face as if she thought he was playing a joke on her and didn't appreciate it.

He waved his hand for her to take all the money. She held up the note and widened her eyes in the manner of a question.

"Yes," he said.

She put the note into her wallet and continued standing there. She tilted her head to one side and looked at him with dark passionate eyes and smiled. There was a new warmth in her face as if she had opened a door to him and was allowing him to see inside. It was the sort of look women used when they wanted to let you know they liked you, far beyond a simple act of courtesy. Women were territorial in their own way, he had always been proud to note. While men established their domain by trying to sleep with as many women as possible, women were more clever and established an even wider domain by smiling at people they either liked or for some reason wanted to have some influence over. A man who was sitting at an adjacent table nurturing a small dog in his lap yelled out something in Hungarian and she turned away to take his order.

When she disappeared behind the door he leaned back and finished his coffee in one sip. Bristling with confidence from the ground he had gained with her, he pulled a small flower out of the cracked glass vase on the table and set it down beside the vase. He then put a five hundred forint note beneath it to show his gratitude. He stood up and walked out onto the sidewalk, feeling a deep sense of accomplishment as he made his way back towards his hotel.

He had finally met her. There was now a basis for something to exist between them. Maybe it was only some form of flirtation or maybe she had just remembered him from two months before and had just been too shy at first to show her recognition. But whatever the meaning of her look, a connection had been made. That much he was certain of, that the beautiful black-haired girl had smiled at him. In some way unspoken yet not subliminal something strong had just transpired between them. As he approached his apartment he was filled with a deep sense of satisfaction. His entire trip back was worth that one smile, that one moment of intimacy, no matter how small and ultimately innocent or unintentional it may have been. In the soft light of evening the world seemed to change. All he had to do now was get to know her.

### VI

Martin took a hold of Gabriella's hand and pulled her up over a tall stone ledge. When he let go of her hand he noticed that her palm had a rough calcined appearance and her fingers were thinner than he remembered. He had called her that morning and they met a few hours later in a small Austrian-style café. Her mood was considerably more inviting than it had been the last time they met - perhaps, he thought, because _his_ mood was also different now that he had met the black-haired waitress and because of this he expected less out of Gabriella than he had before, and she sensed this even more than he felt it. Maybe it was a certain levity in his voice on the telephone that morning that promised an exciting afternoon while also making her feel he was less of a threat to her marriage than she might have thought he was. Or perhaps it was simply the element of surprise and mystery - what was _he_ doing back in town so soon? - that had intrigued her enough to meet him in hopes she could find out who or what had brought him back so soon. Whatever the case, he reasoned he was on a roll of good luck with women and should take advantage of it as much as possible. After a short breakfast, during which his eyes often darted upwards for a quick glance at the heavy wood ceilings and gold chandeliers, she offered to take him up a hill in front of the river in Buda where she said you could get the best view of the city. They turned and continued up a zigzagging path lined with banks of small pebbles on either side. He looked upwards towards the end of the path. The sun was setting and the trees had taken on a grayish appearance, the green of their leaves no longer fully visible.

"How much farther," he said.

"Just at the top of those switchbacks." She pointed upwards to a row of trees about forty yards ahead. She was panting and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. Martin looked down at the banks of the Danube below. Through a void in the trees he could see the top of the dome of the parliament building.

"It's beautiful, isn't it," she said.

"Yes. That's one of the reasons I came back. I had to get a closer look."

"Please." She struggled to catch her breath. "You mean to tell me you came all this distance just for the architecture?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Come on, Martin. There must be some girl involved here. I know you better than that."

"No," he said slowly as he looked across the river. "There isn't anybody."

She seemed to accept this answer and they both went silent and continued up to the top of the hill. A man was selling mineral water in a small booth and beside him a large red tour bus was parked, its engines still humming. _Balogh Zolt Busreizen_ was written on its side. Behind the tour bus stood a tall statue of a man with a beard and a sword who looked like he could have been some epoch-defining historical figure or triumphant general.

"It always seemed to me that if a man reads a book, he does it for self improvement," she said. "If he is in love with a girl it is for some fulfillment of some selfish ontological quest that has nothing to do with that woman."

Martin stood there watching her lips move as she continued speaking. Then he looked over at the tour bus where a group of elderly couples had started filing out. A large woman, garish plastic sunglasses covering half of her face, followed them to a patch of grass where they sat in a circle around her. He watched as she lifted her hand into the air and the others started singing some song while she swung her arm back and forth in rhythm.

"Let's not get into some Reader's Digest discussion about the sexes," he said. They circled the statue and he recounted a story about a guy he knew back in Manhattan who had just broken up with his girl friend. She had apparently told him that he wasn't sexy because he was always worried about what she saw sexy in him. But when he finally gave up on her and found someone new she said it was the sexiest thing he'd ever done and wanted him back.

"When we were together you saw everything as a path to some higher goal," she continued as if his story had no impact on her train of thought. "When you drank - and I know you still do - it was to free you from yourself. Not even I could pull you away from this certain way you had of looking at things."

A gust of wind blew her hair around her face. In the dying light her hair almost looked reddish. He had always wanted her to have red hair when they were together.

"You never gave me a chance," he said. "You always wanted to ruin me or make me pay for something I never did. Whatever you say about men may be true, but a woman's idea of life is worse. It's to latch onto a man and take away whatever it is that pleases him most in the world. You could never stand me having too strong an interest in anything, let alone you."

"Untrue."

"Men claim to be concerned for the best and all such nonsense. They all want families once they've sewn their wild oats, but this is just some masquerade. Women are always jealous of men who have something other than this in their life. So I would imagine that my intensity would be disturbing to you. It's something you lack."

"Is it? Or is it just some way of charging around through life contaminating everything with your selfish desires?"

A shadow fell across Martin's face. All he could think of was the black-haired waitress. "A man has to try things," he said. At first he thought he had said something profound, but as the words echoed in his mind and Gabriella remained silent and unconvinced they seemed empty, even fatuous, something someone in a cheap Western might say. "What I mean is..."

"I don't think you know."

"You're right," he said openly. But he didn't really know if he agreed with her. Did she know him better than anyone else and only want to help him or did she instead just want to get back at him? "I have no right to be here with you," he said.

"Why are you always so insecure? I'm just trying to suggest things. You always back down when I say things. Maybe they're right, maybe they aren't."

She looked at him with those sharp knowing eyes that had always angered him and made him feel she knew what he should be doing and scorned him for not doing it, although she would never dream of telling him what it was. It was the look she always gave him when she wanted him to tear her clothes off and make love to her. For a moment he wondered what it would be like to plant his hand on her thighs, pull her clothes off right in front of everybody, and make love to her on the spot. It would be a hard cathartic fuck, maybe even a watershed one, that they would both remember for years, something which would always make them feel good about themselves and life in general which might signal the end of the past and the clear white beginning of something new between them. He envisioned a scene where the fat woman was rocking her arm back and forth to the rhythm of his thighs as the tour group cheered them on. He heard a shout in the distance and his mind switched ahead to the imagined aftermath in which he was staring into Gabriella's hard stony face. He would hate her all over again, and maybe even love her all the more for the amount she made him hate her. He let his arms drop to his side.

"You always used to make me so angry," he continued. "I would burn up inside when you looked at me. I remember when I quit writing. I felt so sure about it. I knew I wasn't going anywhere and I'd never write anything good. I thought you'd be happy when I told you I decided to go into communications with the goal in mind of going into advertising."

Gabriella looked at him. A hushed sense of pathos spread across her face. "You did what you had to do," she said forgivingly.

"But you looked at me like I had made a huge mistake and compromised myself. I felt so terrible. I felt I let you down."

"I never knew you cared. You always had a way of acting like you were sure of yourself. It always scared me. I was afraid of saying things."

"So you just looked..."

Martin looked down at the rows of buildings stretching off into the distance. The ones closest to the river were the oldest and most ornate. With every block in from the Danube the buildings looked more and more functional. More and more bleak. For a moment he thought he saw the sand-colored building that seemed to be at the end of every street near his hotel, but after looking for longer he realized from the shape of the roof that it was a different building. Beside it stood a second building with a blue neon cross hanging on the side. He wondered how far he was from Prague, Bucharest, and Moscow, places he had never been to and had always associated with Budapest.

They walked back down the hill into Buda and Gabriella caught a bus. Martin agreed to call her before he left and kissed her on the cheek, something she never would have let him do the last time they had met. Although he wasn't sure of the meaning behind her lascivious look he wasn't about count his blessings. It left him feeling good, although at the end of the day it would have held much more importance to him if it stood as some kind of portent that things would go well with the waitress, rather than a signal light for more intimate things to transpire with Gabriella. He made his way across one of the bridges, the name of which he didn't know but felt he should, and back to his apartment. When he opened the door and tossed the keys on his bed he suddenly felt tired. His limbs felt heavy and his mind lost focus. He turned on the television and watched a news report about a nail bomber in London who had been caught after some police surveillance cameras had detected a man in a white hat walking several times around the block after the explosion. The man's face was put on the front page of all of the British tabloids. After questioning five suspects who fit the description they finally arrested a youth after explosives were found in his house. Martin turned the channel and watched a few minutes of a French film he had always known. He quickly became frustrated when he couldn't remember what the director's name was. He shut the television off and took off his clothes to take a nap.

He closed his eyes and that warm fluidic feeling that sleep was about to take over filled his body. In a matter of minutes he fell into a deep dark sleep in which he was almost immediately consumed by the forces of a dream. He was standing on the shore of a great icy lake and in the distance stood a massive city shimmering as it floated on the water. From where he was standing it looked like Manhattan but there was something unusual and almost malevolent about the architecture. The tall office towers, some modern and some older brick and marble structures, had miniature towers with spiraling cornices jutting out the sides like tiny arms. There were obscure abstract symbols painted on the sides of the largest buildings reminiscent of Islamic art or Stalinist propaganda posters. Everything about the strange metropolis frightened him while also drawing him closer. He wanted to walk through its streets and talk to its people. He took a step forward and made his way across the ice. As he approached the outskirts he noticed that the streets were empty and apart from the flickering of neon signs the city was dark and quiet. Just as he was about to land on the roof of the tallest tower an ecstatic feeling rushed through his body and his limbs quaked. When he woke up he sat in his bed savoring the image of the great icy city as it lingered in his consciousness. Then he heard the screeching of a cat in heat and somewhere in the distance the sound of glass shattering. He closed his eyes and slipped back into the warm envelope of sleep.

The next day he woke up at eleven. He felt well rested when he went to the bathroom to shave. He looked in the mirror. With the exception of a little bit of gray hair he thought he looked ten years younger than he actually was. He put on a black tee shirt and a tan corduroy jacket Marleise always said looked good on him. One thing a friend told him once about communist Europe was that everyone always made their best effort to look good no matter how poor they were. It was the one way the people had of feeling good about themselves in the absence of an affluent future to look forward to.

Just as he was about to walk out the door, a new feeling entered inside him, a feeling of guilt for being an American and coming from a country where even the richest people walked around with holes in their jeans wearing smelly old trainers in order to be fashionable. What would the waitress think if he showed up in a tee shirt? Perhaps she would take him for just another decadent American slob. Although, when he pressed his memory, he recalled that he had dressed casually the last time he saw her - trainers and a black sweater if he was not mistaken. On the other hand, if he was too well dressed there was always the danger that she might take him for an ostentatious rich man. But then he could always claim to have had to dress up for business. So, he reasoned in an uncertain and tight-roping kind of way, that it wasn't such a bad idea to wear a suit. He undressed and put on his charcoal gray suit with ice-blue shirt and silvery-blue tie. As he tightened the knot he felt confident and daring in a way he hadn't with the tee shirt on.

He left the apartment and walked out into the Budapest afternoon with all its rows of cafés and lush green trees. He stopped for a quick cappuccino and croissant at an outdoor café situated next to a jewelers, a picture in its window of a slender golden hand holding a diamond. When he was finished his cappuccino he walked until he saw the tall sand colored building. It was exactly where he thought it should be. Impressed with himself for his burgeoning knowledge of Budapest geography, he walked towards Andrássy út past the building with the neon sign of the cartoon robot carrying a tray. Underneath, the words _Föz, Füt,_ and _Süt_ flashed in brilliant red, white, and blue. From a distance he heard the sound of some hip-hop tune coming from an unseen radio. He thought of the waitress walking around the tables of the café in her black shoes and black pants with thin white lines running from the belt to the ankle. The notes of the electric piano line from the hip hop song filled the soft summer air. He imagined her hips swaggering to the rhythm as she walked through a dark and crowded nightclub. It was her song, he thought.

He continued down Andrássy past a letting agency. There was a list of apartments and houses complete with photos posted in the window. He stopped and looked at the picture of a house with a triangular roof with imbricated white and clay tiles, wondering what it would be like to quit his job and move to Budapest. There were said to be at least ten thousand Americans in the city on some sort of temporary or permanent basis. Perhaps he could freelance here for a few years, living the vivacious life of a young bohemian artist - jam-packed with rich exotic nights, champagne corks popping from cold green bottles and soft pink lights reflecting off the waters of the Danube - while he made ends meet by faxing plans for million-dollar advertising campaigns all over Europe and America from a luxurious Budapest hotel as he sat in a hot and sultry steam room gazing at its gold chandeliers and Italian marble floors. He had to admit, he liked it here. He continued down Andrássy, toying with the idea that somewhere in his ancestral past there was some link to the Magyar. Although he knew of no Hungarian blood his family going back at least four generations there was always the chance that hundreds of years ago some Gypsy had ran away from his family in Budapest and stowed away on a Spanish galleon to New York, where he was to have wild and scandalous sex with a woman somewhere in the deepest roots of Martin's family tree. It was a strange and far-fetched idea that would take years of research to prove, but one he liked nonetheless. Although it was highly unlikely that anything like this could have transpired, he remembered reading once that one in five children from so called _stable_ homes were conceived under such circumstances and had not even the slightest genetic link to their apparent fathers.

When Martin got to _Night and Day_ he took a seat on the patio of the café. Within minutes the black haired waitress walked out the door accompanied by a man who looked to be in his early twenties. There was something flat and pugilistic about his face that annoyed Martin. He wasn't the kind of guy that she would have anything to do with. He looked shifty and possibly abusive, and too short and commonplace to be considered by such a woman as anything more than a casual suitor. She walked past him without showing any sign of recognition and crossed the street at the first intersection. Martin got up and went to the bathroom, passing the gambling area, its dark green lights shining down from the ceiling. Just as he unzipped his fly a young man dressed in leather boots and dark green pants came in and planted himself in front of the urinal beside him. Martin guessed he was one of the waiters. He wondered if the waitress had told him about the flower he had left and, if she did, if they both laughed at the obtuse staginess of his gesture. That would explain why she had walked by him without seeming to recognize him. She was ignoring him and wanted to shrug him off in the easiest way possible.

She came back ten minutes later unaccompanied. She stepped inside for a moment to get a pen and her note pad and then came out to take his order.

"A beer please," he said. She smiled with recognition. Her lips were small and tight but the ends reached far up her face. It was a tender smile that made him feel comfortable in its natural lack of lascivious intent, a subtle reminder, perhaps, that she had accepted his gesture of the flower and was even flattered by it. She was a traditional and well-grounded woman who knew the value of a small romantic flower. While Gabriella, like most serious American women who had been to college, always hated it when he sent flowers, the black-haired waitress was a true and pure woman - satisfying the most rigorous criteria for femininity - who respected, and maybe even cherished the role of romance in the grand scheme of things.

When she came back she set the beer on the table. She smiled once more, but this time it was a stronger and deeper smile, one that begged him to say something to her, something sweet and meaningful that she could take home with her and meditate on as she drifted off to sleep with her head nestled snugly in her pillow. He wanted to say something but just ended up nodding his head stupidly as he paid her for the beer.

"Köszönom," she said. Her tone was veiled and ambiguous.

She turned to walk back inside. Just before she disappeared into the dark interior he noticed she was wearing a slim pink plastic watch around her wrist that looked like something you would wear to a discotheque. It was a cheap, but fun sort of watch that made a statement about the kind of person she was rather than just blending in with the rest of her attire. He liked that. It showed she had character and didn't mind going against the grain every now and then.

He finished the coffee quickly, again making sure to place a flower beside the vase before he left. He wanted to make sure she understood that he meant business and that the first flower wasn't the result of some casual whim after one-too-many late afternoon beers.

That night he stayed in and went over some files he had brought from New York to make sure he was keeping on top of things. Even though he had no intention of doing any real work until he got back, such an exercise helped him feel centered and focused, in control of his life even while he was thousands of miles away chasing a girl he had never met. It was always good to sit back and take stock of things, stoke the home fire even when you weren't at home. That way you could always make sure that your life was going in the right direction and you wouldn't fall prey to the spurious forces that life sent ambling into your path every waking day of your existence.

The next day he went back to _Night and Day_ , this time dressed more casually and carrying a blank greeting card of an impressionist landscape that he was sure she would like. It was time to ask her out and expose the roots of his intentions. He wasn't just a rich foreigner looking for a one-night stand. He sat outside at the same table as he had before. Within a minute the waitress came to his table. She was wearing a red sweater this time, and the same black pants from the day before. She passed his table and smiled like she had been expecting him and knew exactly why he had come.

"A coffee please," he said clearly and deliberately, looking at her in earnest to make sure she understood him and wasn't put off by him for speaking in English.

Five minutes later she came back with the coffee and he paid. She smiled and walked away. When she disappeared behind the door he wondered what he should do next. Before leaving her the card he had to somehow forge a deeper connection with her. If he just left her something she might think he thought she was easy and would go out with just anyone. Or maybe she would think that he took her for a slut and just wanted a quick screw on the shores of the Danube before he ran back to his wife in New York.

When he finished his coffee he started writing something. Using English was a gamble, since she obviously wasn't fluent, but what other choice did he have? After fifteen minutes he put his pen down, satisfied the letter was close to completion, and reread it. It was short, but to the point, saying that he liked a certain "way" about her and thought she had deep intelligent eyes and that it would be nice if they could meet at a café in two days, maybe in the afternoon. He suggested _The New York Café_ , a place he had read about in a tourist guide. The write-up said it was old style Hungarian restaurant that had been heavily bombed during the Russian occupation but had been greatly restored to bring out all the old world aristocratic charm of the interior. They could sit there in the afternoon laughing and stumbling over words from the dictionary while they exchanged casual intimacies under the lighting of some great old chandelier, just as Grande dukes had a hundred years earlier when courting the beautiful women of the old regime. After some thought about the practical details, he specified a time and signed his name on the bottom.

When he looked up from the card he noticed a man standing beside him with his coat open displaying a bunch of cheap watches. He was dressed well and his old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles made him look like a Chicago style stockbroker from the nineteen thirties. Martin shook his head, but the man just sat at the table beside him and kept pointing at the watches. Every time he looked over - even after being totally ignored for up to five minutes - the man would catch his glance one more time and open his coat. Then he would move his fingers around like he was counting money.

After a long half hour - during which the waitress had not even once come outside - he stood up and walked back to the bathroom. He had to get away from the man if he was to have any chance at all of leaving the waitress the card. When he passed the bar the waitress looked up at him and smiled. Her face lit up the room like a lamp. She was clearly overjoyed to see him and had been desperately waiting for him to come inside to be with her in more intimate surroundings. It was exactly what he was hoping for.

