“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 own 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 massive Jacuzzi in the bathroom.
“Yeah,” Norbi says, looking up from the black marble worktop.
“Does it work?” the taller girl asks.
“Yeah, sure.”
He asks if they want to try it. He has cut some more lines with the last of the speed and he passes the taller girl the banknote they’re using to snort them. “You want to try it?” he says again.
They don’t answer—they’re busy at the worktop.
“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 only come back 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 semi-darkness.
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 stop things 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 it. 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 was 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. He sees a moment of perplexity pass over the person’s face when they notice that.
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, 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.
So it makes you feel slightly insane or something, to have those things inside you, when they seem to have no reality 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 székely káposzta 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. Székely káposzta 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.