Katia's Story (La Hongroise)

It was 1980 and if you could get out of Hungary, you did. Katia could and did. Ah, but not so fast. How to tell the story of Katia? I’ve wondered for years. Twenty-seven years now. Is it Katia’s story? I can’t really tell her story. All I can tell is what I know about her.

I was 22. I had left Los Angeles two years before. I’d gone by bike from Paris to Barcelona, by train back to Paris, then Brussels, then boat and train to London, where I spent a year working at a cheap hotel. I went to Lake Geneva for a hotel job I didn’t get and then to Warsaw to visit the girls I’d met and made friend with in London when they were working as chambermaids to earn hard currency. Went to visit other friends in Gloucester and Sheffield. I spent a summer relaxing in Honfleur on the Normandy coast, then hitchhiked south through France to Montpelier for a visit with more friends I’d made in London, some French kids who’d also worked at the hotel with me. From Montpelier I thumbed to Nice, then took a train to Rome and stayed a week, visiting briefly with another friend from London. Another train to Brindisi, then a boat to Greece, where I worked at a fleabag hotel in Athens, then traveled around the Pellopenese, stopping at the abandoned Byzantine city of Mystra and a monumental classical temple on top of a mountain in the middle of the island. Headed back to Athens via Delphi, stood alone in the ruins of the Temple of the Oracle at dawn. Headed back across Europe by bus through Yugoslavia, then by thumb through Austria and Germany to Denmark, where I stayed with a family I’d translated for when their car broke down in Honfleur. Was heading back to L.A. via Paris and London, but happened upon a job teaching English in Paris and stayed. Rented a room from a playgirl named Roselyne who lived in a luxury flat near the Arc de Triomphe, but the young British sculptor she was having an affair with dumped her and she went back to an oil company executive named Henri she’d been seeing before the sculptor came to town. Henri and Roselyne decided I wasn’t a good ingredient in the mix so I needed to find a new place to live.

I would’ve gone back to Los Angeles at that point and my life would’ve turned out vastly different. Who knows what I would’ve become? But I’d signed up for a year at La Sorbonne and was looking forward to it, so I wanted to stay in Paris.

Philippe, a guy who ran a language school where I’d been working as a sub, told me his friends were leaving a great place in Saint Cloud, a ritzy suburb outside Paris, and I should take over the lease. So I did.

It was an empty apartment, with one bare light-bulb hanging from the ceiling in the hallway. It was an insane project and if I’d been smart I never would’ve tried to furnish an apartment in France at that point in my life. I made several attempts to equip the kitchen with flea market purchases – a salad bowl, some cutlery, some cups – but the whole enterprise was way beyond me. Roselyne's lover Henri drove me out to Argenteuil, a distant suburb north of Paris, where his parents had just died, and sold me their stove. I was almost functioning, but not quite. I saw an ad for a used fridge, bought it and carted it back to my new home, but the motor exploded when I plugged it in. The woman who sold it to me gave me my money back, though, so I went to a used furniture depot and bought another one.

After I’d paid my first month’s rent in cash, the real estate agent said: OK for this time, but you’ll need a to write a check from now on. Signing a lease was traumatic enough. Now I’d have to open a checking account. That meant keeping track of my money, something I’d never done, nor even conceived of, until then. So there I was in France at 22, with a checking account I didn’t know how to manage and a minimally furnished apartment.

It had two bedrooms and a living room, and the rent was $200 per month. Philippe said he could find me a roommate, too. His girlfriend Marie had a brother named Pascal. They said Pascal’s wife needed a place to stay for a while. I assumed he was traveling because I’d known he’d been around the world a few times. I didn’t know why else his wife would need to rent a room from me. I guess I should’ve asked.

Phillipe brought Marie over to look at the apartment one night. She was working on her doctorate in physiological psychology. I told her the most amazing thing I’d learned about the brain in my college studies was that you sometimes treated epilepsy by cutting the connections between the right and left brain – the corpus callosum. This didn’t disable a person as much as you’d think. But there were strange results, because different sides of the brain controlled different senses. So if one eye perceives a sign, it can send that information to the brain, but the part of the brain that received that information might not be able to transmit it to the part that controls speech, so the person would not be able to say what was seen.

Marie paused for a moment, then said:

“Not many people know that.”

Marie deemed the apartment suitable for her sister-in-law and Pascal brought Katia over on Sunday afternoon with a couple of suitcases. Roseline and I were still friends and she had given me a bed for the second bedroom. We chatted briefly and Pascal explained that he’d pay the rent for Katia as soon as he could. I helped Katia set up her room as best we could. I grilled us a steak for dinner and opened a can of green beans. We sat on the floor in the living room and ate. I made us some tea – actually, a Swiss concoction called “tizaine” – and then went into my room and shut the door.

About 10 minutes later, I heard Katia laughing. She had gotten undressed and walked into my room in her nightgown. She was a pretty blonde. I was in bed. She was holding a letter.

“I just got this letter yesterday and because I was packing and moving, I didn’t have time to open it and read it,” she told me. “It’s from a Hungarian girlfriend. I had written to tell her I’d be moving in with an American boy.”

Katia read from the letter her friend had sent her:

“That’s so great! I met an American guy in Paris when I was there, too! He took me to a hotel and we made love for three days straight! You’re going to have a great time!” Katia laughed and laughed.

I smiled and said “Yeah, that is funny.” Katia laughed some more and walked out of my room and into hers.

Was I supposed to follow her? Maybe. But then I’d be some other guy. Not me, not with my new flatmate, not with a married one whose husband was supposed to be paying her rent. Even if she weren’t married, I’m not sure I would’ve. Business first. If we had a love affair that went bad, I’d have to see her every day. And that would’ve been a situation pretty high on my list of things I didn’t want.

When I got back from classes the next afternoon, Katia was in the apartment, waiting for me, it seemed.

“You made me tea last night,” she said. “That was very nice. Could I make some for you now?”

“Yes, of course.”

She poured boiling water into two cereal bowls, mixed in spoonfuls of tizaine and carried them into my room. I was siting crosslegged on my bed. She sat down next to me and we drank together. She looked straight at me.

“You haven’t asked about me being here with you even though I’m married to Pascal. Is it because you don’t want to know?”

“No. It’s because I didn’t want to pry.”

What I actually said was something closer to “I didn’t want to invade your personal life,” because I don’t think there’s a word for “pry” in French. Or if there is, I didn’t know it. So you formulate your concepts and choose your words based on what you can translate. That’s how you start “thinking” in a foreign language. I didn’t speak Hungarian and Katia didn’t speak English, so we were communicating in French. Or trying to.

“No, you wouldn’t be invading my privacy. We live together, you know.”

I could tell she wanted to tell me.

“If you want to tell me, you can.”

So Katia told me the story:

(to be continued)