Under Budapest (10 page)

“But it's the right thing to do.” That's Ilona. “And they must offer some kind of protection.”

Imre shakes his head. “No. You've done your good duty and now you can happily go on seeing the sights and minding your own business. I mean, look, these guys, they kill each other. It happens. Nothing to do with you.”

“So what, exactly, did you hear?” Lucia asks.

“God. I heard the kid. I heard him die. And then after, they were arguing. The one guy didn't think they should've killed him. The other guy said he just does what Gombas says.”

“Gombas?” Lucie interrupts. “Are you sure?”

The circle of listeners around Tibor grows, people linger in the aisle. Whispers carry the story out. At the front of the lecture hall, two of the three panellists chat while waiting for the third. The chair of the session looks pointedly toward Imre. “If we could get started, please. If we could get started.”

Chairs scrape and notebooks flutter. Imre regains his place at the front, with some apologies. The session begins, but the focus is shot. Tibor feels it. People look to the front, they listen, but their attention is still with him, Tibor Roland, witness.

Agnes
feels
like she remembers Andrassy Ut when the houses were brightly painted and wealth moved at a strolling pace in sunlight filtered through high green leaves. But she would have been so young. Maybe she was remembering her mother's memories. Because all that was before the war, and after the war she was only nine, and houses were blasted shells that grew over with weeds and bush, full of broken treasures: pieces of teapots and palm-sized shards of crystal, and old thick glass bottles all mildew inside, rusting empty cans and stark white pieces of toilet bowl. She and Zsofi had raced along streets that had huge holes in the middle of them, past buildings without windows, black smoke stains up the walls like shocked hair.

Today, mottled limbs of plane trees scaffold the heavy sky. The air smells of diesel and cold, wet earth. Yesterday's snow mashes into grey grass in the pedestrian alley that bisects the avenue. She turns onto Csengery Utca. Narrow. Cobbled.

She's following the numbers: 75, 77, 79. There: 281. It looks exactly as Dorottya had described it: a corner building, with rounded corner windows on the second and third floors supported by a maenad with flowing hair. Dorottya said their instructions were to leave via the cemetery exit, but she and Zsofi had gotten turned around and had first emerged here, too close to the centre of the city, too risky. They'd immediately gone back down, taken the first left, and they'd got it right. Agnes peers through the locked gate into the building's front hall. Past it, the courtyard.

Two rows of buzzers. Twelve apartments. She's checking the names—Toth, Leeb, Kiraly—when a German shepherd fires out from somewhere, barking, teeth bared, and flings himself at the gate. She stumbles back. The thing growls, snapping its jaws between the metal bars.

“Bad dog,” she reprimands. “Down.”

“They trained him to do that.” A young man stands behind her, bags of groceries gripped in hands nearly purple with cold. “He's a good dog. He thinks it's a game. Isn't that right, Cica?” At the man's voice, the dog named pussycat wags his tail.

The man is willowy, a weed. His shoulders slope with the weight of the bags. He puts them down to find his key to the gate. “Who were you looking for?”

“No one. Just looking.”

He's still searching for his keys.

“I lived here, once.” The old skill returns so fluently; she lies as smoothly as a teenager.

“Ah.” Still searching through his pockets. Clearly, he would prefer that she leave him be. He's too polite to push through and leave her standing there. This is the quandary she's put him in.

He's kind, but he's a busy man with things to do other than talk to her. He wants to go inside, read his newspaper, eat his bread and salami. She's holding him hostage. He finds his key.

“Which apartment are you in?”

He points up. “Second floor, back.”

“Oh. We were in the back, fourth floor.”

On Visegradi, they'd lived crammed all together in one room plus kitchen and bath. First the four of them, and then after her father's arrest, just the three.

He'd probably heard similar stories from his parents and grandparents. Probably hated them. Now, glossy shops lined Andrassy. Millionaire mile, it had become. Suits worth more than a Hungarian doctor's yearly salary. Gold necklaces for their millionaire wives. No shame in money, any longer.

“I never thought I'd be so nostalgic.” She smiles senti­mentally, the attack dog now curled happily around his own tail. “I won't keep you. I just wanted to see if it was still here.” She grips the gate and peers.

“Did you want to see inside?” Through his kind-to-old-ladies voice, she hears his reluctance.

“Really? I would love to.” The gate opens. “This is my first trip home since fifty-six—you can't imagine how old I am. Isn't this amazing? An AVO secret policeman was killed at the foot of these very stairs. Did you know that?” She forges ahead, lie after breathtaking lie, defying gravity. The balustrade overlooking the courtyard has fallen away in parts, held together with bits of salvaged wood. “It used to be so well kept. Who lives up there now, in our old apartment?”

