I must have walked through the narrow passage between Kárász Street and Dömötör Street a thousand times. I always slipped a little on the same cracked paving stone when it rained, always glanced into the same dusty window of the shuttered shoe-repair shop, half hoping someone would finally haul away the shelf of wooden shoe-forms that had been gathering dust there for thirty years. By the time you turn thirty-three, you stop expecting a street you know that well to surprise you. Then, on a Tuesday evening, walking home from the accounting firm and glaring irritably at my phone’s signal bars because I couldn’t get through to my mother, I noticed that the gap between the shoe-repair shop and the dry cleaner’s — a gap that had never fit anything bigger than a dumpster — had widened into the front of a shop.
It wasn’t a new building. That much was certain. The wall wore the same tired, mustard-colored plaster as the houses on either side, and the wrought-iron lamp above the entrance looked as though it had been rusting there since the days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. But the door — dark hardwood, studded with brass fittings — could not have been there before, because every time I’d walked that way I’d known, with absolute certainty, that there was nothing there but a blank wall, one that someone had once scrawled a phone number across in pencil, long since washed away by rain. Now a hand-painted sign hung above the door in gold lettering: Fitting Room — by appointment only.
I stopped walking. A bus rumbled past behind me, somebody on the terrace across the street was shouting into their phone in Spanish, and I stood there like a plank of wood in front of a shop window that wasn’t really a window at all — more a frame, a pane of glass behind which bolts of fabric hung, though not the way they would in a tailor’s shop. These fabrics were moving. The draft couldn’t have been doing it, because the door was shut and the air outside was still; and yet they rippled, as though a thin film of oil floated across their surface, and their color shifted minute by minute: one moment deep blue, like the sea at night, the next a rusty brown, like a field of wheat not yet harvested. One swatch — a narrow strip, scarf-shaped — took on, right before my eyes, a shade of violet I had never seen before, not in paint, not in any flower, not in any sunset. As if the fabric itself were remembering something I had forgotten.
I told myself to keep walking, that this was obviously some new boutique’s marketing gimmick, an installation some young designer had dreamed up to get attention. But my hand was already on the brass handle before my brain had made any decision, and the handle was strangely warm, like the outside of a freshly poured mug of tea.
Inside, the shop seemed far larger than the façade had promised. The ceiling began high and, I believe, continued even higher, because the lights — small amber-glowing spheres that floated not inside bulbs but freely in the air, as though gravity worked differently in here — led the eye up into a darkness I couldn’t place. The floor was wood, old creaking parquet, but when I stepped on it the creak didn’t sound like noise at all; it sounded like a soft, musical murmur, the way a cello sounds when someone is tuning it from a room away.
The air held a mixture of smells that had no business being together and yet coexisted peacefully: freshly cut grass, the metallic tang of rain on asphalt, something spiced, cardamom perhaps, and beneath all of it a thin, almost imperceptible note that I only placed after I’d been standing there for several minutes: the smell of old books. More precisely, the smell of my own childhood bedroom, where my grandfather’s books had sat on a pine shelf that had been torn down ten years ago.
I stepped further in. Along the floor stood small tables, each holding a single object: a bunch of keys whose teeth gleamed not like metal but like porcelain; a thimble-sized hourglass whose sand fell upward instead of down. The walls held no paintings, only framed, empty cuts of darkness — as if every frame looked into another room through a window filled not with glass but with dark, and if I stared at one long enough, something seemed to move in its depths: a shadow, a flicker of light, a blurred face. In one frame, in particular, I saw the silhouette of a man standing on a rain-soaked street, waiting for someone, and every time I looked away and looked back, he stood a little closer to the end of the street.
In the middle of the shop stood a counter, and behind it a ladder rising into the dark where the ceiling disappeared, strung between its rungs with tiny glass vials, each holding a single drop of liquid that glowed with its own light: some amber, some poison-green, one so white it made my eyes ache. Beneath them a brass plaque announced, in ornate script: Forgotten Intentions — Not For Sale.
“Good evening,” a voice said, and I startled, because I hadn’t heard footsteps.
A woman had stepped out from behind one of the shelving units, her age impossible to guess — she could have been fifty, she could have been eighty. Her face was smooth as a freshly ironed sheet, but around her eyes had gathered enough fine lines for a lifetime’s worth of laughter or weeping. Her silvery hair was gathered in a loose bun, and in the bun — I’m not exaggerating — tiny pins stood lined up like bees in a hive, each head tipped with a bead of a different color. Her clothes were simple: a dark gray apron over a cream-colored blouse, but around her neck hung a tape measure, and when she moved, even slightly, the tape didn’t catch the light the way fabric does — it shimmered like starlight on a clear winter night, sparkling in tiny points.
