A Public Misadventure with Towel, Red Shoes, and Popcorn

A short, anti-sentimentalist saga

Secretly, from behind

Tünde was an anti-sentimentalist. Her name; ‘Fairy,’ in Hungarian, added to her unsentimental appeal. She was the kind of person who would interrupt a conversation midflow and walk off if an acquaintance drove by in a Mercedes and mirror sunglasses, and hang onto the car with purring fingernails, ever hopeful for a marriage proposal. But she had a nice giggle and white rabbit fur coat that photographed well against the snow, and she wore nice blouses..

As for myself, I had just arrived to the country a few months previous from Kurdistan, and was having some difficulty with the fundamentals of Hungarian society, where foreigners daring to attempt Hungarian in shops were oft.treated as if they were breaching a purity law. It was winter, and it had been pouring with cold rain for days, and my mind was in summer: I was somewhat distracted. After an hour or so of tortuous shopping, in which the woman at the cheese counter refused to serve me for my poor pronunciation, I arriived back to the flat quite soaked, ignoring a large sign on the doorway to the appartment circled in red tipped felt pen. I dumped bags in the kitchen, threw off wet clothes, wrapped a towel around my midriff and went into the bathroom to run the bath.