The building was closed. Nothing to suggest that it had ever been open or was planning to open anytime soon.

Mimi peered in through the glass door. “It feels like a government office of some sort.”

I had assumed that there would be a shop or a store in Maletiani, some place you could step into and begin a conversation about a lost relative and a prodigal grandson. But in a village as small as Maletiani, there were just houses.

“Maybe it’s only open so many days a week. Or maybe it’s only open one day a week.”

Mimi walked around to a window, but it was too high off the ground.

“You know, like the old West with the travelling judges on a circuit and the dentists who worked out of a covered wagon.”

Villages set in the hills tend to be hilly, and Maletiani didn’t disappoint. We wandered up one street that rose rapidly and then slalomed back down the next. Up and down we went, weaving our way through the village.

“We could take a photo of a nice-looking house and pretend that that was where your grandfather was born and raised.”

On the third run, we turned a corner and ran into a cart drawn by a donkey. The cart was filled with various vegetables, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and onions, and standing around the cart was a group of men and women, all older than me.

“All right,” said Mimi. “Show me what you got.”

THE UNNERVING PART of arriving in a new city is that you have no idea as to the layout of the place, and after the first five minutes in the taxi, neither Mimi nor I have any idea where we are. We had said Central Café, showed the driver the address, but we could be on our way to Bratislava for all we knew.

“American?” asks the cab driver.

“Blackfoot,” says Mimi.

“Canadian.”

Mimi elbows me in the ribs. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“He’s not going to know who the Blackfoot are.”

“And he’s certainly not going to know if we don’t tell him.”

“Movies,” says the cab driver. “Bruce Willis. Bang, bang. Tom Cruise. Bang, bang.”

Given its history, I expect that Central Café will be in a sketchy part of Budapest, one of those down-the-next-dark-alley establishments, a small, smoke-filled hollow frequented by poets, spies, and the secret police. So it is a minor disappointment to find the café sitting on the edge of an upscale shopping mall. The building looks old enough, but when it comes to coffee shops, ambience is everything, and Central Café looks as though it has walked away from its colourful history and gone shopping for Zegna and Ferragamo.

“This is it?”

“Very famous,” says the cab driver. “Number one for tourists.”