“I’m Teréz,” she said, and did not offer her hand, only nodded, as if she knew that the formality of a handshake was unnecessary in a place like this. “I see you found the entrance. Not everyone manages that, you know.”
I asked her what this place was, and she only smiled, as though she’d heard the question a thousand times before and answered it just as willingly every single time.
“A fitting room,” she said. “Like in a clothing shop. Only here, you don’t try on a skirt or a coat, my dear. Here, you try on another life. The one you didn’t choose.”
I suppose I should have laughed, or turned on my heel and walked out. But something in her voice, in the way she said that sentence — plainly, without a trace of theater, the way you’d read off the price of coats — convinced me to do neither.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked, and my voice rang strangely sharp in the shop’s silence, as if the air itself were thicker in here than out on the street, holding on to every word a little more tightly.
Teréz didn’t answer right away. She ran a hand over one of the framed, dark windows, and for a moment something lit up beneath the glass — the outline of a kitchen, a child’s laugh that made no sound but showed in the shape of a mouth — then dimmed again, like a cloud sliding across the moon.
“Do you know how many times a day I hear someone say, ‘if only I’d decided differently’?” she asked, not really waiting for an answer. “People think regret is a weight they’ll carry their whole lives and never set down. But regret is only a door nobody’s looked behind. I don’t open that door for them, my dear. I only give them a peephole.”
Teréz led me to the back of the shop, where three curtains hung side by side, each heavy, dark velvet of the kind I’d last seen in a theater, and each marked with a silver number: 1, 2, 3.
“Everyone who walks in here has at least three forks in the road of their life that they still dream about, years later. Not necessarily regret,” she stressed, “just… wondering. What would have happened, if. The booths don’t show you what would have happened perfectly, or whether it would have been better or worse. They only show you what would have happened. Precisely, vividly, with every sense engaged. You’ll spend a few minutes there, in the life you didn’t live. Then you’ll come back here, into this body, into this now.”
“And what does it cost?” I asked, because somewhere at the back of my brain, the suspicion of a bill is always lurking.
“Not money,” Teréz answered, giving a small tug to the tape measure around her neck, as if adjusting it. “But something, yes. Something small. A button off your coat. A lock of hair. A memory that isn’t important to you — say, the color of your cousin’s wedding invitation, or the name of your fifth-grade homeroom teacher. Something small. Something you won’t miss.”
I asked why the payment had to be so strange, and she said that every trial had a price, and that memory, like any fabric, could wear thin in one place so it could grow thicker somewhere else. I didn’t really understand, but I nodded, because the whole evening was the kind of evening where nodding seemed like the only sensible response.
While we talked, a middle-aged man stepped out from behind curtain number 2, his eyes red, though not from crying — more the way eyes look after staring too long into a bright light. His hand trembled slightly as he took his coat from the hook, and he said only one word to Teréz, by way of thanks: “Goodbye, Mrs. Teréz.” Then, on his way out, he looked at me with a brief, odd smile that held neither joy nor sorrow, only something like relief, and said, “It’s worth it. Whatever it is you’re curious about, it’s worth seeing.” I didn’t ask what he’d seen, because it felt improper, and he didn’t offer to tell me. Teréz only murmured, once the door had closed behind him: “He’s been coming here for twenty-two years, once a month. He’s trying on, over and over, the son he never had because he was afraid, in his twenties. He doesn’t want to change anything in his own life — he just wants to know what that child would have grown into.”
That made me shiver a little, and I asked whether it wasn’t dangerous, returning that often to a life never lived.
“Some people lose themselves in it,” Teréz replied, her voice turning serious for the first time, the way a teacher’s does when explaining an important rule. “I had a client, years ago, who came several times a month, always the same curtain, because inside it he lived by the sea with a woman he’d never actually met — only glimpsed once, through a train window. He told me once he remembered her scent better than his own wife’s voice. That’s when I stopped taking his appointments. Not to punish him — the booth isn’t meant for a person to live in. Only to look into, and come back here, a little wiser.”
“How do you know when it’s time to stop seeing someone?” I asked.
“By how hard it gets for them to open their eyes when they come back,” Teréz said simply. “You still open yours easily. That’s why I’ll let you in a third time, a fourth, if it comes to that.”
