A few minutes after that he takes his turn.
The shower is a sort of hose thing and he uses it and then wraps the small towel that’s there around his waist and returns to the bedroom, where she’s pretending to be asleep. She must be pretending. It’s only been a few minutes. And indeed as soon as she feels his weight on the mattress, she sits up.
“What is it?” she says.
He’s sitting on the edge of her bed. When he puts out a hand to touch her face she stops him.
“Please,” she says.
From the way she says it, sort of almost frightened and almost angry, it’s obvious not only that there isn’t any hope of anything happening tonight, there isn’t much hope of anything happening ever.
“Please,” she says again.
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“What?”
“I thought…”
She waits for him to finish the sentence and when he doesn’t she says, “I’m sorry. It’s not that simple.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
There’s another long silence.
He says, “Is it because…?”
He doesn’t finish that sentence either.
“Is it because what?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer and then she says, “I wasn’t totally honest with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am sort of seeing someone. I’m sorry.”
Sitting there almost naked in the dim light he just looks at her for quite a long time. “Who?”
“You don’t know him.”
“Who is he?”
“What does it matter?”
“I want to know.”
“His name’s John,” she says, after apparently taking a few moments to decide whether to tell him or not.
“John?”
“Yes.”
“A foreigner?”
“He’s English,” she says.
“English?”
“Yes.”
“A tourist or what?”
She tells him that he lives in the town.
“Why?” István asks.
“He works for British American Tobacco,” she says. “They own the cigarette factory now. He’s a manager there.”
There’s another long silence, and then he says, “How do you know him?”
“He drinks at Tex-Mex sometimes,” she says.
“Does he?”
She nods and it occurs to him that he might even have met this man, that there was a foreigner there a week or two ago when he dropped in to see her. An older man, maybe thirty or something, sitting up at the bar drinking expensive tequila and talking to her in English. He left soon after István arrived.
“You mean the one with the beard?” he asks.
“He has a beard,” she says. “Yes.”
“That small guy?”
“He’s not small.”
“He is.”
“Whatever,” she says.
“That’s him?”
“Yes, that’s him.”
“You’re seeing him?”
“Yes. I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have told you.” She seems to be about to touch him on the arm. Then she has second thoughts perhaps and doesn’t.
He doesn’t sleep well, or much at all.
Sometimes he drifts off for a while and then wakes up again.
And then it’s light when he opens his eyes.
It’s weird to wake up there, in that concrete hotel room, especially knowing that the motionless shape on the other bed is her.
She still seems to be asleep.
He tries to sleep again himself but it’s hopeless.
He steps out onto the balcony—there’s a small balcony that he didn’t really notice the night before—and sits on the white plastic chair that’s out there and lights a cigarette.
From the quality of the light and from the silence all around it’s obviously still very early in the morning.
The weather seems to have changed.
There’s a ledge of gray cloud hanging over the turquoise lake and the air has an almost autumnal coolness to it.
He’s even a bit too cold, sitting there in his T-shirt and shorts.
He’s been sitting out there for quite a while when her voice startles him.
“Morning,” she says, from the balcony door.
He turns. She has the orange bedcover around her like a cloak, as if to hide the minimal clothing that she has on underneath it.
“Morning,” he says.
“How are you?” she asks, and the question seems to have a more-than-normal significance.
“I’m all right,” he says.
He isn’t, though.
They drive back mostly in silence. The drive seems strangely short, it seems to take almost no time at all. She drops him at the housing estate where he and his mother live.
As he walks up the stairs he understands that the worst part is just starting.
For the next few days he hardly eats or sleeps.
He spends a lot of time on the balcony, smoking cigarettes.
It feels like autumn suddenly.
It’s windy and leaves start to come off the trees.
It rains all night.
“You need to get a job,” his mother says in the morning. They’re sitting opposite each other at the small square table in the kitchen while the rain falls outside. “Are you listening?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“You’re thinking about something else, aren’t you?” she says.
“No,” he says.
“You need to get a job,” she says again.
And a few months later, still unable to find anything else, he joins the army.
3
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. They spend most of the day next to the 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 at the 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.
He 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 up 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 swallows in the drains at the side.
They have these vouchers they can use in the hotel restaurant, which is always 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 overall 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, taking a drink. It must taste horrible—the water is strongly chlorinated.