LITMIR.BIZ

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as shy as she seemed, and it turned out I didn’t need to do that. The next morning I remember her companion bringing two glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice to the room, along with coffee, and then our walking, hand in hand, above the town of Otavalo, where we finally sat in a small restaurant and her friend Annick took our picture. I looked very happy in the photo, though not too handsome. She looked happy too, and quite lovely.

      We stayed in several very lovely, and inexpensive, small Ecuadorian hotels during those days, and I remember, not even a week after not having to borrow her toothpaste, looking down at her one night (or was it afternoon?) and saying, “I think I love you.” “I think I love you too, Gringo,” she replied. She used to call me “Gringo” in those days.

      I remember talking to her an awful lot back then, and thinking to myself how attentively, and compassionately, she always listened. I myself am not such a good listener, except on occasion, so that—along with the sweet way she always said “uh huh, uh huh . . .” and “yes . . . yes” when I was telling her a story—it made a real impression on me. Back then, I don’t remember her being nearly as cold, or quite as thin . . . but, then again, we were in love and in Ecuador.

      Sometimes, now, when I realize we have been together for more than eight years and have a seven-year-old son, I think that this is one of the major miracles of my life . . . and I’m sure she does also. I was so romantic then, that night in Otavalo, and so was she when, hardly a week later, she got on a plane from Quito to the United States and followed me to Boston. I remember her calling me, as we had planned, but suddenly having a sense that the call wasn’t quite long distance. When she told me she was standing at a pay telephone across the street at Porter Square, I ran down the stairs, not even bothering to button my shirt or pull up my zipper, and took her into my arms and carried her halfway up to my fourth-floor, rent-controlled apartment.

      I was stronger in those days, and healthier, and so, maybe, was she. We were not so young, but very much in love, and there was a scent of laundry, somehow, wafting through my windows as we made love, on a mattress located on my study floor, for the first time in the United States of America.

      Now, as I write this, I am sitting in Israel, and we will soon be in Paris, then in Provence, and then back in the United States of America, the only country whose language I have truly mastered. I no longer live in that rent-controlled apartment and that mattress, I am quite sure, is no longer on the floor. She is still beautiful, though—perhaps even more so—with her knowing eyes and beautiful smile and lovely French voice, and she is still, as a friend of mine once described her, “une chouette”: an owl.

THE DEATH OF FEKETE

      When Aunt Etus’s son’s dog, Bori, bit Kormány Lajos in his right leg at the vineyards of Szent György Hill, it seemed only logical to the bored and unemployed men of the village—Gyula, Roland, Feri, and Kormány himself—that the dog had to be shot.

      Because Etus’s son, Árpi, was a large man, however, known to have a bad temper, especially when drunk, self-preservation dictated a wiser course: namely, to shoot Etus’s small puli, Fekete, instead. So the four men, after borrowing Uncle Dönci’s old Hungarian World War I police rifle, grabbed the “innocent looking dog from Etus’s front yard” by the ears, bound him into an oversized potato sack, and took him up into the back of Gyula’s winemaking house, where they fired a round of six cartridges into the helpless animal, who yelped and twitched when the first bullet entered his abdomen, and then moved no more.

      The dog, to be sure, was quite dead after the shooting, and it seemed to many a gratuitous bit of cruelty when the body, blown into small bits, was left on Etus’s doorstep. Though everyone in the village realized that Kormány had been involved, blame for the heinous event somehow began to center around the illiterate and partially deaf Feri, who had, for years, been spending his days, from late morning to well after midnight, ensconced at the local pub, and whose appetite for cheap pálinka followed by large glasses of Balaton Olaszrizling was as extensive as his vocabulary was small.

      It was not that Feri was considered cruel: he was universally acknowledged, rather, to be simply stupid, and like most stupid men, easily prone to the role of follower. Moreover, it had long been suspected that Roland and Gyula, the more robust and mischievous of the unemployed quartet, exerted an undue influence over the hapless lad, who—much to Kormány’s embarrassment—was a distant cousin of his as well. Feri’s mental infirmities, it had been suspected, were the logical by-product of the too frequent marriages and procreations among cousins and near-cousins that village life inevitably spawned.

      In many ways the most innocent of the foursome, Feri spent his increasingly scarce hours away from the pub collecting, and meticulously inventorying, old Elvis Presley and Beatles albums, the one mental activity his limited intelligence could apparently master. Always dressed, no matter how hot or dry the season, in tattered brown leather overalls, a pair of green, knee-high rubber boots known as gumi csizma, a black-and-red woolen ski cap that looked as if it had originally been skied in during the reign of Kaiser Franz Joseph, and a New York Yankees baseball cap, he was known—for the village’s annual Szent Lörinc Festival dance following the soccer match between Hegymagas and neighboring Káptalantóti—to treat himself to a much-welcomed shower and shave, after which he would don the dark gray wool suit that had once been his father’s.

      Feri senior, the former village postmaster, had been run over by a mule-drawn Gypsy cart ten years earlier while staggering home from his mistress’s house in neighboring Raposka. His father’s death and the suicide of his retarded younger sister, which followed almost immediately upon it, had driven the boy (everyone referred to him as “the boy,” though he was nearly forty) only deeper into the inertia of village life, so that he was now as much a fixture on the wooden bench outside the Italbolt as was the pub’s bench itself, rousing himself into action only when some sort of entertainment—such as the soccer match or, everyone now speculated, the shooting of Etus’s dog—was offered in its place.

      The bite on Kormány Lajos’s leg, in fact, had been a bad one, and it was the universal sentiment that Kormány—a frequent trespasser on, and pilferer from, the largely unoccupied vineyard houses—had probably trespassed one too many times on Árpi’s three grape-filled hectares, thus becoming the object of Bori’s, and his master’s, proprietary instincts.

      Etus, on the other hand, was the best loved of the village’s large group of widowed nénis, a woman of boundless generosity and good will who—in addition to being the traditional winner of the annual fish soup contest each August—was known to wander from house to house, distributing ears of corn and the small unsweetened round cakes known as pogácsa to the children and the bedridden, her tattered and (to the dismay of all who loved her) foul-smelling apron tied around her neck and a good word for everyone on her lips.

      Etus had adopted Fekete several years earlier, when the dog followed her home on her bicycle from the market in Tapolca. She could still ride long distances in those days, and the two of them had been virtually inseparable ever since, the dog following loyally at Etus’s feet as she made her way from the vineyard to the pub on her various missions of mercy. Fekete, a small, affectionate, though somewhat yappy animal, was hardly prone to outbreaks of aggressiveness unless severely provoked or, it turned out, finding itself in Árpi’s immediate vicinity, where—much like his more formidable cousin Bori—he experienced a kind of transformation of personality consonant with Árpi’s ornery and frequently inebriated ways.

      On the day of the incident that led to Fekete’s death, Kormány, having downed one too many pálinkas for breakfast, had apparently wandered onto the perimeters of Árpi’s vineyard as he set off into the hills. The two men had had a history of altercations, large and small, dating back some ten years earlier when Kormány had sold Árpi a supposedly reconditioned Trabant station wagon for 20,000 forints, only to have the engine utter its last gasp before its new owner could even make it to Tapolca for a new front fender.

      On the morning in question Árpi, suffering from a headache and hangover, was not at all disappointed to see Kormány staggering toward him and

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