I stepped behind the first curtain, because that was the number that came to mind first, the moment I thought of the violin.
*
Until I was sixteen, I practiced four hours every afternoon. Lajos Kertész, my teacher back then, told my parents at a conference I happened to overhear through a cracked door that “a hand like this comes along once a generation.” He meant my hand. My left hand, which moved along the violin’s neck like a creature with a will of its own, while my right hand guided the bow. At seventeen I auditioned for the Music Academy in Budapest, and I got in — not at the top of the ranking, but in. Then my father had a stroke, three months before I was due to leave, and for six weeks he couldn’t speak or move his right hand, and my mother was working alone at an accounting office, and somehow — there was nothing heroic in it, it simply happened — I stayed. I gave up my place. I enrolled at the business college in Szeged instead, because it was closer, and because my hands were needed at home — not on a violin, but on numbers.
Behind the curtain was a small booth, no bigger than a phone box, its walls dark blue, a single chair on the floor. I sat down. Teréz didn’t follow me in; she only drew the velvet shut and said, “When you’re ready, close your eyes.”
I closed them.
When I opened them again, I was sitting in the dressing room of a concert hall, in front of a mirror, and my hand — my hand, only with twenty extra years of practice etched into its skin, the knuckles slightly swollen from decades of gripping a bow — was adjusting the skirt of a black concert dress. In the mirror a woman looked back at me who was me, but not entirely: my face was leaner, darker circles sat under my eyes than they do now, but my posture — the curve of my neck, the way my head tilted to one side as though I were perpetually listening for a melody somewhere — was entirely different from the one I’d grown used to in my own mirror.
From outside, behind a curtain of this room too — this one plum-colored, not black — a voice called in: “Five minutes, Dóra!” and I recognized Lajos’s voice, though older now, rougher, as though decades had passed since I’d last heard it.
I stood, and my hand reached for the violin case on its own, resting on a velvet-lined stand. When I opened it, inside lay a violin whose wood was a darker reddish-brown than any I’d ever held, and when I gripped its neck, my fingers knew exactly where to go, as though twenty years of knowledge had been poured into them in a single instant.
I stepped out from the wings into a hall I’d only ever seen in photographs: red velvet seats, gilded balconies, an enormous crystal chandelier reflecting the murmur of an audience tuning itself before the performance. I didn’t know which concert hall this was, but the angels painted on the ceiling looked like the angels in the Music Academy’s great hall — only here they seemed closer, more real, than in any photograph.
On my way out I passed a long mirror hung with little notes, congratulations from past concerts, a yellowing poster from a performance ten years earlier bearing — I shivered to recognize it — my own name: Dóra Fekete, “special prize, Brahms Competition, Leipzig.” This other Dóra hadn’t just made it this far; she’d won competitions, performed abroad, built an entire career I’d never had the luxury of dreaming about, because the space where dreams should have been was taken up by tuition fees, rent, and my mother’s pharmacy receipts.
The orchestra members, warming up in the wings, nodded at me, some smiling like old colleagues, and one cellist, an older, balding man, leaned in and whispered: “You’re going to play better tonight than you did in Vienna, I can feel it.” I didn’t know which performance he meant, but my body — this life’s body — nodded, as though it understood the joke.
The conductor — a stout, mustached man whose name floated into my head as though I’d always known it: Simon Rotter — nodded toward me and raised his arm. The hall fell silent. And then my hand — the hand that for twenty years had written numbers, budget spreadsheets, tax returns — lifted the violin, my bow touched the strings, and in that moment it wasn’t really about my hand at all, but about something I can’t describe any other way than this: the body’s memory took over, steering a past I had never lived, and yet knowing, with total precision, exactly what to do.
It was Brahms. The D minor violin concerto, the first movement, the one I had once, long ago, in my real life, attempted, but never managed to perform on any stage. Now the notes poured out of the violin like warm water, and with every arc I drew with the bow, I could feel the whole hall drawing closer around me, as though my instrument were a net and every listener a soft rustle, a held breath caught inside it. I felt the muscles of my arm, aching slightly from the taut posture; I felt sweat beading beneath my dress at the underarms; I felt — and this was the strangest part — a kind of pride that lived deep in my bones, not in my head as a thought, but in my body, as a constant, warm hum.
