Free Exodus: A memoir by Deborah Feldman Page A

individual plastic cup that popped out of a spout, followed by a plastic stirrer that dropped down into the hot foaming liquid. I lifted the cup to my nose and inhaled deeply. Coffee did not smell like this in the States, with that faint underlying note of almost-burnt caramel.
    “
Jó reggelt
,” I said to the guards as I passed them in the corridor. They smiled and replied with “Good morning,” nodding their heads in an old-fashioned gesture of respect. I could feel their curious gaze follow me out the door. I had gathered by now that American visitors were rare in this part of the country. Before I left, I had tried to find a travel guide, but the one book I’d found that covered all of Hungary and not just Budapest had skimmed over this region, implying that it was impoverished and seamy, unsafe for the average tourist. I was lucky to be the recipient of the college’s hospitality; now I was keenly aware of how lost I would have been here on my own.
    It was a humid morning, the kind that started out just bearable and turned positively ovenlike by 8 a.m. The sky reminded me of the clouds in classical paintings; it was as if someone had taken apaintbrush and dipped it into the fresh white paint on the canvas, blurring the edges of the clouds into off-white and pale gray smears. They were not like American clouds, which was the first thing I had noticed about Hungary. It had an old, classical sky.
    We had humid summers in Brooklyn, too, although it usually didn’t get quite so bad in June. My grandmother had always been particularly good at handling the heat, refusing to turn on our air-conditioning units until it became positively unbearable. It was not until I reached Nyíregyháza that I understood why she was so unfazed. It felt like the muggy haze of a thousand summers had been trapped here on the plains, the mist collecting in layers.
    Outside, two ancient gingko trees flanked the entrance to the building. Up close, their leaves weighed tremulously under drops of dew the size of nickels. Every so often, a branch would shake in the breeze, and the dewdrops would quiver and slide along the surface of the leaves, righting themselves eventually when the breeze died. Along the paths carved out between the lush gardens and lawns were the acacia trees my grandmother had spoken of to me so fondly, their dainty, fernlike leaves gently filtering the sun so that it dappled the grass beneath in lacy patterns.
    Here were all the plants of her childhood, some of which she had tried to cultivate in our little backyard garden, and as I walked around the campus, I began to recognize some shrubs and flowers with joy. These were no English gardens at the college. These were the kind of gardens you might imagine had grown wild here and only been tamed, just barely, as an afterthought. Bushes and plants grew riotously into one another’s territory, and the grass in between was twice as tall as grass was usually allowed to grow in America. Willows and poplars competed for space, fat lavender shrubs lined the pathway, and tendrils of creeping fig wound theirway around them. I heard a mourning dove gurgle throatily on the branch above me. The atmosphere was lush and fragrant, the sun was already hot on my skin; I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to preserve the moment into an individually packaged memory, complete with vivid sensory details. It seems funny now, how we are never really in control of the moments that do stand out later, with their smells and sounds so immediate and evocative. I recalled another moment then, instead—one that I had made no effort to retain.

    My grandmother may have grown the only real garden in pre-hipster Brooklyn. It was the early 1990s, and most people had cemented over their backyards to keep away the weeds. She had made an agreement with the neighbors on either side of us: she would take care of the little plots of land behind their houses if they, the owners, allowed her to plant