“Plaster”

There’s some sort of holdup. Every day, they expect to fly out, and every day they are told it will be “another twenty-four hours.” They’re staying in a hotel with a swimming pool.

It’s not really hot enough for swimming. It’s not quite pool weather. It’s, like, seventy-five or something. Still, they spend most of the day poolside—there isn’t anything else to do.

The plastic sun loungers next to the pool face those towers—those three towers that look like spikes pointing at the sky, with a few blue spheres impaled on two of them.

István opens his eyes and sees them there, in the middle distance, pointing at the empty sky.

Usually in the afternoon a sort of light sleep comes. Sounds in a spaceless world take on an abstract quality.

Sparrows.

A passing helicopter.

Voices at different distances.

Something else, he isn’t sure what.

Sparrows.

He opens his eyes and finds things different. The shadows in different places. The quality of the light not quite the same, softer, more opalescent, and part of the pool in the shade, making the water there look flat and deep.

You want to have your last swim while the sun still has enough strength to warm you up again afterward. So at around four he stands and approaches the edge of the pool.

For a while he lingers there, with a sad feeling.

Then he dives in, and the water sloshes and gurgles in the drains at the side.

•

They have these vouchers they can use in the hotel restaurant, which always has a buffet. They eat all their meals there. There’s a weird selection of things.

What there isn’t is alcohol.

There isn’t any alcohol anywhere.

Once or twice they go out into the city. There isn’t anything to do there, so they soon return to the hotel.

In the evening there’s the sound of the mosques or whatever.

They start up all over the place, not at exactly the same time but sort of overlapping, so that the over-all effect is slightly chaotic.

There’s something about it that he likes, though.

The air seems to vibrate.

When they stop it’s not all at exactly the same time, either. They drop out one by one until there’s only one left, and then that one stops, too, and it’s almost dark, and you can hear the sound of the swifts, the shrieks as they zoom around with what seems like incautious speed in the lingering twilight. Quite often he’s sitting outside at that point, smoking a cigarette, with the swifts shrieking in the air around him. They skim the surface of the pool, he notices, to take a drink. It must taste horrible—the water is strongly chlorinated.

He stubs out his cigarette in one of the sand-filled ashtrays and takes the elevator up to the fifth floor.

He and Norbi are sharing a room.

•

At supper on Thursday word goes around that they’ll be flying out tonight. They pack their stuff and wait in the lobby, still half expecting to be told that it was a false alarm. That has already happened twice.

Buses arrive, though.

There’s a murmur of excitement when they see them through the front of the hotel. These two white buses with nothing on them to identify whose they are.

For quite a long time after that nothing happens. The buses just wait there, with their Pakistani drivers smoking next to them.

Then finally the major arrives and they board the buses, which set off through the mild, quiet streets of the city.

Facing them from the front, holding on to two seats to maintain his balance, the major says that they’re on their way to Ali Al Salem.

They won’t be flying home, though.

He tells them that they’ll be flying to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

“From there there’ll be transport to Tata. I’m sorry, lads,” he says. “At least we’re going home tonight.”

There’s some problem with the plane, though. It doesn’t leave until the next morning.

They spend the night lying on the floor at Ali Al Salem, using their packs as pillows.

There’s a table with sandwiches wrapped in plastic, baskets of Mars and Snickers bars, glass bottles of soft drinks, and tokens for the coffee machine.

There’s also a cigarette machine.

Using his last Kuwaiti coins, with their Arabic writing and pictures of sailboats, he buys a few packs to take home.

•

It’s already midmorning when they walk across the asphalt to the plane. The plane is painted pale gray and like the buses doesn’t have any markings on it to show whose it is.

It’s an American plane, though. They know that.

For one thing, there are Americans on it, too.

They mostly arrive in the morning, the Americans, looking like they’ve had a proper night’s sleep. They’re noisy and high-spirited.

“Where you guys from?” one of them asks.

“Hungary,” István says.

“Oh, yeah?” the American says.

“Yeah,” István says.

It’s slightly cloudy. When the sunshine filters through, it’s soft. If the weather here were always like this, it would be O.K.

They leave their packs on the asphalt to be loaded and walk up the metal steps.