At the end of the movement, the hall stood. I don’t say this to boast — because it wasn’t me who did it, not really, only another version of me, one who had never given up her place at the Academy — but because the clapping of hands felt so real, the shouts of “bravo” from an old man’s voice somewhere in the second row, that my own heartbeat quickened too, as though the ovation belonged to me.
Then — because Teréz had said it would only last a few minutes — the hall began to blur at the edges of my vision, the way a photograph does when dipped in water and the pigment starts to run. The last thing I felt in that life was a hand on my back, Lajos’s hand, saying: “I’m proud of you, my girl. I always knew.”
When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in the small blue booth, my hand empty, my knuckles unmarked by any bow, and my tears — I won’t deny it — had already soaked the collar of my blouse.
Teréz drew back the curtain and sat quietly beside me on a chair that hadn’t been there before.
“What did you take from me?” I asked, once I could speak again.
“A memory that isn’t important,” Teréz said, and her voice was warmer now than before, less businesslike. “You no longer remember what your favorite color was when you were ten. See if you notice it’s missing.”
I tried to recall it, and sure enough: the gap was there, clean and straight-edged, like the empty space left by a photograph cut out of an album. It didn’t hurt. It only felt absent, the way your tongue finds the gap between two teeth and doesn’t quite know what to do with it.
*
I sat on the bus home, trying to sort out what I was feeling. My hand still tingled, as if it had really held a bow for minutes on end, and when I caught my reflection in the window, I was briefly afraid that my posture — the curve of my neck — had carried over from that other life. But no, it was only tired, ordinary Dóra sitting there, a bag of invoices in her lap that she’d printed off the office computer that very morning. I didn’t think I should have gone to the Music Academy, and I didn’t think I’d ruined my life by staying. It was more as though someone had opened a window in a room I hadn’t known had a window at all, and now I knew that beyond that window, there existed a landscape. I didn’t long to go there. I was simply glad to know it was there.
All week I kept catching my fingers moving on their own in my lap, searching for positions on an imaginary instrument’s neck, and once, in the office elevator, a colleague asked why I was drumming such a strange, syncopated rhythm on the handrail. I couldn’t tell her that a passage from a D minor violin concerto was stirring in my wrist, for fear she’d think me unhinged, so I only said I’d had too much coffee.
A week later I went back, and this time I didn’t even pretend to myself that I was walking by chance. I set off straight from Kárász Street toward the shoe-repair shop, and when I turned into the gap, I was briefly terrified I wouldn’t find the entrance there, that the whole thing had been nothing but a trick of a tired mind. But it was there, the same mustard-colored wall, the same warm brass handle, and when I stepped inside, Teréz was already standing behind the counter, as if she’d spent the whole week waiting for my return.
*
The second time, I didn’t choose the violin — I chose curtain number 2, because the night before I’d dreamed of Gábor for the first time in years. Gábor had been my friend during university — not a lover, not quite, though for one long summer, when we were both twenty-two and our friendship had started to tremble at its own edges, it might have become one, if he hadn’t won the scholarship to Vienna, and if I hadn’t been so afraid to follow him there. “Come with me,” he’d said at the station, standing beside his suitcase, and I’d answered, “we’ll see, we’ll write,” which of course we both understood to mean no. We wrote to each other for three years, then less and less often, then not at all.
This time the booth bathed in green light, not blue, and when I closed my eyes I found myself in a kitchen where the tile pattern was unmistakably Austrian, blue and white, and beyond the window I could see the rooftops of a city center I’d only ever seen on postcards of Vienna. A thin gold wedding band sat on my hand, and on the kitchen table lay a child’s drawing: a house, a dog, and three figures — one tall, one medium, one small.
Gábor stood at the sink, his back to me, and when he spoke, his German was so fluent that for a moment I didn’t even understand what he was saying into the phone, until I realized that my ears — this life’s ears — understood perfectly.
“Lujza will be home from practice any minute,” he said, and turned around. He was older than I’d last seen him, gray at the temples, but his eyes were the same, that same brown I’d once stared into on a sultry July evening so intently that I’d forgotten to breathe. “Good day?”
“It was fine,” I answered, and my voice sounded foreign to my own ear, a little huskier than usual, as though in this life I shouted more, perhaps in a classroom, because there were marker stains on my hand, blue and red, the kind a teacher gets.
I walked around the apartment while Gábor cooked, and every object pointed to an entire life I had never lived: photographs of Gábor and me in the Prater with a stroller; a half-filled French workbook on the shelf, something I’d apparently used to try to fit in; a framed certificate naming Dóra Fekete a teacher at the International School of Vienna. Lujza, the daughter — twelve, maybe, freckled, with Gábor’s eyes — burst through the door and looked at me the way only a child can look at someone she’s certain will be home when she gets there.
