He wound it back again. His jacket still half-on, the day’s post jammed under one arm, junk mail and all, just as he’d pulled it out of the mailbox. One arm of his glasses in the corner of his mouth. Ever since he’d given up smoking, he’d felt the need, in certain situations, to hold something between his lips. He started the tape on the answer-phone again.

“Well, hello there, if that’s still you, Dodrigó! I’m only here for three days, so instead of shitting your pants, try to be constructive. Let’s meet in the usual place, at six, say. . . or more like half past. And don’t reckon on doing anything afterwards. Ciao ciao! Strictly classified for a hundred years. And to the comrades listening in: lick my ass!! Oh yeah, and it’d be cool if you came in that inside-out-outside-in coat of yours, you know the one, if you’ve still got it. . . otherwise don’t worry. The coat’s not the point. You’re the point! And how! See you!!”

He hadn’t had that coat for maybe twenty years. Mum had got it for him back before he went to college, digging it out of one of those packages that came from the West. It was a big deal: you could wear it both as an autumn trench coat and a winter duffle coat, and it had pockets on both sides. Allegedly, no one was listening in on telephone calls anymore, not even the comrades. Allegedly, there weren’t even comrades anymore, or at least they didn’t call themselves that. And there was definitely no one who called him Dodrigó any longer. Even back then, it was only B who called him that, and maybe a few others who thought they were in the know. And they really did it only when she was no longer there.

B had disappeared two months before graduation. Without saying goodbye, unless their last night together in the dorm was a farewell. There’d been candles burning atop a pile of books:

“You’re getting these on loan. They’re poetry. I want them back, of course.”

The next day he had stood in the pouring rain waiting for her, a single sopping wet rose hidden under his coat, but it was already no use. Some said they’d heard she’d defected. Others claimed to know more: that she’d had to leave because, while she was working as an interpreter, she’d found out something she wasn’t supposed to know. It was around that time that someone, also a Russian translator as it happened, was drowned at Siófok. Maybe B had seen this as a message directed at her? A threat? After that, years went by without any word from her. Later, a postcard or two from exotic countries, a newspaper cutting or the odd reproduction in an exhibition catalogue. The name was different, of course, but the style was unmissable. Passionate ink drawings, sweeping perspectives, a capricious confusion of the planes of time and space.

He dropped onto the corner of the bed, then jumped up, stepped out of his shoes, went to the bathroom, drank from the tap, kicked the dirty washing basket into the corner and bent close to the mirror. He tipped his head forward so that one lock of hair tumbled down loosely over his forehead and pulled out two white hairs. He was fifty. Not quite yet though. He breathed onto the mirror and stood watching the misted-over patch shrink and disappear. That evening, he had drawn a heart on the mirror, and B had stuck a fork into it. But that may have been another time. He went out onto the balcony to look at the Beetle and check no-one had blocked him in. He’d do better to move it off the service road and park it by the entrance. Ever since his first car had disappeared, also a Volkswagen and a red one at that, he had been unable to rid himself of the thought that he might really need it sometime and not find it there. Even though the car had turned up a few weeks later, with ‘Lilly 7’ sprayed on its side and a letter on the seat saying a student had borrowed it, the need had been great, love and all that, very sorry etc., this anxiety had stayed with him. It was only now that he realised the post was still stuffed under his arm. Flinging his arms wide, he flopped back onto the bed and closed his eyes. There were still four hours to go. Strictly classified for a hundred years. He started the tape again.

∗

He’d been relieved, actually, when B had disappeared. She had filled his life to such an extent that he’d barely had time for anything else. Even if they weren’t together, he’d be trying to see things through her eyes. He rated news stories depending on what he thought B would say about them, and if he got to know someone new, he would instantly begin to compare them to her. B always came out on top, of course, and if it was his own traits he was happening to measure against hers, she would be the clear winner then too. When he was away from B, he desired her, but when they were together, there was a small nerve above his right eye that always began to twitch.

That nerve had been still for a good while now. In his mind’s eye, he rearranged his features, lifting his eyebrows a little higher, pushing his chin and his lower lip a little further forward. There were a few wrinkles crossways on his forehead. If he slept a couple of hours, the bags under his eyes might disappear. He had a habit of writing down his dreams in the exercise books set out for this purpose on his bedside table. There was one notebook for wish-fulfilment dreams, another for dreams about embarrassing situations and another for neutral dreams. Beside each dream was the exact date. He used to have a special exercise book for erotic dreams, and even had another just for those involving B, but then he realised that these dreams could be assigned to one of the other three exercise books. If a dream was accompanied by an erection, he would mark it with a star; an ejaculation got two stars.

