LITMIR.BIZ

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would never have agreed with). An orphaned girl didn’t have a chance. It was an act of “cultural rescue,” that’s what Anna said to the caseworker when he told us there were plenty of Romani kids, kids with AIDS, even some Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, and of course whole battalions of Romanian kids filling the orphanages in Bucharest to overflowing. “The Hungarians in Transylvania look after their own,” he said to us. “If you want a Hungarian girl there’s tons in Hungary.” But Anna shook her head. And when the agency did find us one, there was always some problem—a form we hadn’t filled out, a glitch in the paperwork, another hidden processing fee—and after that another wait from six to eight months, by which point the child was gone. Either that or we made it to the finish line, received the file—the family records, the medical reports, the photographs—and Anna took them to our doctor, who held them in the light and said, “Hm, see these shadows under the left ear, those bumps, that could be something.” He tilted the pictures. “Or it could be nothing.” Anna would come home and brood over Scotch and soda, and after a few days request more information, which the agency could never obtain, and finally she’d turn down the adoption. Then I’d lie in bed at night listening as Anna talked in her sleep, apologizing to the child, begging forgiveness, smashing her fists so hard against her face I had to wake and then hold her while she cried. Finally, we decided I should go to Romania, that maybe I could do in person what we’d failed to do through bureaucracy.

      “In the Museum of Failed Escapes there are sails made out of tinfoil,” I can still hear Judit saying, her voice slurred, on the verge of laughter. Her drunkenness, I would realize, was more an affectation than reality, all part of the act, and that any day of the week she could have drunk me under the table. “They are perfect mirrors,” she continued. The sailor set them afloat one day on the Sea of Hungary when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and they sparkled so that a man could swim unseen from one shore to the next, because the snipers were blinded by the glittering armada.

      “The Sea of Hungary? There’s no Sea of Hungary!”

      “There is. There are many. You don’t know anything about this country.”

      “Where are they?”

      “There’s a map of it in the museum. One day I’ll show it to you.”

      There are certain retreats you make—retreats that seem to come naturally—when your marriage is spent. I saw it with some clarity in Budapest, sitting up at night, Judit asleep in bed beside me, thinking back to that moment when things were at their worst, six or seven years ago, Miklós was two or three, staring out a window then as I was staring out of one now, dreaming of what it would be like to get the whole thing over with—the arguments, the divorce, splitting up our stuff, arranging custody, and then, after that, starting all over, the initial freedom, the loneliness, followed by another relationship, followed by a marriage that would more than likely end just as this one had. The problem in the sequence, no matter how I arranged it, was me. For years now I’d been doing more and more as Anna asked—keeping an eye out for dirty laundry; for meals I could make; chores around the house; driving Miklós here and there; sitting on the veranda with her at night drinking and talking, trying to be pleasant—a hundred minor obligations and pleasures, the careful work of putting your needs to one side to make sure that everything goes well, and then collecting your rewards: a child’s laugh, your wife smiling thank you, your neighbour visiting with extra strawberries from the garden. It’s perfect enough on the surface, but that’s all it is, containing less and less of yourself, of what you really want, until one day you realize that the only life that matters, the only place you exist, is on the inside, a world you no longer mention, filled with wants so unrealizable there’s no point in even talking about them, whole continents of desire taken off the map, excised but ever-present even as your wife and child talk to you and you pretend to listen.

      This, I suppose, is why on one lonely business trip I ended up leafing through the Yellow Pages looking at the ads for escort services. It seemed ideal, the intentions were absolutely clear—sex on one side, money on the other—and none of the stuff people who had affairs, and I knew a few of them, had to deal with: running a second relationship involving as many compromises as the first, the fear of exposure, the snowballing of desire into demands: “I want us to take a trip together!” “I want you to leave your wife!” “If we’re to continue together we have to do it honestly and in the open!” And so these people, most of them men, would be forced to choose between a home life that was, except for the occasional irrepressible urge, the one they wanted, and a life that had no basis except for those urges. Who needed that kind of stress? As far as relationships went, my marriage was as good as I was likely to get, and beyond that I just wanted to be left alone, and to have sex. The call girls, prostitutes, whores, whatever you called them, provided all the benefits of an affair with none of the risks.

      Except of course an ever-increasing loneliness whenever I placed another call, ushered another girl into my room, handed over another wad of cash I’d covertly put aside. Every night I spent with Judit I’d awaken at three in the morning, the worst possible hour, and gaze at the twinkling city, the Danube, thinking of how to get out of my situation, of what could still be rescued or restored and what it would take.

      Then Judit would wake up, her hand would travel up my spine, and she’d tell me another crazy story about a sailor in the Museum of Failed Escapes, consoling me not so much with alternatives as with putting off the decision, not thinking about it, so that when she finished I was still in exactly the same place. She knew exactly what to do, what I wanted.

      We met just after I arrived in Budapest, one night when I’d gone out hoping to lose myself in the city as I’d done on nights in countless other cities, wandering in and out of bars, looking for someone to hook up with, a businessman out for a drink, a banker from the U.K., some Hungarian guy, men who’d also taken off their wedding rings. I think on this occasion his name was Gergő, and he took me to the Tip-Top Klub, one of the city’s strip bars. I was too drunk, about to get more drunk, and already listening with regret to the rising sound of morning traffic.

      Judit was one of three girls we ended up sitting with, Gergő strolling over to their table and asking if they’d mind. They didn’t mind, they didn’t care, they were sitting in identical shorts, tight, low-cut T-shirts, drinking straight cherry pálinka over ice. I ended up sitting next to Judit, who turned to me with a sour smile and asked what I was doing in Budapest.

      Two hours later, on the Margit Bridge, I stood in the first light of morning holding up Judit, caressed by one of those cool summer breezes that almost makes you happy to be drunk, sleepless, and still up that early. I shuffled her around to face Margit Island, then around again to gaze past the parliament with its neo-Gothic spires, at the Lánc Bridge beyond, then the Erzsébet Bridge, the green river winding itself away. All of the girls Judit had been sitting with danced at the Tip-Top Klub. I knew what “dancing” meant, and Judit knew I did, and that more often than not they danced for people like me, “men from the west,” as she said, who’d get drunk, have their Visa cards overcharged, and if they didn’t mind spending that much money the girls were told to offer them other things at similar rates. I knew enough about it not to ask why she did it, why she didn’t quit, why we were standing on the bridge at five in the morning.

      Earlier that night I’d told Judit everything—Trianon, Erdély, Anna and Miklós, the orphaned girl. It was a lame attempt to prove to her that I sympathized, that things were not good for me either, though remembering the clichés about women like Judit—those without options, unable to make the switch when communism fell, forced to cash in on their beauty, five years of work, ten at the most, before the steady slide down the rungs of the sex trade left them wasted, addicted, dead—I realized how ridiculous it was, how narcissistic.

      “It’s good that you’re married,” Judit said. One of the last casino boats of the night—those golden barges that sail up and down the Danube—pulled into dock, blaring music, lit up, filled with men and women at the roulette wheel, playing blackjack, dancing. “A child should have a father and a mother,” she continued, slurring her words in that way she’d perfected, pulling up her slumping head, letting it slump again. A fleet of Mercedes passed on the bridge behind us, smaller sedans grouped

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