“Mom, I won the relay!” she shouted, and my arms reached for her on their own, to pull her into a hug, and in that embrace was a kind of simple, grounding joy that held no drama at all, only the thick, warm fabric of everyday life.
We sat down to dinner — Gábor had made some kind of potato-and-mushroom stew that turned out, in this life, to be “his mother’s recipe” — and the conversation was so ordinary that it was precisely this ordinariness that made it unbearably beautiful: who was taking Lujza to piano on Thursday, whether the washing machine needed fixing, how strangely Gábor’s boss had behaved in the meeting. There was no dramatic love scene, the kind I suppose I’d half expected. Just a life, full of the kind of boredom people secretly pray for when they’re busy wishing for the other thing, the adventurous one.
After dinner Lujza brought out her math workbook for a quiz the next day and sat beside me on the couch, her leg pressing against mine with the unthinking ease of a child who trusts someone completely. I helped her with fractions, and my hand instinctively knew how to explain it more simply than the textbook, clearly having done this a hundred times before. When she finished, she looked up and said, “Mom, you’re the best teacher in the whole world, you know that?” And though I knew it was only a twelve-year-old’s everyday exaggeration, something tightened in my chest, because in my real life no one had ever said that to me — not for lack of love, but for lack of occasion.
When I glanced out the window at the city lights, and Gábor came up behind me at the sink, wrapping his arms around me while I ran water over the plates, he said into my ear, in a voice that was at once familiar and utterly strange: “I’m glad you stayed, back then.”
I didn’t know how to answer, because the word “then” held an entire decision inside it — one I hadn’t made, but this other Dóra had, the one who’d said yes at the station.
That was when the image began to blur, just as the violinist’s life had, and the last thing I remember is Lujza’s laughter from the other room, over some cartoon or other.
*
Teréz was there again when I opened my eyes, and this time she didn’t ask what she’d taken, because I already knew that something small would be missing each time, and I found it easily enough: I could no longer recall the name of my fifth-grade homeroom teacher. The space where the memory had been was empty, but it didn’t hurt, only left that same strange gap-between-teeth feeling as before.
“You cried,” Teréz said, not as a question.
“Yes,” I answered. “But not the way you think.”
“How do I think?” she asked, fiddling with the tape measure at her neck.
“You think I cried from grief. But I didn’t. It was more… ” I searched for the word, “gratitude. As though I were thanking someone for sparing me from having to live that life, because it was enough just to know it existed.”
Teréz nodded, as though she’d heard that answer a thousand times too, and listened to it gladly every single time.
“Many people believe they come here to regret their decisions,” she said. “But most of the ones who come back aren’t looking for regret. They’re looking for gratitude. They just don’t know that’s what they’re after until they sit down in that chair.”
*
Walking home in the cold October wind that blew in off the Tisza into the city center, I tried to untangle exactly what I felt about Gábor and that other life. I didn’t want that life back — that was the strangest realization of all. Not because it would have been worse, because it clearly wasn’t worse, only different. It simply wasn’t mine. This one was mine, the one I had now, with Márk, who at this very moment, in this reality, was waiting at home with a bowl of cold pasta and a text message asking if everything was all right, because I hadn’t answered in two hours.
Márk wasn’t Gábor. He wasn’t the kind of man who stood by a window staring into the distance, as though always thinking of some other country. He was the kind who remembered that my left knee ached if I stood too long, and slid the footstool in front of the armchair before I even sat down. Not the blazing, dangerous love of films. More like a well-lined winter coat: undramatic, but warm.
That evening, when I got home and Márk asked where I’d been so long, I didn’t really know how to answer. I told him I’d gone into a strange shop, and he looked at me as if I were trying to be funny, then let the subject drop, because he knew there was a part of me I didn’t share with everyone, and he respected that without peppering me with questions.
Two days later, at the office computer, I looked up Gábor’s name on a social network I hadn’t opened in years. According to his profile he still lived in Vienna, alone, with photos of a dog and an album of mountain hikes — no wife anywhere, no Lujza. For a moment I wondered whether he, too, had ever been offered something like this, had felt, in some other Gábor’s skin, that kitchen, that child we two never brought into the world. I didn’t write anything deep, just a short line: “Hi. It’s been a while. Hope you’re well.” Three days later he answered, as lightly as when we were students, and our correspondence never turned into a declaration of love or some relived closeness — only into the loose, friendly contact of two people who once mattered to each other and are now simply glad the other exists somewhere in the world. That was what I’d actually needed: not the Vienna life, but this small, real thread that closed the question of “what if” without reopening it.