There isn’t assigned seating. It’s a free-for-all. He sits with Norbi and Balázs, and they talk about the night out they’re planning to have when they get home. It’s something they’ve been planning for a long time now, something they’ve sort of promised themselves—this massive night out, their first night home.

•

He sleeps on the plane.

He wakes up and looks around.

Everything seems exactly the same as it did when he fell asleep.

Most of the others are sleeping, too.

From somewhere there’s the sound of music leaking out of headphones.

More than half of the window blinds are pulled down, including the one next to him. He lifts it a little. Strong light pushes in so that it’s painful, and he slides the blind down again. It’s impossible to tell from the quality of the light what time of day it is, wherever they are. It is day, though, and not night, even though it feels like it should be night.

•

They’re waiting at the American airbase in Germany. The Americans who were on the plane with them have disappeared. It’s just them, the Hungarians, about a hundred of them, waiting under fluorescent lighting with darkness outside the windows. There aren’t enough seats for everyone. Some people are sitting on the floor. The officers went off somewhere as soon as they arrived. They come back later with a cart with sandwiches on it. The officers don’t eat from the cart themselves; they seem to have eaten already. The men mob the cart, though. They’re very hungry; there wasn’t any food on the plane. While they eat, the major tells them that the buses will be there in about two hours. “They’re on their way from Tata as I speak,” he says, and there’s an ironic cheer.

István, Norbi, and Balázs are sitting on the floor with their sandwiches. They’re talking again about the night out they’re planning. “We need to get some speed or coke or both,” István says.

“Yeah,” Norbi says.

“Do you know anyone?” István asks.

“At Tata?”

“Yeah,” István says.

“Not really,” Norbi says.

“You?” István asks Balázs.

Balázs, eating, shakes his head.

•

The walk from the building to the buses waiting in the darkness outside, their engines shedding a strong diesel smell, is the first time that he has felt real cold in more than a year.

It’s quite a pleasant feeling, the clean sting of it on his face, the unfamiliar sight of his own breath.

The light inside the bus is dim orange, almost brown.

He takes a window seat a few rows back from the toilet, and balls up his jacket to use as a pillow.

•

He wakes from a shallow sleep to find himself looking at a European landscape. Churches with onion domes. Wet green fields. It’s weird to be back here.

•

When the buses arrive at Tata, about four hours later, the men disperse to their allocated rooms. István dumps his pack and then sits on the toilet, and after that has a shower and a shave. He has this meeting with a colonel. He puts on his dress uniform, after ironing the shirt with the communal iron in the room at the end of the corridor.

“You managed to get some sleep?” the colonel asks him.

“Yes, sir,” István says.

“We hoped to get you boys back here last night,” the colonel says.

“There’s a fifty-fifty chance these lab results are yours.”

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István’s eyes are focussed on a point beyond the colonel’s shoulder.

“Yes, sir,” he says.

Behind the colonel is a window, beads of rain partially obscuring a view of the car park.

“So you’ve decided not to do another five years?” the colonel asks.

“No, sir,” István says.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re a brave man,” the colonel says, looking at a paper on his desk.

“Thank you, sir.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“There are support programs that you can take advantage of,” the colonel says. “I suggest you do so.”

“Yes, sir,” István says.

His five-year enlistment contract doesn’t actually expire until the end of January, but he’s owed enough leave to mean that this is basically it.

“Good luck,” the colonel says. “With whatever you do do.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And please remember that until the end of next month you’re still a member of the armed forces.”

István keeps his eyes fixed on the point beyond the colonel’s shoulder.

“Yes, sir.”

“Conduct yourself accordingly.”

“Yes, sir.”

After leaving the colonel’s office, he makes his way to the men’s room on the first floor.

The private is already there when he arrives. They spoke on the phone earlier.

They go into one of the stalls, and the private takes out the stuff. István and Norbi asked around as soon as they arrived that morning and his name was the one that was mentioned most often. He sells István a few wraps of speed.

“Have you got any coke?” István asks him.

“No,” the private says. “Not now.”

“O.K.,” István says.

•

Norbi’s brother has an apartment in Budapest. They arrive there in the middle of the afternoon, after taking the train from Tata, and then the metro. Norbi has a key to the apartment. His brother isn’t there. He works in England or somewhere.

“What does he actually do?” István asks.

“I don’t know,” Norbi says.

“He must have money,” István says. “Look at this place.”

