“Where’s your computer? You have one, don’t you?” Tamás asked, tossing The Devil’s Marshal onto the bed. Sándor picked it up and returned it to its place on the shelf.
“Why do you ask?”
“Come on now, phrala. Are you my brother, or what?”
Phrala. He had heard people call each other that on the street in the Eighth District, their voices gently mocking, evoking a sense of community that he wasn’t a part of. Hey, brother. Hey, Gypsy. No one called out to him, though. They could tell he didn’t belong.
Take care of the girls and Tamás. But he had only been eight years old. What did she expect?
“What do you want?”
“There’s just something I want to find out. Online, I mean. You have Internet access, right?”
“Yeah,” Sándor admitted, reluctantly.
SÁNDOR HAD TO log him onto the university network with his own username and password, but otherwise Tamás needed no help. He clearly didn’t want Sándor looking over his shoulder.
“What are you searching for?”
Tamás glanced at him briefly. “None of your business.”
“Um, hello? That’s my computer you’re using, right?”
“Okay, okay. It’s a girl. Happy?”
There was a fidgety energy in Tamás’s compact body, excitement or anticipation of some kind. It worried Sándor and made him a little envious. He had never been young the way Tamás was young right now—there had always been so many rules for him to follow, so many unforeseeable consequences if he stepped out of line.
“You can’t sit here and surf porn, just so you know.”
“I’m not! It’s not like that. I’m just going to chat with her a little.”
“Is she Roma?” Sándor blurted out. Knee-jerk reaction, as if that were the most important thing. It would certainly be the first question his mother or grandmother would ask, he thought.
“No, she’s a gadji.”
“What does Mom have to say about that?”
Tamás straightened up and turned around. “Well, it’s really more what Grandma would say. If they knew, but they don’t.”
Tamás’s hands flew over the keyboard. But Sándor noticed that one of them was flying more slowly than the other.
“What happened to your hand?”
Tamás turned it over and studied it for a second, almost as if he hadn’t realized anything was wrong with it until now. The skin was peeling off in big flakes, like a freshly boiled new potato, and the surface underneath the old, dead layer of skin was strangely reddish brown.
“I burned myself,” Tamás said.
“On what?”
Tamás flipped his hand back over. “A motor,” he said. “Now get lost. I can handle this myself. Don’t you have to study or something?”
Sándor did, but it was impossible to concentrate with Tamás in the room. He was a foreign body, and a fidgety one at that. He rolled around on Sándor’s old office chair and drummed his fingers on the worn desktop, humming or whistling softly but constantly. Twice he pulled a mobile phone out of his pocket and spoke into it in a low voice, but it didn’t sound like he was talking to his new conquest.
“You have a mobile phone,” Sándor said, half as a question. Maybe that meant money wasn’t quite as tight as the last time he had been home.
Tamás simply said, “Yes.”
“Does Mama have one, too?”
“No.”
It was quiet for a bit. Then Tamás said, vaguely apologetically, “Here. I’ll write the number down for you. Give me yours, then she can call you, too.”
Sándor gave Tamás his number, even though the idea that his mother could now call him at any time made him feel strangely uneasy. Going back to Galbeno for a few days a year when he thought he could cope with it was one thing. Being … available like this, whenever his Roma family felt like it … that was entirely different.
Added to that, there was the other increasingly urgent problem.
He needed to pee.
His computer was hands-down the most expensive thing Sándor owned. Scrimping to buy the Toshiba had been a struggle, even though it was secondhand and far from state-of-the-art. There was no bathroom on Sándor’s floor. He had to go down two flights of stairs and partway down the hallway. But he didn’t trust Tamás enough to leave him here, even though right now he seemed completely focused on typing and had just hissed a soft, triumphant “Yes!” which might mean his chat romance was paying off.
In the end Sándor didn’t really have a choice. He set down his Roman law compendium and got up off the bed.
“Don’t touch my stuff,” he said. “And if you wreck my computer, I’ll rip your nuts off.”
That was the kind of thing he could never say to other people. To all his Hungarian friends and acquaintances who had no idea that he was half Roma. But Tamás just grinned.
“That would take bigger hands than yours, phrala.”
SÁNDOR HURRIED. BUT of course the lavatory was occupied, and it wasn’t until he had knocked on the door twice that one of his downstairs neighbors came out.
“Yeah, yeah! Give a guy a chance to pull up his trousers.”
“Sorry.”
He locked the door, pulled down his fly and relieved his sorely tested bladder. Someone had tried to improve the smell in the room with a pale-green air freshener hanging off one side of the toilet bowl, but as far as Sándor could tell, it just added an odd chemical sweetness to the considerable stench of sewage and urine.
He was too anxious to take the time to wash his hands properly, just quickly stuck them under the tap and dried them on his trousers instead of the damp, red towel hanging next to the sink.
When he got back, Tamás was gone. Luckily the computer was still there, unharmed, still on and logged in. He pulled the window open and looked down at the street. His brother’s slender yet compact form was heading toward Prater Street.
“Hey!” Sándor yelled.
Tamás turned and danced a couple of steps backward.
“Thanks for letting me use your computer!” he yelled back at Sándor. “See you, czigány.”
Then he turned the corner, and Sándor couldn’t see him anymore.
SÁNDOR TURNED OFF the computer. Now that Tamás was gone, he suddenly wished he had asked more questions about how things were going and what kind of girl Tamás was so terribly in love with that he would travel for five hours on three different buses just for a chance to chat online with her. Surely there was a computer somewhere closer? Didn’t they have Internet cafés in Miskolc?
Maybe the girl lived in Budapest. Maybe that’s why Tamás was suddenly in such a hurry to leave.
Or maybe there was another reason. Sándor suddenly noticed that one of his desk drawers was ajar. It hit him like a punch to the stomach, because even though he had been afraid that Tamás would make a mess or knock something over or pour soda on his computer, at no point had he been afraid that his little brother would take something that was his. You didn’t steal from your own people.
And his wallet was still there. It was his passport that was gone.