*
The third time, two weeks later, I went back because of my mother. I’d gone with her to her cardiology appointment, and the doctor, a young woman with tired eyes, showed us the waveform of her heart rhythm on the monitor and said the disturbance we’d thought was mild was worse than we’d believed, and that she’d need a new medication that might make her dizzy for a few weeks. My mother seemed calm, nodding along, asking her usual practical questions, but when we stepped outside into the cold air, her hand suddenly gripped my arm, harder than I expected. “I don’t want to die yet, Dóri,” she said. “There’s so much I haven’t done.” We don’t usually talk that openly, and the sentence sat in my throat the whole way home, like a stone I couldn’t swallow.
On my way home from the hospital, I stopped at Teréz’s shop, and this time I chose curtain number 3, because it had suddenly occurred to me that at nineteen my mother had been accepted to a scholarship program in Trieste — she’d wanted to study marine biology — but my grandparents hadn’t let her go, because “it wasn’t proper for a girl to travel that far alone,” and my mother had never spoken of it, except once, over a glass of wine, when I was sixteen, and even then only in a single sentence: “I could have been someone else, you know.”
I didn’t want to experience my mother — the booth didn’t work like some kind of body swap — but rather the version of me who would have grown up in Trieste’s warmer, saltier air, if my grandparents had let my mother go, and she had met someone there, by the sea, and I had been born there instead.
When I opened my eyes, I was standing at the edge of a rocky shore, the blue of the Adriatic so intense it made my eyes ache, and the air smelled of salt and iodine, mixed with something sweet and citrusy that I realized came from orange peels drying outside a nearby café. My skin was darker than it is now, and on my arm ran a thin white scar that I knew, in this life, came from a childhood boating accident. I was thinking in Italian — this was the strangest sensation of all, because the thoughts didn’t arrive in translation, they simply formed as Italian words — and the name a voice called out to me from the pier was Dora Nero, because my father — a fisherman from Trieste named Marco — had Italianized the name my mother had brought with her.
A small fishing boat rocked at the pier, and on its deck stood an older woman, instantly recognizable by her sun-browned face and thick gray hair: my mother, only thirty years younger than I knew her, and healthier, more alive than I had ever seen her, because here, on this shore, she worked at the marine biology research institute she’d always wanted to work at.
“Dora, vieni, aiutami con le reti!” she called — come help me with the nets — and my legs set off toward her on their own, feeling the slick, salt-damp stone of the pier beneath my bare feet.
We hauled in the net together, and my mother — this mother, this other mother — gripped my arm and told me about a pod of dolphins she’d spotted from the research vessel that morning, one of them bearing an old, healed scar on its dorsal fin that she’d been tracking for years, because she believed it was the same individual her own father — my grandfather, whom I’d never known, because in this life he’d been someone else entirely — had shown her as a child.
Her voice was light, her laugh quick and frequent, nothing like the strict, tight laugh of the mother I knew in reality, the one who had spent her whole working life sitting at a desk by a window that looked out onto nothing but a parking lot.
In the afternoon, once we’d sorted the catch into crates — unfamiliar, silver-flashing species whose names my tongue produced automatically in Italian, as though I’d always known them — we went into the research institute, an old villa painted yellow, its walls letting in even the cool mist of the sea. My mother introduced me to her colleagues, all of whom greeted me as though they’d known my family for generations, and one of the older researchers, a man named Bruno whose office wall was papered entirely in dolphin photographs, clapped me on the back and said that next year, if my exams went well, he’d personally recommend me for fieldwork in Genoa. I could feel in my skin that this future was already decided, solid and within reach, unlike in my real life, where the future had always stayed vague.
That evening, at a small restaurant by the harbor, the owner set down a bowl heaped with black mussels in front of us, and my mother talked about how my father, Marco, was about to leave on a three-week research trip around Sicily, and how the two of us would manage just fine without him, the way we always did — and there was none of the anxiety in her voice that I always heard in my real mother’s voice when she spoke of my real father, the one who had never quite been the same since the stroke.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” she said, while we tidied the nets, “that you stayed here with us, and didn’t run off to Milan with that boy, like your friend did. Your place is here, by the sea.”