Norbi shrugs.

He’s cutting lines of speed on the black marble worktop.

István sits on a leather sofa, using an empty Red Bull can as an ashtray.

Without the speed and the Red Bull to keep him going he probably would have fallen asleep already. He didn’t sleep much on the overnight journey from Germany. He fell asleep properly only once, he thinks. That was toward dawn. He must have slept for a while, though, because when he woke up it was broad daylight and there was a wet patch on his T-shirt where he’d drooled.

He stands up from the sofa to snort his line from the black marble surface. He feels the drug trickle down the back of his throat with a warm phlegmy sensation. He sniffs and rubs his nose.

“What time is it?” he asks Norbi.

He has no idea what time it is.

He keeps forgetting where he is as well. There was a moment, sitting there on the sofa, when he seriously thought he was still in Kuwait.

“Five,” Norbi says.

István has a look around the apartment. It has an empty, unlived-in feeling.

Though there’s furniture there don’t seem to be any personal possessions.

There’s some sort of huge Jacuzzi thing in the bathroom, with steps down into it.

He breaks open another Red Bull from the otherwise empty fridge and lights another Philip Morris.

“You hungry?” Norbi asks him.

“No,” he says.

•

He feels edgy as they troop down the stairs, which are massive and made of stone. Their feet and voices echo. They’re making a lot of noise, an unnecessary amount of noise, shouting at one another, pushing and shoving, laughing loudly at stupid things.

Then they’re in the street, walking along in the early evening darkness and the sound of the traffic. They have a few beers in a sports bar, the first place they see. There’s soccer on a screen. Toward the end there’s a punch-up, with several players involved. One player is sent off. Soon after that the match ends and they go to the men’s room to do more lines. They take turns in the stall and snort the speed from the plastic top of the toilet. They’ve been looking forward to this evening for a long time. It was something they talked about a lot at Camp Babylon—this first night out when they got home. Just a normal night out, essentially. That’s what they wanted. And that’s what this is. Except there are moments when the very normality of it feels like a sort of outrage.

•

They have rum in some sort of rum place. It seems like a rum place. The bar has a thatched roof that’s presumably supposed to look like something on the beach of a Caribbean island. The whole décor of the place is trying to get that vibe. They aren’t that aware of it. It’s quite dark in there. The rum-based cocktails have little paper umbrellas in them.

“These things actually work,” Balázs says, closing and opening one with a small papery flapping noise.

“Why don’t you take it with you?” Norbi suggests. “It’s raining, isn’t it?”

Balázs holds it up as if it were an actual umbrella. They laugh at that.

It seems very funny at the time.

Out in the street Balázs is still doing it, he’s still holding it up as if it were an actual umbrella, and they’re still laughing at it.

They wind up at Morrison’s and start talking to two foreign girls. One of the girls is quite tall, the other quite short. “Where are you from?” István asks them.

“Norway,” the taller one says.

He tells them they served alongside some Norwegian soldiers in Iraq.

“What were their names?” the taller girl asks.

“Sven,” István says. “There was Sven and . . .” He turns to Norbi.

“Olav?” Norbi suggests.

“Yeah, Olav,” István says. “Sven and Olav.”

“Where were they from?” the taller girl asks. The taller girl does most of the talking.

“Where were they from?” István says.

“Yeah.”

He turns to Norbi again. Norbi just laughs.

“Oslo, is it?” István says. He starts to laugh himself.

“Did these guys even exist?” the taller girl asks, smiling at him.

“Yeah, I swear,” István says.

They’re speaking English. His English improved a lot in Iraq. It was the language they used to talk to the other foreign troops they were stationed with.

Norbi asks the girls if they want another drink.

They’re drinking vodka Cokes, they say, after exchanging a look.

While Norbi takes care of that, István talks to them about what they are doing there. “You on vacation?” he asks.

“No, we live here,” the taller girl says.

“You live here?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you live here?”

“We study here.”

“You study here?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you study?”

“Medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“Yeah.”

“You must be very intelligent,” István says.

“Yeah, very,” the taller girl says, and laughs.

When Norbi gets back with the drinks, he asks the girls if they want to do some speed.

They look at each other and sort of shrug and then say that they do.

They go to the toilet with them to take it, to the men’s.

First Norbi goes with the taller girl.

