He nods hello to half-drunk old men, and then sits at a table on his own with his white wine spritzer.
He almost always sits on his own.
Normally he drinks two spritzers and then leaves.
When he’s finished the first one he takes the empty glass to the bar for the second. Seeing him approach, Bori starts to prepare it, ladling the wine into the glass and then adding soda from the hose.
He likes Bori.
They talk sometimes.
When there’s not much going on she sometimes stands near his table and they talk about things.
Sometimes they find themselves smoking together on the steps up to the street.
She’s a tall woman of about his own age, or slightly older. There’s something attractive about her personality. She’s tough and straightforward. There’s also something physically attractive about her, he finds, even though objectively she’s sort of ugly. It’s interesting how that happens. Sometimes he fantasizes about having some sort of affair with her.
And in fact they do have a sort of affair.
One night, when she’s locking up and he’s still hanging around smoking a last cigarette, she asks him if he wants to come back to her place.
He’s not sure what she means by that. She asked the question in such a matter-of-fact way that he assumes she just means for a drink.
“Where do you live?” he asks her.
It’s in another part of the town.
“Yeah, okay,” he says.
She drives them there.
They drink a bottle of white wine that she has open in her fridge, and then another one.
When the second bottle’s empty she asks him if he’s going to stay the night.
It’s quite late now.
“Is that okay?” he asks.
“If you want,” she says.
“Sure,” he says.
She says she’s going to get ready for bed.
“Should I sleep here?” he asks, meaning the sofa.
“You can sleep where you want,” she says.
She leaves and he hears the bathroom door shut.
It’s a small panel apartment, not unlike his mother’s except that it’s in a much taller building.
There’s the same sort of little balcony though, and he stands out there with her straggly tomato plants, far from sober, smoking a cigarette and looking at the twinkling lights of the town.
She’s in the bathroom for quite a long time, and when she’s finished he takes his turn.
Making his way back through the hall he notices that she’s left the bedroom door partly open.
He taps on it.
“Yes,” she says, and he puts his head in.
She’s under the duvet. The sight of her naked shoulders interests him, and she seems to be looking at him in an inviting way.
He’s still worried that he’ll misinterpret something though. “Shall I sleep on the sofa, then?” he says.
“If that’s what you want,” she says.
“It’s not what I want,” he says.
In the morning it’s awkward.
There’s that thing of not knowing how to act.
They edge past each other in the small spaces of the apartment.
It’s strange to see her in a dressing gown—almost stranger than seeing her naked.
She makes coffee.
“Where’s your husband?” he asks her.
“He’s traveling,” she says.
“Yeah?”
Her husband’s a truck driver. István knows that.
She says that he drives to Italy usually.
He’s normally away for a few days a week.
“Okay,” István says.
“Are you working today?” she asks.
He nods.
“What time you start?”
“Nine,” he tells her.
He thanks her for the coffee.
“That’s all right,” she says.
Half an hour later he leaves and waits for the elevator. He needs a shit. He didn’t want to take one in her apartment, of course.
The elevator has bright orange doors. Everything else in the stairwell is gray.
The next time he stays the night at her place it’s a Tuesday and he’s not working the next day.
She asks him, as she makes the coffee, if he feels like going for a walk.
“Yeah, okay,” he says.
“It’s a nice day,” she points out.
“It is,” he agrees.
She has a small car, a white Fiat Panda, and they drive a little way out of the town, into the hills. There’s a Communist-era TV tower at the top of one of them, and trails through the forest around it. On the north sides of the hills the forest is mostly mature beech and pine. On the south side it’s mainly younger oaks, and the path is drier and stonier.
“I like walking here,” she says.
“Sure,” he says.
He spends the night at her place a few more times.
Waking up in her bed is something he gets sort of used to.
The room is very messy.
It’s summer and during the night the air conditioner that her husband installed last year blows cold air onto them.
There are these dark red curtains. When he wakes up he sees them glowing as the sun hits them from the other side.
The air conditioner is off now and the room feels slightly stuffy.
She brings him coffee in bed and then takes off her dressing gown and joins him under the duvet again.
“Thanks,” he says.
She has a nice body for a woman of her age, he thinks—thin and long-limbed, though with large breasts that are starting to hang down. He finds himself secretly wishing that he’d seen them twenty years ago, and then one day she says that she wishes he’d seen them then too, only she says thirty years ago not twenty. “They used to be really nice,” she says.
“They still are,” he says.
And she says, “I know you’re just being polite.”
For a while they spend quite a lot of time together. They go for walks in the forest and have supper in town at the Tex-Mex place, which is still there, though somewhat different from how it used to be.
He tells her about his life.
For instance, she asks him if he was ever married.
“Yeah,” he says. “I was.”
“Divorced?” she asks.
He shakes his head.
“No?”
“She died,” he tells her.
Another time he tells her that he had a son who’s dead too. That in fact they died in the same accident. Talking about it feels strange, like he’s talking about someone else’s life or something. He doesn’t usually tell people about it.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“You don’t mind talking about it?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“This was in England?” she asks.
He’s already told her that he lived there for nearly twenty years.
“Yeah,” he says.
After a few drinks, he talks to her about his life in England.
He tells her that he was extremely wealthy there for a while.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Like?” she wants to know.
“Helicopters,” he says. “Private jets.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
She makes a face at him across the table in the Tex-Mex place.
“It’s true,” he says. “I promise.”
He shows her some pictures on his phone.
When she asks him what happened, how he lost it all, he says that his wife had a son from her first marriage and that he got everything when he was twenty-five.
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have anything of your own?” she asks him.
“No,” he says.
Which isn’t quite true of course.
He did have things of his own.
The various development projects that he did with loans from the Nyman trust fund, they were all in his name, as well as valuable possesions like the Bentley and the watches, the Audemars Piguet and the 1953 Rolex Submariner.
In the interests of keeping the story simple though, he doesn’t tell her about those things. He doesn’t tell her that as soon as Thomas took possession of his inheritance, he started a legal action against István claiming that all the loans that the trust fund had made to István’s projects over the years were in fact against the terms of the trust and should therefore be annulled and paid back immediately, which was in itself enough to bankrupt what was left of the projects. And because the assets were now worth less than the value of the loans, István was unable to pay back the money in full, at which point Thomas’s lawyers went after him personally. In the end declaring himself bankrupt was the only way out, and that was what he did. Unfortunately it involved handing over everything of value that he still owned, and it was at that point that he and his mother decided to leave England and move back to the town in Hungary where they had once lived, and where his mother still had her apartment.