of manic reconsideration, she smiles slightly in her slightly smiling French way, as if to say, “Oy vey, what a case I am married to.”
I like to eat on the street—frequently, and mostly greasy and unhealthy foods—which accounts for the fact that most of my clothing have grease and/or coffee stains on them, souvenirs of my animalistic habits she claims American washing machines are incapable of eradicating. Most of all, I like to devour greasy Hungarian sausages at stand-up counters in Budapest. She likes to eat only “à table,” quietly, savoring every morsel of, say, pâté with, preferably, a glass of red wine. Among the tastes in life I can truly not abide are pasteque, fennel, and every form of anise, all of which she has rather an affection for.
I am often angry at others, friends, foes, and family alike, and like to hold, and nurse, these angers for as long as is humanly possible, until I can almost feel them eating at my liver, like an earthquake with numerous, sustained aftershocks. She is incapable of sustained anger or hostility and would, I believe, (perhaps already has) forgive me the most egregious deeds and betrayals, an attitude I have no desire to test to its limits. Even in her case, I like to remind her as often as possible of the ways she has disappointed and betrayed me. She, on the other hand, rarely mentions my betrayals and weaknesses.
I never cry, even when I am truly unhappy, yet I have a tendency to grow teary-eyed whenever an athlete experiences some major triumph, or after the last out of the World Series, when the players all rush to the mound and hug each other. She cries easily, even at sentimental movies whose pandering to sentimental feelings she despises.
I will take any kind of pill or medicine anyone recommends in order to relieve pain and discomfort. She prefers “natural” remedies. Although I am not terribly Jewish by religious conviction, I wanted to have our son circumcised when he was born. She felt it to be a pagan ritual tantamount to permanent disfigurement, and began assembling propaganda from various anti-circumcision organizations around the country depicting vast armadas of mutilated children with heavily bandaged penises. She won. She usually wins.
I think she is beautiful, but too thin, and am constantly after her to try and gain weight. She thinks she is less beautiful than I do, but comments frequently about her “beautiful arms.” When she was younger, in California, she wore her hair very short and looked like a kind of postmodern French punktress on her way to the wrong discotheque. Now, I think, she is much more beautiful and womanly, and, like I am, a bit older.
When we met in Ecuador, she had rather gray hair and was wearing purple nylon pants and a yellow sweatshirt. She seemed, at first, more interested in reading her mail than in talking to me, a fact that I soon realized was due more to her shyness—and her passion for her mail—than to lack of interest in me. On the two-hour bus ride between Quito and Otavalo, across the Equator, I slowly began to realize that she was quite beautiful, in an undemonstrative sort of way, and that night, as I way of getting myself into her room and closer to her bed in the hotel where she, her female traveling companion and I were staying, I planned to borrow her toothpaste. But she wasn’t, I discovered, as shy as she seemed, and it turned out I didn’t need to do that. The next morning I remember her companion bringing two glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice to the room, along with coffee, and then our walking, hand in hand, above the town of Otavalo, where we finally sat in a small restaurant and her friend Annick took our picture. I looked very happy in the photo, though not too handsome. She looked happy too, and quite lovely.
We stayed in several very lovely, and inexpensive, small Ecuadorian hotels during those days, and I remember, not even a week after not having to borrow her toothpaste, looking down at her one night (or was it afternoon?) and saying, “I think I love you.” “I think I love you too, Gringo,” she replied. She used to call me “Gringo” in those days.
I remember talking to her an awful lot back then, and thinking to myself how attentively, and compassionately, she always listened. I myself am not such a good listener, except on occasion, so that—along with the sweet way she always said “uh huh, uh huh . . .” and “yes . . . yes” when I was telling her a story—it made a real impression on me. Back then, I don’t remember her being nearly as cold, or quite as thin . . . but, then again, we were in love and in Ecuador.
Sometimes, now, when I realize we have been together for more than eight years and have a seven-year-old son, I think that this is one of the major miracles of my life . . . and I’m sure she does also. I was so romantic then, that night in Otavalo, and so was she when, hardly a week later, she got on a plane from Quito to the United States and followed me to Boston. I remember her calling me, as we had planned, but suddenly having a sense that the call wasn’t quite long distance. When she told me she was standing at a pay telephone across the street at Porter Square, I ran down the stairs, not even bothering to button my shirt or pull up my zipper, and took her into my arms and carried her halfway up to my fourth-floor, rent-controlled apartment.
I was stronger in those days, and healthier, and so, maybe, was she. We were not so young, but very much in love, and there was a scent of laundry, somehow, wafting through my windows as we made love, on a mattress located on my study floor, for the first time in the United States of America.
Now, as I write this, I am sitting in Israel, and we will soon be in Paris, then in Provence, and then back in the United States of America, the only country whose language I have truly mastered. I no longer live in that rent-controlled apartment and that mattress, I am quite sure, is no longer on the floor. She is still beautiful, though—perhaps even more so—with her knowing eyes and beautiful smile and lovely French voice, and she is still, as a friend of mine once described her, “une chouette”: an owl.
When Aunt Etus’s son’s dog, Bori, bit Kormány Lajos in his right leg at the vineyards of Szent György Hill, it seemed only logical to the bored and unemployed men of the village—Gyula, Roland, Feri, and Kormány himself—that the dog had to be shot.
Because Etus’s son, Árpi, was a large man, however, known to have a bad temper, especially when drunk, self-preservation dictated a wiser course: namely, to shoot Etus’s small puli, Fekete, instead. So the four men, after borrowing Uncle Dönci’s old Hungarian World War I police rifle, grabbed the “innocent looking dog from Etus’s front yard” by the ears, bound him into an oversized potato sack, and took him up into the back of Gyula’s winemaking house, where they fired a round of six cartridges into the helpless animal, who yelped and twitched when the first bullet entered his abdomen, and then moved no more.
The dog, to be sure, was quite dead after the shooting, and it seemed to many a gratuitous bit of cruelty when the body, blown into small bits, was left on Etus’s doorstep. Though everyone in the village realized that Kormány had been involved, blame for the heinous event somehow began to center around the illiterate and partially deaf Feri, who had, for years, been spending his days, from late morning to well after midnight, ensconced at the local pub, and whose appetite for cheap pálinka followed by large glasses of Balaton Olaszrizling was as extensive as his vocabulary was small.
It was not that Feri was considered cruel: he was universally acknowledged, rather, to be simply stupid, and like most stupid men, easily prone to the role of follower. Moreover, it had long been suspected that Roland and Gyula, the more robust and mischievous of the unemployed quartet, exerted an undue influence over the hapless lad, who—much to Kormány’s embarrassment—was a distant cousin of his as well. Feri’s mental infirmities, it had been suspected, were the logical by-product of the too frequent marriages and procreations among cousins and near-cousins that village life inevitably spawned.
In many ways the most innocent of the foursome, Feri spent his increasingly scarce hours away from the pub collecting, and meticulously inventorying, old Elvis Presley and Beatles albums, the one