Then István goes with the shorter girl.

Then Balázs goes by himself.

“Is he O.K.?” the shorter girl asks when Balázs goes.

“I think so. Why?” István asks her.

It’s true that Balázs didn’t look well.

“He’s drunk,” István explains.

They have a sort of rapport now, he and the shorter girl, after their minute of proximity in the toilet.

“Did you kill anyone?” she asks.

She’s drunk, too.

Even though he’s drunk himself, she’s drunk enough that he thinks, She’s drunk, which must mean she’s even drunker than he is, he thinks.

“In Iraq, I mean,” she says.

“Yeah, I know,” he says.

“So?” she says.

“I’m not allowed to tell you that,” he says.

Then he says, “No, I’m joking. I didn’t.”

The speed has made her more talkative and she asks him some other things, and then Norbi’s there with her friend saying why don’t they go back to his place.

They wait near the entrance while the girls sort themselves out.

“Where’s Balázs?” Norbi asks, after they’ve been standing there for a minute or so.

“Balázs?” István says.

“Yeah.”

“Dunno,” István says.

“When d’you last see him?” Norbi asks.

“He went to do some speed, didn’t he?”

“Yeah?”

“Didn’t he?”

They have a look for him, and István finds him semiconscious in the men’s room, sitting on the toilet though with his trousers still on and his face pressed against a wall plastered with old stickers promoting d.j. nights at Morrison’s and other venues.

“Wake up, Balázs,” he says. “We’re going.”

Balázs opens his eyes.

He seems to have been sick. There’s some fresh vomit on the floor anyway.

“Wake up. We’re going,” István says.

Balázs looks like he doesn’t understand what István is saying.

“We’re going,” he says again.

•

They walk to the apartment, which isn’t far away. Balázs falls over twice, and István has to help him. When they arrive, Norbi tries to remember the code that opens the front door of the building.

“You can’t remember the code to your own place?” the taller girl says, laughing little puffs of steam.

“Yeah, of course,” Norbi says.

Eventually he works it out and they go upstairs and he manages to get some music playing and finds a bottle of vodka and cuts some more lines of speed.

The taller girl has an Apple iPod and seems to know how to plug it into Norbi’s brother’s expensive sound system. “What is that?” István asks.

“It’s a fucking iPod,” Norbi says.

“What’s an iPod?” István asks.

“What’s an iPod?” Norbi says.

“Yeah,” István says.

“What’s an iPod?”

“Yeah.”

“You seriously don’t know?”

“No,” István says. “What is it?”

The girls are laughing at them, and in fact they’re deliberately hamming it up to amuse them.

Then the girls put on their music very loud and start to dance.

István and Norbi dance with them, mostly making a sort of joke of it, which seems to amuse them, too.

After a while the girls go to find the toilet together and come back asking if that’s actually a huge Jacuzzi in the bathroom.

“Yeah,” Norbi says, looking up from the black marble counter.

“Does it work?” the taller girl asks.

“Yeah, sure.”

He asks if they want to try it. He has cut the last of the speed, and he passes the taller girl the banknote they’re using to snort it. “You want to try it?” he says again.

They don’t answer—they’re busy at the counter.

“Actually, I don’t even know if it works,” Norbi says.

After they’ve snorted the last of the speed, they go to the bathroom and Norbi tries to make the Jacuzzi work. For a while he presses buttons and there are beeping sounds. Nothing else happens, though, except that the tub fills with hot water.

“Is this actually your apartment?” the taller girl asks him.

At that moment the Jacuzzi starts.

They stand there watching it go glub-glub-glub.

“Want to try it?” Norbi says.

There’s some discussion and the girls agree to do it if István and Norbi go out of the room while they get undressed and come back only when they’re already in the water.

István and Norbi wait outside.

After a few minutes István knocks on the door. He makes eye contact with Norbi. “Can we come in?” he calls.

The girls are both in the Jacuzzi, sitting down low to hide their breasts under the surface foam.

Norbi asks them if it’s nice.

They nod.

They seem maybe a bit nervous.

The Jacuzzi has underwater lights that keep changing color—they go from blue to purple to red to blue again.

There are no other lights on in the room now.

“Are you going to join us?” the taller girl asks.

“Of course,” István says, his eyes still adjusting to the semidarkness.

