about it.”
“I know, I know. I said it might be a good idea. It felt like it at the time. What’s her name? Janka? She could go back once in a while to visit. We could pay for her mother to come see her sometimes . . .” She paused. “No, it’s nothing,” she sighed.
“We’re going to need more money,” I said. “There are some additional costs . . .” I had been expecting enthusiasm, and now I was looking for something to jolt her.
“Oh sure,” she said, after a quiet laugh.
“So I’ll go ahead?” I said.
“Yes, you go ahead,” she answered, faster now than before, as if she’d caught up to my excitement. “It’s what you’re there for!”
“There was a sailor. I think this was in 1967 . . .”
“Listen, Judit, I’m trying to talk to you about something.”
“Just a minute,” she smiled, taking the bottle out of my hands after I’d grabbed it, and unscrewing the cap. “The sailor wanted to build a boat so fast its hull would not touch the water. One night he got very drunk and built these wheels, they were like balloons, except with fins, and attached them to his car and drove it into the Tisza . . .”
“We need to talk about Janka.”
“You can have her,” she said, still smiling.
“Have her?”
“I can’t take care of her,” she said. “I don’t take care of her, Mother does, but she’s so old. Janka would be better off without me.”
“Where you live, it’s no place to raise a child. It . . .”
“Your place would be so much better. Filled to the roof with money.”
“Look, if it’s a question of money . . .”
“Always.” She laughed. “It’s always a question of money.”
“You’re her mother,” I said.
She put down the bottle, and came over and looked me in the face, and opened her lips in a way that brought out her teeth. But then something slackened in her, and she grew soft, and patted the place where she’d grabbed my shirt. “Yes,” she said, “I’m her mother,” and then she put the cap back on the bottle and sat on the bed and hugged her knees to her chest.
“You could come out, too . . .” I was safe in saying that. I knew it.
She shook her head. “And do what?” She laughed. “It’s the same out there for me as it is here.” She opened the bottle again. “There was one sailor who made it, only to find that the place he’d arrived was the place from which he’d departed.”
“Could you stop it with the sailor thing? This is important. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened to him?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”
She shrugged, tracing the sailor’s route with a finger along her bare thigh. “It’s why you invited me back to your place, wasn’t it?” I said. “For Janka? It’s why . . .” I looked around the decaying apartment, the missing parquets from the floor, the balloons of yellow water stains on the ceiling. “It’s why we’re always here. Why I read to her.” I shook my head. “You didn’t expect me to believe it was for me, you bringing me here? You could do much better than me. And I’m sure you do.” I knew it was all true, what I was saying, but I still expected her to contradict me.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I could do better than you.” She laughed. “I could do it easily.”
“Why then?”
She waited. “Your wife,” she said. “The way you described her that night on the bridge. She sounds . . .” Judit smiled her widest smile. “She sounds like the one.”
There was a sailor who built a sea of paper. That’s how I think of Judit now, and how she was in those weeks when we were dealing with consulates, agencies, doctors, even civic politicians, all of them scratching their heads, reaching for paperwork, telling us we were going too fast, that we couldn’t get it done, that it would take up to a year, even longer, for the adoption process—that we’d need more money, there were fees and medical tests and records to be ordered and processed, even a number of “gifts and donations” to be made. And when we weren’t doing that, trying to batter a hole through that bureaucracy, then I was in some park, mainly the Városliget, playing with Janka, trying to get the girl used to me, though I think now it was just the attention she loved, attention from anybody, her mother’s blessing floating along with us wherever we went—the circus, the Vidám Park, the Szécsényi Fürdő, the Gerbeaud—almost like a kind of anticipation, a perfume, some hint of a perfect future. Janka would slip her hand into mine, and smile, and ask question after question about Canada, about lakes, about rivers, about birds, about the Arctic, that would echo in me a long time afterwards. “Yes, your mother will come visit.”
“What if you were to just take her?” Judit said to me one day. She was drinking even more heavily then, our hours together more and more quiet as if her interest in me was steadily draining away, the two of us leaning into the pillows, uncorking another bottle. Even her stories of sailors grew shorter and shorter, reduced to single sentences spoken at the very end of the night, when I was almost asleep, not sure if she was speaking or it was a dream. “You could take her, and I could write a letter that would let the two of you travel, and then I could work out the legal things afterwards.” Judit tilted her head to one side. “But I would need the money.”
“How much?” I asked. She shrugged as if she didn’t know. “Twenty-five thousand dollars? That would be enough, wouldn’t it?” I waited. “Thirty thousand?” Judit nodded, and I wrote her a cheque right there, the paper curling on itself like a wave. She cashed it the next morning while I went back to my hotel and, after sitting in front of the phone for what seemed hours, left a message for Anna and Míklós, telling them I was coming home, that Janka was her name.
But that’s not how it worked out. Janka was standing beside her mother at the airport, crying, holding Judit’s hand, the tiny flower-printed suitcase I’d bought for her sitting on the ground beside them. We were ten or fifteen minutes from boarding, and I nodded at Judit over Janka’s head, saying I’d leave them alone for a moment to say goodbye. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, leaning down to stroke Janka’s hair, pointing at the sign for the men’s room, and then, once I was out of sight, I stood there, back against the tiled wall trying to regulate my breathing, glancing out into the crowd to see if they’d followed. Then I was gone, keeping the passengers between me and Judit, moving fast through security, down along ramps and onto the plane, looking over my shoulder every few steps to make sure Janka wasn’t there, still crying, the little suitcase banging against her legs as she tried to catch up to me. Looking out the airplane window I thought I could see Janka in the terminal, back at the boarding gate, pressed against the glass wondering where I was, what happened to our plane, how long it would take before I came back, or whether her mother was still there on the other side of security or gone home, goodbye forever, the airport suddenly large and exitless and all around her.
I watched and watched for that little girl standing by the window,
