His grandmother smiles.
She has these travel books. They’re lined up next to one another on a shelf near the TV. Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, the USSR, West Germany, Great Britain. Out of boredom he looks at them while his mother and his grandmother talk. The books have pictures in them, mostly black-and-white, and a few color ones too. The colors in them look unnatural somehow, they don’t look like the colors of things in reality.
There’s a lady who lives in the apartment opposite them. Soon after István and his mother moved into the building, the lady asked his mother if István would be able to help her with the shopping sometimes.
“What does that mean?” István said when his mother told him about it.
“She wants you to go to the shop with her and help her to carry the stuff upstairs.”
“I don’t want to do that,” he said.
“She’s been very helpful to us,” his mother said.
“I’m not doing it,” he said.
“I told her you would,” his mother said.
“You said I’d do it?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“She’s been very helpful to us,” his mother said again. “And her husband has some sort of heart problem. I’m not going to argue with you about this.”
Since then, once or twice a week, he goes to the supermarket with the lady and helps her to carry the shopping home.
After arriving home from school he drops his backpack on the floor of the apartment and then leaves again and knocks on the door of the apartment opposite.
It’s opened by the lady who lives there and she tells him to wait a minute, which he does, with his hood up and his headphones on, looking down the first flight of stairs to the half-landing, where there’s a line of plants in pots on the floor next to the window. The window is set oddly low in the wall. In fact it extends below the level of the floor.
“Okay,” the lady says, locking the door of her own apartment.
She has her coat and hat on now and they start down the concrete stairs together.
“Is it cold out?” she asks him as they walk down the stairs.
He has to lift the headphones from his ears to hear her.
“Is it cold out?” she says again.
“Yeah,” he says.
They pick their way among the puddles on the uneven sidewalk and wait at the traffic lights.
It seems very light inside the supermarket after the wintry darkness of the street.
The lady frees her hair from her hat and loosens her scarf.
He follows her around pushing the cart while she puts things into it.
They don’t speak.
Afterward they walk back to the building where they live, and up the stairs. There’s no elevator in the building and their apartments are on the fourth floor.
“You’re very strong,” she says to him as he puts the heavy stuff down on her kitchen table.
He doesn’t know what to say to that.
He just nods, and she asks him if he wants some Somloi galuska. Sometimes when they get back she offers him something to eat, something sweet like Somloi galuska.
“Yeah, okay,” he says.
“Sit down, then,” she says.
He sits at the table.
The Somloi galuska is in the fridge, and she serves a large helping into a glass bowl and puts it in front of him, with a spoon.
“Thanks,” he says.
While he eats it she puts the groceries away.
He’s becoming aware that she feels a sort of affection for him, or something. It embarrasses him, and he also quite likes it in a way, even though he doesn’t feel any affection for her.
He doesn’t feel anything for her.
She’s just this old woman, maybe even older than his mother.
It’s like she hardly exists.
“How is it?” she asks, putting things away.
“It’s nice,” he says.
He eats it quickly, partly because it’s delicious and partly because he wants to be out of there as soon as possible.
When he has finished it he stands up, making the chair scrape loudly on the floor.
“Okay, then,” he says.
“Can I kiss you?” she says.
She’s standing in front of him.
The question is so surprising that he doesn’t know what to say.
He doesn’t even know what she means really.
When he doesn’t say anything she kisses him on the lips. It’s nothing—her lips just lightly touch his for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” she says immediately afterward.
He just stands there.
“I think you should go now,” she says.
Still without saying anything he leaves and walks across the landing and lets himself into his mother’s apartment.
The lights are on in the classroom, fluorescent lights on the ceiling in translucent plastic boxes. The boxes contain a fair number of dead flies—blurred little shapes that he sometimes stares at while the teacher speaks. Only a few people are even pretending to listen to the teacher, who’s reading aloud from a book. “In broad terms, individuals that are more ‘fit’ have better potential for survival. However, modern evolutionary theory defines fitness not by how long an organism lives, but by how successful it is at reproducing. If an organism lives half as long as others of its species, but has twice as many offspring surviving to adulthood, its genes become more common in the adult population of the next generation.” It’s the last lesson of the afternoon.
Afterward he walks home.
He’s taking the stairs two at a time when suddenly she’s there, in front of him, holding a small plastic watering can. She’s watering the plants on the half-landing between the floors. He hasn’t seen her since the last time they went to the supermarket together, when they kissed afterward. “Hello, István,” she says without stopping what she’s doing.
“Hello,” he says.
He just stands there a few steps down from her, still panting slightly. To see her again makes it even stranger to think that he actually kissed her.
She asks him if he can come to the supermarket with her.
“Okay,” he says.
As usual, they don’t speak to each other while they do the shopping.
It’s only when they’re back in her apartment that she says, “I’m sorry about what happened the other day.”
It surprises him that she should say that. It makes it sound like she did something to him, whereas the way he’s been thinking about it, it was something that they did together.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“Is it?” she asks.
He’s not sure what he’s supposed to say.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Did you tell anyone?” she asks him.
“No,” he says.
He hasn’t told anyone. He has no one to tell. And even if he did, what would he tell them? That he’d kissed someone old and ugly like her?
The next time they get back from the supermarket and she asks him if he wants some Somloi galuska, he hesitates and then says, “Yeah, okay.”
She tells him to sit down and puts a bowl of it in front of him, with a spoon and a folded paper napkin.
“Thanks,” he says.
While he eats it she puts the groceries away.
He has just stood up from the table and is wiping his mouth with the paper napkin when she says, “Can I?”
It’s obvious what she means.
“Okay,” he says, after a few seconds. He doesn’t know why he says that. Some part of him seems to want to.
Her lips lightly touch his for a moment, just like the first time.
“Thank you,” she says, not looking at him.
“That’s okay,” he says.
Still not looking at him, she waits for him to leave.
When he understands that that’s what she’s waiting for, he walks across the landing and lets himself into his mother’s apartment.
After that they kiss every time. It becomes part of what they do when they go to the supermarket. She offers him something to eat, and then she lightly touches her lips to his for a moment, and then he leaves.