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God with their portable harmonium.”
    “And what about your family?” Jack countered. “I bet you never see them.”
    “What’s to see? More nieces and nephews? I might have to start sending them presents if I met them. And I think there might be thirty or forty by now. Maybe fifty. My mother set a bad example.”
    “And what about your mum?”
    “I assume she’s still praying for me. You never know, someday it may make the difference between hell and purgatory.”
    Eva Kálvin came from the direction of the pedestrian street, Váci utca; she clattered quickly over the square on high heels. Her blond hair was in a French twist, and she wore small pearl earrings.
    “So tell me quick, Jack, what’s the story with Eva?”
    “All I know is that she’s divorced and says she’ll never get married again.”
    “You know what I’m talking about.”
    In England and in our native countries, both Jack and I knew better than to get intentionally entangled with straight women (there was always the occasional Charis Freespirit, who simply forgot to mention her husband until later) but we’d both found that in the rest of the world, where there were no rules or different rules about gender and sexuality, behavior and naming that behavior were often two separate things. Jack had had several amorous encounters with married women in North Africa (“I’m irresistibly drawn to veils”), and while I drew the line at married women after an extremely unfriendly interaction with the lovely Flora’s husband, a Bolivian policeman, I rarely said no to any woman—particularly spinster schoolteachers with a pedagogic bent—who wanted to flirt with me and teach me the names of body parts in her language.
    “I never got anywhere,” said Jack. “And of course now we’re in business together. But maybe you’ll have better luck. If you can get past Mrs. Nagy.”
    Eva kissed each of us enthusiastically several times and sat down just as a phone began to ring somewhere in the vicinity.
    “Excuse me,” she said and, opening her handbag, pulled out a cellular phone.
    “The new Hungary,” Jack remarked. “In a nutshell.”
    Eva’s conversation was soon over and she turned back to us.
    “You can’t imagine how well our secretarial service is doing, Cassandra. Already we have five women working for us speaking six languages among them. There hasn’t been anything like this in Budapest before; American and British businesses have told me that they’re very impressed with our staff. We’re helping many women. And, we’re going to get rich!”
    Hungary was moving more quickly than I’d guessed, if feminism and capitalism could already be combined in such an unabashedly exuberant manner. It had taken Western feminists almost two decades to get through the anti-hierarchical, anti-financial-success stage. Though I suppose you could say the Hungarians had already done the collectivity thing.
    “And of course they all love Jacqueline. They wish she was always available. But I save her for the top clients.”
    “But Jack doesn’t speak any languages!” I said.
    My friend looked disdainfully at me. “Well, I’ve never studied them, like you have,” she said. “I speak them—sympathetically.”
    “She’s even picked up Hungarian, in only two months,” said Eva.
    “Hungarian’s impossible,” I said. “It’s like Finnish. It doesn’t look like anything else.”
    “The secret is not to look,” said Jack. “Not to use your left brain.”
    I thought back to various travels with Jack; she always had been adept at getting herself from place to place and making herself understood. I also recalled an impressive intervention on her part in Java when I seemed to be on the verge of purchasing a very large live tortoise rather than a colorful sarong.
    “I suppose it’s possible,” I allowed. “Hungarian is based on root words. It’s an agglutinating language.”
    “My point exactly,” said Jack.
    “I’ve heard that