He figured it shouldn’t be too bad if he could find a few interesting titles on Mr. Nyilas’ bookshelves, as Mr. Nyilas had a pretty significant number of books, not that Pierson really knew how long Mr. Nyilas had been living in Budapest, as maybe it was reasonable for him to have such a collection owing to how long he’d been in Budapest.
Wandering over to the bookshelf nearest him, Pierson discovered, to his dismay that the first books he laid eyes on had Hungarian titles, and so did the ensuing ones all down the shelf.
Every ensuing unit of shelving also proved to contain only Hungarian-language volumes, whose titles Pierson couldn’t even make sense of. Hungarian had no relation to English whatsoever, outside of the fact that they used a common alphabet, which likely meant that the letters each represented the same or similar sounds in Hungarian as in English, but they were given meaning by wildly different combinations than in English, and with such accents as acutes, umlauts, and what looked rather like doubled acutes.
Since Pierson didn’t know any foreign languages outside of food-identification French, he wasn’t necessarily sure what the different accents meant. He knew French used a lot of them, such as acutes, graves, circumflexes, and umlauts, but they didn’t use doubled acutes, and there was no guarantees that the way the French used their accented letters was the same way that the Hungarians did.
After all, French, along with Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, was a member of the Romance Language family. Hungarian, Pierson had always presumed, was a part of the Slavic language family that included Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, and the Balkan languages, but Pierson wasn’t entirely sure, and even if there was a book in Mr. Nyilas’ collection that told him what family of languages Hungarian was a part of, Pierson wouldn’t be able to read it because it was Hungarian.
Pierson did make sure to examine the spine of every single book on Mr. Nyilas’ shelves on the off chance that there was one in English, but he wasn’t altogether surprised when he found that every single one had its title printed on in Hungarian.
He did open one up, just to see what a long passage of written Hungarian looked like, and he had to admit that it looked like rather a challenge to read, but obviously Mr. Nyilas’ father had taught his son — and probably the rest of his children — to read Hungarian enough that they could acquire books and read them for information or pleasure, as well as speaking it fluently like natives.
As for him, unless he had someone teach him Hungarian, there was no way he was going to understand a thing, but he wasn’t likely to learn anytime soon owing to the fact that he had no one who was really available to teach him.
Mr. Nyilas had important business to do for Broadway, which Pierson had come to the conclusion was a codename for MI6, and was probably used for confusion reasons by suggesting that Mr. Nyilas was a theatre actor.
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