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the mere memory of shirts, coats, dresses.
     
    The old man rose and turned. Hair grew from his ears, and he hadn't
     
    shaved that day; whiskers lodged in deep diagonal furrows. He nodded and moved his lips in the way that had seemed so unpleasant the night before but was now somehow different; the action no longer disgusted John. It now seemed to reflect something other than a need to adjust dentures or savor brandy. John imagined words caught behind the lips; he felt certain Szabo was trying or hoping to say something. He stared with an expression John took to be one of longing, but after a moment the old man just went to the sofa and lay down on his stomach, his head tucked under his arm, turned away from the room.
     
    The son found the new subtenant on the balcony, leaning against the rail, facing into the apartment, watching the old man apparently asleep. "Okay, Janos! Good," the younger Dezso pronounced. He shook John's hand, then re-entered to poke his father in the ribs. The old man mumbled in Hungarian and sat up sluggishly but did not stand. The son spoke briskly, gestured to John and the door, obviously time to go. The father responded angrily: He stared at the floor but now shouted his responses. The tone changed rapidly to an argument, which swelled and darkened into a storm front with a speed that surprised John. He remained leaning backward out over traffic, as far as he could be from the squall without leaving the apartment. He did consider leaving, but that would have required passing right by the raging Magyars on the way to the door, making a show of his departure while they argued, which they might read as an effort to make them feel bad for impinging on the "wealthy" American's time, so he stayed where he was, leaned against the balustrade, stared at the men in uncomprehending embarrassment.
     
    The son raised his arms in exasperation and made the sound of air being let out of a tire. He half turned toward the balcony and yelled, "Okay. 'Bye-bye, Janos. Phone if needs," and tossed John the keys: a small apartment key and a two-and-a-half-pound skeleton key for the building's converted carriage door. The old man did not move as his son left. John heard the enormous front door of the building open beneath him. Over his railing he saw the man stride to his green Trabant, lean against its hood, and light a cigarette.
     
    Behind John, the old man was up and off the sofa, pulling something off the wardrobe's top shelf. He yelled, "Amerikai, fur Sie," and then some Hungarian. John stood on the threshold of the French doors, shrugging the apologetic shrug he had mastered whenever someone insisted on speaking to him in Hungarian. The old man held two framed pictures. After a deliberation, he placed one on top of the cable box and the other on the bedside table next to
     
    the lamp. He stretched his arms out to the two pictures, his fingers spread wide and his palms facing the frames, clearly to say: Leave them like that. "Igen? IgenP
     
    "Ja. Igen."
     
    He shook John's hand without looking at him and left. John retreated from the closing door back to the railing, even more uncomfortable in the empty apartment than during the packing or the fighting. The echo of the front door rose again from the street. The old man shuffled down the sidewalk and folded himself into his son's passenger seat. The Trabant burped and choked, slowly joined the boulevard's traffic. Cartoon clouds of black smoke marked its path from curbside to disappearance.
     
    John examined the decorations he had agreed to maintain. On the cable box, a black-and-white photograph in a size format he had never seen before: a baby, no more than two or three weeks old, in a bundle of blankets, photographed from above, crying, its eyes shut tight, tiny fists flailing. Next to the sofa, again in an odd size and in black and white, a gold-painted wooden frame embracing a young woman in a white dress. No great beauty, no aura of magic or romance. Just