“And I have some special requests from my furry friend.”

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He and Norbi start to undress.

“I like your tattoos,” the shorter girl says when István has stripped down to his briefs.

“Yeah, thanks,” he says.

Feeling slightly self-conscious, he slides off his briefs and steps into the water.

When he’s sitting on the submerged ledge, the smaller girl moves over so that she’s next to him and looks more closely at the tattoos on his shoulders and arms.

“They’re really good,” she says.

“Thanks,” István says again.

“Yours are cool, too,” she says to Norbi as he, also naked now, takes his place in the tub.

“You got any?” István asks her. She shakes her head.

Her taller friend is on the far side of the tub. Her face is flushed from the heat of the water, and she seems to be keeping her distance from them.

She also shakes her head when István asks if she has any tattoos.

There’s a definite tension.

Nobody seems to know what to do or say next.

István is about to say something just to keep things from getting awkward when the smaller girl says, “I’m too hot.”

She stands up and steps out.

At first the others seem unsure how to deal with this development. They just sit there in the water as she moves around the room looking at things, her wet skin shining in the dim and constantly changing light as the last traces of the tub’s spume slide off her. She has a pierced navel and no pubic hair.

“Nice body,” István says after a while, feeling again that someone should probably say something.

“Thanks,” she says without looking at him.

A minute later she’s sucking his dick while Norbi fucks her from behind.

The taller girl is still in the Jacuzzi.

She hasn’t moved at all.

István is sort of half aware of her, that she’s still just sitting there in the water on her own, looking straight ahead as if nothing were happening.

•

The next day, in the afternoon, he takes a train to the town where his mother lives. Deer flee across flooded fields. In the distance are low hills the color of smoke.

He is sitting at one of the tables with four seats around it, and he sees the passenger diagonally opposite him notice that the health warning on his Philip Morris packet, which is lying on the table between them, is in Arabic. A flicker of perplexity passes over the person’s face.

It’s already nearly dark.

The last daylight flashes from the standing water on the fields and then instead of the dusky landscape it’s his own face in the window, or a transparent, shadowy version of it.

He realizes that the things that are so important to him—the things that happened in Iraq, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again—they just aren’t important here.

Those things have no reality here.

That’s what it feels like.

It makes him feel slightly insane or something, to have those things inside him, when they aren’t real here.

Next to his head hangs a rough blue curtain with an ingrained smell of cigarette smoke.

He’s in the smoking carriage.

He lights another Kuwaiti Philip Morris with the end of the last one and then presses out the old one in the little metal ashtray with the clinky lid.

When he went to Iraq he smoked ten to twenty cigarettes a day.

Now it’s forty.

•

His mother pushes the pan of székelykáposzta toward him. “Have some more,” she says.

“Thanks,” he says.

They’re sitting at the small square table in her kitchen.

The kitchen is still the same as he remembers it, in every detail. Except there’s the postcard he sent her from Kuwait attached to the fridge. A picture of those towers with the blue spheres on them. He sent it on his way out to Iraq, about a year ago. They spent a few days in Kuwait then as well.

He spoons more of the stewed cabbage and meat onto his plate. Székelykáposzta is his favorite, has been ever since he was a kid.

His mother knows that.

She stands up and saws off another slice of soft white bread.

“There you are,” she says.

He takes it from her.

She’s drinking red wine. He said he didn’t want any.

He asked her if she had any Coke.

She didn’t.

“So what was it like?” she says.

He shrugs.

There’s the sound of the phone from the other room.

“Sorry,” she says.

She goes through to answer it.

While she’s gone he unsticks the postcard from the fridge and looks at what he wrote a year ago. He looks at it with the feeling that it was written by someone else. It’s very hot here. I’m fine. They weren’t really allowed to write anything else.

He sticks the postcard to the fridge again.

Also on the fridge is a cutting from the local newspaper. It’s about him. About how he was given a medal for what he did.

His mother comes back.

“You had enough?” she asks, indicating his plate.

He nods and says, “O.K. if I smoke?”

“Go on, then,” she says, and opens the window. “I know your friend was killed,” she says, putting the sour cream back in the fridge. “It was on the news.”

“Sure.”

“That he was killed,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“What happened? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” he says.

“O.K., then,” she says. “I’m sorry anyway.”

“I know,” he says.

