by
Elif Batuman
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Ralph and I went to the student center to study for midterms. He was reading an econ textbook and I was studying psycholinguistics. Every time I looked up, I caught the eye of Ham from Constructed Worlds, who was sitting at a nearby table with three other guys.
After a few minutes, Ham came to our table.
“You seem pretty interested by that book,” he said. “What’s it about?”
I tipped it up to show the cover, which was purple and said LANGUAGE in big white letters.
“Man, do I hate language,” Ham said. “If I had it my way, we would all just grunt.”
“If we all did that, the grunting would become a language.”
“Not the way I would do it.”
“Really,” I said.
In reply he made some kind of noise.
Helen, the fiction editor, was petite and cute, with a down-to-earth manner. I could see she wanted me to like her, and I did like her. Without knowing how to demonstrate it through any speech act, I towered over her mutely, trying to project goodwill.
Over lunch, Lakshmi from the literary magazine told me about the preoccupying problem of her life. The preoccupying problem of her life was a boy. He was a senior, like Ivan. Lakshmi and I tried to discuss our shared plight, but the things that happened to us were so different that they barely seemed comparable or commensurable. Noor was from Trinidad and studied literature and economics. He was into theory. Every weekend, Lakshmi went out with him and his friends to clubs or raves—institutions I couldn’t begin to imagine, architecturally or in any other way—where they did ecstasy and talked about postcolonialism and deconstruction. Sometimes Lakshmi would black out and wake up in Noor’s bed, though nothing ever happened. “Nothing happened, of course,” she would say, in a rueful tone that seemed to imply that this outcome was somehow to Noor’s credit.
I could see that my stories made as little sense to Lakshmi as hers did to me. The emails, the walking around, the burial of strawberries. Lakshmi said that I must have been leaving something out.
“For you to assume I’m so heartbroken,” I said. “It is presumptuous.”
“Yeah, I get it.” He sighed. “My friend Imre said I was behaving really badly toward you. He said I was—what was it, it was a funny expression. Leading you on. He said I was leading you on.”
It felt like being hit again, this time in the stomach. Ivan was looking at me. With a sinking feeling, I realized he expected me to say something.
When Vivie apologized for eating slowly, Béla said that eating slowly was good: “If you eat slowly, you can feel the food.”
“You don’t feel food,” Owen said, “you taste it.”
“Yes,” Béla said. “But I also mean more than to taste it.”
“You enjoy it,” suggested Daniel. “If you eat slowly, you enjoy the food.”
“You enjoy,” repeated Béla.
“You relish it,” said Owen. “You savor it.”
“Savior?”
“Not savior—savor. It’s like enjoying something, but more slowly.”
“I don’t know this word,” Béla said, his eyes shining.
I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said “you can feel the food.” That was how Owen would end up with students who said “savor,” while I would end up with students who said “papel iss blonk.”
“Yes, of course!” I noticed then that she was wearing a tiny backpack with both straps on. I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn’t get to decide. At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.
"A HAT, A HAT, A BEAUTIFUL HAT,” she said, pulling me to the stands that sold baskets and other straw goods.
I felt some irrational primal resistance toward letting her buy me a hat, even though it was clear, or should have been clear, that this was the only way we would ever be able to move on with our lives. She picked up a wide-brimmed child’s hat with a ribbon, set it on my head, and started yanking down on the brim, trying to make it fit. “Hat,” she murmured under her breath in Hungarian.
Panic mounted in my body. “I DON’T NEED A HAT!” I shouted in Russian. Everyone turned to look at me. “You know what I like very much, is this,” I said, picking up a tiny misshapen basket.
“I didn’t know you liked baskets,” she said, a bit accusingly. She bought me the basket, and then a little stuffed basset hound that fit inside. The basset hound wore a tragic expression; a plastic heart glued to its front legs read I LOVE YOU in white script.
Left alone, I washed up, changed into the Dr. Seuss shirt, got in bed, and started writing in my notebook. I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back. I wanted to write about it while I could still feel it and see it around me, while the teacups still seemed to be trembling. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened and, just as I had that thought, I saw a dark shape behind the frosted glass and heard a knock on the door.
I dreamed I was sitting in a tiled bathhouse. Late afternoon light poured through a high window, and water was seeping under the door, slowly filling the room, mounting higher and higher. Then the door opened and a wall of water gushed in, and through the same door my brother also came, but it wasn’t my real-life brother, it was Ivan, and I stood up and we embraced. The water was up to our knees. We held on to each other really, really tightly.
“I love you so much,” I said.
“I know—so do I,” he said.
I woke up with tears in my eyes. Sunlight streamed through the window, sparkling off the gilded teacups. I found a disposable camera in a side pocket of my backpack, and snapped a photograph of the teacups, with one handle facing left. At least I would know I hadn’t dreamed the thing about the teacups.
“Do you think it’s going to rain?” I asked.
“Yes. Why?”
My heart quickened. “I don’t know,” I said. Then I realized I wanted it to rain because maybe Ivan and his family would come back to Budapest a day early and Ivan might call me. I knew there were a lot of flaws in this reasoning. But my body didn’t know.
A whole ocean of rain seemed to be pouring out of the sky. We sat under an awning near a hotel parking lot and ate yellow plums. Eventually Rózsa ate one of the cookies I had bought, and I felt happy and proud, like I had successfully fed a shy and proud animal.
Within minutes the sun was blazing as if it didn’t remember a thing.