Szentendre
When I was a college freshman, I had a terrible crush on a senior called Ivan, a math major originally from Budapest. That summer, Ivan got me a job through an organization that sent American students to teach English in Hungarian villages. Ivan would be spending the summer with his parents; the idea was that we would see each other on weekends. Shortly after we had made these arrangements, I discovered that Ivan actually had another girlfriend, the whole time he was seeing me.
By that time it was too late not to go to the Hungarian village, so I went. For the first two weeks, I lived with a kind family who drove me to see all the local historic sites, most of which commemorated victories over my Ottoman ancestors. I taught English seven hours a day. I didn’t call Ivan once.
In the third week I was sent, along with thirty village children, to a camp in a beautiful historic town on the Danube. All the female staff slept in a single cabin: me, a young English teacher, and five gym teachers. That Saturday evening, the gym teachers organized a special entertainment: a boys’ leg contest.
“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music came on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up. Identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. Gripped by panic, I stared at the form on which I was to rate the legs on a scale from one to ten. Nothing, in either my life experience or my studies, had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally, the English teacher, appearing to understand my predicament, whispered to me her own scores. I wrote them on the form, and pretended I had thought of them myself.
The next day, Sunday, I was alone in the cabin, reading, when someone came crashing through the door: it was the winner of the boys’ leg contest, a fourteen-year-old daredevil named Gábor, his prizewinning left leg covered in blood.
“Can you help me?” he asked, and handed me a first-aid kit.
I had just managed to identify the bottle of iodine when we were joined by two gym teachers.
“Lukács Gábor, you leave the American girl alone!” they shouted and, steering the boy away, disinfected and bandaged his leg in a visibly efficient fashion.
The English teacher appeared at my side. “He vants something from you,” she observed darkly.
When nobody was looking, I fled to the nearest pay phones and called Ivan. Two hours later, he and his mother drove up in the family Opel with a canoe tied to the roof: his mother thought it would cheer me up to spend some time on the water. “If you’re wearing a bathing suit, you can take off your shirt,” she told me helpfully. Ivan and I paddled that canoe for seven hours, all the way back to Budapest, where we missed the docking place and ended up moored in some kind of a swamp. Ivan went to find a pay phone. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” he said.
He was gone for two hours, which I spent guarding the canoe. From whom? By what means?
At one point two policemen rode up on mopeds, and tried to question me in Hungarian. The only question I understood was whether I was homeless. “Do you have a house?” they said loudly. One of them put his hands over his head in the shape of a pointed roof.
“My friend went to the telephone,” I said. To my surprise, they seemed satisfied by this explanation. “Good, good,” they said, and rode away on their mopeds.
Just when I had taken out a pen and paper and begun to write a note, in the dark, about how I was incapable of guarding the canoe anymore, I heard the approach of pounding footsteps. Ivan collapsed to the ground beside me, damp, breathless, his shirt torn and muddy. He had been chased several kilometers cross-country by a wild dog.
When I got back to camp, late the following afternoon, I was greeted at the gate by the English teacher, closely followed by the bandaged boy leg champion.
“You have been . . . loafing,” said the English teacher accusingly.
“Your hair looks cool,” Gábor said.
“No it doesn’t!” the English teacher snapped.