He lies on the bed in his old room, smoking a cigarette.

He wonders why he didn’t want to talk to her about it.

Usually he talks to her about things.

She’s the person he talks to about things.

So why didn’t he want to talk to her about this?

There’s this feeling that she wouldn’t understand something important about it, something so important that the whole exercise of talking about it would seem futile, or worse.

The strange thing is, he isn’t exactly sure what that something is, the thing that she wouldn’t understand.

In a way it’s all of it.

The whole thing, what it was like. She wouldn’t understand that.

And without that—

There’s a knock on the door.

“Yeah?” he says.

“You O.K.?” her voice says.

“Yeah,” he says.

She opens the door a little. “I’m going to bed,” she says.

“O.K.,” he says. “Good night.”

“Good night,” she says. “Sleep well.”

“Yeah.”

•

Toward the end of January, his mother says she might have found him a job.

“What?” he asks.

“At the winery,” she says.

“Them again? They didn’t take me last time.”

“You weren’t a war hero then,” she says.

The winery is in a village about thirty-five kilometres south of the town, almost on the Croatian border.

His mother drives him there for the interview.

She has a car now, a secondhand Suzuki Ignis.

The morning they drive down there the countryside looks totally dead. The only signs of life are the faint plumes of smoke above some of the single-story houses when they pass through a village.

The winery is in a more substantial village than most of the others in the area. There’s even a sort of café, where his mother sits while he does the interview.

The owner of the winery talks to him. He’s a red-faced, middle-aged man. He mostly asks him about Iraq, what that was like.

“So probably you want to know a bit about the job,” he finally says.

“Sure,” István says.

The winery owner explains that it would involve managing the warehouse—keeping track of deliveries and shipments.

“O.K.,” István says.

“So you’ll take it?”

“Sure,” István says.

They shake hands.

His mother is having a second coffee and doing a sudoku puzzle when he gets back to the café.

“How did it go?” she asks.

“I got the job,” he says.

“I knew you would,” she says. “How much did they offer you?”

“You mean money?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“You don’t know?”

“He didn’t say.”

“And you didn’t ask?”

“No,” he says.

“You’re so innocent,” she says.

•

The work at the winery is essentially a matter of keeping records. Since Hungary is now in the European Union, the winery buys its new bottles from Italy. They are cheaper and better, the owner says. They arrive on a truck every second Tuesday, tens of thousands of them. It takes a while to unload, and as well as keeping track of the numbers István has to make sure that they aren’t damaged. With so many, there are always a few that are cracked or whatever, and that’s O.K., the owner says, as long as it is only a few.

When the bottles are full of wine they go out to shops around the country and to restaurants mostly in Budapest.

Again, he has to make sure that the shipments are properly recorded.

One of his colleagues also lives in the town and drives down to the winery every day. He takes István, and István pays him some money toward the gas. Every morning he shows up in his old red Citroën AX.

When István first starts working at the winery, it’s icy and only just beginning to get light when his colleague shows up.

By April, though, the sun is already above the trees between the housing estate and the road, and the trees are in leaf, and the air is quite mild when he goes down the concrete stairs and leaves the building.

The drive takes about forty minutes. His colleague has been working at the winery for a long time, and he seems to assume that István will do the same. He says things like “After you’ve been here a few years” and “You wait till you’ve been here as long as I have.”

István mostly just sits there looking out at the countryside, which is quite picturesque, especially now, in spring, and enjoying the taste of the cigarette smoke in his mouth. The wind ripples at the windows, which are down a few centimetres to let the smoke out.

To the extent that he thinks about it at all, he thinks of the job at the winery as a very temporary thing, something he will do for a few months maybe, just until he finds something else.

Except that he isn’t actually trying to find anything else.

It’s like he’s waiting for something else to find him. Or not even that. He isn’t really thinking about the future at all.

When he gets home in the afternoon he walks up the stairs of the building and forgets about all that, about work and the future and everything.

He looks in the fridge.

He smokes on the balcony.

He watches TV—the news, or some quiz show.

He pours himself a glass of Coke.

His mother makes them some food.

And then it’s the next morning again, and he’s standing in front of the building waiting for the old red Citroën to arrive.

•

It’s the Pentecost long weekend, in late May.

On Monday afternoon he’s lying on his bed, smoking a cigarette. When he’s finished it he stubs it out in the ashtray.

