“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 some stuff about how hot the weather was, that he was fine. They weren’t really allowed to write anything else. It’s very hot here. I’m fine.
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, “Okay 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.
“Okay, 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 okay?” her voice says.
“Yeah,” he says.
She opens the door a little. “I’m going to bed,” she says.
“Okay,” he says. “Good night.”
“Good night,” she says. “Sleep well.”
“Yeah.”
The next day they go to the supermarket car park where the Christmas trees are sold and spend a while looking at them. There are hundreds of trees piled on the asphalt. When they’ve settled on one the man puts it through the metal funnel to sheath it in plastic netting for them and they take it home, with István on the heavy end.
The day after that it’s Christmas Eve. His mother lays a nice table in the living room, with lace and candles in glass holders, and the two of them have the usual supper of fish soup and beigli. Afterward they exchange gifts. His mother has another glass of wine.
Later they watch Die Another Day, which is on TV. When it’s finished he stands on the balcony and smokes a cigarette. It’s a mild, damp night, and the housing estate is very quiet. In the room behind him his mother is still watching the interminable end credits of the film and the Christmas tree lights are still doing their sequence.
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 kilometers south of the town, almost on the Croatian border.
His mother drives him down 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 interviews 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.
“Okay,” 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 okay, 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 village where the winery is 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 starting 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 boom of the wind ripples at the windows, which are down a few centimeters 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.
The work itself isn’t very interesting. After the first few weeks he’s able to do it without thinking. It takes a certain amount of focus though, which means that it’s not possible for him to think about other things while he’s doing it, or even for his mind to empty of thoughts altogether like it sometimes can when you do physical labor. It’s not like physical labor in that way. In a way, he would prefer to do physical labor. He envies the man who drives the tractor. The people who prune the vines. They’re pruning the vines now. He never knew about that before, about how they prune the vines right back to almost nothing every spring. The owner of the winery takes the people who work in the warehouse and the office to see them doing it—he says he wants them to be aware of what actually happens on the land. The day they go up there the workers are burning the pruned stems in piles on the grass at the sides. The white smoke rises into the air. The sun shines through the rising smoke. There’s the scent of the smoke and the quiet crackle of the burning stems.