(a journal)

Most things are not dangerous, anymore. The Appalachians were once the highest mountains in the world, the jagged seam between this continent and Africa. Now they are rounded, forested: after the rain, you hike through afternoon light all watery and green. In the evening, you pitch a tent on soft ground, hunt for wood in the near-dark, drink whisky beside a fire, beside a stream. Touch his shoulder before sleeping, find it again in the morning. The car is parked at the trailhead, and you reach it just before the next rainstorm. You take the passenger seat, wipe the fogged windshield, watch the wisps of clouds spiral up against the slopes; there’s coffee in the cupholders, seatbelts, indicators, the engine hum.

But there are other things. Tuesday morning at the train stop, he parks in the post office lot beside the rails, you check the time, you shoulder your bags. He gets out to say goodbye and says something else instead, just as you’re turning away. You keep going, you’ll be undone by all this otherwise, cross the tracks to the northbound side. The summer’s dissolving into thunderstorms. You’re uncertain your luck will hold.

The backyard is full of trees just now yellowing, and the trees are full of cicadas with abdomens like drums– and even in the morning, in August, the cicadas sing.

In June, there was the precipice.

August began with waiting, and then unfurled. One day I was in the old world, walking the yellow bridge, eating stone fruit at the water’s edge, carrying ivory train tickets tucked inside my notebook. Five days later, I was napping in an airport parking lot with my cellphone on vibrate and tucked under my leg, waiting for his call.

I am only half alone, suddenly. On these quieter nights, I am up late slicing hard boiled eggs into a potato salad, or reading long poems before stretching out across my bed in the heat, before falling asleep to the ceiling fan’s chain clinking against the extinguished bulb.

We ate breakfast early, sharing a plate of salted cucumber and cheese and an egg that Andras boiled while I packed my bag. He asked me to read his favorite Graham Greene novel, and I promised, and he asked me to return, and I promised to try.

But you may be in Israel by then, Andras.

Then you will go there.

He carried my bag to the trolley stop and kissed me twice before I boarded.

All day, I traveled west: through rainstorms in Austria; through Germany, where the sky was filled with clouds towering and shifting and not quite real. Into France’s pastureland. The trains all running late, close connections in the huge open halls of railway platforms. It was dark again by the time I walked up out of the Gare de l’Est and into the heat.

Today was like autumn, Andras said, cool and dark and damp. We took the old metro through the city, standing together by the doors, speaking above the noise of the rattling carriage. In the synagogue, I looked up through the blue stained glass and looked out into the burial garden, and Andras talked about what happened to his sisters during the war. When we were finished, we returned to the apartment and stood against the kitchen counter and drank apricot brandy. It was barely lunchtime. I heated food on the porcelain stove, fumbling with the aluminum pots and the lighter and gas knobs.

At the basilica, in the evening, I knelt on the tiles and halfway listened to the familiar cadences and unfamiliar language of the Mass. After, I walked. Budapest could not help but be beautiful tonight: the unexpected cold, the broken indigo clouds, the bridges and palaces orange-gold under lights. I probably don’t believe in God, but I believe in gratitude. So I sat on the crumbling steps leading down to the Danube and listened to the black water moving and tried to give thanks.

Today in Budapest, a strong, cool wind from the northwest. I sit on the warm sandstone wall at the edge of the Danube, and I turn my face toward the wind, and I button my cardigan and close my eyes.

The Danube gives way to the Sava. As I remember it, the Sava moves slowly in July and a woman stands beside it, the edges of her mind softened by disease. My sister shares this disease, stands by the window, follows me to the laundry room, stands beside me and shouts. I don’t tell anyone this history, but I’m heartsick over it all the time.

In Budapest, in the kitchen overlooking the alley, Vesna boils coffee on the stove and pours it into glass mugs. I search my memory for the Serbian words for gratitude, and I think about drinking coffee this way in Chicago, in Sremcica, in Ivanjica.

Three summers ago, we sat in his grandparents’ house outside Belgrade, in the little kitchen with two narrow beds and icons on the walls. It was late, and we had a flight the next morning. I remember his grandmother crying, her insistent Serbian through the tears, my bewilderment. But then she fixed her gaze on him, still crying, and linked her hands together like a bird that rose and disappeared. When the bird was gone, she kept looking. I turned toward him and thought, I know exactly what she means.

I’m sorry for the way my pronouns are running together. I’ve given myself ten days to be alone in countries where I have no history, where these memories surface as I wander through strange cities worrying over love. There is a past and there is a present, and there is a distance. I make promises to myself, and I walk for hours.

An old Budapest flat filled with books, a high-ceilinged bathroom, a cast-iron tub. I plug the drain and turn the hot water faucet, and the gas heater hisses. I take off my dusty clothes and climb in. My legs are bruised from nights braced against adjacent seats in the bus or on the train. My thigh is burned and blistering from an accident with hot water four nights ago in Bamako. My back aches, and I’m just coming out of the loneliness of three days of anonymous travel. For a few minutes, my desires are winnowed to this single bath. I take my time. Above the tub, a clothesline has been pulleyed up toward the peeling ceiling. There is a bright washing-machine in the corner. Out in the kitchen, there is a man whose family has lived in this apartment since it was built ninety years ago. The mirror over the sink is distorted with age.

There was a long night on a plane diverted through Dakar, then out from West Africa. A day in Paris, an hour watching the sun on the windows of Notre Dame. On the night bus to Munich, the man behind me shared the food his sister had given to him. Two days ago I was in a dust storm in Bamako, and this afternoon I walked alone through Dachau in perfect weather.

This morning, I stood on one leg in a European restroom and tried to wash the sand off my feet, then painted my toenails pink. Standing, now, amongst the teenagers in an Apple store in Munich. I’m content, somehow, traveling farther east, carrying a bag of tiny apricots, e-mailing my father before the late train to Budapest.

Deep in the unbuilt industrial district of this city, we sit at a terrace bar that shares a wall with an unfinished hotel. We listen to music at a dark table, my friend closing his eyes and shaking his head in his quiet way. I do not know how to describe the music here, the amplified kora, the melancholy cry. We stay for hours. Sometime near midnight, an airplane passes in the near distance, heading north. My friend looks at his watch and says Ah. The Air France flight is late. The singer pauses to smoke his cigarette; the tip of it glows against the red wall behind him, and the cinder scatters across the tiled ground.

I come home in an impossibly broken taxi, watching from the window the nighttime tailors working the ancient foot-pedaled Singer machines on the old colonial balconies. I’m a little bit drunk, exhausted, wondering if there is space enough in my heart to love another place that I will leave.

The sun these mornings is pale yellow and blotted by dust, dulled and suspended high over the half-paved streets. I carry an old Malian coin like a talisman, I take it all in.