The Idiot

The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist. There was no “went” or “sent,” no intention or causality—just unexplained appearances and disappearances.

It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened.

Almost everything that was interesting or meaningful in my story was, in her story, a pointless hazard or annoyance.

It was painful to feel at such cross-purposes with her.

I kept walking toward the river. I could hear the tears welling up

But none of these things would change the fact that he was going clear around the Earth, with no plan and no reason to come back to where I was.

We got out of the car and stood facing each other.

“So,” he said. “You’re going away.”

I felt my eyebrows tense. “You are,” I said.

That was when I realized that I wouldn’t see him again—not for a long time, and maybe not ever.

I thought I wouldn’t be able to find you,” he said. “I never feel like I’ll be able to find you.”

Esperanto had words from every language in the world. However, the only Hungarian words were papriko and gulašo.