He doesn’t know why he does what he does next. Something wells up in him. It feels as purely physical and involuntary as throwing up.

There’s a surprisingly loud noise, and the door has a splintery dent in it now.

For a while he doesn’t feel anything in his hand, but when he tries to take another cigarette with it he can’t.

He uses the other one.

Yeah, fuck, his right hand hurts a lot.

It hurts so much suddenly that he needs to do something.

In the kitchen, using his left hand, he opens the freezer and pulls out a bag of peas.

He sits at the kitchen table with the frozen peas on his right hand.

He’s sweating weirdly heavily, he notices. His shirt is sticking to him.

The peas seem to be helping, and he takes them to his bed and lies there on his back with his right hand on his chest, and the peas on his hand.

He’s shivering now even though it’s warm, and when he looks at his hand again half an hour later it’s about twice its normal size and dark red. It’s also hurting more than ever. He should probably show it to a doctor, he thinks.

Still heavily sweating, he leaves the apartment with his shoelaces flapping around undone and starts down the stairs.

The nearest hospital isn’t far.

He shows his hand to someone in the entrance area and they tell him where to wait—it’s a wide, windowless corridor with metal seats down the sides and another two rows of them back to back in the middle. All the seats are taken so he stands next to the vending machine. It’s noisy in the corridor, with so many people there. There are some doors with numbers on them—though the numbers don’t seem to make any sort of sequential sense—and every so often one of the doors opens from the inside and some of the people who are in the corridor press in around the person who opened it, usually a middle-aged woman in green hospital clothes whose expression seems designed to deter inquiries. Sometimes, though not always, she says a name and one of the people waiting there is admitted to the room. After he has seen that happen a few times, he understands that he’s supposed to make himself known to the woman as well, and the next time she opens the door he pushes his way to the front and shows her his hand and without saying anything she adds his name to a list.

Finally his name is called, and he’s admitted to the room behind her. The room seems very quiet and peaceful after the noise and tension of the corridor. There’s the woman in medical green and a bearded young man in a white coat who’s presumably a doctor. He’s no older than István and possibly younger. He asks what the problem is and István shows his inflated hand. “O.K.,” the doctor says.

“I’m not sure if it’s broken or what,” István tells him.

“Oh, it’s broken,” the young doctor says, with a laugh. “What happened?”

István says he punched something.

The doctor waits for him to elaborate.

“A door,” István says, feeling ashamed.

When he doesn’t add anything further, the young doctor says, “O.K.”

Something about him irritates István. Maybe it’s the way that he’s smiling. Or maybe it’s just that he’s the same age as István and already a doctor. “Does it hurt?” the doctor asks.

“Yes,” István says.

“A lot?”

“Quite a lot.”

“It’s really good, and I’m not just saying that because you’ll get totally depressed and make my life miserable if I sound even the slightest bit negative.”

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“Have you taken any painkillers?”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“No, I haven’t.”

The doctor asks the woman in green for some codeine, and she gives the white pill to István with a small paper cone of water.

“Thanks,” István says.

When he has swallowed the pill, he returns the empty cup to her and she drops it in a bin.

“We’ll need an X-ray,” the doctor says while that’s happening.

He says some technical-sounding things to the woman in the green clothes, and she writes out a slip, which she hands to István.

The doctor tells him to take it to the radiology department upstairs and wait there.

•

He waits about an hour for the X-ray, and once it’s done he waits another hour in the noisy corridor downstairs to see the doctor again.

“So,” the young doctor says, smiling at him when it’s finally his turn. “It’s not a simple fracture.”

“O.K.,” István says.

The doctor says that it might be necessary to do an operation.

“Why?” István asks.

“You might lose some movement in these two fingers,” the doctor tells him, indicating the two smallest fingers of his own right hand, “without an operation.”

“What do you mean lose some movement?”

The doctor explains. It doesn’t sound very serious, the loss of movement he’s talking about, and István says so.

“So you don’t want the operation?” the doctor asks.

“Is it worth it?”

“It’s up to you,” the doctor says.

“What happens if I don’t have the operation?” István asks him.

“Well, then I’ll just try to put the bones back the best I can and set it,” the doctor says.

“You mean with plaster?”

“Yes.”

“O.K.”

