But the customs agents never showed up. Our stop in Hegyeshalom lasted three minutes. The train pulled out, rolled over the border, and he, the free son of a free country, experienced nothing, his soul did not soar in jubilation.
“Did you want to find out,” Katja asks our traveler, “how deep the fear still sits?”
“But without customs agents—”
“You should have taken the train to Prague,” Katja says, “from Dresden to Prague.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But I’m here now.”
“So you didn’t want to see me at all.”
“Sure I did, of course, I wouldn’t have made the trip if it weren’t for you.”
“No,” Katja says, “I was just the pretext.”
He looks at her. He lays his hand on hers. “I’m not sure, Katja — on my honor, I’m genuinely not sure.”
“You’re disappointed — no customs agents, no story.”
“Yes,” he says.
“No customs agent to demand you hand over your story.”
He nods and leans back for the first time. “I even had the title,” he says.
Katja smiles at him.
“‘One More Story,’” he whispers and looks like a little boy again.
“Well then just write a different story, leave out the customs agent.”
With the gesture of a magician forced to take the stage at the most inauspicious moment, I remove the blue folder from the table and let it vanish into my bag.
“Do you have to go?”
“No,” I say, and think: There is love in her. Then I get up and walk over to the counter. I wouldn’t want those prawns now, even if they did show up. Accepting prawns after an hour’s wait would be an act of self-abasement. “I’ll pay for the effervescent white,” I say, “two waters, and an apple juice.” The mole immediately starts punching up the numbers. The waitress calls out, “Cancel the order, the whole thing,” and says that the gentleman — to wit, me — doesn’t need to pay for the drinks and that she’s sorry, very sorry. I ask why even after an hour they were incapable of serving a skewer of prawns.
She says they had searched themselves silly but simply couldn’t find the prawns.
“Maybe you’re sold out,” I say, as if it were in my interest to find a better excuse. “Not only is the seafood sold out, but also the prawns, prawns being after all a form of seafood.”
“Yes,” the waitress says. “That may well be, the gentleman is probably right.”
Katja asks me if I can’t stay a little longer, we could go for a walk.
“I’ve got a date this evening,” I say. I smile, despite myself.
“Ah,” Katja exclaims. “I can guess.”
“Yes,” I say, “I ran into Katalin again.”
“I would like to have met her,” Katja says.
She accompanies me to the subway entrance. I push her bike. As we stand there at the top of the stairs, I ask when the happy day is.
In August, Katja says, a boy. Leaning forward, we hug, but our tummies touch anyway.
I forget to validate my metro ticket. At the West Station I try to give it to the fellow selling the homeless people’s newspaper, but he declines.
I buy some Leberkäse, oven-baked, 1.60 euros per hundred grams. It weighs a little more, so with bun and mustard, it comes to 2.90 euros.
Across from me at the entrance to the betting office, are two televisions — Michael Schumacher has just won his fourth Grand Prix in a row, exactly ten years after Senna’s death. I buy another half-liter bottle of water. My shoulder bag now weighs exactly what it did when I left Budapest.
I’m on my way back to Budapest. I’m on my way to Budapest. Isn’t that an act of independence and freedom — not leaving home, not returning home, but simply being under way?
I’m sitting on the right, facing the front of the train. I’m relieved and I’m discouraged. The Örkény is lying on my lap. I pull the little ribbon out, the book opens to page 18. I begin to read the one-minute story titled “The Bow.” I’m tired. The Hungarian border guard comes through the train. They do their job quickly. Because the seats block my view of the passports of the travelers ahead of me, I have the impression the border guards are shaking hands with the passengers.
“Must go back Austria,” says a border guard — beard and pointy nose — to a mop of gray hair one row ahead. “Go back!”
The mop of gray hair speaks softly, the border guard loudly. “Buy visa! No multi, Hungary fly, Budapest, go by train out, finish! Must go back. Really go back. Next train go back Austria.”
The border guard — beard and pointy nose — makes sweeping gestures with his arms, his hand is the airplane on which the mop of gray hair flew to Budapest several days before. The mop of gray hair intends, as I understand it, to fly home tomorrow too. He took a little side trip to Vienna, and now they won’t let him back in. “No multi visa. Must go back!”
The mop of gray hair stands up. A trim older gentleman in a pastel pink shirt. He is told to follow the border guard. He’s ready to follow him, but the border guard plucks at the man’s sleeve and mimics pulling on a coat. The mop of gray hair needs to take his baggage and jacket along. But he doesn’t have any baggage or a jacket, just the Vienna guidebook in his hand. Moving toward the front of the train, the border guard and the mop of gray hair vanish from the car.
A hush falls over the car, the train pulls out, the train stops, the train starts picking up speed, we’re departing on time, Hegyeshalom, 4:45 p.m. On the other track a milk train, its cars are red and white, with windows you can still pull down — the merry mood of the children, mothers, grandfathers makes it look as if the train has stopped for a picnic.
We’re moving past the long platform, and then, for a brief moment, I spot two border guards and right afterward, there where the platform makes a dip so you can cross the tracks, stands the mop of gray hair, with his pink shirt and a Vienna travel guide in his hand, and right behind him at an angle, but in fact shoulder to shoulder, a border guard. The mop of gray hair stares at the train where he was sitting just now, as if trying to see what awaits him on the other side. You can’t tell whether the border guard is holding him by his upper arm or not.