Then some of it goes in her eye. “Oh,” she says. “That stings. It really stings.”
“Sorry,” he says.
With her hand to her eye, she laughs. “It’s not your fault.”
She goes to the bathroom to wash her eye out.
When she gets back her eye is very red.
“Is it okay?” he asks.
“It still stings,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
“It’s okay,” she says.
She joins him on the bed.
He likes lying there naked while she touches him.
The rest of the day feels somehow fake compared to this. It feels like a less intense sort of reality. It feels unimportant.
The important part of life happens with her. That’s how it feels.
When she goes away for a week to visit her mother his life seems empty.
He drifts through the days at school with a sort of indifference to everything.
Without that hour in the afternoon to look forward to, there is nothing to give the days any sense of purpose or meaning.
When she gets back the summer holidays have started. He’s at home all day, and for the first time they do it in the morning.
“There’s something I’d like to do with you,” she says.
“What?” he asks.
She tells him.
“Would you like that?” she says.
There’s a lake ten or fifteen kilometers from the town, among the hills to the north. They take a bus there, first having to take one into the town center, where they wait for a second one that goes to the lake. Once the bus leaves the suburbs of the town it takes about half an hour to get there, mostly on a road through the forest where it has to keep slowing for sharp turns.
It’s almost empty by then. It’s the middle of a weekday and there aren’t many people going to the lake.
When they arrive she says she knows a nice place, where there won’t be anyone to disturb them.
“Okay,” he says.
The lake is surrounded by steep green hills.
They walk on a forest track under the trees.
As she said, there’s no one else around.
It’s pleasant in the shade under the trees.
She says she’s already wet and asks him if he wants to check for himself.
He’s not sure what to do.
She has stopped. He stops too.
“Do you?” she asks.
They’re standing on the track under the trees.
The track is made of dried mud that has taken the imprint of tractor tires in places. In deep hollows the mud is still visibly damp.
The wind is shaking the upper branches of the trees.
“Yeah, okay,” he says.
“Go on, then,” she says.
He lifts her dress at the front up to about the level of her navel and puts a few of his fingers into her panties.
“See?” she says.
Again, he isn’t sure what to do.
His fingers are still in there.
“So do you want to…?” he says uncertainly.
“What?”
“You know.”
She laughs. “Not here,” she says.
“Why not?” he asks.
“I know somewhere else,” she says.
The trees end and there’s a sort of meadow near the top of the hill.
They do it there in the long grass.
They eat lángos while they wait for the bus back to the town. She’s worried that they’ll meet her husband, or his mother, when they arrive back at the housing estate—it will be about the time that they both get home from work. So she says that they should arrive separately. At the bus station in the town she tells him to wait and take the bus after her.
“Okay,” he says.
When she has gone, though, he feels something painful and confusing.
“I love you,” he says to her, the next day. They’re lying on his bed.
“Don’t say that,” she says.
“Why not?” he says.
“You don’t know what that means,” she says.
“Yes, I do,” he says.
“You don’t,” she says, stroking his hair.
It makes him angry, the way she does that. He moves his head away.
“Why do you say that?” he asks her. “Why do you say I don’t know what that means?”
“You don’t love me,” she says.
“I do.”
“Please,” she says. “Stop saying that.”
“Why?”
“If you keep saying that we’ll have to stop this,” she says.
The next day she tells him that they have to stop it anyway. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I really didn’t think this would happen.”
“What?”
“How you feel,” she says.
“That I love you?” he says.
“You don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
She puts her hand on his face. “Well, I don’t love you,” she says. “I’m sorry.” She looks tired, as if she hasn’t slept much, as if she was awake for most of the night.
“Do you love your husband?” he asks her.
“What difference does that make?”
“I just want to know.”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” she says.
“Yes,” he says.
“Why?” she asks.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes, I do,” she says.
“How can you say that?” he says.
“I don’t think you understand the situation,” she says.
“I think I do,” he says.
“No, you don’t,” she says. “I don’t think you do. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she says. “Please don’t cry. I’m sorry.”
He spends a lot of time hanging around on the stairs, waiting for her. It seems impossible to him, after what they have done together, that what she says is true—that she doesn’t love him, that she loves her husband.
He waits for her on the stairs. When she sees him there she hesitates, as if wondering whether to step back into her apartment.
He’s on the half-landing, where the stairs turn and her plants stand in a line next to the low window. Hot afternoon sun slants in.
“What are you doing here?” she says to him, without stopping.
They have already met on the stairs a few times.
Following her down, he says what he always says. “I want to see you.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Please,” he says.
“No,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Please.”
She stops on the second-floor landing and says, turning to him, “No. You have to stop this.”
“What?”
“Waiting for me like this.”
“I want to see you.”
“No.”
She continues down the stairs and leaves the building.
She looks angry to see him still there when she returns nearly an hour later.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“Waiting for you.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you.”
She won’t let him take the shopping from her.
He follows her up the stairs.
“I want to talk to you,” he says again.
She ignores him.
“You have to stop this,” she says, finally speaking to him again when they arrive at her door.
“Please,” he says.
“No.”
She starts to unlock the door.
“I love you,” he says.
“No, you don’t.”
“I do.”
“Stop saying that.”
Seeing that she is starting to hate him, he decides not to try to see her for a week. He hopes that if he does that she will eventually agree to see him again.
After only a few days, though, it’s unbearable not to see her at all. Not to know where she is or what she’s doing. Even her hatred and anger would be preferable to that, is what he feels, and it’s with that feeling that he knocks on the door of her apartment one evening. He isn’t sure exactly why he’s doing it, or what he will say. He just wants to see her.
He has to knock for quite a long time.
Finally her husband opens the door. “What is it?” he says.
“Is she there?” István asks him.
“What?”
“Is she there?”
“What are you talking about?” her husband says.
“Is she—”
“No,” her husband says, already shutting the door.
Instinctively István pushes it open again.