He pointed back to the door and opened up his jacket doing his best to mime the man and pretend he was trying to sell her a watch. She tilted her head in confusion. He sat down and pointed towards the door again. She arched her eyebrows for a second and then nodded her head as if she had suddenly understood. She set down a towel that she had been using to wipe the counter and strutted outdoors. She came back less than a minute later, nodding her head while making a shooing action towards the door with her hands.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much...köszönöm." He said the final word slowly, almost clumsily, and her face relaxed with pleasure as though she was impressed that he had made an effort to speak to her in Hungarian. He went back to the table and she followed him, smiling at him as she passed. It seemed she was trying to add some kind of coda on their interchange to let him know it had meant a great deal to her. When she slipped back behind the door again he took a flower out of the vase and put the card in the envelope. He set the flower on top of the card and left immediately, shuffling quickly down Andrássy and disappearing into the midday crowds as he walked back towards his apartment, watching the play of the trees in the soft afternoon light.

### VII

When Martin arrived at the New York Café to meet the black-haired waitress the sky was overcast and the first few drops of what looked like a long and dreary shower had already started to fall. The entrance was surrounded by a few stages of wood and metal scaffolding from an ongoing restoration project. He walked through the front door and past a front desk where a man with a droopy mustache gestured for him to take a table in a large floor area. He found a seat on the other side of the room, a comfortable distance from a grand piano in front of which a man in a white suit was standing and stretching his fingers like he was getting ready to play some superficial and possibly annoying background music. A waiter approached his table and Martin ordered a beer. He was half an hour early and wanted to relax and possibly compose himself before the waitress showed up. He took a deep breath and looked around. The café had a natural wood interior and a delicately carved wooden ceiling that must have dated back as far as the twenties. He imagined the great diplomats and artists of the day discussing the advent of cinema - the seventh art - and the _new morality_ while drawing up plans for social change or possibly even the invasion of some neighboring European empire. Parties of well-dressed people walked in and out. They were different than the people that walked up and down the streets of Andrássy. They seemed more serious – even slightly drab - and obviously more wealthy. As he waited, his glance furtively wandering back and forth between his watch and the front entrance where the host seemed to be pacing around as if he was anxiously waiting for an important delivery that was several hours late, Martin started to wonder if he had made the right choice in asking the waitress to meet him here. Maybe the locals regarded it as nothing more than a pretentious tourist hang out, the sort of place \- like Lindy's or The Chelsea Hotel back in Manhattan - that would provoke derisive grins from the regular patrons every time a foreign tourist stepped in. He imagined the waitress was standing outside that very minute laughing as she stretched her head around the door to catch a mocking glimpse of him.

Thoughts rattled through his head as he looked up at a glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling. What sort of woman was she? Was it wrong of him to ask her out? Although she had a traditional, almost aristocratic look in her eyes that suggested she might be attracted to a man who would spend his afternoons in such a café - a reasonable and educated man that would one day make a good husband - she seemed to dress like many of the younger European woman he had scene hanging around in front of night clubs at four in the morning. But if that was the case, what did he have to be worried about? It was just a few months ago in New York that he'd gone out to the Limelight - an exclusive disco in a revamped gothic church - and danced until four in the morning. His gaze drifted over to the man at the piano, who had started to play some sort of nondescript jazz piece, something almost self-consciously romantic and sentimental she might make fun of him about years later if they ever actually hit it off. And when it all came crashing down she'd run around telling everyone about the dreadful place he'd asked her out on their ill-fated first date and mention the pianist in particular as evidence of his poor taste. But what if he had asked her out to a bar instead? Would that have been any better? Maybe she might assume that all he wanted to do was get drunk and sleep with her, a thought that might be appealing while he was alone in bed in the middle of the night, but one which ultimately belied the purity of his intentions.

He looked at his watch. She was already twenty minutes late. A tall woman with a floppy hat walked by his table and blinked at him seductively as she smiled. He smiled back and turned his head away. Her gesture suddenly restored his confidence, something that had already started to wan since his last meeting with Gabriella. He laughed at the thought that she could know or understand anything about the waitress's feelings or motives. He ordered a second beer and then a cappuccino. By the time he finished the black-haired girl was already a full hour late. He called the waiter over and paid. As he walked back to his apartment, weaving through a series of narrow side streets that reminded him of Paris, he was far less despondent than he thought he should be. He had taken a long shot with a stranger and it hadn't paid off. Those were the facts and there was no reason he should extract only the most negative conclusions from them. There were countless reasons she might not have come so why should he assume the worst? Perhaps she didn't get the card at all and another waitress picked it up. Maybe she did get the card but had to work. Or maybe she didn't have to work and just couldn't make it for some other equally acceptable reason that had nothing to do with him. Or possibly she _could_ make it but didn't come out of service to some sort of traditional prudence taught to her by nuns at some all-girls school. After all, she was beautiful and didn't look like the type that would go out with just anybody.

He felt strangely confident as he passed a shop window advertising a shoe sale - something there seemed to be an endless supply of in Budapest. He had to give her a second chance and go back to _Night and Day_ in a few days to touch bases with her. If he went too soon she would think he was pressuring her. If he held off for too long she might think he was angry or didn't even care. He still had four days left before he had to go back to New York and he had to make the best of his time here.

He spent the rest of the day wandering through the streets of Buda looking at the old book stores and interesting little shops. It seemed that everywhere he looked was a potential photograph that could have appeared in a tourist magazine or tabletop architecture book. He bought a small Hungarian dictionary in case he might need it to say something special to the waitress when he went back. A phrase book was too dangerous, as it would immediately brand him in the eyes of most Hungarians as an opportunistic tourist trying to pick up women. Then he had an ice cream before going back to his apartment.

The next day he went to _Night and Day_ and took his now usual seat outside on the patio. The sky was a crisp blue and people were walking down Andrássy in loose cotton shirts enjoying the near-perfect summer weather. He waited for the waitress to emerge from inside. At worst she would greet him with a smile, he thought, showing him in a subtle but unmistakable way that she had been flattered and maybe even deeply moved by his card. After about five minutes she walked out. She was wearing a shiny black silk shirt and the same black pants with white stripes that she had worn many times before. Without seeming to notice him, she walked directly to the next table to serve a middle-aged man who had brought his dog and was petting it in his lap.

He turned his head to look at her. Perhaps if she looked back their eyes would meet and the contact he had hoped for would be initiated. When she finished taking the man's order she turned around. Their eyes met and she stopped.

"Hello," she said uncomfortably. She had an angry and disdainful look in her eyes. He felt for an instant they were standing in a courtroom and he had just been convicted of assaulting her thirteen-year-old-daughter. He smiled to hide his tension and put up his finger to say he wanted to order. She stepped up to the table with her note pad and stared at him. Her expression had not changed.

"A cappuccino," he said. She nodded her head without looking at him and walked away briskly.

Five minutes later the second waitress with red hair came out and set a coffee at his table. He had obviously done something so callous and unthinkable in the mind of a Hungarian that she no longer could bring herself to serve his table. He felt awful. He had to go inside and try to turn things around. Anything, even just a reconciliatory smile would do. He stood up and walked through the door, a pathetic and groveling smile pasted across his face, noticing for the first time the image of a moon etched in frosted glass on the front window. The waitress was talking to a brown-haired girl who was standing at the bar. She was staring with such quiet intensity into the girl's eyes that the rest of the room didn't seem to exist for her. He thought he heard them whispering as he approached. He stopped directly in front of the two women and stood there for a moment. It was the only way he could make her acknowledge him, the only way he could make her realize that his intentions were honest and noble. She continued talking as if he wasn't there.

"Excuse me," he finally said after waiting for over a minute. She looked up at him for a second with the same hard and threatened eyes and then turned back to her friend. A waiter walked by. Maybe she had told him about the card and the man was preparing to throw him out. He felt small and ugly. How could he have been so thoughtlessly conceited as to leave her a card?

"A beer," he said, holding up his finger helplessly, trying to pretend that nothing had happened. She grabbed a glass and poured the beer without looking at him. He handed her a five hundred forint note and gestured for her to keep the change. She took the money and put it in her black wallet without saying a thing. He nodded his head and went back to his table.

She passed his table three times over the next half hour without acknowledging him. He opened up his dictionary and flipped through it. The only thing he could do to save face was to bow down and apologize by writing something in Hungarian. Understanding was the key. It was possible she had misconstrued the intention of the card. Or maybe a rival lover – the guy with the angry face that she was with the other day - had translated it for her and warped its meaning to make him look bad. Anything was possible.

He pulled out a pen and started writing on a small napkin. After half an hour he had managed to write a small paragraph with several words scratched out and others scribbled in above them. To the best of his knowledge it said he was sorry for scaring her and that he thought she was so beautiful that he had to fly back to Hungary to see her in hope that he might be able to meet her. It also said he was going back in a day to America and he hoped that maybe she would write to him and he could be her friend. When he finished he exhaled in hopeless frustration, realizing that it was most likely filled with hidden and bizarre grammatical errors that would potentially distort the meaning into something completely different and maybe even offensive.

The next time she passed his table he caught her attention and ordered a cappuccino. She gave him a cold nod. It wasn't much, but it was a start. Something he could possibly build upon to regain her trust. When she came back she set the cup on his table. She smiled thinly. He pulled out a five hundred forint note and handed it to her. As she was searching through her wallet for change he pressed his lips together and handed her the napkin. She stepped back and shook her head. She looked no longer angry but merely uncomfortable. She set the change on the table without taking the napkin and turned to walk back through the door.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She stopped and turned around.

"I scared you," he pleaded. "I wrote this for you... _Magyarul_ ," he said pointing to the note and holding it out to her.

A disarming, even gentle, look suddenly fell across her face. She stepped towards him and took the napkin from his hand.

"You write this?" she asked, pronouncing _write_ as if it were spelled _wryyyte_ with a soft and almost inaudible _t_.

He pointed to the dictionary and shrugged. "Not good," he said. He noticed he had started to laugh. "When I first saw you I thought you were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I had a dream that you made me lucky. You must think it's all so crazy..."

He paused and looked at her. Her eyes were open and yielding, and her lips widened to a crazed and wondrous smile as if he had just provided one of the most memorable moments of her life.

"It's just that..." He paused. "Do you understand?" he asked her.

"Kisci...a little," she said, nodding her head quickly and excitedly. "Card so nice, no one ever give to me like that."

"I just came to see my ex-wife. Very bad woman," he said. Exposing his failures with Gabriella might make him more sympathetic in her eyes. "But you made me not care anymore."

"Maybe I will write to you," she said in a factual manner like she was talking about the likelihood of rain that afternoon. She set the napkin back on the table.

Just then a man behind her called her attention and she turned away. Then her friend came from behind the door and leaned against the wall. Her expression flipped back to one of blank unconcern and she went back inside.

Martin stood up and walked quickly out onto the street. He pulled out his pen and scribbled down the street address of the café on a piece of paper. He folded it up and put it in his pocket before realizing that he had forgotten to ask her for her name. He turned and started back in the direction of the café before changing his mind. It was poor form to go back and ask her for her name after he had several chances and failed to do so each and every time. It would draw attention to his own clumsiness - a strategy that would get him nowhere. After all, she had said she would write and if she kept her promise - which, judging from her positive reaction, she would – he would find out her name later. He turned and walked back towards his hotel. His limbs tingled as if his blood was charged with oxygen. He had broken through her tough exterior and was starting to find his way inside. As he walked down the green funnel of Andrássy everything about his past life in New York had suddenly ceased to matter. The orange tint of evening was already visible in the slant of the sun off the pavement.

Later that night Martin put on his coat and went to see Gabriella, memories of the black-haired waitress still twinkling in the back of his mind like a tray of diamonds in a luxurious Parisian window display. Although he was sure there would never be anything between him and Gabriela again, something inside of him was desperate to go back and see her. Perhaps it was just the need to be with someone rather than spend the night alone in some bar drinking beer and listening to Eastern European techno music, or maybe it was more from a need to relate to someone - especially her - the details of his latest romantic enterprise. This way he could gauge the full impact of what had happened with the waitress that day and what its impact might be on the grand totality of his life. The chances were that Gabriella would seem old and tedious in comparison, but he needed to know for sure.

When he got to Gabriella's house there was no light in the windows and the streets were empty except for a policeman who was walking slowly down the sidewalk. Certainly the police would be suspicious of anyone walking alone in the neighborhood given the recent bombing. Martin stepped up to the door and knocked. He waited a minute and knocked again. He turned his head and noticed the policeman had walked down the block and seemed to have forgotten about him. After a third knock the door opened slowly. A white hand appeared from the darkness and then a pale gaunt face.

"Come in," Gabriella said. There was a note of defeat in her voice.

He stepped inside. "Can I turn on a light?"

"I'm sorry," she said. She flicked on a light. She looked frail and weak. For a moment Martin had the distinct impression that he was facing someone he had never met before. There was a bruise the size of a plum on her arm. She invited him to take off his jacket and closed the door. "My husband is away. You have good timing."

"I just thought I'd..."

"What?" Her head dropped and a sultry but frightened look fell across her face. It was like the way she had looked at him on the hill, only more vexed and fatalistic.

He walked into her living room and sat down. She turned on a lamp and sat beside him on the couch. He looked again at the bruise. It looked like a chemical had spilled on her skin and spread outwards from the center.

"You look beautiful," he said almost automatically as if something inside her took hold of him and forced him to say it.

"Martin," she said. "Please." She let her shoulders sag. He sensed she was put off by his comment.

"You should be happy. Beauty is a window to God."

"I never knew you were religious," she said wryly. "Besides, I don't want to be a window to God. Too much responsibility." Her eyes were hard and serious. "Beauty is destitution. Can't you see? Don't you understand?" She lit a cigarette and stood up. Martin looked at her. "Beautiful women always go through life defining themselves as beautiful women. Nothing more. That's all they are."

"You make it sound..."

"Sound like a burden? Is that what you wanted to say?"

"Something like that. I wouldn't have put it like that."

"Maybe it is. I feel stunted and cramped by all the men that have made me what I am. If I went off to an island I would still think of myself in terms of how I looked. If I imagined I looked shabby, I'd feel bad. If I imagined I looked beautiful, I'd feel good. It's all destitution. It's all isolation."

"But we all get trapped by other people's thoughts and expectations of us. It's not just..."

"That's what I'm saying. All the men that said I was sweet when I was a girl and trapped me in my own image of sweetness...we compromise - even mold - ourselves to our surroundings."

"No." He touched her arm and she pulled away quickly as if in pain. "I'm sorry," he said.

"It's nothing. I just fell over," she said.

"Have you seen a doctor?"

"The doctors are no good here," she said. She looked away sharply as if what she just said had suddenly assumed a second, more painful meaning. He thought for a moment he knew what she was thinking. Then she looked into his eyes and he was no longer so sure.

"Life is closure," she said. "Disappointment and ending. Look at us. We have nothing but the past. Everything that happened between us is over. I want to think that a story has a line to it. A point. But sometimes you read books that have no real plot. Things meander around and that's _it_." She lifted both arms up like a conductor at the end of a movement.

"We're still friends at least," he said with some uncertainty. She didn't look at him.

"I can never be your friend," she said in a way that was somehow comforting in its finality. "There are always too many barriers between friends. Too many rules. Friends come together out of need and honesty. A desire to open oneself and be oneself - _really_."

"Yes," he said. "I understand." He wasn't sure if he did.

"But then once people become friends too much relies on the preservation of that friendship, that moment of openness that invariably becomes darkness. Then it's like a lifeline to the terminally ill. That's why I can only be with strangers."

"But we've already become strangers. We were once...now we're not."

"Maybe that's why I'm here with you." She sat down beside him and looked off into space. It was a new expression he'd never seen. One of resignation and openness, but one that was nonetheless bleak in its acceptance.

"Martin," she said solemnly. There was something in her voice, an eroticism so dark and boundless that it bore no tangible description.

"I want you to make love to me," she said.

He looked into her green eyes and for a moment felt nothing but the desire to plunge inside her and possess her in all her entirety. He straightened his posture and put his hand on her knee. "Gabriella," he said. The room was now dark and all he could hear was the hurried sound of her breathing. He imagined that she knew he was going to turn her down and that she wanted him to leave. He wanted to tell her about the waitress but decided it would be wrong.

She coughed.

"Yes. It's just..." She had a hollow look in her eyes that scared him. "Well...You're not only married, but there's also Marleise to consider," he said in the way he might bring up an important point at a meeting.

"Don't lie to me anymore," she said in a tone that was neither accusing nor even slightly impassioned. "There is no Marleise. Or if there was, she would have left you. I know you better than that. You wouldn't be here if you were telling the truth. Do you want to make love to me or not? Maybe you do and you're just afraid. Or maybe there's someone else. Someone new that you're afraid to go after without some other female presence in your life to fall back upon."

He didn't say anything. If he agreed with her, she would just say he was just doing so to avoid further confrontation and if he disagreed she would say he was being argumentative and defensive. She stood up and went to the kitchen. He put on his jacket and made his way to the door. Gabriella walked half way, but no further, back into the living room and watched him as he put his hand on the door handle and walked outside. She said nothing. He felt he should have been angry at himself but for some reason he wasn't.

He walked down the steps and continued until he got to City Park, where a light haze had fallen over the darkening grounds. He could still smell her scent on his hands. A circle of hippies had gathered around a fire pit and what looked like a greyhound raced by, chasing after some unseen prey.

The next day he put on his shorts and T-shirt and ran up to the hill where Gabriella had taken him before. He was determined to have a good day in spite of the way the previous evening had gone with Gabriella. He should have expected it anyway. Who could be so foolish as to think he could ever reawaken a friendship with an ex-lover anyway? And why would she even care about the waitress? But even more unsettling was the question of what she had meant by asking him to make love to her. Was it some sort of game she was playing with her current husband to make him jealous? Martin would never deny that she was the only one he had ever loved and it would stay that way, but something had changed between them since the divorce, and yet again since the first time he had seen her in Budapest, and he now had a new direction in life to follow. Even if what Gabriella had said was true about friendship never really being anything more than a sudden revelation or sense of need or dependence that eventually dries up to become nothing but an empty act of lies, he could still enjoy that moment of _opening_ afforded to him by the waitress's reaction to his off-the-cuff pen-and-napkin revelation.

He jogged lightly up the same path they had taken before trying to form an image of the waitress in his head. Her smile the day before at the café, it suddenly occurred to him as he reached a small plateau, reminded him of a girl named Tracey he was once in love with back in college. She was married to a Frenchman he had never liked and she never responded to his advances. Perhaps in some strange way he had only fallen in love with Tracey out of some kind of cosmic foreshadowing to the life he was living now, and her smile was really a sort of signpost pointing forward to some future woman - obviously the waitress - he had not yet met but was always destined to fall in love with. That was why it had been a mistake to pursue Tracey and why it had ended so disastrously with her. She had only been in his life so that one day he would meet the waitress and her smile would trigger off a deep web of unconscious associations that would make him fall in love with her. He walked passed an elderly woman wearing ostentatiously modern wire-frame glasses and suddenly felt ashamed for thinking such a fantastical thought. But that's how love made you feel, he reasoned in his own defense. Everything was possible.

