Every two hours or so there’s a ten-minute break. Usually István takes the escalator up to the roof of the shopping mall to have a cigarette. The roof is also the car park. The escalator arrives in a glass box that houses the machines you use to pay for the parking. He tries to find a quiet spot to smoke his cigarette. In the middle of the shift he also eats his sandwiches.
After work he most often walks home.
When it’s raining he takes the bus.
Most often though, he walks.
There’s the footbridge over the train tracks and then the long walk through nondescript streets up the hardly perceptible slope of the hill to the housing estate.
His mother usually has supper ready for him.
As he takes his shoes off in the hall he hears her putting things on the table.
“How was your day?” she asks him.
He sits down, smoothing his hair with his hand and looking at what there is—breaded chicken, maybe, with sticky rice and some leaves of green salad.
“Yeah, okay,” he says.
When they’ve eaten he washes the dishes. It doesn’t take long and by the time he’s finished it she already has the TV on.
He joins her on the sofa, and they watch the Hungarian version of The Apprentice or The Voice or something like that.
At about ten, usually when the news is just starting, he tells her that he’s going to bed.
“Okay,” she says. “Sleep well.”
He stands in the dubious-smelling cubicle of the toilet and then brushes his teeth at the sink in the separate small bathroom.
About a year ago he became addicted to sleeping pills. He was having trouble sleeping and the doctor prescribed them. He’s more or less over that now. There’s just a vague feeling that something’s missing at this point of the day.
He undresses down to his pants and smokes a last cigarette leaning out his bedroom window, looking at the quiet housing estate.
His mother is still watching TV and the sound of it finds its way through the wall as he lies down on his bed and looks at the pattern of light that the lampshade puts on the ceiling.
After about a year he thinks it might be nice to have a dog. Maybe a brown Labrador called Kurt. Obviously that was Jacob’s idea. And in fact the whole dog idea is about Jacob. He’s perfectly aware of that.
They sell puppies at the Sunday market, which isn’t far from his mother’s apartment. Even though it’s only eight in the morning when he arrives, there are already hundreds of people there. There’s the smell of frying and the sound of announcements over the public address system. Political parties have set up stands in one place and on makeshift terraces men are already drinking beer.
In one part of the market there’s a double line of trees along a sort of track, on each side of which the puppies and other animals are displayed. The people who are selling them park their cars end-on to the track with the animals in the open trunks of the cars.
It’s always one of the most crowded parts of the market, with a lot of people moving along the track, looking at the animals in their cages.
István moves slowly with the crowd, looking for brown Labradors. He finds some in one of the last cars, at the end of the track where the trees are smaller and the shade starts to give out. The puppies, four of them, are in a cardboard box full of shredded paper. There are some other people already looking at them and István stands there, waiting his turn. The man selling the puppies seems slightly impatient with the children who are looking at them now—probably because he thinks that they are just looking. The children are asking him questions and he’s giving them surly monosyllabic answers between pulls on his cigarette. István can’t hear, above the noise of the market, what the children are asking.
After a while, as he waits there, he becomes aware that people are looking at him in a strange way.
Then the person standing next to him asks him something.
He asks him if he’s okay.
István just nods.
The PA system plays its jingle and makes some echoing announcement.
Even the man selling the puppies is looking at him now, and after a few more seconds István turns and walks away.
He walks for quite a long time, until there aren’t people around him anymore and the sounds of the market seem to arrive from a slight distance.
He’s among secondhand cars.
He has walked as far as the secondhand car market, which consists of dealers’ huts with the vehicles they’re selling gathered around them in the glare of the sun. From the nearest hut two men watch him suspiciously as, standing next to a twenty-year-old BMW SUV, he clears his throat and wipes his eyes with his hand. He inhales deeply through his nose and feels in his pocket for his cigarettes. It has been a long time, more than a year, since anything like this has happened. And it’s not quite over yet. Standing there next to the old BMW, he starts to sob again. He knows that he won’t be able to stop until it’s over and he doesn’t even try to.
The men watch him from the hut.
Seeing them he waves apologetically, and after a few seconds they look away.
Sometimes he misses Helen. It’s only now that he fully understands what a significant part she played in his life. A more significant part than anyone else probably. In a way, that’s obvious. In another way though, it surprises him. Or it seems strange somehow, to put it like that. He’s not sure why. Something to do with how things started with her maybe. It just never occurred to him then, during those first months when they started having sex, that she might end up playing such a significant part in his life. He’s not the same person he would have been if he had never known her. The way he thinks about a lot of things is her way of thinking about them, and his memories of a lot of other things are inseparable from memories of her.
One day he finds the naked pictures that she sent him from that hotel in Munich, nearly twenty years ago. He had forgotten about them, but they’re still there in Facebook Messenger if he scrolls back far enough. He looks at them with, initially, a kind of archaeological interest. Then, experiencing an unanticipated stirring of arousal, he undoes his trousers and masturbates just sitting in front of the laptop, sometimes pausing his action to move to one of the other pictures.
After he has come he feels sort of silly and ashamed.
He’s aware of how absurd he must look, sitting there in front of the laptop with his trousers at his knees.
He’s also suddenly very aware of the fact that Helen is dead, or his perception of the fact that she’s dead changes. There’s a deep immovable sadness that wasn’t there before.
With a tissue he wipes the small amount of grayish semen from his thigh where it fell.
His dick has shrunk to almost nothing now, has almost disappeared into the tangle of his pubic hair, which has definitely started to turn white, or at least there are a significant number of white hairs now among the darker ones.
He does up his trousers again.
The picture of Helen, as she was then, naked in that hotel in Munich, is still there on the screen.
She would be happy, he thinks, if she knew that he was still doing this, that he was still, at least very occasionally, thinking of her in this way.
Sometimes, after supper, he goes out for a drink.
There’s this place not far from the apartment. It’s down some steps from the sidewalk, underground. The floor tiles crudely depict bunches of grapes and a sign above the entrance says IN VINO VERITAS. He’s not sure if that’s the name of the place or what. It might be.
Inside there are plastic plants and neon tubes and backlit pictures of well-known local landmarks. An illuminated Coca-Cola sign over the bar.