“You want to do that?”

“Yeah.”

The doctor says he’ll need him to sign a paper that the woman in the green clothes starts to prepare. While she’s doing that the doctor gives István an injection in his right hand. “This might hurt a bit,” he says.

“O.K.,” István says.

It does hurt, though not as much as he thought it would. “We’ll give it a few minutes,” the doctor says.

The hand already feels numb.

The woman in the green clothes has the paper ready for him now.

“What is this?” István asks.

“It just says you refused the operation,” the doctor tells him, from the other side of the room, where he’s taking things out of a drawer.

Put like that it sounds as if he might be making a mistake, and István hesitates. “Am I doing something stupid?” he asks.

“It’s your decision,” the doctor says.

“Do you think I should have the operation?”

“It’s your decision,” the doctor says again.

The woman in green is still waiting there with the paper. She puts it down for István to sign, and he takes the pen with his left hand, and then turns to the doctor with a look that says, What am I supposed to do?

“Just make some sort of mark,” the doctor tells him. “How is it?” he asks, meaning the hand he injected.

“I can’t really feel it,” István says, using his left hand to put an illiterate-looking scrawl on the paper.

“Can you feel this?” the doctor asks, prodding it with the pen that István has just handed back to him.

“No,” István says.

The doctor says he’s going to try to put the bones back as they should be.

“O.K.,” István says.

“This will probably still hurt,” the doctor warns.

“All right,” István says.

The doctor takes the hand and starts to tug and shove at the smallest two fingers and immediately out of the numbness a dull pain comes.

He can only imagine what the agony would be like if it weren’t for the anesthetic. For the past few hours, the slightest brush of anything on the hugely swollen hand has made him flinch with pain, and now this doctor is sort of wrestling with it.

The pain starts to get worse, and he has an impulse to pull the hand away. He feels something like fear. He wants to tell the doctor to stop. He inhales through his nose.

There’s sweat on the doctor’s smooth young forehead. The woman in green watches, looking slightly worried.

The doctor stops. “O.K.,” he says. “That should do it.” He shapes the hand into a particular position—all four fingers bent about halfway into a fist, with the thumb free at the side—and says, “Hold it like that for me, please.”

István does, and the doctor starts to wrap a bandage around it. He wraps it until the bandage entirely covers the hand, except for the tips of the fingers and the free thumb, as well as István’s wrist and part of his forearm. Then, after putting on latex gloves, the doctor takes a roll of heavier-looking material that the woman in green has prepared for him by soaking it in a stainless-steel basin of water. The doctor unrolls some of this wet material, which looks like white slimy cloth, and starts to wrap it around István’s arm and hand, on top of the bandage that’s already there. “Can I ask you a question?” he says, as he does that.

“Yes,” István says.

“Where did you go to school?”

“Where did I go to school?” István says, and as he says it he understands why the doctor looks so familiar to him.

“I thought so,” the doctor says, after István tells him. “I was there, too.”

“Oh, yeah?” István says.

“We were in the same year, I think,” the doctor says.

“Maybe,” István says.

“How are you doing?” the doctor asks him, smiling again now in his narrow beard.

“How am I doing?”

“Yeah.” The doctor is still winding the slimy material around his wrist and hand, and the separate layers of material have started to merge into one another, forming a single white mass, which the doctor smooths and molds.

“I’m O.K.,” István says.

“What do you do?” the doctor asks. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“No,” István says. “I don’t mind. I was in the Army.”

“O.K.,” the doctor says.

He takes a second roll of dripping-wet material from the woman and starts to apply it over the first one.

“Until a few months ago,” István says.

“And now?” the doctor asks.

“Not sure,” István says.

“Fair enough,” the doctor says.

He doesn’t ask any more questions, and István doesn’t ask him anything about what he’s doing. He’s obviously a doctor.

That’s what he’s done with the past decade or whatever—turned himself into a doctor.

Ten years ago he and this doctor were the same, István thinks.

They were the same.

And now the doctor’s a doctor and he’s . . . whatever he is.

Although they began at the same place, this enormous space has opened up between them, is how it feels.

They seem to be on opposite sides of some fundamental divide now.

The plaster is already starting to dry, at least on the surface.

It looks chalkily matte in places.

It feels solid, fixed.

His hand feels trapped in it. ♦