In the years since their last lovemaking, he must have played it through on the screen of his memory a thousand times, analysing every frame with a stock-taker’s dedication. He had reached back for gestures, conjured up how words were stressed and attempted to spot any that may have hinted at a farewell. Half-kissed kisses had been reinterpreted, unfinished caresses had taken on a new meaning, often many times over, as they receded in time. Her forehead left resting on his, a far-away gaze or an unusually passionate bite on the ear.

“I’m taking this bit with me!” she had said, laughing. “Or, even better, you should post it to me, little Vincent! Post it to me!”

Had she said that? And, on that day, he’d forgotten to take along the yellow rose. He’d had it with him the next, when he went to meet her at their usual place, but B hadn’t turned up. At that point, he had still believed that the weather, which had taken a turn for the worse, might be making her late. It was plausible. The tram lines were down, and the metro tunnels were flooded, but she never came again. For a few days, a good week possibly, he parked near the Mignon every evening around six, but then, after a while, he got out of the habit.

Time, of course, couldn’t be wound back, and it was impossible to play it again like the tape in the answer-phone. The magnetic tape of memory sometimes puckers up and at other times gets stretched and ends up in a tangle. That last night with B snarled into an unavoidable knot in the passage of time, one onto which past and present could be projected and thereby reflected. The deeper he tried to sink that day into the well of forgetting, the more often it rose to the surface of his mind. He connected it with the issue of the new thousand-forint note, with the day the national television channel switched to colour. Even the date a certain poem was written became the day that B disappeared: the poem in which a young poet had said that murderers must be named, the poem in which two letters written in capitals (I.N.) matched the initials of a prime minister executed by the authorities in 1958 (Imre Nagy), the poem that only a few people would have noticed, had the reigning General Secretary not had a hissy fit and hastily shredded the newspaper that had published it.

In actual fact, it was B who had first told him about I.N. It would be more accurate to say that the things he had found out from B had enabled him to see the chief villain of the history textbooks as a bespectacled grandfather. Change of perspective, explained B. They were at an exhibition, possibly in the Palace of Art. “Look at this one straight on and it’s a landscape. Then look at it from this side, from an acute angle, and what you see is a portrait.” Since that time, the grandfather had been dug up and turned on his back. The barbed wire had been unwound from his feet and he’d been reburied, while, the very same day, the General Secretary had suffered a stroke. Did B know about that? Had she already been able to come back home then? He had often thought about her during the period that would later be referred to as ‘the regime change.’

He had never been entirely sure whether B was his alone, or whether she also flirted with others. The determined ease with which she dealt with love, and the casual way she skimmed over questions of that nature made it clear that, or at least suggested that for B, fidelity wasn’t particularly important.

“Freedom and private property are mutually exclusive,” she had said, repeating the communist slogan, then immediately placed it in inverted commas with a mocking twist of her lips. “You’re only truly free when you have nothing,” she’d added. Or had it been, “when you have no-one?” Whatever the case, what she had been saying at that moment and in that place was that freedom and jealousy couldn’t exist alongside each other.

He had often imagined the moment when he would be able to meet B again, and in every telling of it, B’s return would begin with the phone ringing unexpectedly. There was a period when he memorised answers and turns of phrase and practised the necessary intonation and rhythm to go with them. He wanted to act naturally, to appear at ease, not to let slip any sign of hurt or loneliness, but also not to stumble over expressions of emotion or even romantic feelings should the conversation move in that direction. He had stopped rehearsing the phone conversation with B long ago and was almost glad he hadn’t been at home when she called. He felt lucky to have been given several hours to prepare before he was put to the test again. It was like going before a selection board, he thought, and wiped his sweaty palms on his trouser leg. Or more like taking a final.

∗

At ten minutes before six he parked close to the usual place. He didn’t get out straight away; instead he put a tape on and listened to it. This is the place he would start it from, if they got into the car together: ‘Floating down the stream of time. . . ’. Would she recognise it? ‘. . . from life to life with me. . .’ They had watched The Yellow Submarine some six times. ‘. . . makes no difference where you are / or where you’d like to be.’ Over in the café there was some kind of muzak playing. He bounced the yellow rose between two fingers, the petals at knee-height. Only the Mignon had remained what it had always been: a smoky café in the city centre. Near the traffic, but still hidden away, in a place you would barely notice. The almost twenty years that had gone by since their last meeting had left no mark on the furnishings, and barely any on the clientele. Coffee-stained doilies, lead-crystal ashtrays, the triangular patterned mosaic floor, the clattering-pinging cash register. The nickel-plated wall-clock on the tympanum over the door, with its spiky numbers and angular face. The faded poster on the wall from some tourist agency: ‘Gold Coast.’ He chose a seat where he could keep an eye on the door, but still be a fair distance from it. The B who survived in his memory and the B that would step in under the clock were sure to look different – he would need the little bit of time it would take her to reach his table to put his surprised features in order. He had plenty of time to sit and look. B did not arrive at six. Nor at half past. He ordered another cognac. She didn’t come at seven either.