When he reached the top of the hill he swept his hair back as he passed a group of young school girls who he was sure were secretly watching him - perhaps even thinking how old he might look. He looked out at the broad expanse of bridges fanning out to Pest, with the world famous parliament building, and out further to the gray domino-like apartment blocks in the distance. The entire city seemed almost to absorb him as he walked slowly towards the statue at the crest of the hill.

### VIII

Two days after Martin got back to Manhattan he went to a florist's in Spanish Harlem to order a bouquet of flowers. He had walked by the shop several times over the last three years and although he had never been inside, he was always impressed by the dazzling and tasteful arrangements in the window. He had to let the waitress know that he was serious about her and that something out of the ordinary had happened between them that he wasn't going to forget about, even though he was back in New York and could be spending his time pursuing other women if he wanted to. It wasn't that he wanted to philander or was even considering it, but more that he was still thinking about her when he was thousands of miles away in a situation where lesser men would quickly break down, forget about whatever woman they had sworn their love to only weeks before, and start seeing someone else. On the other hand, there was always the risk that she would take the flowers in the wrong way – some gesture of unwanted force \- and he'd end up having to backpedal, but it was a risk he would have to take if anything at all was going to transpire between them.

Martin walked through the doors and stepped up to the counter. An old woman with a green cardigan draped around her shoulders was sitting down in a small wooden chair.

"Hello," he said. The woman smiled and he went on to explain that he needed to send a small bouquet to Hungary. She took out a catalogue and after perusing the various possibilities he decided on an arrangement of seasonal fresh cut flowers.

"I'm sure she'll love them." She smiled with the wise glow of an old Russian tea reader divining a budding romance.

She asked for the name and address of the recipient and he took a piece of paper from a notepad on the counter and wrote "A szép fekete haju pincerno." Then he wrote down the address for _Night and Day_. Beneath it he put his own address and phone number.

She looked at the message and squinted her eyes.

"It means _the beautiful black haired waitress_ ," he said. It was a phrase he had created out of the Hungarian dictionary on his flight back. The woman raised her eyebrows with sudden concern.

"What if there are two black haired waitresses?"

"It's a small place," he said. "We're friends, so she'll know. I just want to surprise her."

The woman looked unconvinced as she handed him the receipt. "They'll take a few days," she said.

The next day he bought a Hungarian lesson book from a bookstore on St. Martins. If she wrote him a letter in Hungarian he wanted to make sure he could read it. After a late afternoon business lunch, during which he caught up with the important details of some of the ongoing projects in his office that he had left behind, his quest to sell peanuts to Gen Xers at the top of the list, he went home and started the first chapter. Within an hour he had finished the readings and done all the required exercises. "Szeret veled szeretkezni", he learned, meant "I would like to make love to you" while "piros" was the word they used for red when talking about a red pepper while "vörös" was the word used to describe red wine or the color of a woman's hair. "Egy üveg vörös bort kérek", meant "I'd like a glass of red wine," or, more literally, "I ask for a glass of red wine." At nine he started to feel sleepy and put the book down. There was no point continuing if he was too tired to even string a decent sentence together in English. Besides, he was more than satisfied with his progress and, by immersing himself in Hungarian for an evening, hadn't he just gotten that much closer to the waitress?

Over the next two weeks, patiently waiting for a possible response from the waitress, he ploughed through the increasingly dense and incondite pages of the lesson book, repeating words over and over in his head until he was sure they were indelibly etched in his mind. He felt at times he was delving into something almost mystical, like the Tarot or Kabbalah, at the bottom of which lay the deepest secrets of the universe. The words were both sexy and alien, reminding him at once of late-night rendezvous by the Danube and bearded men in strange uniforms patrolling the walls of burnt-out tire factories as they waved their machine guns threateningly through the predawn air. He taped small tags to every object in his apartment that he could find the Hungarian word for and wrote that word on each tag in bold black letters.

After three weeks and six chapters - a whole third of the book - he still hadn't heard from the waitress. He started to worry. Maybe she didn't get the flowers and they ended up getting sent to someone else. Or maybe they didn't deliver the flowers at all. But if that was the case, wouldn't he have heard from the florist? The confidence he felt after she had first smiled at him - a smile he continually reminded himself was like no other he had ever seen - had already started to fade. But maybe, he thought one afternoon while trying his best to enjoy a bad Ruben in a nearby deli, she _had_ got the flowers after all and was more threatened than impressed by his impertinent advance.

Another two weeks passed with still no news. He had no choice but to go back and see her again. Although it seemed ridiculous to keep flying back to Hungary under the pretext of business, he couldn't afford to take any chances when he was so far away. Of course he could always wait for her to sort out her feelings and possibly write him a letter thanking him for the flowers, but every day he was away from her was a day she was likely to sense him becoming a smaller and smaller force in her life, essentially one more step towards her completely forgetting about him. A day away from a woman was one more day someone else had a chance to get his foot in the door and cast the seeds of doubt in her mind. While he didn't want to impose himself on her against her will - there was no question of that - out of sight, out of mind was a credo most people lived by these days and words he should take very seriously.

As the days passed he felt more and more pessimistic about his chances with her. Why hadn't he even asked her for her name? How could he expect to be taken seriously if he hadn't even the decency for that? It was like expecting to win a hockey game without even scoring a goal. He had heard it happened once, when the Rangers were able to find grounds for reversing the decision of a 1-0 loss to the Black Hawks because the winning goal was scored by a player who wasn't even registered in the league. But international love affairs were not like sports matches and had no appeals boards for proper conduct, so there were no second chances.

Later that afternoon Martin went to a travel agent near his office to book a flight back to Budapest. Go back or lose her, he thought as he stepped purposefully through the aluminum and glass doors. Half an hour later he left with a ticket in his hand. He would leave in three weeks and come back two weeks after that. Two weeks there would be enough time to recover from jet lag and pick up where he left off with her. After a few days of telephone calls, e-mails, and faxes he managed to secure the same apartment he had the last time.

When he stepped off the plane in Budapest and proceeded through customs he was greeted by the same driver as before. The leaves of the trees were turning brown and the sun seemed lower in the sky, creating a bronze glare on the surface of the highway as they drove into Budapest. Once in the apartment he made an advance payment for the rental and tipped the man a few hundred forints for driving him from the airport. After the man left, he undressed and slipped into bed. Although he was sure the noise and clatter from the street outside would drive him crazy and keep him awake all afternoon, he fell asleep after only ten minutes.

He woke up at six and put on some fresh clothes. The sky outside was darkening and he could hear the low-pitched drone of wind blowing over the roof of the apartment. He put on his jacket and went out to the delicatessen around the corner to buy some beer and sausage to tide him over until later. The woman at the counter nodded at him as if she recognized him from before. Perhaps it meant she found him handsome. If this was true, it was more than likely that the waitress felt the same. He once read that women within an isolated culture or gene pool were usually attracted to the same things in a man. He pulled out his wallet and paid with a newly-issued five-hundred forint bill that had a picture on it of a man with a big curly mustache who looked like a cartoon rendition of a Cossack. As Martin waited for the change he flipped through his wallet, finding a few of the older notes, which featured instead the haunting image of a man that looked strangely like a friend in college who had hung himself only weeks after taking a high-paying job for a telephone company. When Martin got his change he put his wallet back in his pocket and went back to the apartment. He opened a beer and watched TV until ten. News stories were filling the air about President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinski. The European news analysts seemed to find the entire thing ridiculous, wondering why the US didn't pay more attention to more important foreign issues.

The next morning he woke up at nine and went out to the McDonalds around the corner - now becoming his home base \- to get a coffee. If he had breakfast by eleven then he could make it to _Night and Day_ by twelve, just before the waitress took her lunch, if she still worked there. He felt a certain trepidation as he walked up Andrássy towards Oktagon. But as he got closer he felt more comfortable. Something about the sad look of dignity in the eyes of the pedestrians filled him with an eerie sense of calm bordering on spiritual transcendence. It was a feeling of deep empathy and boundless compassion that made him feel connected with them in a way that he was sure the great mystics had all experienced. Although Hungarians had less money than your average American they had a level of composure and class that very few Americans could ever have. Propelled by this new feeling into a kind of meta-emotional stratosphere he continued down the street. The worst that could happen was that the waitress had got the flowers and found it flattering. The best was that they would fall madly in love and get married, although he didn't realistically expect this to happen. Life always took a medium course, it seemed, between complete disaster and total success. Deep down inside everyone's existence was polarized by two central emotions, the fear of some great cataclysm coming along and demolishing their lives - that's why insurance companies were so successful - and the far fetched hope that something great and spectacular would happen to them, like winning a lottery or meeting the man or the woman of their dreams in some secret moonlit hideaway - _a card so high and wild you'll never have to deal another_ , as Leonard Cohen once sang. Ultimately neither really happened. People paid insurance and bought lottery tickets and went on with their mediocre lives as normal.

When he got to _Night and Day_ a new waitress with short black hair was standing outside cleaning one of the tables - had the other black-haired waitress been replaced? He took the same seat he had the day the man tried to sell him a watch. He took out his dictionary and wrote down on a piece of paper "Hol van a fekete haju pincerno?" When she came up to take his order he handed her the piece of paper. She looked at it and then looked strangely at him.

"Varjon," she said. He didn't know what this meant. She went inside. As he waited for her to come back the looming thought that she didn't work there any more grew stronger, meaning he could only hope to run into her somehow by chance. But if that was true, maybe the new waitress was in the back asking someone - perhaps a close friend who was sitting inside that very minute laughing at his feeble attempts to romance her - if it was all right to give out her new phone number or location of her new workplace. She came back a few minutes later.

"She will be here tomorrow," she said in clear English. He felt a great sense of relief. "You can meet her then." There was something in her voice that suggested - although he wasn't really sure - that she had just spoken to the black-haired waitress on the phone and she had been expecting him all along.

"Thank you," said Martin. He ordered a beer and drank it slowly as he watched the traffic go by. The air had the smell of autumn and people were dressed in darker colors than they had been in August. On his way back to his apartment he passed a theater that had a poster outside for a new film about Queen Elizabeth I. She was young, shrewd, and even sexy - an image that surprised him based on what he knew about her reign - with long red hair and firm, almost pointed breasts. Wasn't she the "virgin queen" after all? Standing in front of what was obviously a great artistic edifice and cultural hub made him feel guilty for not having taken full advantage of being in one of Europe's great cities the last time he was here. There were dozens of art museums and just outside the city there was apparently a monastery with a collection of art treasures second only to that of the Vatican. There were also the great hotels and Turkish baths, once frequented by Austrian royalty and the likes of Béla Bartok and Zoltán Kodály. The locals were said to spend entire afternoons wrapped in a towel, a sweaty stick of sausage in one hand as they discussed the local news and played chess in the steamy stone-walled caverns.

That night he went out to explore an area to the west of his apartment he never knew existed before, walking through a series of narrow deserted streets lined with elegant neon signs spelling out long incomprehensible words that glowed in purple and deep blue. After walking around for an hour he was satisfied he knew his way around and decided it was a good time to see Gabriella. He hadn't thought of her for so long that the idea seemed almost refreshing. Whatever uncomfortable feelings might have transpired from their last meeting would have had time to vanish in the vapor trails of time. He had to make the best use of his time in Budapest and every evening counted. Who knew what might happen after his projected meeting with the waitress? They might go out to some quaint Gypsy café, fall in love, and over his two weeks here become so absorbed in one another that it would be difficult or even impossible to arrange a time to meet Gabriella. He rounded a corner and walked down Dálszinház út until he found a café called _Incognito_ that looked like a popular hang out for the modern Hungarian youth culture. There was jazz on the intercom and the people - some that looked like Germans and others that looked more Asian - mingled freely with one another as they moved from one table to the next.

After two quick beers he paid and took a cab to City Park. When he got to Gabriella's house the moon hung low over the city and the sky was clear enough to discern several individual constellations. He walked up to a front row of hedges and stopped. The curtains were shut and the lights were on. He could see the silhouette of two figures in the room. One appeared slender and frail, even as a shadow. He guessed this was Gabriella. The other was much taller and kept moving back and forth across the room. He went to knock on the door but stopped when he heard the cry of a man's voice inside. It was deep and powerful - like the voice he had heard there before - but also vulnerable and pained, like that of a dying animal. He stepped back from the door and looked at the shadows. One of the figures, he could no longer tell which, had dropped to its knees and seemed to be begging forgiveness while the other stood there almost indifferently. Then the standing figure vanished from sight for a few seconds only to rush back into view with what looked like a long blunt object in its hand. He heard a shrill scream and some thudding. Then the figures disappeared from view. He walked up to the door and put his ear against it to listen. He heard nothing. Then he backed down the stairs to see if he could see anything through the window. There was nothing. He heard the sound of a bell striking in the distance and then something that sounded like a cat rushing through a bush in front of the neighboring house. He turned his head but it was too dark to see anything. Just then he heard the door handle turn. He ran across the street to a row of trees and hid. A tall man walked out of the house. He was coughing and seemed to be dressed in a sweater with a heavy turtleneck. It was too dark to see the details of his face, but he thought for a second that he looked like the picture of Gabriella's husband he had seen in her living room. The man accelerated to a light jog and turned down the street. As he disappeared in the distance, Martin thought he could hear the man whispering under his breath, but there was no way he could tell for sure. The man was already too far away and it didn't seem realistic that he would hear anything so subtle. Yet hearing was supposed to become remarkably acute in the dark and perhaps there was a light wind he wasn't aware of that was carrying the sound. They said it was always bad for soldiers to talk when there could be enemies downwind.

When the man was far enough away and Martin was sure he was safe he stood up and walked across the street. The light in the house had been shut off. He looked to his left where a young couple had suddenly appeared from out of nowhere and were kissing under the bough of a tree. He walked slowly up to the door of the house. He put his ear to the wood, but couldn't hear anything. He knocked lightly with the knuckle of his index finger. There was no answer. He knocked more loudly. There was still no answer. He heard something like a set of keys dropping behind him and he turned around. The young couple had disappeared and all he could see was a small dog sniffing around a tree illuminated by a yellow cone of light from an overhanging street lamp. He put his hands in his pocket and retreated from the house. The shadow of a woman appeared in the curtains and he sighed in relief.

A siren wailed somewhere in the distance and suddenly Martin felt foolish and voyeuristic hanging around in front of Gabriella's house. What would she think if she found him there? After all, she was his ex-wife and what would a man want out of that? It was the sort of thing only stalkers and desperate maniacs did. Besides, he was in love with someone else now and could always come back another day. He walked out to the street and turned towards City Park. If it wasn't too late he might be able to get back to the café and have another drink before going back to his apartment.

### IX

The next morning he woke up at eleven. What had happened the night before already seemed like a distant memory. It was probably nothing, and even if it wasn't he had no right lurking around her house so late at night. It was Gabriella's business and hers alone and it was best that he forget about it. He dressed and went across the street to the McDonalds for a small coffee he hoped would get him through until he could hunt down a decent café where he could have a real coffee and order from a broad selection of breakfast pastries. After a quick bland coffee in a small Styrofoam cup he made his way down Andrássy, deciding to put off breakfast until after he had gone to see the black-haired waitress. Whatever caffeine had leached into his bloodstream from the tepid brown concoction was making him feel unusually calm and energetic, a perfect frame of mind in which to confront her, and a large breakfast would only weigh him down and blunt any edge he felt he might now have.

When he got to _Night and Day_ she was standing behind the bar beside the red-haired waitress he remembered from before. She was wearing a black silk shirt that looked from a distance like it had the rubbery texture of a scuba diving suit, the overly shiny surface backfiring by giving the unwanted look of high-tech functionality rather than elegance. She was looking down at the counter, perhaps reading an unseen book or newspaper. He closed the door behind him and walked up to the bar. She didn't seem to notice him. The red-haired waitress smiled with curiosity and prompted her attention with a short nudge in the side.

The black-haired waitress looked up at him and then looked away as though he was a complete stranger. He went to sit down. Over the next fifteen minutes she passed his table five times without once turning her head to acknowledge him. He struggled to think of some way in which her behavior could be interpreted as a positive response. Perhaps she had spoken to her red-haired friend at great length about the details of his romantic overtures and that was why the red-haired waitress had smiled the way she had before nudging her black-haired counterpart. She had only ignored him out of shyness or prudence. Women were always taught to ignore the men they liked the most to make sure that their advances came from a place of depth and sincerity.

He took a deep breath and walked up to the bar. "I'll have a cappuccino," he said to the black-haired waitress.

She smiled subtly and tilted her head downwards. He wondered if she received his flowers or even if she remembered him.

"Thanks," he said.

He walked back to his table without looking back. A minute later the red-haired waitress brought his coffee. At first he was offended, angry even, as he had hoped that _SHE_ would have brought it instead. But the black-haired waitress stood behind the bar going about her daily business as if he wasn't there at all. When he finished his coffee he decided that his only option was to force the issue. After all, he was the one who had walked up and asked for coffee instead of doing something more dramatic. He had taken the cowardly route in and so deserved her cold response. At least, he thought as he tapped his spoon on his coffee cup, he could have kissed her hand. But then, wasn't he the one that had sent the flowers and had asked her to write - perhaps in vain?

He stood up and straightened his posture. She suddenly looked up at him as if she had been watching him all along through a third invisible eye. As he approached she smiled welcomingly as though she had been waiting for him all along.

"Hogy hivnak?" he asked for her name.

She said something quickly, but he wasn't sure he understood. He shrugged his shoulders. She took a pen and a piece of paper and wrote in big letters that looked more like the handwriting of a man. "Ildi," she said.

"Ildi?"

"Not English," she said. "Ildiko."

"I'm John," he said, forgetting that he had already revealed his name to her several times in writing.

"I know," she said. "Thank you for the flowers." She tilted her head again the same way she had earlier. "They were so big." She smiled in a way that made him think he knew exactly what the flowers looked like.

"You were so beautiful. I thought I had to."

She looked at him and squinted her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said. "I have someone two years ago."

He was suddenly ashamed of himself. "Just friends," he said. He let his head drop in disappointment. But something inside him maintained a tiny sense of levity. What sort of person could just show up out of the blue with a bouquet of flowers hoping the woman of his dreams would drop everything and come running into his arms? It was par for the course that a beautiful woman would have a boy friend. And besides, he could tell by the way that she had greeted him and the way that her friend had looked at him that she felt something for him.

She turned around and walked into the room with the black jack table. After what seemed like almost half an hour she came back into the room followed by a short man with a shaved head. For a moment he thought it might be her boyfriend and that he had come to pick her up and take her back to a beautiful split-level penthouse apartment on the Danube, but then she hugged him in such a loose and casual way that Martin was sure he wasn't.

She walked up to the bar and leaned over towards him.

"You have brother?" she asked like she genuinely cared and that family issues were very important to her.

He said he did but that he never saw him. Then he asked her where she came from.

"Kisci," she said. "Small village. Very beautiful with trees and lake. Budapest ugly."

"It's quite beautiful. At least compared to America."

"I have brother in America."

"Where?"

"Kentucky," she said, smiling with wonder, as though it were a magical place in her mind that had never been associated with rednecks or Colonel Sanders, or if it had, the fried chicken chain occupying the same mythical status for her as some place like Oz.

