The Škoda immediately lunges forward and stalls just short of the car in front.
“Fuck’s sake,” Noémi says.
“I didn’t realize it was in gear.”
“You should’ve checked.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“You sure you want to drive?”
“Yes.”
Partly it’s just that he wants something to do, something to occupy him, to absorb his nervous energy.
He puts it in neutral and turns the key again.
“There,” he says when it starts without mishap.
“Well done,” she says.
“Fuck off,” he says.
She laughs.
She has her feet up on the tough plastic of the dashboard. They’re a serious distraction, as are her legs in his peripheral vision.
He tries to ignore them as he directs the car out of the housing estate and onto the main road.
“How are you?” he asks, as he does that.
“What d’you mean?”
“What d’you mean what do I mean?”
“It’s a weird question,” she says.
“Is it?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is it a weird question?”
“I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing grown-ups ask each other.”
“Aren’t we grown-ups?”
She laughs again. “Maybe,” she says.
They leave the town and the car reluctantly picks up speed.
The wind booms at the open windows.
Dry fields of sunflowers and maize pass slowly on either side as they get stuck behind tractors and trucks on the two-lane road.
The weak engine struggles with overtaking, especially uphill.
They don’t talk much, partly because the wind noise means they’d have to shout, and if they put the windows up it would be unbearably hot.
Just for something to do, Noémi rummages in the mess of the glove compartment and finds some of Miki’s tapes.
She puts one on and they laugh at his shit taste—it’s Hungarian metal, some deep-voiced guy yelling about death and the devil.
When they get sick of it she stops the tape with her big toe.
“Thanks,” István says.
“Want a smoke?”
“Yeah.”
She lights a cigarette, hands it to him, and then lights another for herself.
There’s an intermittent stench of farms and, sometimes, on straight stretches of road, a table under a faded sun-umbrella and someone selling peaches or melons. Sometimes as well, in the shade under trees, there’s a bored-looking woman in a tank top and a miniskirt waiting where the entrance to a dirt track provides somewhere to pull over.
“Have you ever done that?” she asks him.
“What? Sold my body?”
She laughs. “Used a hooker.”
“No,” he says. And then, when she doesn’t say anything else, “Seriously.”
“It’s okay,” she says, laughing again, though more drily this time. “I believe you.”
“I’d never do that,” he says. “I don’t need to pay for it.”
“Listen to him,” she scoffs.
“I don’t.”
“How many people have you slept with, then?” she asks.
“What? Ever?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean slept with?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know. Do you mean like… fucked?”
“Whatever.”
“Does a hand job count?”
She thinks for a moment and then says, “Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” he says.
In fact he does, he knows the exact number. It is, he thinks, an embarrassingly small number. The three years he spent in the young offenders’ institution were wasted from that point of view, and in the year since then it hasn’t been difficult to keep a tally of the number of women he’s had sex of some sort with.
“I don’t know,” he says again.
“Yeah, you do,” Noémi says.
He asks her what her equivalent number would be.
She thinks for quite a long time, sort of marking things off on her fingers, and then says, “Twenty-three.”
He tries not to sound surprised. “Yeah?”
“I think so,” she says. “Unless I’m forgetting someone.” She laughs.
“Twenty-three?” István says.
“Yes.”
There’s a sort of similarity in their situations in that they’ve both accumulated most of their experience, numerically anyway, in the past year, in her case because until about a year ago she and Gábor were together. That’s why the number she said seemed surprisingly high to him. He knew she’d been sleeping around. Still, it seemed like a lot for one year. He says, “There was no one before Gábor?”
“Yes,” she says. “There was.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He was the second.”
“Okay.”
“And then there was no one else for… five years,” she says.
“No one?”
“No.”
“So,” István says, trying to stay focused on the road ahead, “in the last year you’ve slept with twenty-one guys?”
“I guess so,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Are you shocked?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says.
She laughs. “You’re shocked.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he admits.
They park in a street of gloomy bungalows near the lake.
After more than two hours on the plastic seat the back of his T-shirt is wet and stuck to his skin. He peels it off over his head, and then, standing on the pavement next to a chain-link fence, lights a cigarette.
It’s fairly quiet—the summer season officially ended a week ago. Not that it’s deserted or anything. People creak past on bicycles or walk toward the lake with towels and stuff. After locking the old Škoda they do that themselves.
The wind picks up as they near the water. The road they’re walking down just stops, the asphalt disintegrating and giving way to sandy grass with some people lying on it and then the dark blue water of the lake and the strange outline shapes of the hills on the other side.
They swim and afterward she squeezes out her hair as they lie on their towels on the grass.
“Nice, isn’t it?” he says.
“Yeah, it’s nice,” she admits.
They talk for a while about other times that they’ve each been there in the past, family vacations and school trips, and where they were and what happened, and when they feel too hot they swim again. The water is murkily shallow, a silky green soup of living things and dead things. Reeds mass along the shore. In one place there’s a jetty that sticks out among them. It might be a private one. They lie on it anyway. The wind from the lake raises gooseflesh on their skin, and makes the reeds thrash sleepily. The wooden planks of the jetty have a hot, dry smell. For quite a long time they don’t talk at all.
After a while he lifts his head and sees that she’s sitting up and nervously twisting a stalk of grass with her fingers as she looks at the hills on the other side of the lake. He sits up and looks at them too. They look like furniture with sheets draped over it so that it’s not possible to see exactly what’s underneath, he thinks. For a minute they just sit there and he wonders whether to put out a hand and touch her. He wonders whether she might be waiting for him to do that.
And then the moment passes, and she’s standing at the end of the jetty looking down into the water.
She turns and sees him watching her.
“What is it?” she asks.
He shrugs.
“I’m hungry,” she says.
There are some makeshift eateries along the shore, and sitting on the terrace of one of them they eat greasy fish off paper plates with plastic knives and forks.
“How about a beer?” he suggests.
“All right, just one,” she says.
Still in only his trunks and flip-flops, he goes to the counter and asks for two Sopronis and the woman takes them out of the fridge.
“Thanks,” Noémi says when he sits down at the table with them.
He opens his and has a drink from it and then asks her if she’s seen anyone recently.
“Seen anyone?” she says.