The Inventory of Mrs. Koronczai

The morning Mária Koronczai came in to sell her husband's books, she was wearing the coat she'd worn to his funeral, which Eszter noticed but said nothing about, because there are things a person wears without choosing them.

She had three cardboard boxes, which she'd carried up from a taxi in two trips, her breath fogging in the November doorway, and she set them on the low table near the window — the one Bálint used for repricing — and stood back from them with her arms crossed, as if they were boxes of someone else's things, which in a way, Eszter supposed, they were.

"He collected," Mária said. It wasn't an apology. It was a category.

Eszter put on her reading glasses and began lifting books out, one at a time, the way you handle things that have belonged to a specific weight of grief. There were the expected ones: a nearly complete Jókai set, a Kosztolányi with the spine cracked at the same poem in every volume, two Hungarian translations of Hemingway that no longer sold, several histories of the second siege that she already had four of. She set them in a row and wrote nothing down yet.

Then there was a small book near the bottom, wrapped loosely in a grocery bag, which is what made her pause — the wrapping, not the book, because why wrap only one.

Inside was a novel she didn't recognize. The cover was cloth, dark green, faded to a color that had no name. No author on the front, only a title pressed into the cloth in letters that had lost their gilding except in the serifs: *A tükörszoba*, The Mirror Room. She opened it to the title page. An imprint she didn't know, a year — 1961 — and a name that was either the author or the translator, she couldn't tell, Zsigmond Kerti, and below that, in pencil, in a hand that was not the dead husband's hand because she could see the dead husband's hand in the Jókai margins, someone had written two words: *meg ne add.* Do not sell.

Mária was watching her, arms still crossed.

"Do you know this one?" Eszter asked.

"No. He had things I never knew."

This was said without bitterness, which was perhaps the saddest way it could be said.

Eszter turned pages. The paper was thin and slightly foxed, the typeface old-fashioned in the particular way of provincial presses, the kind that ran until the metal wore and the letters began leaning imperceptibly to the left. The prose, when she read a sentence, was — she stood in the shop trying to find the word, while Mária looked at the window where the frost was retreating in irregular patches — the prose was unshowy in the way that costs more than showiness costs. A woman in a room with mirrors. A conversation reported in the past perfect. A door that was probably not only a door.

"Can you take them?" Mária asked. "All of them, or most."

Eszter looked at the row. "Most," she said, which was honest.

"And that one?"

Eszter turned the small book over. She thought about the inscription and whether it was instruction or plea or the record of a private agreement between two people she would never know, and she thought about the coat Mária was wearing.

"I'll take it," she said, "but I'll need to research the value. It may be nothing. I'll let you know."

Mária nodded. She helped Eszter repack the boxes that were going back, and she did not ask again about the green book, and when she left she took the grocery bag with her without noticing she'd done it, which is also a thing a person does without choosing.

Eszter put *A tükörszoba* on the shelf behind the desk — the shelf where she put things she needed to look at longer before she understood what they were. She did not write it into the ledger that day, or the day after. By Thursday she had read it twice. By Friday she understood that she was not going to find another copy, because she had searched and found nothing, not in any catalog or any archive or any list of publications from that press, and either the book had been published in a way that left no trace or she was making an error somewhere that she couldn't locate, which sometimes amounts to the same thing.

She did not call Mária.

Instead she moved the book to the section where she kept the Hungarian novels, between two writers whose names she trusted, and she left it there, spine outward, the cloth green going gray in the light, and when customers asked — and occasionally they did, drawn by the oldness of it — she told them it wasn't priced yet.

This was true. She intended to price it eventually.

The inscription she had not quite decided what to do with, which is another way of saying she had decided.

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