"I've never been there." She looked surprised as if she thought that for some reason he should have been. "I've heard it's nice, but it's too far south." He said encouragingly. He didn't want to reveal that he associated it with whiskey, horse racing, and racism. That would be tantamount to insulting her brother's – and therefore her own – taste.

She leaned towards him in a way that he found intimate and suggestive as he went on to tell her how he was working in advertising in New York and described in slow and clear English how nice his apartment was and what his neighborhood was like.

"Did you ever take English?" he asked, sensing he might be going on too much about himself.

"I try to teach at home," she said.

"You didn't have it in school?" He had heard that most Hungarian children had studied English or Russian.

"No," she said, waving her hands and laughing as if to highlight the absurdity of his suggestion. For a moment he thought he may have embarrassed her and that she wasn't a good student and had perhaps gone to a trade school where English wasn't taught.

"Did you learn Russian?" he asked. She laughed and shook her head demonstratively as if he had asked her if she liked to eat raw eels or something equally repellent.

" _No_ Russian!"

She looked away for a second, exposing the thin rim of fat around her chin, a detail in her face that reminded him of the very first night he saw her.

"Were you born in the same small village?"

"Egy kisvarosban? Nem. I born..." she took the piece of paper on which she had written her name and drew a picture of Hungary, showing a small line, which he guessed right away was the Danube. "This Budapest." She made a small mark on the upper end of the line. "I from here." She drew a circle to the eastern edge, near the Romanian border. "We move when I small."

She looked up and a woman with dark brown hair and a soft clear face walked in. Ildi and the other waitress seemed to know her. She was wearing a black jacket and was holding a CD excitedly in her hand. Martin recognized the band - a British he had seen once in New York at a time before they had released any albums. She put it on the top of the bar and the two girls gathered around to look at it with a hushed sense of urgency as though it contained some secret personal message written just for them.

"I see before," Martin said to the girl with brown hair, who seemed to be enjoying the fact that her CD was making her the indisputable center of attention. She looked at him and nodded, but he could see that she didn't understand what he had said and was just being polite.

A few minutes later Ildi walked over to a table in a brisk and business-like manner. He stood up. It was his cue to leave and he wanted to make sure not to wear out his welcome. He caught her attention and waved to her and the red-haired waitress as he backed out the door. As he looked at her one last time across the metal bar top he felt that he had met someone that would continue to be a part of his life for years. She would be his special friend and they would be able to share intimate personal details for years to come. He walked out the door and ventured back down Andrássy, savoring the way the soft evening light filtered through the darkening leaves. Although everything had not gone totally in his favor, in many ways he sensed he had just scored a victory; after a rough start the interaction had gone better than any sane person could ever have hoped for. And even though she had a boyfriend didn't she open up to him and several times look at him in a way that seemed to suggest she wished she hadn't?

That night Martin stayed up in his apartment watching television until he was too tired to go out. After he fell asleep he remained numbly aware for a long and unspecified time that he was asleep in a room somewhere in Budapest and that something important had happened to him the day before. Yet soon this awareness vanished and he found himself in the midst of a dream in which he was on a ledge standing beside a tall pine tree somewhere in the middle of a vast plain. The sky was the deep blue he had always associated with the Mediterranean. In the distance was a pack of what looked like small bears followed by a procession of oddly dressed people. The group was led by a man who was suited-up like the conductor of some Sunday afternoon trombone gazebo band. He was waving a megaphone around and seemed to be announcing something about the bears. Martin was afraid of the bears until he saw one of them run up to a small girl who was carrying a red sand bucket and lick her leg affectionately. The girl laughed and patted the bear on the nose. Martin ran up to the head of the procession and asked the man with the megaphone what was happening. The man turned to him, megaphone protruding from his face as if he wasn't aware that Martin was standing so close to him. He aimed the large metal cone at Martin's ear and shouted that there were brown bears from Luxembourg on the loose and they were potentially dangerous. Just then a bear came up from behind and started nudging its nose into Martin's ankle. His first reaction was to turn around and pet the bear but then it started biting him and tearing away at his pants. He turned around and swung at the bear but before his fist landed on target he woke up.

The next morning he turned on the television and changed channels until he found the British news network. The first story was a sports update about a newly appointed coach for the Brazilian soccer team - a man called Luxembourger. It was certainly a strange coincidence as he hadn't remembered thinking about Luxembourg for several years at least. He went to the bathroom and when he came out there was a story about mourners for Lady Diana and how they had started to annoy local Londoners with their seemingly endless vigils and marches. He put on his socks and grabbed his pants. As he slid them over his legs he noticed a pack of bears on the television. An announcer was saying something about a bunch of bears that had escaped from a zoo in Hungary. At first he was mildly amused that the day's news seemed to echo his dreams from the night before, but then a much more powerful feeling came over him that he was somehow destined to spend many years of his life in Hungary and that the dream was just a message from deep within the collective psyche that he was doing the right thing in pursuing Ildi. It was a link to his first dream about the water, a golden guidestone reassuring him that he was in Budapest for a reason and events were unfolding as if to a magic script written for his benefit. It was a message from the cosmos that he was on the right path and things were already turning in his favor. Although he didn't believe in the supernatural, he had heard stories of people who suddenly were reminded of a person who they hadn't seen in years when only moments later the phone rang with news that the person had just died. Maybe it was fate, or maybe it wasn't and was really only a coincidence. But what was fate but a coincidence of coincidences? Of all the coincidences that happened and ended up meaning nothing - bumping into an old classmate you never really knew or liked while abroad, for example - there were those very few coincidences that just by coincidence ended up being meaningful. Wasn't this, then, fate? He wasn't really sure.

Later that afternoon, while walking down Andrássy past an expensive shower and bath shop on his way to _Night and Day_ , he stopped to imagine a scenario in which he was sitting with Ildi in their new and modern Budapest apartment telling her for the first time about his dreams. In his fantasy she fell to her knees in a fit of all-out love as he finished the last fragments of his story and proposed to her. He let the story play itself out in all its possible permutations as he continued further along the bright and lushly landscaped boulevard.

The closer he got to _Night and Day_ , the more far fetched his fantasy seemed. What did she _really_ think of him? What would she do if she knew that he was fantasizing about her in such an explicit way that very instant as he walked towards her workplace hoping to steal her away from her boyfriend? Maybe she would shout at him and call the police, although this didn't seem too likely. People were never arrested for just _thinking_ the wrong thing. Not in America, at any rate. The world was free and you could think whatever you wanted. Besides, if she was afraid of his advances she would have told him so already. It was more likely that she would respond to the knowledge of his desires by just smiling and walking away, while of course still thinking in the back of her mind that he was crazy. That way no one could accuse her of being mean to him. But maybe she would be right in thinking this and he was crazy after all. Why else would he be in a strange city allowing some nebulous sequence of dreams and revelations dictate the course of his life? Wasn't that exactly what madmen did? How could anyone rightfully think that they could have dreams foretelling the future? On the other hand, he reminded himself as he recoiled from self-criticism, the two events - the one about Luxembourg and the one about the bear - _had_ to be more than just a coincidence.

As he made his final steps towards _Night and Day_ he noticed for the first time that Oktagon had a distinctly Soviet look about it. It was a place where you could imagine enfilades of tanks and soldiers marching through the streets brandishing banners of Stalin. He slowed to a halt and took a deep breath as he reviewed the possible consequences of his visit. Going to see her two days in a row was a bit risky to say the least, but as long as he acted casual and didn't try to push her everything would be fine. They were just friends. He only had a week in Budapest and he had to go in and show her that he had no intentions of doing anything else but being her friend. The last thing he wanted to do was cause trouble and be taken as a stalker. He set his hand on the door handle and closed his eyes for an instant, trying to imagine how she might be dressed. Black was her color. He imagined her maneuvering rhythmically through the tables inside to the disembodied tune of the piano line from the hip hop composition he had associated with her before, wearing her black and white stripped pants with the shiny black silk top that seemed to be her favorite. Like the piano notes, she seemed to abound in the beauty and singularity of their own existence. She was the fekete girl and they were newfound friends. Special friends. And one day soon, maybe even very soon, but not quite yet, they would be lovers.

He opened his eyes and walked in. As soon as he saw her – she was wearing a long white dress and had her hair tied back - he wanted to throw himself at her feet and kiss her knees as he confessed that he loved her and had crossed the ocean just to see her. But instead he smiled in an intentionally disarming way to let her know he didn't expect anything special to happen between them and walked up to the counter. She looked happy to see him and laughed as soon as he opened his mouth to order a coffee.

"Tessek parancolni?" she asked. He wasn't sure what it meant.

He nodded his head and pulled out his Hungarian-English dictionary. She leaned towards him to get a closer look at the dictionary as he flipped through the pages, her hair falling against his cheek. Their eyes met and her face froze for an instant. She had a look that suggested she knew that he wanted to make love to her and was more curious and moved than threatened.

"Hogy vagy?" she asked buoyantly.

"Jó," he said.

He nodded his head politely and walked back to take a seat at a nearby table, holding up the dictionary and pointing at it. "Szeretnék most tanulni," he said. She nodded her head quickly, seeming to say that she had already understood that he had come that day to study.

She brought him his coffee and he paid. As the afternoon passed, he sat at the table and watched her going about her daily business. There was a rustic beauty to everything she did from the way she talked to a stout deliveryman with a heavy mustache and a balding head who came in for a routine chat to the way she smiled at a small boy who came in with the brown haired girl from the day before. She talked loudly, sometimes even assertively, with her female friends, but smiled tenderly at him every time she passed. At one point the boy came up and stood in front of Martin. He was holding a glass ashtray as if to offer it to him.

"Hello," he said to the boy.

The boy nodded impatiently and the red-haired waitress smiled in what looked like appreciation of his friendly manner. Martin guessed from her mannerisms that the boy might be her nephew.

These are my new friends, he thought. These are my new family. He imagined a life in Budapest where he would get up every morning and have coffee with Ildi and her friends and just talk - free of any sexual pressures or connotations as he fully understood she had a boyfriend - about the daily goings on in Budapest. Maybe, he thought for just an instant before dispelling the idea as ridiculous and fanciful, he would one day become rich and found a special charity to help children in Hungary. He pictured a statue of himself standing in front of _Night and Day_ in commemoration of his donations and overall service to the state of Hungary.

By five he decided he had had enough coffee and it was time to leave. Just as he was about to put on his coat he scribbled on a piece of paper in broken Hungarian that he thought she was beautiful and had been madly in love with her but he would accept instead her friendship. This, he thought, would prove once and for all that he wasn't just some sleazy tourist that only wanted to sleep with her and leave. He stood up and walked over to the bar. She was standing in the small kitchen area to the left frying a sausage. The sight was both strange and sad. He started to put the piece of paper in his pocket, but decided at the last minute that it was better to hold back and confront her another day. But before his hand was out of her line of sight her eyes perked up and she seemed to notice it. She took the pan off the stove and walked over to him.

"What you write?" she asked, her eyes sparkling with warmth and curiosity. She knew he had written something nice about her and wanted to read it. With some reluctance he took the piece of paper out of his pocket. As he passed it to her, she looked at him with the same look, only more salacious and direct, that she had the day he had confronted her almost two months earlier. It was the sign he was looking for. There could be no mistaking the burning warmth in her eyes. Either she didn't have a boyfriend at all and had just said so out of prudence or she did and was fed up with him and ready for someone new. Someone like him.

But before she got a chance to look at the note, he did a sudden about face and waved to her as he marched out of the café. If he stood there in front of her and watched her read it, she might think he was pressuring her into a positive response. Worse, if she didn't like what he had written, her reaction would completely ruin what had already been a very good day and he would spend the rest of the afternoon and evening worrying about what he could do to turn things back in his favor.

Later that night he went out for dinner in a small Andalousian café wedged off onto one of the deserted side streets by the opera house to celebrate what was easily one of his greatest days in recent memory. However ultimately unknowable and unattainable she had seemed the first time he saw her while sitting with her friend at _Night and Day_ , it suddenly seemed that it wouldn't be long before she was his. The walls of the restaurant were painted in burnt sienna and there were sheet-metal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Over the central bar was a series of what could be taken for French North African drawings. He took an instant fondness for his waitress, who had slanted blue eyes and wore a long black sweater. After a glass of mineral water, which he found too hard and bubbly, he ordered a light salad and a French dish that was apparently made by taking pike and semolina and driving it through a sieve before molding it into small sausages that were subsequently boiled like dumplings. After a coffee to wash down the slightly bitter after taste he ordered a beer and sipped it slowly as he watched the young couples coming in and out of the café.

When he got back to the hotel he felt a sudden urge to call somebody back in America. He picked up the phone and dialed Joe. It was about time that he told someone about Ildi, and he probably should have called him earlier. After all, if it wasn't for Joe giving him Gabriella's number in the first place, he wouldn't have met Ildi. He calculated that it was around dinnertime back in the midwest and he should be home.

He heard a crunching sound on the other end. Then a male voice.

"Hello?" it said.

He wasn't sure it was Joe but went on anyway. "It's me," he said.

"Martin?" Joe replied. "Where are you?"

"I'm in Budapest," he said, trying not to sound too boastful.

"So you went after all," he said as if he had expected him not to go at all and his desire to see Gabriella a few months before was just some fleeting emotion loaded with the kind of dubious conviction one gets at four in the morning after too many drinks.

Martin went on to explain his situation with Ildi, who he was careful to refer to as _Ildiko_ to emphasize the foreignness of her name, and how she had prompted him to give her the love note earlier that day.

"She knew it was a love note and she wanted it anyway! That means she can't be taking her boyfriend too seriously, don't you think?" He listened carefully to Joe's breathing to see if there was something in the rhythm or texture that might say he agreed with him.

"Sounds like he's on the way out," he replied like a sportscaster talking about the fading career of a once prominent boxer. Martin felt good inside. It was comforting to know Joe had extracted the same meaning he had from the day's events.

"So, are there a lot of buskers and skateboarders there?" Joe asked with a muffled giggle. Martin thought it was a strange question, but answered anyway.

"No. It's not like you think. The people are always well dressed and respectful. Nobody bugs you or tries to rip you off. You oughta come out some time with me."

"Fat chance," he said. Martin heard the receiver drop to what he imagined was a hard wooden table, possibly circular. A second later he was back on the line saying that his wife was calling him for dinner, although Martin heard nothing resembling a voice or even a noise in the background.

"Sure. Sorry to bug you."

"Tell me what happens," Joe said. Martin heard a click. Then the dial tone. He paused for a moment and then put the receiver down. He looked out the window. A light was on in a neighboring apartment block casting a silhouette of a woman standing alone in the room. He turned off the lights and went over to his bed to lie down, sinking almost immediately into a long and restful sleep.

### X

Martin woke up the next morning to the thought of Ildi's soft white cheeks pressed tightly up against his. It was as though the images of her face had lingered on in his mind from a dream he had experienced just a moment before but could no longer remember. He imagined running his index finger along the thin rim of fat under her chin while he pulled her closer and whispered her name into her ear. As he lay in bed a thousand questions filled his mind. What did she look like when she was a girl? What did her parents do? What kind of school did she go to? What was the natural smell of her hair and skin and what kind of perfume did she wear? But maybe she didn't have much money and couldn't afford such luxuries - it seemed like a foregone conclusion in a country where the standard of living was so much lower than it was in the west. He got out of bed and dressed, the image of her face still hovering softly in his mind like shadows from an origami menagerie. When he opened the curtains and looked out on the street the thought suddenly occurred to him that he should buy her some perfume. Since he could obviously afford it and she deserved the best it would be selfish of him to withhold such a gesture. It was just the thing to let her know that he cared about her and was willing to share his money as though it were hers. The flowers had obviously gone over well, so why wouldn't a bottle of the finest perfume? After a quick coffee at McDonalds, where the teenaged boy behind the cash register seemed to acknowledge Martin's loyalty with a subtle smile and nod, he walked through a long series of side streets until he found a cosmetics shop on Vaci utca. He stepped through the tall glass doors and immediately a girl, hips tightly wrapped in a black leather mini skirt and short blonde hair cropped across her forehead, came up to help him.

"Jó napot," she said.

"Do you speak English?" he asked. She shook her head. He pointed to a shelf of perfume bottles behind her. She nodded her head as if she understood and brought out a selection of scents, most of which came in strangely-shaped glass bottles, far too ostentatious for a woman of Ildiko's taste. The woman sprayed samples of each on his hand, but he found none of them to his liking. They all seemed to leave a strange chemical odor on his skin or were so sweet or musky that he could barely stand the smell. One even smelled like Raid or mosquito repellant. After half an hour of careful deliberation he finally picked _Infinity_ , a scent that came in a simple white box. It was a feminine fragrance, but not overly so. He paid the woman and had the perfume box wrapped in black and gray paper with a small pink bow.

He walked out onto the street where a group of folk dancers had gathered in front of a small kiosk as though they were getting ready for a small performance. There was a slight chill in the air and the sky was bright but overcast. He went back to his apartment to drop off the perfume and, after a quick glass of water, put his coat back on and went outside. It was the perfect time to go and see Gabriella. If he came during the day she could only regard it as a casual visit and the chances of something strange happening were probably much less than if he went after dark. He toyed with this idea as he ambled in a semi-purposeless way through the streets of Pest, until he realized his unconscious had already started pushing him in her direction. In minutes he could already make out the monuments in the distance that marked the edges of City Park. As he walked closer he noticed how many flowers were still in bloom. It seemed unusual for late September. Autumn had always been a time for thinking and planning, a time where he confronted his life head on and did whatever it was he had to do to push his professional life forward. It was never a time for new love - at least not in his experience. As he walked across the street and up to Gabriella's door he tried to remember his very first words to her and what month it was that they had first met. He couldn't. For some reason it was far too difficult. Somewhere that far back in his memory things had become too cloudy, vague, and unresolved. After stopping at an intersection for a green Peugeot, garish travel stickers pasted all over it, he finally conceded that he couldn't remember what month they had met or even what he said to her the first time they met. But somehow it didn't matter. Their relationship was special in that they had let each other go completely and then came back to each other years later as friends. The fact that she had wanted to make love to him the last time he saw her was proof that their relationship had ripened in a late harvest to a rare kind of friendship in which anything was possible without any petty jealousies or unpleasant consequences. If he had succumbed to her advance, things wouldn't be any different than they were now. Nothing could ever happen to change things between them and she would probably not even be offended at hearing he had forgotten about the time they first met - at worst she would consider it an amusing emblem of what _they_ had become and how free they were from one another. Perhaps this was the perfect love.

As he stepped up to the door to knock, he felt a strong urge to tell Gabriella everything about Ildi and how she had looked at him the day before. She would probably say it meant nothing, since it was her style to be pessimistic, especially when it came to any of his successes. But he knew that, so it was just one more reason he should tell her. Once corrected for their inherent pessimism, her comments would not only shed light on Ildi's actions and maybe give him an idea of where he could take things from here on in, when it was best to give her the perfume and when he should ask her out next. But it would also be a useful probe as to what his new relationship with Gabriella actually meant. So whatever happened it was win-win. If she said negative things, as he expected, then he could go away thinking how great it was that they could say negative things to one another without taking offense, but if she said something positive and supportive he could spend the rest of the day marveling how great it was that they were still friends. And whatever she said he had to take with a grain of salt anyway, because after all, she was his ex-lover. So whatever she said or did he would still come out on top.