∗

When he stepped outside, it was already getting dark. Shattered fragments of cloud were scattered across the dark red sideboard of the sky. In all directions, stonework was glittering and puddles steaming. It must have absolutely chucked it down. A cloudburst, perhaps: that was the only way you’d get so much water in such a short space of time. Autumn leaves had piled up in the drains and blocked them, so that gangplanks had had to be put at the street corners. It was not easy getting to his car; he was obliged to go a long way round to reach it. He took deep breaths and held them for a long time. There were rusty plane tree leaves stuck to the windscreen too. Hands with fingers spread wide. He dragged the first one right across the glass, then leant his palm on another. The cool feel of them was calming. As he pulled the leaf towards him, it picked up a few more leaves in its path, and this bulkier leaf-dozer swept aside those around it. The leaves made crisscrossing paths on the window. Curious labyrinthine designs. He noticed that, if he placed his palm on a wet leaf for a few seconds, it would come away from the glass and stick to his hand. A warm breeze had got up, and it was pleasant to be out in the quiet of evening. Sweeping his hand to and fro on a fan-like trajectory, he felt in this motion the sobriety of geometry. He leant over the bonnet, braced his thighs against the bodywork and swung back again, a new leaf on his palm, then freed himself of it with a quick flap of his wrist. New strength was coursing through his muscles. He began to hum ‘It’s All Too Much’ and put the stem of the rose between his lips, so that he had two hands to work with. First his right, then his left, taking turns. . . She loves me. . . she loves me not. . . He was careful not to let two leaves stick together. He made up rules which slowed down the work. Where the dark glass of the windscreen appeared, and a copy of his own defiant face looked back at him from the glass, he leant forward and breathed on his reflection. Then, automatically, he pulled his finger across the patch of fogged-up glass. Strictly classified for a hundred years. The cold lights of the neon tubes flickered into life and stuck to the damp glass in radiating clumps. He worked nonchalantly and unselfconsciously, almost sorry to think he would soon be finished. A greater and greater area of the windscreen had begun to gleam, and he was glad when a sudden gust scattered a few new plane tree leaves onto the car.

∗

At first, he thought the guy outside was doing it for money, but he didn’t look at all like a tramp. In fact, he seemed to be downright enjoying the work. He was beavering away cheerfully, nonchalantly even, almost contentedly, as if some great, oppressive burden had just been lifted off his shoulders. He hadn’t looked behind the windscreen, though even if he had it wasn’t certain that he would have noticed the young man waiting in the dark. He patted all of his pockets once more. Last week’s cinema listings, coupons for the university cafeteria and the change he’d got back from the flower-seller. The man outside was still picking leaves off the windscreen. He couldn’t have realised that there was someone behind the wheel, otherwise he wouldn’t be muttering to himself. Or maybe he was singing? Was that a yellow rose between his teeth? Leaning on the bonnet, he was pushing the blanket of leaves to the edge of the window, sometimes with the edge of his palm, sometimes with fingers spread, then it looked like he was messing it up again by pulling a few leaves back. Maybe he didn’t want to be done with it. Poor git! Now though, it looked like he had actually noticed that someone was sitting in the Beetle. He was bending right down to the glass. . . Eye to eye. In the guy’s glasses the black windscreen was glinting and, on the windscreen, the glasses were reflecting. He couldn’t see him after all, hadn’t noticed him, was just blowing on the glass and drawing something in the misted-up area. A heart. He was giving it a long, satisfied look. What curious kind of pride was moving him to do these things? Would he leave when he got to the end at last?

It struck him that the cigarette may have ended up in his inside pocket. It had gone clean out of his head that when he had parked, an hour ago now, he’d turned his coat inside out. The duffle coat had become a raincoat. A trench coat. He needn’t have bothered, as it looked like the walk in the rain wasn’t going to happen that evening. There in the inside pocket were the matches too, and his room key. The flame leapt up and this startled the leaf-collector who was standing, legs firmly planted, in front of the window. Startled, he jumped out from in front of the Beetle, and stood gaping on the pavement even when their eyes met in the rear-view mirror. Who could he be? All the way home, he wondered where he knew the man’s face from. It was so familiar. It was only when he parked in front of the dorm that he realised he had forgotten to turn off the windscreen wipers. They’d been going the whole way back on a dry windscreen. He was still thinking about the old guy as he ran up to the third floor, but then he had other things to do, and he forgot about him. Forever, in fact.