28-Sep-2006
It’s New Year’s Eve 1988 and I am sitting on a streetcar in Budapest on my way to a party at the American Embassy. In the next year, the next few months even, the world will shift seismically in ways we can only imagine. But for now, despite glasnost and the new, western facades on the downtown shopping street, this a still a country separated from the rest of Europe by barbed wire and mine fields. At the Benetton shop and the shiny new McDonald’s the dollar is still the only currency accepted. And I am still utterly, unmistakably an American.
The day before, while I was jogging through the diesel smog along the riverbank, a pensioner, identifying the English on my t-shirt and the unmistakably American obsession with fitness, stopped me to tell me in passionate but badly broken English about his “secret democracy club.” At some point, he actually began to cry. At the airport checkpoint, even the stern-faced soldiers gave me the thumbs up. I am eighteen and already a hero, through no virtue of my own and for reasons I am incapable of understanding. And yet I wear the mantle with the kind of unrestrained arrogance of which only the profoundly naïve are capable.
In the seats behind me, a group of boisterous young men are gearing up for the night ahead as only Hungarians can. They are drunk already, but endearingly so, singing and clowning for the crowd, joking with each other. Then one of them spots me and there is the usual banter.
“American?”
“Yes.”
“New York City?”
I shake my head apologetically, knowing how much they all love New York.
But he flashes me a huge grin and the requisite thumbs up anyway. “America! Yes!”
He is a few years older than I am, a college student, I guess, and disarmingly handsome. Out of my league by a long shot in the world I’m used to. But here my desirability is buoyed significantly by the passport I carry. Emboldened by this knowledge, I begin to flirt shamelessly, imagining all sorts of possibilities for the night ahead, aware of the fact that wherever this group is heading is doubtless somewhere I would much rather be than the embassy party.
But when the tram stops and the man stands to go, there is no invitation to join him, just the doors sliding awkwardly open and a blast of frigid air. Without even saying goodbye, he hops down out of the tram with his friends, and they all make their way across the snow-cloaked square toward a group of smiling young women who are waiting there for them.
It will take me a long time to understand exactly what has happened between us. Truth be told, I am still trying to understand. But at the moment what I feel is the shame of rejection, embarrassment at my own presumptions, at having thought I could somehow compete with those girls out on the square. Those Hungarian girls who at the time I thought were merely beautiful but can now see possessed the kind of sophistication that only those who have been forced by circumstance to create their own version of beauty can. Then the door slides closed and the tram lurches forward and I am on my way again.