He knocked and after about thirty seconds Gabriella opened the door. Her eyes were wet and tired. She was wearing a red button-up sweater that looked like it heralded from the gas station world of nineteen fifties Wisconsin and she had picked up from a delete bin in a used clothing store. It had a small blue patch with a Firestone tire embroidered in the center. It was a kitschy article of clothing that someone else, someone from a younger generation he normally didn't associate with, would wear. He felt sympathy for her. His gaze dropped to her arm. Her sleeves were rolled up, but not enough for him to see if the bruises were still there.

"Martin," she said slowly. She had a stunned look on her face as if his presence had just shaken her out of a dark state of depression.

"I came to see you before, but you weren't home." He didn't want her to know he had seen the man.

She stepped back to invite him in and then closed the door. Martin followed her past a hat rack that he didn't remember being there and into the living room. "Something about a girl?" she asked, raising her eyebrows inquisitively.

"Yes," he said. "How did you know?"

"It's not hard to tell. You get all fidgety. Let me guess. You've known her since the first time you came here and you are fed up with your girl friend back in New York."

"That's enough," he said, holding up his hand in jest like a traffic cop.

He took a seat on the couch and proceeded to tell her what had happened. How he had sent Ildi flowers and how he was convinced on the basis of her expression the other night that she was in love with him and was prepared to drop her boyfriend any day now to give him a try.

"But I don't want to jump to conclusions," he said, hoping she would disagree with his reservations. "It could have just been a friendly smile or maybe she was just flattered. Gabriella nodded with a self-congratulatory sense of objectivity and understanding that bothered him. It was the way psychiatrists and counselors acted. That was the one thing he most loved and hated about women. They walked through the world with their tiny little secrets hidden away in some figurative mausoleum as if they all belonged to some universal sisterhood that men were permanently excluded from, or even if they weren't they would never even begin to comprehend the key dictums.

"But I have something else to tell you," he blurted out, suddenly lowering the tone of his voice as the final words came out of his mouth like a man caught whispering during a church service.

"What?" she asked with less interest than he had hoped. He could sense that she didn't want him around or she would have offered him tea. But he went on anyway.

"I had a dream."

She broke out laughing.

"It's not what you think," he said. "Maybe it was nothing..."

He looked out the window, observing a gypsy woman as she walked across the street. She was wearing a vulgar green dress and a hat that looked completely out of place, like something Bogart might have worn.

"But you don't want to believe that," she said. "You would prefer to believe that it was _something_."

"No," he said, still watching the woman tottering by. "Not this time," he added, making unspoken reference to whatever romantic hopes and fantasies she might think his relationship with Ildi was predicated on.

She smiled at him like she had the last time when she had wanted him to make love to her. Maybe she did not want him to leave after all. In all her darkness she had never looked so attractive. He put his hand on her leg and kissed her on the cheek. It wasn't that he wanted to give in to her, as Ildi was the new focus of his life, but rather that touching her seemed like a natural compliment to her beauty. In his mind, however, everything became inverted and he wanted to make love to her anyway. She had just brushed off his attempt to describe to her his dream and his disgruntlement had sharpened into lust. He put his hand on her leg and started rubbing it in slow repeated strokes. He looked into her eyes and let his head drop in her lap. Without even kissing her, he undid the button on her pants and then undid the zipper and pulled her pants down with her white panties, embroidered around the thin elastic - the way he always liked them - to her knees. Her breasts were just as he remembered them, small and perfectly formed like bulbs of a red wine glass. He had to prove to her that he wasn't just some wispy romantic chasing his foolish dreams around Budapest. She put up no resistance as he lowered his face into the crook between her thighs and stomach. Her hair was already wet when his tongue and lips touched the tips of her light brown pubic hair. When he finally looked up her shirt was off and he was naked although he couldn't remember how he had come to be so or how long he had been down on her.

"No," she said. "No, Martin," she kept whispering as he continued to fuck her on the couch, pulling her hips right up against his while letting the rest of her body flop around like a rag doll. Just as he was about to come, her pouty little "No's" having evolved into rich and languorous sighs of pleasure, he pulled away from her and let her drop. When he realized he had been looking down at her leg for what must have been five minutes of complete silence he lifted his head and looked her in the eye, hoping for some response that would guide them both onwards into safer territory.

The image of Ildi smiling at him innocently as he sat at the café telling her how much she meant to him entered into focus. He felt awful inside. In a very clear way he had just deceived her. He looked up at Gabriella. She smiled faintly and pulled away from him.

"What's ultimately more sad?" she asked flatly.

"Sorry?"

"What is ultimately more sad, a memory of something good or a memory of something bad?"

He turned to her and looked in her eyes. They had a thick heavy appearance and she returned his gaze without blinking.

"I think happy memories are worse," she said. "Because it makes us sad to know that something good has passed." She continued looking at him and blinked. "I can only be happy that pain is behind me, but there is nothing worse than the death of something beautiful."

He didn't know what she meant but nodded his head anyway. Maybe she was referring to something wonderful that had happened between them that had long since faded into the past. But something inside him was clearly intent on resisting this idea. In coming to Budapest he had put their relationship on a new plane, a plane in which all was possible and all regret had vanished. It must have been the man, he thought. He had done something terrible to her the other night. That was why she was in such a gloomy mood.

"What happens when your happy memory of pain being gone for good becomes just a memory of being happy remembering?" he said, feeling like he had just brought to light some great and immutable secret of life.

"You're just mincing words," she said.

He walked over to her, wanting to make some physical gesture - a hand on the shoulder, a light touch on her palm, or maybe even a kiss – but a chaste and innocent one that would show her once and for all that he cared about her and how deeply he regretted what had just happened between them. When he was a foot and a half away, leaning directly over a dark green ashtray, he stopped. She stared at him strangely as if she was unsure of his motives.

"Tell me." He grabbed both her arms, the bruises now in clear view. "You're sick aren't you?" he asked. She shook him away and stepped back. Then she looked at him. Her lips were thin and unforgiving. "No...of course not. What made you think?"

"I guess you're right," he said. "You looked a bit pale, but it must have just been my imagination." He didn't want to probe any further. The bruises were clearly none of his business. Even in the sanctuary of this new friendship with Gabriella, now matured over time to the level of absolute timelessness, there were some truths that were not permitted to be exchanged.

"Look," she said in a suddenly authoritative way that caught Martin off guard. "I think you should go." He looked at her as though to say he was not sure she was being serious. "Yes," she emphasized, standing up and taking a deep assertive breath, "I'm just not feeling well. It's been a bad time for my husband and I and I need to be alone right now."

"I'm sorry," he said. He knew when it was time to head to a woman's words and when it wasn't. There were some cases where you had to stand ground and tell a woman what she wanted without taking no for an answer. This was what woman called strength and it was a quality that they always looked for in men. But there were other cases, sometimes difficult to pinpoint, where a man had to do exactly what the woman wanted even if it was against his better judgment. This husband of hers wasn't good for her - and perhaps he even beat her and left the bruise on her arm and was coming over this very instant to beat her again because somehow he suspected she was with another man. He wanted to stay and protect her, but her look told him that it was time for him to go. If he didn't he would risk being an asshole. Men could never demand that a woman just leave their home. Those that did were perceived as cads by everyone in their immediate social circle and sometimes even lost their jobs because of it.

He stood up and looked at her in a firm and sober way, but not without tenderness or sympathy.

"You'll come again," she stated in the way of a question.

"Of course I will," he said. "I understand. I'll come back." But he really wasn't sure if he would. There was something in their relationship that seemed to have changed such that casual visits were no longer possible. Maybe it was the way she had shaken him off and asked him to leave, or maybe it was the way he had made love to her when he knew he should have been thinking of Ildiko.

"When are you going back?"

"In a week and a few days. I'm not sure exactly how many."

"Come by again before you go back."

"I will."

He walked to the door and she followed him with the kind of inviting smile someone only puts on after they've just kicked you out, the warm smile that absolves them of all guilt and says "come again" and makes sure you still regret having to leave and reconsolidates whatever friendship had been there before the moment you were asked to leave in spite of the cold hard fact that they've just let you know they don't want you around any longer. Men were always made to look bad and guilty no matter what their intentions were. Those were the rules. He set his hand on her shoulder and then turned around sharply and walked through the door and out onto the street. It was warmer than he thought it should be and a group of three children riding identical green bicycles drove by. He looked down at the pavement and didn't raise the level of his gaze until he saw a curb a few feet in front of him.

### XI

Martin spent the next morning sitting in a small café on Dalszinhaz út. His successful interchange with Ildi the day before gave him some much-needed mental elbow room to stop thinking about ways to meet her and start putting some thought to the projects he'd left behind in New York - something he realized he had let slip over the last few months. After an hour he had made little progress. Whatever advertising scheme he dreamt up reminded somehow him of Ildi and what might happen between them the next time they met. By noon doubts had already leaked in and he started to wonder if the look she gave him the day before was perhaps just some frivolous act of flirtation aimed more at alleviating the dish rag and beer glass boredom of her work day than striking up any real relationship with him. So, without really making any meaningful progress with his work, he decided he had to go back to see her to make sure he wasn't misinterpreting her signals. Three in the afternoon would be the perfect time to catch her. She would have finished her lunch and it would be late enough that he could have a few drinks without looking like a midday drunk. Perhaps she would be so taken by the perfume he bought for her they would even end up leaving together and taking a long romantic walk down the banks of the Danube, across the bridge and onto the island where they could sit on a park bench like many of the young couples and watch the birds flying over the small mound-like hills on the shores of Buda.

When he walked through the doors of _Night and Day_ there was an atmosphere of immediate unease. It was as if his very presence was the center of some invisible force that spread its dark and troubling waves throughout the room. The tables were filled with vulgar and impatient-looking people and the red-haired waitress was standing behind the bar, a look of covert distress on her face as she watched him approach. He clutched his left hand pocket to check for the perfume box, but it wasn't there \- he had stupidly forgotten it back in the apartment when he was getting ready. As he neared the bar, a few people stepped aside and Ildi came into view. She had been standing in the small kitchenette area to the left and behind the bar. Their eyes met and she smiled with a kind of dry restraint. The red-haired waitress looked at her and raised her eyebrow as if to say "Well, how are you going to handle this one?"

Martin nodded his head firmly to hide his disappointment and ordered a beer. Ildi looked over at the red-haired waitress and then darted off into the conjoining room with all the gambling implements. The red-haired waitress proceeded to pour him a beer and set it in front of him with a coaster. He paid and put his wallet back in his pants.

Ten minutes later Ildi walked back into the room and at about the same instant the man he had seen with her before back in August walked in holding a newspaper under his arm. He came up to the bar beside Martin and handed her some change. The man was wearing a loose-fitting bomber jacket - something Martin had always associated with skinheads - and had a pair of black leather shoes with large brass buckles and bulbous toes the size of a man's fist. She smiled and they kissed lightly on the lips. The man went back to sit at a table directly behind Martin. After serving a few customers she walked by Martin, throwing out a quick uncomfortable smile before going to take a seat with the man.

Martin caught a glimpse of the man's face in the mirror behind the row of spirits at the bar. If he tried hard enough he could hear them talking. She seemed lively and animated in a way she didn't before, her strong gurgling laughter rising over the din and clatter of the room. For a moment Martin imagined that he was the center of their conversation, but he quickly dashed this idea as the tone of their voices was too light and casual, suggesting her lover wasn't even remotely aware that there was a competitor in his presence. No doubt she was cleverly hiding her feelings for Martin, pretending that there was nothing going on between them and life was the same as it ever was. Smart women never left their man until they were absolutely sure that the new man was the right choice. Joe was right and the guy was on the way out. Martin even felt sorry for the pathetic little skinhead as he sat there watching him talk to Ildi through the corner of his eye and again through the mirror. He probably worked for minimum wage in a bar somewhere on the outskirts of Budapest and would never be able to give Ildi the kind of life a woman of her class and refinement was looking for.

A few minutes later the man walked up to the bar beside Martin and ordered a cappuccino from the red-haired waitress. As she leaned over the espresso machine, she looked out of the corner of her eye every few seconds, obviously trying to gauge Martin's reaction to the potentially disastrous situation. _I don't care that you think I'm feeling hurt or uncomfortable,_ he thought. _I'm as calm as ever_. The waitress served the man his cappuccino and Ildi came over and stood beside him, completely ignoring Martin just as he expected her to do. She leaned towards her lover - in much the same way she had leaned towards Martin just a few days earlier - and whispered something into his ear. As he watched them from the corner of his eye he wondered what she was saying. Maybe they were talking about him and she was saying that she wished he would just get up and leave. Wouldn't that be the easiest solution? But if he left he would be giving in and she would perceive him as weak and yielding, hardly traits he wanted to put on show in front of all her friends and co-workers, and would never take him seriously again.

Her lover wrapped his arms around her and kissed her on the cheek. She was now standing with her back to Martin. " _Mr. Fuckface_ ," he imagined himself saying to the man, " _Why don't you just turn around and leave? After all, I flew half way across the world to see her and you probably beat her every night_." As he stared blankly at the man's tight aggressive face - always pretending he was focusing his gaze on a point on the wall about five feet behind them - he wondered what would happen if he actually did say this. Would the man ignore him and take Ildi with him into the other room or would he instead just turn around and punch him? And if he did, would she run to his protection while scowling at her lover or would she smile and act as though she was happy that Martin had finally been vanquished from her life?

When he was just about to order a beer from her in order to bust through the wall and steal just a glimpse of whatever it was she was obviously hiding from him - indeed if he did not get such a glimpse he could only imagine himself getting hopelessly drunk in his apartment room that evening - she pulled out a pair of scissors from her purse and cut a loose thread from the man's jacket in a way that was so ingratiating and tender that Martin lost all desire to compete for her attention. She was a being of pure light, he thought, and it was enough that he was there standing beside her in her lovely shadow. Who cared if he only worked in the back of a restaurant? Maybe they were star-crossed lovers and he was just some bloated rich American who hadn't discovered the value of true love and was just trying to interfere in some reckless insensitive way people always attributed to Americans anyway.

An hour later her lover finally left. Martin breathed a sigh of relief as Ildi escorted her lover to the door and he gave her a look like he was going to come back later to see her. The red-haired waitress turned and smiled at Martin knowingly as though she genuinely empathized with him and was happy to see the burden of the man's presence lifted off his shoulders. He looked at her neutrally. Showing too much emotion would be revealing his frustration and he didn't need a PhD in psychology to figure out that women never liked it when you seemed to care about them too much.

Ildi walked back behind the bar and disappeared for the next half hour into the small kitchenette area. He wondered what she was thinking and why she was still avoiding him. But perhaps he was just being paranoid and she wasn't avoiding him at all and just wanted him to make the first move. When she came back out she smiled at him wanly, walked behind the bar, and leaned towards him.

"I am sorry," she said in a hushed voice.

"That was your boyfriend," he said while nodding his head in acceptance.

"Yes. He very angry with me."

"Because of me?"

"He very, very angry," she said with her eyes downcast as she played with a strand of hair. He felt irresponsible and crude.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"That's why I no write to you. He find out you send flowers and he read the letter you sent."

Someone shouted from the gambling area and she grabbed her note pad and went into the other room.

Martin turned his gaze down to an ashtray that was sitting in front of him. He felt angry and violated. He imagined her lover passing the letter on to everyone in _Night and Day_ as everyone laughed out loud about it. How had the guy gotten the letter in the first place? Had she given it to him so he could see whether or not she was allowed to write him? Or did one of the waiters or waitresses at the café who was working when the letter came tell the boyfriend? He imagined that the red-haired waitress was her boyfriend's sister and that she had fulfilled her family duty by reporting Ildi's unfaithfulness to him. Yet they hardly looked alike and that would seem like a cruel thing to do. It was more likely that he had somehow found it inadvertently. But this possibility had the dark consequence of suggesting that they lived together and he had somehow found the letter stuffed away in some jewelry-box hiding place she thought he didn't know about. When she said she lived outside of Budapest she never said it was with her family. But after some thought this scenario also seemed unlikely. He had heard property was expensive in Hungary and young couples could rarely afford their own places. It was more likely that she had kept the letter in her pocket or purse and while she was over at his apartment in Budapest - which he imagined to be small, cramped, and dirty with old food crusted on the stove, socks and underwear strewn all over the floor with posters of bands like The Beastie Boys hanging glumly from the chipping plaster walls - he had gone through her personal items when she was taking a shower and had discovered the letter. He hated the thought of him going through her things without asking as if he somehow owned her.

As he looked at Ildi from across the room - which now seemed like an unfathomable distance - he could see a sadness in her face he hadn't noticed before. It was as though she was a woman trapped in a life she didn't want. If only he could talk her into leaving her lover behind and coming over to him. If only he could find a way of telling her about his dream and everything she meant to him. Then she would understand that he was right for her and the other man was just leading her astray down some perilous road that would ultimately lead to boredom and disappointment. He nodded at her as he finally stood up to go. Her mouth wrinkled into a half smile half frown and she turned her head away.

That night he ended up fulfilling part of his prediction by getting drunk by himself in a dank little sörözo near Vaci utca. He felt heavy inside and wished for a long while that he had never left Gabriella and everything was like it used to be while they were still in college. At two he was asked to leave by the manager and escorted out into the rain by a man who looked like he was a bouncer, although he was too drunk to know for sure or even care. He walked back to his apartment and fell asleep face first in the bed, the bottle of perfume still in its bag on the night table beside him.

The next day he woke up with a new optimism. The sun sifted through the curtains of his room making soft orange and blue patterns on the bed. After all, she had told him she was sorry for what happened, which meant that he was making an impact in her life and she genuinely cared about him. Ildi was bound to have doubts about leaving her boyfriend and there were still rough days ahead where he would wonder if it would ever work out. It was life testing him for his strength and depth of feeling. If he had the internal fortitude to withstand the challenges set out to him like the witches of Circe then she would one day be his. He was ultimately the deciding factor. What he did and how he acted was the key. His performance the day before was clumsy and unsophisticated, but surprisingly impressive given what life had unexpectedly boomeranged back into his face. Countless men - good, brave men at that - would have done much worse. So he was actually in a much better position than he thought the night before. All he had to do was reinstate the magic that had happened between them a few days earlier. He took the box of perfume out of the bag and examined it. Black was _her_ color and she would recognize that he knew her well enough to pick this color to wrap it in. It was something very small but something necessary and integral like a single and concluding line in a twenty page proof that would ultimately convince her to switch up.

On his way down Andrássy út he bought a small card to go with the perfume. After lunch he sat in a quiet café and wrote in broken Hungarian how he understood she wasn't free and respected her as a friend and had bought the perfume for her the week before when he was still unclear as to the status of her personal life. He sealed the card in the envelope and wrote her name on it.

When he got to _Night and Day_ she was standing behind the bar wearing a silvery silk shirt with her hair tied back in a way that he had never seen that made her look somewhat like a tall geisha girl. He walked up to the bar and smiled. She nodded her head and walked into the other room.