I didn’t know who she meant, which boy, which Milan, because in this life, too, I had made decisions I never saw, only their consequences, like a film where I only got to watch the final scene.
That evening, sitting at the end of the pier with our feet dangling over the water while the sun painted the horizon red, my mother — Dora’s mother, in this world — said that she’d always known that if she could ever settle anywhere in the world, it would be by the sea, and that she was glad she’d managed to teach me that too, before it was too late.
That was the sentence where the image began to tremble, like air shimmering with heat, and by the time it dissolved completely, I could already feel my hand — my real hand — clenched into a fist on my thigh, in the chair of the blue booth.
*
When I opened my eyes, Teréz was no longer sitting beside me but standing, and her gaze seemed somehow more attentive than before, as though she knew this third time had been different from the previous two.
“What did I lose this time?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.
“Nothing important,” Teréz said, but without her usual businesslike tone, more gently, like someone who knows “nothing important” is a relative concept. “The name of a childhood friend. A girl you played with in the sandbox, but haven’t spoken to in twenty-five years.”
I sat in silence for a while, staring at the velvet curtain, which hung now in a greenish-brown color, like autumn leaves.
“Did my mother really give that up?” I finally asked. “The sea, the research?”
“That I couldn’t tell you,” Teréz answered. “The booth doesn’t give answers about the past. It only shows what would have happened in a future that branched off from a different fork. Whether your mother truly wanted that path, or whether it was only the nostalgia of an evening with a glass of wine talking — only she can know that.”
*
I walked home, scrolling to my mother’s name in my call log, and a strange calm settled over me — not relief, not sadness, some third thing I had no word for. I called her.
“Mom,” I said when she picked up. “Can I ask you something? Did you really want to be a marine biologist?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line, so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Who told you that?” she finally asked, her voice careful, like someone lifting an old, delicate piece of porcelain out of a box.
“You did, once, a long time ago. I just started thinking about it.”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I wanted to. But things turned out differently, and I don’t regret it, Dóri. I just… sometimes wonder what it would have been like.”
“Me too,” I said, my voice softer than it ever was when I spoke with my mother, because now, for the first time, I truly knew what it would have been like. I didn’t tell her. I wouldn’t have known how to begin, and besides, that knowledge was mine, not hers.
*
I went back one last time, not for another trial, just to thank Teréz, because it felt wrong to leave a gift like that without gratitude. She was straightening the shelves, adjusting the empty frames, and when I walked in, she didn’t look surprised.
“I didn’t come to try anything,” I said. “Just to say thank you.”
Teréz set down the frame she’d been holding — inside it, it seemed, a mountain landscape floated somewhere in its depths — and sat with me at the counter, no longer as a shopkeeper, but as someone curious, for once, about what her visitor had made of it all.
“A lot of people ask me who I am,” she said, as though anticipating the question I’d actually meant to ask. “Why I have this shop, who I work for, what happens if one day I don’t go back to wherever I came from. I can’t give an answer to that, because I don’t know for certain myself. All I know is that whenever I open a door on some street corner where someone stands at the exact point of believing their life was a single straight line, one that never branched anywhere — something stirs in my chest that has no better name than joy.”
“Will someone else come here, after me?” I asked.
“Someone always comes,” Teréz answered, toying with the tape measure at her neck, which seemed, in the evening light, to sparkle more densely than before. “But you won’t find anything else here, if you come back this way again. Once someone gets what they needed, the shop moves on. It always opens on a different street corner, for someone else.”
I didn’t ask any more, because it felt like the answer I’d gotten was exactly as much as this place was willing to reveal about itself, and that, too, was a kind of gift: the knowledge that not every mystery needs solving before you can be grateful for it.
Before I left, Teréz took my hand, and her tape measure brushed my wrist for a moment, warm as a living pulse. “There’s one more thing I haven’t told you,” she said, and real warmth stirred in her voice now, not the voice of commerce. “The booth doesn’t show you every possible life. Only the ones your soul still, after all these years, reaches for on its own. If there weren’t something alive in them, something that still breathes in you, you wouldn’t have been able to step behind that velvet curtain at all. So what you saw in there, my dear, wasn’t a lost possibility. It was a part of yourself that never truly died — it only took on another shape here, in the present: in the hand that holds the bow now, in the voice you’ll use with a daughter someday, if you have one, or in the quiet respect with which you turn toward your mother now.”
