The window doesn't open. We had to nail it shut after being broken so many times. I'm sitting with my face to the glass, watching my breath roll out like a rug, flat and opaque, and quickly roll back, as the snow falls outside in immaculate silence. The street has been washed away in white, the shapes of houses, cars, trees, the train station, the tracks, all smoothed away by the down feathers of pristine snow. My leg is broken, I have a cast. I broke it last week when my Grandpa took me skiing in the city park. He felt so guilty about it; he would have ripped his heart out and offered it to the pediatric nurse, my mother, anyone who cares. He is reading the newspaper in the other room. He will die in about a year from now but none of us know it yet.

     I don't intend to make this a story on loss. It is the nature of memories I am interested in, their power and ambiguity, their transparency and persistence. Subotica seems like a good place to start-- its cobblestone streets keeping me alert as they unevenly unfold under my feet on a warm and breezy evening. I pass the train station, the Puppet Theater, and head toward the Town Hall, turn around the market and end up on "Sugarut" number four. I climb the stairs to the roof of the building where Marko is waiting. It smells like matches and there's a shower of shooting stars around Marko's dark curls, making firecracker noises and landing with thuds. He smiles and takes my hand as we watch the first bombs over the city. It is two days before he gets drafted, five before his suicide.

     Growing up I spent a lot of time with my Grandpa. He looked like Cary Grant and was the sun and the moon and the stars in my world. He had a magical briefcase filled with candy and toys. We sailed the seven seas together, as he pushed me around the apartment in a yellow plastic wash basin. I heard him curse only once, when he lost his tortoiseshell glasses on the train back from an assignment. He was a reporter and I wanted to be just like him when I grew up.

     I am here now, all grown up and asking myself whether it would be harder to let go of dreams or of memories and decide it is futile to do either because rewinding is handy while waiting tables. What is rewinding, you ask? The other night I was driving down Sepulveda with a friend. I heard the faint chatter of a helicopter in the distance and I froze with terror in the middle of conversation. It is like that; like conditioning, almost like a trigger paired with activity, in my case involuntary rewinding. Then again, it's also like wiping down the tables at the end of the night, humming "Angelina" to myself, reminiscing of how my Grandpa would lift me up and set me down on his toes and we would dance like that, wobbling and laughing. Memories have their fickle ways. They are neither friend nor foe, but a mediator between reality and oblivion.

     Yet strange how when you need to remember a face the most, memory fails and visual circumference is lost to obscurity. My mother is buttoning a navy blazer across my chest, she is placing her favorite jeweled owl pin on my lapel, and she is brushing my hair quickly before we leave the house. We are at the funeral; I refuse to talk to anyone, and even feel offended when friends and family come up to us with words of condolences. All I can do is look at his shoes. They are like two gondolas, but perpendicular and buoyant, like they are about to start sinking. They are impossibly shiny, creaseless, and fresh from the box. I know they will blister. Why do we remember, and why some things rather than others? Are these the right questions or is it simply an arbitrary necessary process? Seems like questioning is the only answer.

     They say smell is the most powerful sense when it comes to embedding itself into our memories. I find my rewinding driven by it most of the time, especially by the cocktail of yeast, propane, and a certain bath salt called "Adria". The yeast is in a mauve tin cup with a peeling picture of a piglet on it. The propane is in an orange rocket like container next to the boiler. The hallway is long, dark and cold as I run to the bathroom where Adria is waiting for me. Things were funny like that back then; we had no central heating, I had to drink yeast because I sang in the school choir, and bathing and calling long distance was only at night. On Sundays, my Grandma would take me to Catholic Church for mass in Hungarian while at home my Grandpa read Virgil in Latin. I was twelve with a hairdo like Claudia Cardinale and madly in love with Atilla, the next door Romani neighbors' son. Atilla smelled like detergent and sour apples and we played the lotto together. We hoped but never won. He disappeared one day along with his family and a Bosnian family of refugees moved in. A few years later I got a letter from him saying he was stationed near Vukovar, inviting me to visit. I thought what a splendid idea, I had never taken a trip by myself but only watched the trains from the balcony, so I went and saw him. His hair was neatly combed, he was wearing a crisp green uniform and he even made me sit on a tank, holding a bouquet of carnations while he waved a flag. Someone took a picture of us and it appeared in the paper, which made me feel very proud and important. On my way back I left my sweater on the train, I was so exhilarated.

     Years later I went to see Binyamin Netanyahu's house. The state had turned it into a museum. All of his belongings were eerily in their place, the slippers in front of the bed, the pajamas neatly folded on top, I half expected him to walk into the room, startled and irritated, yelling at me to get out. I had the same experience later that year when I went back to my Grandparents' house. Everything was in place there too, except smaller than I remember, the museum of their life, of my life. The matching striped terry cloth robes still hanging on the door, the crystal ashtray on the table, the telephone my Grandpa would call me from pretending to be a dog still hanging on the wall, all of it untouched for years, a secret and private mausoleum. I opened all the doors and drawers, ran my hands over everything; over the naked bronze lady with the harp, the heavy velvet curtains in front of the door, the dusty woven speakers of the radio, folded socks and handkerchiefs. This time I knew no one was going to walk into the room to shower me with kisses and scold me for not wearing a hat. There was a quiet indifference shrouding everything around me as I watched myself stricken with a child like helplessness, both here now, and in the past, and outside somewhere watching the two of us, the two of me standing in the middle of the room.

     Riding trains I learned something. You can pick a point where your life has ended once. It doesn’t have to be a life changing memory, just the last known event at a given time in your life. It's just a reference point, like a tree to a moving train. The nature of memories is such that, just like the tree, the point in question stands still but is never quite vivid, and when we remember we move against it as if sitting facing backwards. But the memories are still there, even when they disappear from the window. I like to think that my Grandpa’s glasses and my sweater are still on the train, forever riding together, watching the seasons change, watching time go by, unfettered, and unchanged, like two lovers forever eloping.