Half an hour later the girl with the brown hair he recognized from before came in with her son and sat beside him. She had a few CDs in her hand and her son seemed happy and proud in his Chicago Bulls shirt as he played with a toy truck he was running back and forth over the surface of the bar. He handed the truck to the red-haired waitress and ran into the other room. A few seconds later he came out with Ildi behind him. He was holding her hand and she was following him obediently in the manner of a game a child would play with his baby-sitter. Ildi walked right by Martin without even acknowledging him and went to talk to the brown-haired girl. The three girls turned away from him and resumed their discussion. _You bitch, he thought. You absolute bitch. I came all this way and brought you perfume and this is how you treat me?_ A few minutes later the boy, who had been quietly playing with his truck on a nearby table came up to the girls.

"Michael Jordan," Martin said supportively. The girls seemed unaffected by his comment and continued talking. The boy looked confused.

"Basketball," he said, pointing at the boy's shirt. He looked even more confused and ran into the other room. The girls turned to look at him as if he had said something rude or threatening. Martin felt ashamed and wondered why he had said such a stupid thing in the first place. He wasn't a basketball fan and even the boy seemed to have an unconvinced expression on his face as if he thought that Martin thought he could win him over by telling him he was from the same country as what was obviously his great sports hero. The boy probably ran into hundreds of American tourists a day, all of whom claimed to know Jordan in person.

Half an hour later the brown-haired girl left with her son and Ildi went back to her small kitchenette, completely out of Martin's view. The red-haired waitress sat directly across the bar from him and talked to Ildi on and off as Martin ordered one coffee or beer after another, in hope that she might step out of her hideaway and talk to him. But whenever she came out she just walked right past him, took a few orders and cleaned some tables or dropped off some drinks, and then went directly back into her kitchenette without even the slightest hint of acknowledgment.

Finally, when Ildi was sitting in the other room and he was sure he couldn't stand another coffee, he reached for the jacket and pulled out the black box and card. He was feeling slightly drunk and the alcohol had softened his mood considerably. A golden haze had settled over the room and, with the artificial stars and palm trees cast on the wall, the entire bar had taken on the ambiance of a Latin American island or beach resort. Perhaps, he thought in her defense, the reason she was ignoring him was because of a threat of physical violence from her lover. He set the box on the table and waited. If she walked by him she would certainly see it and feel obliged to stop to talk. After what seemed like half an hour she walked out of the other room and came towards him.

"Ildi," he said.

She stopped and smiled as if nothing had ever happened to come between them.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I don't want to get you in trouble." He handed the box and card to her. She looked uncomfortable and shrugged her shoulders. "I bought it last week. I have no use for it. I know you have someone, but it's only for you. Please take it."

She tilted her head gently, seeming to understand what he had said, and took the box from his hand. She opened it slowly, using her fingernails like the blade of a letter opener. The red-haired girl looked on with eyes like she was watching the pivotal love scene in a time-tested Hollywood romance. When Ildi took out the box she placed it on the bar, looking at it with only analytical interest in the way one would look at the ingredients on the side of a cereal box. Then she opened the letter and read it. She bent her eyebrows a few times and pointed at some words he had written. With some explanation she seemed to understand what he had meant.

"You are very nice," she said. He smiled.

"No trouble," he said. "Csak barat," he reassured her. It meant _only friends_ , as he didn't want her to think he was pushing the issue, even though a part of him thought he might have been.

"Csak barat _ok_ ," she corrected him with the plural ending.

She set the card down and went to serve a table. The red-haired waitress picked it up and read what he had written. She had such a glow in her eyes that Martin felt he could do no better and he must have done something right and had turned things around in his favor. After all, if Ildi really didn't have any feelings for him she wouldn't have accepted the gift. And it wasn't as if he was trying to buy her. It was a gift of love straight from his heart that was designed to overcome their language barrier and lift them to a higher plane of understanding where they would be one and she would see once and for all that he was the right man for her.

Over the course of the week the weather got colder. The skies turned from deep blue to gray and everyone started wearing heavier and more darkly colored clothes. Every time he went back to _Night and Day_ Ildi seemed more and more distant. One day he came by and sat at a table for three hours while she stayed in her little kitchenette wearing a black down-filled jacket, only occasionally coming out to serve other customers while completely avoiding him and getting the red-haired waitress to serve him instead. Watching her walk by his table time and time again without so much as a glance or friendly nod made him angry. She was callous and cold-blooded. Why had she acted like she liked him just a week earlier? After three beers he finally stood up and walked to the door. He waved at her as he walked backwards out into the street but she just turned her head away and continued reading a newspaper as if he wasn't even there.

Later that same evening, while sitting alone in a bar whose main decorative feature was an vintage gun collection displayed in long glass cases on the wall, his feelings anger towards her changed to those of defense. How could the woman who smiled at him the way she did that day when he first bled his heart out to her be so cruel? It was obviously something _he did_ to make her that way. He looked behind him. Hanging from the walls was a collection of black-and-white photos of sitting bull and various famous old west generals with tall black boots and big walrus mustaches. Instead of making him feel more at home, the photos alienated him. They were obviously aimed at someone else. A sort of person who, like the majority of Hungarian locals, had no knowledge of what America was really like and wanted to cling on to some romantic notion of a world that no longer existed. After a double Jack Daniels he came to the conclusion that what had happened with Ildi was either his fault for putting her into a bad situation, or her boyfriend's fault for being violent and oppressive. She didn't seem the cheap and mean-spirited type. She openly spoke to customers and deliverymen who came by, being friendly, but not flirtatious, with everyone. So why should she single him out? It had to be her lover. She had even said as much and he just wasn't listening. Martin imagined a scenario in which every day she went home to his miserable flat. There, he would corner and interrogate her, with frequent and violent beatings, forcing from her the details of who she talked to at the bar and for how long and what was said and why she had talked to whoever it was for as long as she did. And if she lied he would find out as the other waiters and waitresses in the bar were his spies and every time he came by they gave him a full report of her doings down to every last gaze any man had made in her direction. He could see her image clearly in his mind crying in her lover's apartment as she leaned up against a small refrigerator, paint peeling off the ceiling above her while he slapped her and glared at her with his small angry eyes.

The next few days passed with little event. He resigned himself to the fact that if something was to ever happen between them, it wasn't going to happen during his last few days in Budapest. If she suddenly changed her mind and wanted to make love to him he could never respect her. If he truly loved her he could afford to wait. There was a whole life in front of them and he had no right to be impatient and forceful. The day before his flight he went to a local store to buy a camera. He needed some memento of her to keep her fresh in his mind when he went back to America. It wasn't that he had given up on her, he argued to himself as he walked out of the camera store with the cheapest camera he could find - a small gray Romanian instamatic with red-eye flash protection - but more that he had realized that she would only come to him over time. She was testing him, or the powers that be, whatever they were - were testing him to prove his love for her.

Later that afternoon he went back to _Night and Day_. When he walked in she was standing behind the bar reading a newspaper. Her shiny black silk shirt was glistening under the bar lights. She looked up at him and turned away blithely. He sat down at a table near the door so as not to come across as being too intrusive and as expected it was the red-haired waitress who came to serve him. He ordered a beer and sat back tapping his fingers lightly on the table as he drank it. Once or twice he looked over at Ildi, who didn't seem too busy, but she showed not even the slightest sign of caring that he was there. _If this is how you want to play_ , he thought, _well then fine. I know you aren't free to act, so I won't push you._

When he finished his beer he pulled out the camera and walked over to the bar. "No pictures," she said, waving her hands back and forth as though he were part of a television crew looking to report the scandalous secrets of her life.

"I go back tomorrow," he said. She seemed unconcerned and turned to walk away. He felt horrible and foolish. It was clear she was just waiting for him to leave and get out of her life for good. "I need something to remember you by," he said. She stopped and turned to face him. He raised the camera and clicked the button. Then he put it in his pocket and stood up. She turned to walk away.

"No," he said. "Ildi."

She turned around reluctantly. He stepped up to her and held out his hand. He closed his eyes. He expected to feel her hand touching his, but instead he felt her cheek press up to his lips. It was soft and warm, more firm than he had imagined. Then he felt her other cheek press against his lips for a moment. He opened his eyes to look at her, but she had already turned and started walking into the other room. He wanted to follow her and drop to his knees and swear his love to her but instead he turned around and walked out the door. The sky was black with night and people were walking by in couples, looking as though they were on their way to dinner or a movie. He looked at his watch. It was only seven and he was already feeling drunk.

He looked down Andrássy út where the trees - now almost barren of all life and color, the leaves somehow having dropped from their boughs without him even noticing - seemed to hang lower than before. He started walking back to the hotel. His flight wasn't until the next morning and he knew it would be a long time before he would be back in New York.

### XII

When Martin got back to his New York apartment he took off his shoes and laid his suitcase down on the bedroom floor. He was exhausted. From his window he could see the dimpled shiny surface of the street below as the rain gathered and flowed through the beveled gutters, disappearing into the mouths of the curbside drains just below the crossing lights on the corner of each block. His living room looked like it hadn't been occupied in months. His favorite leather sofa, which always stood beside his book collection and reading lamp, was covered with an layer of dust so undisturbed it looked as though it had been applied with an airbrush.

He made himself some tea and went over his bank statements. Although he hadn't made a single deposit in over three months, he had enough money to live until summer and his trips to Europe hadn't really hurt him as much as they could have. So, all things considered, his life was in unexpectedly good order and he didn't have that much to worry about. Even though things hadn't worked out with Ildi, they might very well have if she didn't have a boyfriend and may still turn in his favor if he was patient enough to wait for her to come around. As he sat in the comfort of his sofa watching television and catching up to local news events he thought of buying a plant - perhaps a small tree - to name after Ildi so as the years rolled by he could always be remembered of the time he stood before her telling her how beautiful she was that magical first time he spoke to her. She was a special friend and they would keep in touch for years and maybe - if he could hold on and bide his time - they would one day get married. All the long hours he spent in _Night and Day_ waiting for her to come and talk to him in retrospect seemed small and insignificant in comparison to the ways in which she had looked at him before her lover made her go cold on him.

The next morning he woke up and looked around room. The idea of buying a plant in her honor seemed obsessive and absurd in the light of the new day, something if he had heard another man had done he would find bizarre and even pathological. What if he had gone through with it and she somehow found out? She would think he was crazy and would never want to see him again. He got out of bed and dressed before grabbing a piece of dry bread from the fridge that had been left over from before his trip. He went downstairs and walked outside. It was warmer than it was in Budapest. The streets were empty except for a group of young Asian men standing in a small circle in front of him dressed in long black parkas with wool hats. He turned his head to avoid any eye contact and walked down the street. Everything seemed to have a strange air of unfamiliarity about it as he made his way to his office. He felt as though he had been gone for much longer than he actually had.

Over the next few days he gradually slipped back into the habit of work, even gaining valuable ground on the peanut project, and his experiences in Budapest seemed to drift further and further into the past. It was only the middle of November and the trees had already shed their last leaves. In the cold gray light of autumn everything that had happened between him and Ildi started to seem like something that had happened to someone else. He wondered why he had gone over in the first place, especially since the way things had ended with Gabriella left him feeling strange and uncomfortable.

After weeks of ambivalence his feelings changed and he started to feel a yearning to go back to Budapest. Somehow whatever had happened with Ildi - no matter how virtual or imaginary and quickly fading into the past it was - hadn't ended properly. It needed a better coda so that whenever he stayed up late thinking about her - even years down the road - he would at least remember her, and do so for the good things and not the bad. It wasn't that he expected anything to happen, but more that he needed to go out on a positive note, leaving a warm and tangible memory that he could hold onto in the future like a souvenir or fireside piece. To leave things so awkward yet still so open and unexplained was more than he could stand.

After a few days of mulling it over he decided he could afford to go, but only for a short while. Maybe for just a week before Christmas. If he stayed away for too long his reputation in New York would crumble and he'd run out of money. But he could certainly chance a week, and one just before Christmas was likely to go unnoticed by his contacts in the advertising world, who were probably already wondering what was going on and why he was suddenly unavailable for so long. It was also a good chance - perhaps his only chance - to see Gabriella as well. He wasn't sure why, but something inside of him said that it would be a good idea to see her again and smooth over what had happened before. You never know, he thought while pouring himself a glass of orange juice and looking out on the street where an elderly woman seemed to be arguing with a cab driver, one day they might be lovers again. It wasn't that he wanted to or even entertained the idea, even though she clearly might - after all it was she that had set the subliminal events in motion that eventually led to their making love that day in Budapest. Getting back together with her was absolutely out of the question. He was in love with Ildi and no matter how far she drifted away from him into the past he would never lower himself to take advantage of Gabriella's ailing marriage a second time. That was final. Yet in his maturity he knew that life - even feelings - changed in beautiful and often even terrible ways, and that even though he might not love her now he might yet again somewhere in the future. Never burn your bridges, was a motto he had always stood by.

He flew back to Budapest in early December. The same man with the blond hair and thin pointed chin picked him up at the airport and drove him to the same apartment he had rented before. There was snow on the ground and the city seemed covered in a dull lifeless haze. He made a down payment on his flat and collected the keys from the man. After trying to sleep for a while he went for a walk around Vörösmarty. It looked like a completely different place than the one he had come to for the first time six months before. On the surface it seemed plastic and touristy - yet there were no tourists to occupy it, only Hungarians. It was a city where people got old and died. People milled through the streets like strange caricatures from an old Dutch painting. And the local women, who seemed universally attractive before, looked grossly overdressed with their flabby white cheeks and excessive make up.

His first night back he slept for fourteen hours. When he woke up the next morning he got up and looked out the window. The skies were overcast and he could see the tip of the unusual sand-colored building peeking up over one of the apartment blocks across the street. In the dull morning light it looked somehow depleted, completely devoid of all the mystery it had once elicited. He dressed quickly and went out to get a coffee. There was a light snow and the streets were filled with small kiosks selling various knickknacks for Christmas. One booth sold green ashtrays of different sizes and had an English sign reading "Don't be late for Gold Christmas" hanging over it. In the street a horse-drawn sleigh with red runners and small silver bells passed by. Inside, four women were dressed as elves with body-tight green suits and big floppy ears that looked like antlers. He felt hung over and the lights on the street started to annoy him. He went into the nearest café to order a croissant and coffee.

Looking out on the street with all its cheap Christmas ornaments he was suddenly overcome with fear. It was a darker and more all-encompassing fear than anything he had ever felt before. Something like the dread one might feel on the eve of the arrival of some horrible and ultimately unknowable presence, the slow and irretrievable slide down the walls of a long dark funnel from which he could never reemerge. He wondered why he was in Budapest at all. If anything the people outside were all his enemies and only wanted him for his money. Perhaps the fat proprietress of his apartment was in there that very instant going through his belongings looking for something of value like his passport that she could use as leverage in some kind of seedy eastern European extortion plot.

A woman with long black hair and a shopping bag walked by and his thoughts immediately turned to Ildi. How could he walk back into _Night and Day_ after having sent all those letters and flowers? She would certainly think he was stalking her or had flown across the globe to demand an explanation that she wasn't prepared to give. Then she might even call her friends over to drag him off into some alleyway where he would be taught a hard lesson never to try and steel someone's girlfriend again.

He felt isolated and friendless. Everyone was a potential enemy. He finished his coffee and waved for the waitress. She walked over.

"Fizitek," he said.

He handed her a five hundred forint note and walked out into the snow. In all his loneliness and destitution his only hope was to go and see Gabriella. Only she could help him settle down and regain the courage that brought him here in the first place. After collecting change from the waitress he took the normal route to her house, walking down Andrássy út - but intentionally avoiding _Night and Day_ by taking a slight detour - and then making his way up to City Park, which was covered in a bright thin blanket of snow. When he got to the north end of Gabriella's block he stopped and looked around. The neighborhood looked strangely alien. He turned his head and stepped backwards. As far as he could tell her house was no longer there. He scanned up and down the block a few times until he spotted a blue house almost exactly in the middle. He walked until he was standing right in front of it, sure from the tree beside him and all other geographical cues that he was standing exactly where he had the time he saw the mysterious man in the window. The house was exactly the same except that it had been painted blue - a color Gabriella would never dream of painting her house. He walked up to the door. The curtains in the window were also different. He couldn't quite recall what color they had been before, but he knew they were not the bright orange with small butterflies in interlocking patterns they were now. There was something in the artificial optimism of the decor scheme that suggested over-blown liberalism or possibly even an affiliation to some sort of far-left political front.

He knocked. The door swung open and a small woman holding an eggbeater in her hand stepped out.

"Jó reggelt," she said smiling.

"Hol van Gabriella?" he said slowly, hoping that he wasn't mispronouncing any of the words.

"Nem ismerem Gabriella," she said. He didn't understand and shrugged his shoulders. "Nobody home. Me house," she said in strained English. "Just now buy."

He squinted his eyes and thought for a moment. If they sold the house there must be a record somewhere.

"Who did you buy it from?" he asked slowly so she could understand.

She shook her head.

"A young lady and a man?"

Her face showed a hint of recognition. "Woman," she said. Then she said something that sounded like _megült_ , a word he thought he had read had something to do with sitting down but he really wasn't sure. She stared at him with hard insistent eyes and he suddenly felt ridiculous just standing there in the cold trying to discuss something in a language he hardly knew. "Bocsanat," he said. "Jo napot kivanok." He turned abruptly and walked away.

The woman said something else he didn't understand as he neared the street. Then she shook her head with what looked like regret and shut the door.

He walked towards City Park. He looked down at his watch. It was already four in the afternoon. Time had seemed to roll by that day as in a deep and clouded dream in which all tangible events pass by without making even the slightest impression, giving the feeling that time has actually passed more quickly than it seemed to have while these events were actually occurring. Budapest had that effect on people. It slowed things down in such a way that they ended up passing by more quickly. It was a feeling he liked, one which made him feel good to be alive and one which reminded him of his student days when he first met Gabriella. A series of transient illusions arranged neatly within one another like an intimately painted set of Chinese boxes. Life was always better, he concluded as he passed by a strange building fronted with at set of turrets that looked like giant limpets, when it lacked impact and importance. That was his mistake with Gabriella. When he had first gotten serious about life, around the time he first met her, he had infused his existence with so much importance and decorated his day-to-day life with all those specific details and events centered around his career, personal expansion, or even relationship with Gabriella, that he had somehow forgotten simply to live. Perhaps that was why she had gotten distant from him. It was something she had always told him, but he had never really grasped it until now. At the time it annoyed him and seemed like some crazy blip coming from outside their love to destabilize and ultimately ruin it.

When he next looked up he was a block away from Oktagon near _Night and Day_. As he approached the central intersection he wondered what they would think if they could see through the walls and knew he was walking along towards them. Perhaps they would think he was stalking Ildi or had flown across the globe to try and hurt her boyfriend and take her captive. By the time he reached the door he came to the conclusion that he didn't really care. Gabriella had vanished and Budapest suddenly seemed like a place in which nothing mattered. If he pulled out a gun and shot everyone no one would care. It would be like emerging from a dream in which you've lost control and murdered someone, then ended up on death row only to wake up and find it never really happened. Like the time after he had started having an affair that he dreamed he had shoved Gabriella's head into a drainpipe until it fit neatly inside the four-inch opening. In no time his house was surrounded by the police and he was facing life imprisonment or maybe even the electric chair - a punishment which had been resurrected in the landscape of his dream for him and him alone. Just as he was about to surrender to the police, he awoke to the sound of Gabriella in the bathroom running the tap, a sound he immediately recognized as identical to that of the police sirens wailing off in his nightmare.