I never went back to Teréz’s shop again, although for months afterward, every time I walked toward Kárász Street, I found myself glancing that way without meaning to, hoping the entrance might be there again. It never was. One day it had vanished entirely, the wall sealed shut again, as though it had never been anything but a blank wall between a shoe-repair shop and a dry cleaner’s, and for a moment I thought the whole thing must have been nothing but a long, detailed dream — until I remembered that I still couldn’t recall the name of my fifth-grade homeroom teacher.
But something in me had changed, and not the way a resolution does, the kind you jot down in a notebook one morning. More the way it feels when you realize a door you’d believed was locked forever had in fact only been closed, and you could open it any time you wanted — you simply hadn’t known that until now.
Before all that, though, that same evening, coming home from the third trial, I sat down beside Márk at the kitchen table and told him the whole thing, for the first time in our four years together — the shop, Teréz, the violin, Gábor, the sea — and the entire time I was afraid he’d laugh, or worse, start to worry that I’d lost my mind. But Márk only listened, his face resting in his hand, and when I got to Gábor’s name, his expression didn’t flicker; he only leaned in a little closer, as though he wanted me to let him in even further.
“So what are you going to do with it?” he asked, once I’d finished, and there was no jealousy in his voice, only the kind of curiosity with which you’d study a map you hadn’t known existed.
“I don’t know yet,” I answered honestly. “But I know I don’t want to leave. Not for Gábor, not for Vienna, not for anyone. I think I just want to take something back that I left behind.”
“The violin,” he said, not as a question, because he already knew me well enough to know what I meant before I said it.
Three weeks later I called the adult-education department at the Szeged music conservatory and signed up for an evening violin course they run twice a week for people who studied once and gave up the instrument. Not to become a concertmaster in some big-city philharmonic — I knew that ship, at least in this life, had sailed, and I’d made peace with that — but because my hands needed to learn again what they were capable of, when they weren’t only writing numbers.
At the first lesson, my teacher, a loud, bluntly funny woman named Ágnes Ferenczi, looked me over as I pulled my violin — ten years dusty in my father’s attic — out of its case, and told me my technique was “fossilized, like a mummy,” but that somewhere underneath, the instinct was still there, it just needed the dust scraped off. The first notes my bow coaxed out were scratchy and uncertain, nothing like the Brahms I’d heard in the booth, and strangely, that didn’t discourage me. I found myself laughing, right there in class, among the other rusted adult students — a retired dentist, a young mother back at her instrument after giving birth, a nineteen-year-old too embarrassed to admit he still took lessons — because I realized it wasn’t the concert hall I’d missed. It was the motion: the weight of the bow, the aching, familiar tension of my fingers on the strings.
When I got home and Márk asked how it had gone, I told him my voice was sore from concentrating, my shoulder ached from the old posture, but my heart was pounding the way it hadn’t in months. He just nodded, and the next evening, when I came home from work, a music stand stood by the window, ordered online without a word to me about it.
The months passed, and my hand slowly relearned what it had once known — not with the certainty I’d felt in that other life inside the booth, but certain enough that by Christmas, when my family gathered at my mother’s house, I managed to play a simple, clean Bach chorale all the way through without stopping. My mother sat on the couch under a blanket, because her heart made her cold quickly in those weeks, and when I finished, she didn’t say anything for a while, her eyes just shining, and I told her then that this was her thanks too, for never giving up her own life for mine, even though she’d never once put it that way.
I took my mother down to the Tisza riverbank after her next checkup, and we bought ice cream and sat on a bench, and neither of us mentioned Trieste, but every time the water caught the sunlight, we both looked a little longer than necessary, and in that silence was something we had never shared with each other before: a shared respect for something we’d never lived, but that was still ours, somewhere, in another fitting room, on another possible afternoon.
In the spring, our class gave a small recital in the conservatory’s little hall, for family and friends — a room that came nowhere near the crystal-chandeliered hall where the other Dóra had played Brahms. But when I rose from my chair, lifting the violin to my chin, and saw Márk in the front row drumming nervously on his knee, and beside him my mother, who had gotten out of bed just to be there, something stirred in me that resembled neither the gratitude nor the pride I’d felt in the booth, but a mixture of the two, entirely my own, entirely from this life — one I now knew for certain I hadn’t chosen for lack of any other path, but had built, in my own way, with small, clumsy, honest motions. My bow touched the strings, and though the sound wasn’t perfect, my hand didn’t shake, and that meant more than anything I had ever felt behind that velvet curtain.
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