He stopped in front of _Night and Day_ and looked past the painted figures on the glass door and further on into the interior. From where he was standing he couldn't tell if Ildi was there or not. He pushed the door open and walked in slowly. She was standing behind the bar. She had a sloppy lip tattoo that looked more like a milk mustache than the work of a beautician. He approached her and she looked at him as if she had been watching him all along and knew that he had been standing behind the door and also knew exactly why he had come. Just as he was about to say something - some harmless greeting or platitude that would set them off in the right direction - the thought occurred to him that she had gotten married and already viewed their interchange as nothing but a sweet and harmless memory from a past which ceased to have any relevance once she decided to make her life-long commitment.

"Hello," he said.

"How long in Budapest for?" she asked. She leaned towards him and smiled warmly as though to let him know there was still something between them, something both hot and immutable that they would remember for as long as they lived if it didn't drive them mad and kill them first.

"A week. Then vissza..." he paused to think of the right way to end the sentence.

"Megyek vissza," she said. She tilted her head admiringly in the way a teacher does when her student finally grasps a difficult concept. She raised her eyebrows and pointed at the cappuccino machine.

"Of course," he said. She fixed him a cappuccino and placed it in front of him. "Thank you," he said.

She walked over to a table and talked to an attractive blond girl with her hair in a tight bun except for a few strands hanging languorously over her eyes. A few minutes later the woman stood up and walked towards him, passing by as her eyes gazed up and down his figure. She turned her head in a clumsy effort to be surreptitious and nodded to Ildi in approval. He continued drinking his cappuccino and waited for her to come back.

When she finally came back to the bar he complimented her on her lip tattoo and asked if it was permanent. Woman had always complained that he didn't take note of the evolution of their personal manicure enough. She didn't seem to understand and widened her eyes in a way that was unflattering to her features. He pointed delicately to her lips and then her eyes brightened to signal that she had understood. She shook her head.

"Only lipstick," she said. He nodded his head and pointed reservedly towards the cappuccino machine.

"Egy meg," he said. She laughed and shook her finger in a playfully scolding manner.

"Meg egy," she corrected him.

"Meg egy," he repeated. She smiled in a way that said she was genuinely glad to see him and wanted to go on seeing him every day for years to come.

He finished his drink quickly and stood up. Things had gone far better than he had ever thought possible. There was no way she would smile like that - not after all his cards, the flowers, and the perfume - unless she was ready to leave her lover and start seeing him instead. His perseverance had won her over and she was finally convinced that she should act on her feelings. He said a quick good-bye - shorter was always sweeter he had come to learn after years of failing with woman by being too effusive - and waved as he left. It was better to leave her wanting more than wishing he would leave her alone and stop making her uncomfortable.

On his way back to his apartment he took a turn by a small restaurant with quaint painted tiles framing the windows. He stopped to look for a moment and then walked further. The sidewalk was lined with tall bare trees that drooped slightly over the street as though an undetected wind were forcing them. He wondered why he had never come this way before. Certainly he must have passed the same tiled restaurant countless times before without ever noticing it. Gabriella always said that about him. When they lived in their small townhouse in upstate New York she used to scold him for never noticing the simplest things around him. _You could go a whole lifetime_ , she had once said, _without ever knowing who lives next door to you or what color the house across the street is. You see everything, I'm sure, but nothing registers but your own set of thoughts or feelings_. He never took comments like this seriously, sweeping blanket criticisms with no purpose but to make him feel inadequate and shift the balance of power back in her favor, although that's one reason she claimed to have emotionally withdrawn from him. Yet in retrospect he knew deep inside that this was this very trait within him that she was attracted to the most. _At least I don't just disappear without the slightest explanation_ , he said smirkingly to himself as he continued wandering down the Budapest street. She may not have liked the way he never seemed to have anything to do outside his work, but she loved him for it anyway. And he was proud that he never let her know that he had always secretly envied those who were able to occupy their spare time with frivolities like making picture albums or decorating the house. If he were left to his own devices he'd probably end up working twelve hours a day and coming home every day to a bare apartment where he'd pace around nervously wondering what to do until it was bed time.

He walked past an ice-cream stand. In front a young girl with blond hair and distinctive Germanic features was playing with a pair of drumsticks. He passed without making eye contact. When he reached the end of the block he suddenly realized that he was surrounded by a crowd of people who seemed to be in a hurry. A man carrying a brief case bumped into him without apologizing. When Martin looked up his eyes met instead with those of a tall man with blond hair who looked similar to the man that had emerged from Gabriella's house before, although he couldn't really be sure, the lighting by her door was so dim. The blond man was wearing a tan overcoat that fell sloppily to his ankles and held a small box of what could have been chocolates under his arm as if he was on his way to an important rendezvous. The man looked at Martin and then turned away suddenly as if seeming to sense some form of danger.

The man slipped away behind a tall woman wearing white plastic pants and then disappeared completely. Martin pushed past the woman and then maneuvered through a group of small black-haired boys carrying school bags. At the perimeter of the crowd was assembled a row of structures that looked like they could have been used as office buildings before the Soviet invasion. The outer walls were coated with a glaze of soot, disguising the original color. He looked right and then left. There was no trace of the man anywhere. He swiveled his head back in the direction of the crowd, which had since broken apart and drifted further down the road. When he turned back to look forward again he noticed what he thought was a white synagogue he hadn't noticed before at the end of a cul de sac about three blocks away. He broke into a light jog, scanning from side to side to see if there was any trace of the man. When he was a block away from the strange white building he could now see that it was a movie house and a small line of people had gathered in front. As he got closer he made out what he thought was a long tan overcoat hanging off the shoulders of a man standing in the line. He quickened his pace and wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead. He felt a sudden excitement. Maybe Gabriella was in that line that very instant or already seated in the movie house waiting for her husband. But if it was her husband, then why would he run away after sensing Martin's recognition? He certainly had nothing against him unless you considered the bruise, which would explain everything. Her husband had beaten her and because of this she moved out on him into a new apartment. Then he begged for her forgiveness until she invited him to come back to her to live in her new place. That was why they were no longer there. And the man would have recognized him from old pictures - or maybe even the night he was watching them - and felt guilty because he thought Gabriella would have told him everything about the origin of the bruise. It all fit together nicely.

When he was close enough to see the man's face his back was turned in the other direction. Martin slowed to a walk and caught his breath as he moved nearer. _I bet you know I'm here_ , he thought. _I bet you'd like it if I walked up and punched you for the bruises. It would give you the benefit of feeling you'd paid for your sins and at the same time would give you the luxury of thinking I was a barbarian - something you'd no doubt relate proudly to Gabriella one night as you stood there with your ugly penis jammed between her legs._ Just as he was about to tap the man on the shoulder and introduce himself, the man turned to face him. He looked directly into Martin's eyes but showed no sign of recognition. He blinked once and turned away. Was it even the same man as before? Martin was no longer sure. He stood behind the man for a second before a small woman holding a large bag looked at him strangely as if he was committing some perverted act of voyeurism.

"Where's Gabriella?" he whispered loud enough for the man to hear, but with his head turned askance to face an invisible companion so if it was all a case of mistaken identities an embarrassing confrontation would be avoided. The man didn't seem to notice. "Does anybody know Gabriella?" he asked more loudly. The woman looked at him even more strangely.

"My dog," he said with a happy cover-up nod to the woman. Then he stamped his foot to the ground in frustration. "Gabriella!" he called out. The man turned and looked at him uneventfully. _I bet you're just playing games_ , Martin thought. _I bet you know exactly who I am and why I'm here but you think you're too clever for even yourself._

"You win," he said to himself as he walked away. A moment later he turned to see if the man was watching. He wasn't. Then he looked again. This time the man was looking and looking right at him. He was still in line but his back was facing those of the others in line. Gabriella's husband had a fat and sickening smile on his face and was pointing down to his waist where his pants were undone and his penis was hanging out in full view. Martin wanted to shout some curse at the man but for some reason he felt outnumbered. Who was to say he might not be arrested instead for disturbing the peace? He hid his disgust and turned away as though he had seen nothing, walking until he was sure he could see the unusual tan building and then following a zigzag path of his own invention until he could see Vaci utca off in the distance. The sky had the dull pinkish color that always preceded a heavy snowfall.

That night he stayed in and went to bed early. It had already started to snow and he could discern fractal patterns freezing out from the layer of condensation on the inside surface of the windows. After watching a German news station for an hour without understanding a single word he turned off the lights. Almost immediately he descended into a deep and forgetful sleep in which everything was blackness. All that was left was the vague and comforting sensation of being and knowing nothing. At times he became aware of rising into a partial state of wakefulness defined only by a heavy feeling in his limbs and the dark and shapeless feeling that somewhere in somebody's life it was winter. He had become for a moment little more than an isolated will trying either to push itself further upwards into consciousness or allow itself to sink once again into the depths of darkness. Eventually his sleep broke into a not unpleasant cycle of rising into the awareness of fatigue accompanied by a sensation that he was possibly dying, followed by his sinking once again into a sleep that seemed less and less willing to draw him downwards. When he finally awoke it was still dark and he could hear someone shouting in the room next door. The first thought that entered his head was that Gabriella was forever gone and he would never see her again. But even before he was able to allow this thought the time to sink further into his being and inexorably take hold of him the thought that Ildi was glad to see him the day before brushed it aside and took its place. It was a welcome thought that made all of the previous day's uncertainty appear exaggerated and unfounded. Gabriella had obviously moved and if she really wanted to see him she would contact him back in New York. He sat in bed waiting for the dawn's light thinking about what the new day might bring and how he could approach Ildi a second time. By the time it was fully light outside he came to the conclusion that it was best to go and see her later in the day so that she might perhaps invite him to share dinner with her - if things did indeed go in that direction.

He fell asleep one last time and when he woke up again he dressed and went outside, spending the rest of the morning walking through the shops along Vaci utca as he squinted his eyes to avoid the sting of the cold wind. The stores were preparing for Christmas and had beautiful and ornate displays in their windows. Most of the woman that passed by were either holding hands with their lovers, warmly satisfied smiles glowing on their faces, or walking in groups of two or three, arm in arm with a fresh exuberance that said they were hoping to meet a handsome well-to-do man, marry him, and settle down into a cozy life replete with children and fireside stories before bedtime. Yet they were somehow still sexy in their humble passivity, combining the innocence of a Dickensian match girl with a European sense of relaxed sexuality. As he meandered through the streets admiring the well-dressed people and the intricate shop displays he wondered if should buy Ildi a box of chocolates as a small Christmas token or gesture of his good will. People here seemed to take Christmas seriously and if he didn't get her anything she might think he was cheap and thoughtless, the kind of guy you just met in a beer garden, which he had to admit was where he had met her. After some deliberation, he decided that it was best to let his presence in Budapest do the talking. Although Hungarians adored ritual and politeness in a way that North Americans could never comprehend, love and romantic tactics were universal. An unwanted present was an unwanted present whether he was in Japan, Cincinnati, or Hungary.

When he got tired of wandering around he went back to his apartment for a nap. He woke up almost four hours later. It was already getting dark and the room was filled with a dull gray light. He put on his suit and grabbed his coat. It was getting late and he had to get to _Night and Day_ before it was too late.

When he got there it was completely dark. He opened the door and ducked his head as he walked in. When he lifted his gaze he saw Ildi and her lover sitting at the bar talking to the red-haired waitress. She was dressed more casually, this time in a pair of cream-colored pants and a drab sweater that he would have found unattractive on any other woman. It looked like she was off duty. Her lover was wearing a similar sweater and was resting his leg on her chair as if to tell the world that she belonged to him. When she looked over he smiled inconspicuously as one would do to someone they didn't know and turned to sit at the nearest table. He broke into a sweat as he opened a book he had brought as an insurance policy in his coat pocket. If things went against him he wanted to be able to hide it and seem to have come for another purpose. Before he finished the first paragraph the red-haired woman came over and took his order. She smiled at him with the same look in her eyes she had the first time he crossed paths with Ildi's lover. It was a look of anticipation that dared Martin to go over and do something big and dramatic to stir up whatever boredom may have filled their daily lives.

He sat there and waited, unsure of what to do. Every few minutes he looked up to see what Ildi was doing. Her lover was standing behind a small pillar but he could see his hand caressing her leg. She didn't seem interested in the man and continued talking to the red-haired waitress as if he wasn't there. _Yes_ , he thought. _You don't deserve her. I know it. She knows it. You know it. So, why continue the charade? Why stand in the way of giving her what she wants? Are you that small-minded and possessive?_ He focused his eyes on a small Hungarian flag that was hanging from the opposite wall and then looked back at them. He wondered if her lover was aware of him sitting there as he watched them from behind. Perhaps he was and they were talking about him that very instant.

He turned his head back into his book and, just as he started to read, he heard Ildi laugh in the deep gurgling way she did when she was with her girl friends. She turned her head around to take a quick glance at him while she was saying something to her lover. She had that earnest but distant look in her eye of a woman who was checking out a man. Martin waited for her lover to turn his head but instead he kept on talking to Ildi as if he didn't notice her stray glance.

A few minutes later Ildi stood up and went to the bathroom and her lover put on his coat and walked towards the door. Martin fixed his gaze devoutly into the book although he could see her lover's vague form in the periphery of his vision. He jingled the keys impatiently as he stood there. Martin imagined he was being examined. He could feel her lover's eyes on him as he continued to pretend he was reading. Yet somehow they weren't the angry eyes that he would have guessed. There was something almost peaceful and reassuring about his vague form hovering by the door. The reassurance of finally confronting an enemy face-to-face with the revelation they might be human after all. No doubt her lover had spent late nights arguing with her about Martin's letters and why she hadn't done anything to dissuade his advances. Perhaps he had once viewed Martin as a monster from America who only wanted to brainwash her and pull her away from him and his humble little life in Budapest, a life that depended as much on her love to make it work as it did on his own hard work and perseverance. For the first time he felt sympathy for the man. Maybe he wasn't that bad after all. As he looked down at the table, his rival still standing a mere six feet away by the door, a dark and strangely unwelcome thought emerged from the most heavily barricaded garrisons of his mind. What if Ildi was the villain in all this and she was toying as much with him as she was with her lover?

Martin turned his gaze to the bar. He could see Ildi approaching out of the corner of his eye. He let his eyes sink back into the book. As she passed she turned to him and stopped. Her lover was standing beside her. Martin looked up at her. She looked kind and natural like a woman who was about to go collecting berries in the country.

"Szia," she said to Martin with comfortable enthusiasm. She was letting him know that she cared about him and his presence wasn't the faux pas it could have been and she was happy to see him and be near him, even in the presence of her boyfriend.

She stood there smiling for a moment as if she wanted to say more but was unsure of what to do. He could hear her boyfriend's keys jingling somewhere by the door. As she stood there he started to wonder what she _really_ meant by it all. It was the sort of thing that was designed to make her boyfriend angry and let Martin know that should anything go wrong in her personal life she might still be available. Martin waved his hand and smiled in a friendly but unprovocative way like a regular customer that had no special attachment to her. If he acted like he knew her more intimately, her lover would get angry and possibly even take her home to beat her for defying his will. A horn beeped outside and she turned away to join her lover, who had gradually moved outside during the interchange. She waved to Martin as she left.

When the door fell shut he leaned back and put the book down. He felt both victorious and angry. It was clear that she liked him and was only waiting for the right moment to bolt from her current personal situation. Yet if this were true, then why did she leave with her boyfriend? Why didn't she just tell him that she no longer loved him and wanted to spend some time with her new suitor from America? He ordered a beer and sat in the cheap plastic chair for the next two hours going over all the possible solutions to the dilemma from grabbing her and demanding that she drop her lover to finally follow her true feelings by coming with him to America, to pretending he didn't care about her to force her suit and arouse her natural feminine possessiveness and curiosity. Although her motives were still unclear, the one thing he was sure of was that her reaction was positive beyond a shadow of a doubt and, because of this, the balance had just tilted back in his favor.

That night he went to bed early. There was nothing to be accomplished by going to some empty and depressing bar and drinking his face off. The best thing he could do was treat himself to a full night's sleep. That way he would be relaxed and well rested the next time he saw her. At some point in the night, after he had finally fallen asleep after several times getting up to go to the bathroom, he dreamt he was standing in a field and Ildi was standing on the other side of a wire mesh fence looking at him. The sky was unnaturally dark as in the depiction of some great holocaust. He walked up to the fence to say something but his mouth was frozen shut and words were somehow an impossibility. He then became aware that he was in a dream. The symbolism of a barrier standing between them suddenly seemed ridiculous, like something that would pop up in a bad novel. He stepped towards the fence. She had the virginal but somehow sultry look in her eyes of a woman about to give her heart to a vampire. He pressed his face up against the wire and she pulled closer, kissing him as their faces touched the cold metal between them. Her lips were warm and soft, momentarily annihilating the sensation of cold metal on his skin. He stepped back and looked at her. She tilted her head and stared into his eyes as if she was pleading for him to understand her while openly admitting she wasn't free to act.

The next day he woke up feeling fresh and energetic. A pillar of golden light extended across the room from a crack between the curtains. It was only a matter of time before Ildi was his. The dream was a link to other dreams and premonitions he had experienced going all the way back to the first time he felt he had to cross the ocean to see Gabriella. Somewhere in the depths of sleep their souls had touched and her true feelings came out. As he dressed he toyed with the idea that she had experienced the same dream, but from the opposite perspective. He had heard of such things on television and never believed them before. After all, he was a sensible and well-educated American who had no use for ridiculous new age theories and superstitions. What was happening to him, though, was different. It was scientific fact. It was far too much of a coincidence that at the time when he was the most confused about her behavior he would have a dream reconfirming her love for him.

He opened the curtains and looked out the window. It was snowing and the streets below were virtually empty except for a service vehicle of some sort that looked like it was there to repair a pipe beneath the road. After a light breakfast he went to a café to sit and relax. It was the coldest day of the year according to a newspaper that had been left on one of the tables. By the time he got to _Night and Day_ it was already two in the afternoon. Ildi was dressed in her black silk shirt and had big dark circles under eyes as if she hadn't slept all night. She was alone behind the counter reading a book. When she looked up she smiled faintly and then looked away. He immediately wished he hadn't come but took a seat at the bar anyway. She looked at him neutrally, beckoning him to order by raising her eyebrows.

"Nagyon hideg vagyok." he said. She looked at him strangely like she hadn't understood him, although he knew she must have. He shivered in a slightly exaggerated way, hoping she might notice and then understand what he had just said.

"Snowing still?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

Her face perked up and she looked beyond him to a point he guessed was ten feet behind him. She smiled in a way that was suddenly friendlier. He turned his head to see her boyfriend walking up to the bar. When their eyes met her boyfriend looked at Ildi in a hard and spiteful way as if she had done something wrong and he had no option but to punish her. _Not this again_ , was Martin's first thought. He was suddenly fed up by the whole situation, which now seemed all too familiar in its cruel emotional Ping Pong. _Have your stupid lover_ , he thought as he looked over at them. Then he looked down at the bar and pretended to be interested in the patterns made by the wood grain by running his finger in small circles over the surface.

As he sat at the bar beside them staring at his reflection in the mirror behind the spirits the thought crossed his mind that her lover had already been here and had just left the café a few minutes ago but saw Martin walking up to the door just as he was walking away. Once he had spotted Martin sneaking up to swoop in on his girlfriend he rushed back immediately to guard his turf. Either that or he had been spying on her all day and when Martin had walked up to _Night and Day_ he had spotted him from his secret lair somewhere across the street. A hotel room? A restaurant? He imagined the young skinhead sitting there with binoculars at a bench across the street pretending to read a newspaper. His sudden arrival on the scene was just too much of a coincidence to be accidental, especially given the way Ildi had greeted Martin in such a cold and standoffish way as if she almost _knew_ her lover was somewhere in the fold waiting to spring out and accuse her of being unfaithful.

Ildi and her lover whispered a few things to one another. She had a sweet repentant look on her face as if she was telling him that he was the only one when she knew and everyone else knew that he wasn't. There was something fake about her expression that bothered Martin. It was at once a sweet and endearing testament of her loyalty and disgusting exposé on her ability to lie. A sham. She kissed her boyfriend tenderly on the cheek and he turned and walked towards the door in quick irritated steps as if he was still angry and was not yet convinced that she loved him the way Martin had imagined she had just told him.

"Szevasz!" she said emphatically as if she was trying to patch something up. Martin recognized the word. It was the way lovers said goodbye to one another.

When he was gone and the door had fallen shut he looked at Ildi. She looked back reservedly and shrugged her shoulders in a way he knew meant that she was trying to tell him that nothing had ever happened between them and he might as well go back to New York and never come back for all she cared.

"Ildi," he said calmly and without a trace of spite. She looked at him. There was something yielding and forgiving in her eyes that she hadn't shown him since before her boyfriend arrived on the scene over a month ago. His mind flipped back to the first time he met her. His growing doubts vanished and suddenly he wanted to tell her he loved her and wanted to marry her. He had come so far so many times that he had no choice but speak out his heart - win or lose - to make it all somehow worth it. She was sitting at a stool across the bar from him with her head down playing with the skin between her thumb and index finger. She looked at him once to see if he was watching her and then turned away quickly. It was the kind of thing people did if they were flirting with you or the kind of thing they did when they didn't want to talk to you. But if she didn't want to be with him, he thought, why didn't she get up and hide in the safe nook of her little kitchenette like she did so many times before?

He heard the clatter of dishes in some back room he had not yet seen the entrance to and felt suddenly gloomy again.

"There is so much space between us," he said. It wasn't what he wanted to say. He wished he had something else, something about how much he loved her and why he had crossed the ocean just to see her. She shrugged her shoulders. He knew she didn't understand what he had just said but he felt she knew what he was saying anyway. For the first time he felt that he had understood her and that there was a strong and meaningful bond between them no matter how abstract and tenuous it seemed.

The dishes clattered more loudly. Ildi turned her head behind her and in the direction of the sound and yelled something.

"I have to go," he said. He felt both sad and elated like life had opened up for a moment and he had finally peered into something bigger than himself, something like birth or death that ultimately has no meaning yet masquerades as if it does. He leaned across the bar to kiss her cheek, but she resisted and pulled back. He stepped back, twisting his face in contrition. He felt vulgar and obtuse and wanted to apologize and say he was sorry for all the trouble he had caused her. She held out her hand in the way of a queen to a knave and he kissed it out of nothing but polite compulsion, the feeling that something great had just happened suddenly disappearing. He turned and left, walking out into the cold winter darkness. He looked one last time at the patterns on the door as he walked away slowly and backwards down the street.

### XIII

Martin didn't know what time it was or how long he had slept when he woke up. All he knew was that he was in a bed somewhere with covers over his body and that it was cold somewhere, although he was still warm. He looked around the room and then shut his eyes and let his head settle into the pillow. When he opened his eyes again all he could see was the white stucco ceiling above him with its network of plastered crevices, which if he tried hard enough seemed to form whatever shape or pattern he wanted them to. For a moment he felt like a god, a small and insignificant god, but a god nonetheless, a god of nothing but paint and plaster, isolated in his own separate infinity with nothing to worry about but the ceiling and its meaningless little existence, laid out in bland perfection only six feet from his bed.

After a long silence he heard a sound emanating from the street below, connecting him to a world outside whatever world he had been a part of in the time that had passed since he woke up. At first he wasn't sure if it was his imagination, since it sounded like nothing he had ever heard before. It was a low-pitched hum that was almost musical in its tone. As the sound became louder and the room gained definition in much the same way he imagined whales could chart out whole oceans with their sonar he realized that it was two people talking somewhere outside his window. There was a soft female voice and a more assertive, yet equally distressed male voice. It was the pain in this voice that made it hard for him to recognize it, a pain too strong and unidentifiable to be related to anything that he had ever experienced.

He heard a shout. It was only then that everything came back to him. He was in Budapest and it was winter. He had fallen asleep on the bed the night before with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He looked around the room and noticed that the television was still on. A woman was smiling and holding up a tube of toothpaste. He felt happy that she was so pleased with her purchase, but then he became confused. Maybe it was just a gift and she was pretending to be happy. But why would someone make a gift of a tube of toothpaste? A darker thought then entered his head. Maybe she wasn't even happy at all and she was just being paid by some toothpaste representative in a suit to pretend she was happy. He found this thought offensive and threw a pillow at the TV, hoping that it would hit the on-off button and release him from his momentary disgust. But instead of shutting off the TV, the pillow knocked a vase over that was sitting on a side table. It was a vase he had never recognized before in the room and he wondered why it was there and who might have put it there.

When he got out of bed he noticed for the first time an unpleasant smell permeating the room. It was a smell that he identified as having been there since he had taken the apartment, but had never consciously registered. Something like new diapers and old people, something clean and septic but immediately reminiscent of birth and death or those things associated with birth or death. He brushed his teeth and looked in the mirror. Although he wanted to think that he looked old and washed up - it would have made him feel more comfortable, somehow less responsible for being in the situation he was in because he could always blame it on his age - he felt he looked younger than he thought he should. There was a zest and energy in his face that made him instantly more confident, but at the same time only drew attention to the enormity his failures. He dressed clumsily and looked out the window. There was a clean white bed of snow evenly covering the awnings across the street. He felt happy again and shut the curtains. He was alive in a city called Budapest and everything that had happened before that moment suddenly ceased to have any relevance.

As soon as he put on his coat this feeling faded. It was as if the coat - now soiled and torn at the cuffs, something he had bought some weekend in Boston - contained vestiges of the person he once was before that he would never able to get rid of. He took off the coat and walked over to the window. There was a dense blue light passing through the curtains that made him think of water and how his life would be better if he were somewhere else, somewhere with water. When he went to part the curtains the memory of his first dream snapped into place. Water. He was supposed to go back to New York and when he returned to Budapest everything was supposed to change and he was to become lucky. At least that was what his dream had told him. He stood motionless thinking in front of the curtain, his face bathed in the cold blue light. Perhaps he was lucky and he didn't even know it yet. Maybe in a strange way his not ending up with Ildi was the beginning of something new that he had not yet recognized and that his life would begin to unfold in such a way as to make it obvious that what had happened with her was only a prelude to something better that might still happen to him. But maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was a diversion, obstacle or even a red herring. Or maybe it was nothing at all. That's what he feared most of all. Nothing.

He put his coat back on, deciding to challenge the day. There was no point sitting inside moping. After all, Ildi hadn't really rejected him. She was just taken - and that was different - and he was impatient and rude for expecting so much out of her so soon. He was a man with principles who wasn't afraid to believe in his feelings. He went outside and walked through a series of narrow streets until he reached a small square in the middle of which stood a statue of someone he had never heard of with long hair and a mustache. At the opposite side of the square from where he was standing people were funneling into an inconspicuous side street. He heard a church bell ring off in the distance and the sound of two women shouting from an apartment window hidden from view. He crossed the square and followed the line of people. They seemed to have a look of anticipation on their faces as if something magnificent might be waiting at the end of the street. Perhaps they were happy because it was Gold Christmas, although he wasn't sure that it was or what Gold Christmas really meant. He spotted a man in the distance who was walking with his head down, a newspaper tucked under his arm. For a moment Martin thought he was the same man who had flashed his penis at him the other day, a dubious individual from any standpoint whose identity and motives were still unclear - was it Gabriella's husband? - but when he got closer it was clear it wasn't. This new man was dressed in an elegant gray coat and had long hair neatly wrapped in a pony tail as if he was once a hippie but had since acquired a new dignity with age, only keeping his long hair as an emblem of the person he once was. As he Martin continued to slowly catch up to the man they passed a small cluster of kiosks that were lined in a row in front of what looked like a warehouse. The building seemed out of place with its neatly squared corners and red brick arches, looking more like what you would see in Boston or New York. He followed the man for several blocks until he noticed that the crowd had dissipated and he realized that it hadn't really been a crowd after all, but just a bunch of people who happened to be on the street walking in the same direction for different reasons. When Martin looked back to where the man had been, there was just an empty space. The man had vanished and Martin was now standing alone directly in front of a greengrocers (he knew because it said _Zöldgyümölcs_ , one of the few Hungarian words that stuck in his memory, in wildly elegant script) and across the street from a post office. Behind him, in the direction from which he had just come and a mere block away, the tan-colored building was towering over the cityscape. He hadn't recalled passing it on his way so he concluded he must have been lost in thought. Then he tried to remember what he might have been thinking when he had passed it, but nothing came up. He had been vacantly following a strange man for no reason and that was all. It was as if he had become a mirror of the city and had been emptied of all reflections and thoughts to become nothing but that which was around him. Every person, and every sound and every street corner, seen from every possible angle was at once him-and-not-him. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and noticed that he had forgotten to bring money or his wallet.

He stopped for a quick lunch at a country-style Hungarian eatery and ordered chicken breast with goulash - something he had avoided since he had come to Budapest, as he had always imagined from its ugly-sounding name it was something bland and inedible reserved for the Oliver Twists of Hungary and no one else. The goulash was surprisingly spicy and hearty - not at all what he had expected - but the chicken breast looked like a mirror image pair of human ears in both size and shape, as though the cook had deliberately saved the smallest serving of meat in the house for the next American tourist that was unlucky enough to stumble into their establishment. On his way back to his apartment he stopped and sat down at a park bench. The snow had relented and the air had a crispness and clarity that reminded him of spring. A tall woman with dark hair and thin elegant eyebrows approached him. For a second he thought that perhaps he could ask the woman to join him for coffee. They might get along well and maybe after a long and intimate conversation decide to go back to his place. Then, even though he really didn't expect this to happen, they might even make love.

"Hallo," she said. "Speak English?"

She blinked her eyes evocatively. From her demeanor he could see she was a prostitute.

"Hello," he said. He was engulfed by a cloud of perfume. The words _Asian Fuck Cream_ popped into his head as though from a television commercial for such a product, giving him an immediate erection while also making him feel guilty for leaving his ad campaigns behind for so long.

"You look like a nice boy," she said. She was standing in front of him. She was wearing a dark blue shirt unbuttoned to show the top third of her breasts and black pants. After staring at her pants for a few seconds he realized they were the same style that Ildi wore. He was surprised that it took him so long to make the connection. Somehow they didn't come across as an extension of her being as they might have done only a few days earlier.

"American?"

"Yes," he said.

"I'm a student," she said. "In law. Very hard in Hungary to get the money to finish."

"So I've heard," he said. She stepped forward as if she thought he had given her some subliminal green light for her to make an advance. In actuality he wanted her to go.

"Do you want to come for a drink?"

"No, that's fine," he said, sensing danger. "I'm happy just sitting here."

"Why?" she looked shocked and disappointed. "It's cold. And I'll buy the first drink. We can go over there." She pointed to a place across the square called Mephisto, a joint he had seen before but didn't like because the doormen looked like Mafioso.

"No thanks."

"Don't you like talking to me?"

"Sure I do. Just have a seat and we can talk."

"Why don't you want to come for a drink? Is there some problem?" she asked with sudden aggression and even outrage. She obviously was not used to being turned down. He had heard of shakedowns in Budapest where men were lured into bars by women and beaten up for their money.

"I know a better place," he said.

"No. We have to go there. What is wrong with you?"

"Nothing. I just don't like that place. The doormen bother me."

"They are nice," she said with renewed hope and warmth as though she suddenly realized she could still change his mind. "They won't hurt us. I know them."

"Have a seat," he said obstinately. He gestured to the place beside him and smiled

She clenched her fist together and turned around to walk away. After only two steps she stopped and turned back. He sensed she was gauging his reaction, hoping to find some new opening that had not existed before. But he remained motionless, watching the few flakes of snowfall onto her head.

"You're crazy, do you know that? You're absolutely crazy. I should call the police." He smiled stupidly, trying to think of the right words in his defense. She turned up her nose and stormed off towards the doormen. He watched to make sure she didn't prompt them to come after him. She walked past them and nodded. They looked in his direction for a moment and then went back to talking to one another. He wondered if she was right and he was crazy. What was he doing sitting on a bench by himself in the middle of a strange city half way across the world from his home a week before Christmas?

The next morning he gathered his things together and packed them into his suitcase. The blond man picked him up at the street corner outside the apartment and drove him to the airport. It was still very early and there was a dense granular fog hanging over the roads to the airport. He took a last look at Budapest as they pulled outwards into the country. There was a whole row of apartment blocks he hadn't seen before and a billboard with a greyhound or whippet on it advertising what he guessed was life insurance. When they got to the airport it was virtually empty. He checked in and waited in a small lounge from which he could see the runway through a large picture window. Several planes had just landed and were waiting in line to be taxied off the runway to their respective gates. He didn't have the energy to get up and see if one of them might be his. Instead he just sat there waiting for the appropriate announcement to echo through the airport. If he had learned anything in coming to Budapest it was how to wait.

Two days after he got back to his apartment in New York he found a strange letter in a glossy brown paper envelope sitting in the mailbox. His name and address were scribbled on the front of the envelope as if by someone afraid of something or in a hurry. There was a red and blue stamp on the upper right corner that showed a battle scene from what looked like several hundred years ago. For a moment he thought it was from Ildi and she had finally decided to tell him how she felt about him, but on closer inspection he noticed it was from Germany. He took it inside and opened it up slowly, recalling the time Ildi had opened his letter with her fingernail. Inside was a small note written on pinkish paper in green ink. The handwriting looked familiar but he couldn't place it.

Dear Martin,

I'm sorry to have just vanished from you like I did. There was something I was hiding from you all along. But maybe you already suspected this. I was diagnosed as terminal a few weeks before you came and I didn't want you to know about it. It would have only made our last moments together more strained and difficult than they already were. When I first asked you to make love to me I wasn't trying to open up old doors, but only renew what we once shared so I could bring it with me when I pass. All those years after we divorced I always wished I could have you back. But I knew it would never be and you would never be able to love me the way that I loved you. That was why I left you. In the end, nothing is ever retrievable. Even when we made love last month I wanted it to mean something but somehow it ended up being nothing. I can never be angry with you for cheating on me so long ago, and in some ways I even feel sorry for you. You are a dreamer caught in your own illusions of the past and hopes for the future and will never find true happiness. You can only see things as they relate to you and not in themselves. You will never know the difference between sex, love, and romance and because of this will never find a true friend.

As I get closer to death I get further and further away from the man I called my husband (we were never actually married). I know any minute now he will be in my room bowing at my feet, weeping, mourning. But it is I who should be mourning him. Death detaches you from all confusion and uncertainty. It makes you whole again. It is quickness and resolution. Purity. I can feel it ebbing into me from all sides. Even as I write you everything is speeding up around me. Death is quickness. If only you could see it in all its power and beauty. I feel a new blood flowing through me. I look at the world and only see light. Everything is light, Martin. Everything is light...

Gabriella

Martin put the letter down and looked out the window. The sky had darkened and the street below seemed strangely devoid of light for the time of day. There was a woman draped in an enormous orange parka walking her dog - a toy poodle or terrier, he couldn't really tell - on the sidewalk directly across from the front door of his apartment block. He looked to the right and further upwards towards midtown where he could usually see the skyline but a spot of glare on the window obscured his view. He wondered where the glare was coming from if it was so dark outside and if somebody - perhaps playing a practical joke on him - was shining a bright flashlight on his window just so he would have trouble seeing the skyline. He shut the curtains and inhaled deeply, noticing a smell similar to the one he recognized in his Budapest apartment. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was a low-down womanizer after all and years back when she went cold on him and he started seeking affirmation from other women - or screwing around on her, as she would have it - he really was being a good for nothing cheat. Was love really possible at all or was it really just a way of seeking affirmation for some aspect of yourself which was either in the process of developing or for some reason you feel insecure about and are not yet ready to show the world? And if death was really quickness, what was life? Hiding? He didn't know why this came to mind, but it did. The question formed in his mind and by some unknown process the answer formed around it without any doing of his own. Was the most glorious aspect of life really to keep things concealed from everyone until it was too late to find out the truth and correct it? But if this was true then why had life allowed something important to be revealed to him before he was even dead? It was certainly like Gabriella to lie and deceive and he wouldn't put it past her to do so on her deathbed just to get back at him.

He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was empty except for a bag of apples on the bottom shelf that had somehow staved off the forces of decay. The thought occurred to him that she was actually still alive and that the letter was a way of testing him to see how he measured up in a certain personal quality that she was convinced he might still be lacking. He walked out into the living room and opened up the curtains, folding back their thick blue fabric and resting it on the side of his face. On the street below the woman wearing the orange coat was still pacing back and forth with her dog. He wanted to shout out to her that he thought she was fat and ridiculous and had no right walking her stupid little dog in front of his apartment like she was, but instead he just stood there watching her. The instant he was about to close the curtains the woman stopped and looked up. Although he couldn't tell for sure, he thought she was looking at him. He wondered why she might be looking at him and what she might be thinking if she was. Then he wondered what it would be like to be that woman that very instant as she stared at him so conspicuously. What was she thinking? Would it ever have even crossed her mind that the strange figure she was examining or spying on had just received a letter from a woman who was most likely dead and that he had just returned from Budapest where he was in love with a woman he had never really known? But did he ever _really_ known Gabriella either? Wasn't that why she was always so damning of him? Was it or was it just his guilty conscience, a conscience handed down from childhood - all those moments of clumsy imperfection measured against pretty little girls with perfect hand writing that always seemed to make all the teachers so much happier than he had? Maybe the woman on the street was such a girl when she was a child, but then again maybe she wasn't and only always wished she was.

He let the heavy fabric of the curtain fall past his face and stepped away from the window. He wanted to shout something out or cry - even a tear would do. But nothing came forth from within him and he just stood there looking at the curtains. The room darkened for an instant as if a plane had just flown over the house and cast its shadow. He became aware of himself standing there unable to shout or cry and it was only then that he started to cry. He wiped a tear from his eye and then turned on the lights. It was a tear heavier than any he had ever cried but one he didn't understand and in retrospect wished never came. He sat down on his bed and folded the letter, letting it drop from his hands to the floor when he was finished. It was almost suppertime and that empty feeling he always got when he hadn't eaten all day was starting to set in.

The End