The man shrugs. He's trying to get away from her.

“Maybe I'll just go and see if anyone's home.” She follows him up the stairs. “I would love to see what's left of the place. I wonder if my grandmother's kitchen table is still there?”

As soon as he gets to the second floor, he flees. “Hallo,” he says. “Csokolom,” as he pushes open his door.

Agnes waits until he's well inside, counts to thirty, then quietly, on kitten feet as her mother would once have said, creeps back down the stairs. Rugs hang over balcony rails on the third and second floors, awaiting their weekly thrashing. There's the sound of a vacuum from somewhere. Jangling keys, locking a door, then the gate in front of the door.
Clip-clop
of a housewife's brisk step. The door to the cellar is at the back of the courtyard, as it is in every old-style Pest apartment block. She edges around, under the balcony, just in case her young friend looks out his window. This door's unlocked. She slips in. Closes the door behind her. She's come equipped. She pulls a flashlight from her purse.

The steep stairs are exactly the same as the ones she remem­bers from the place on Visegradi. In that cellar, each family had their own storage space—for coal, extra or old pieces of furniture. The family next door had once been aristocrats, though they never talked about that. Their storage corner held heirlooms: oil paintings they had no room for in their apartment, a huge Herendi vase, a disassembled mahogany table. Her family's space was only for coal. They'd lost their house and everything in it after the war, when the Russians “liberated” Hungary. Most of this cellar is stacked to the hilt with old furniture. This might be a challenge. She puts the flashlight on a dusty record cabinet, reaches again into her purse. Tibor was always teasing her about her large bag. “An old woman's prerogative,” she would answer. Now, she pulls from it the metal detector she purchased before leaving Toronto. Thank goodness she'd had the foresight to practise in her backyard before leaving. It wasn't complicated, but today there's no time to waste. She extends the collapsible rod, screws it tight, puts the earphones on her head, takes the flashlight in her other hand.

The thing is to be systematic. Start at one end, work pro­gressively to the other. Any door to a tunnel would have to have some metal part, even if it was only the hinge. She begins at the corner closest to the stairwell. She doesn't know what she's going to do about the area covered in furniture, but maybe she won't have to figure it out. Already, the thing is beeping like crazy. She drops to her knees. Pulls the trowel from her bag and digs. A button. Start again. Two hours she works and the thing almost never stops beeping. Each time, she takes out her trowel and digs down. She retrieves: a button, several coins of different denominations, the handle to a cabinet, a chain link, many nails. She's working at the rate of approximately two square metres per hour. She's covered about a third of the space. She pauses for some water and the buttered roll she'd brought. If her husband, James, were here, he'd be laughing, but in a nice way, the way that reminded her she was loved. He might even take a turn with the trowel, just to humour her. But James isn't here. He's been gone for nearly five years now. Nearly five years she has managed to go on living without him, and there's no point leaving a job only half done. She's sitting on the arm of a couch. As she pushes herself to standing, she looks down, between her feet. That's definitely a glint. She takes the trowel. She digs. Not a coin or a button, not a nail. Heavier. Sturdier. Circular. About the size of her hand. The floor is hard-packed earth. She needs a pickaxe for something this deep, not a trowel. Sweat beads and her breath comes heavier, clouding the freezing air.

Creak and rattle of the door. A heavy tread. Then faster. Someone coming down the stairs at a gallop. A snarling growl.

Cica.

The dog lands on her.

“Cica.” The dog backs away. A flashlight shines in her face.

“What the hell?”

She puts her hands up, to cover her eyes.

“What the hell are you doing down here?”

It's the kind young man. Is he really so kind, or was he pre­­tending? There's no way to know, really. There's never any way to know for sure.

“My mother buried her jewellery box,” Agnes stutters. Realizing she's holding her hands as though under arrest, she drops them into her lap. “From the communists.”

He's trying to decide how to be, with her. Should he scare her away? Let her do her crazy, old-lady digging?

“You got the wrong building, lady. Mrs. Zena says her family's been in that apartment you said was yours since the end of the war.”

“The wrong building? But that's impossible. I remember it so clearly. Maybe it was the third floor.”

The man seizes her elbow, surprisingly strong for someone so skinny. Would anyone hear her if she screamed. If he killed her, how long would it be until her body was found? Would the dog eat her? “Lady, calm down. I'm just trying to help you up.”

“I can get up by myself, if you will stop breaking my arm.”

Once standing, she removes her gloves, dusts off her skirt. “Help me dig,” she says. “If you help me for one hour I will pay you twenty Canadian dollars.” He seems to be thinking about it.

“Forty.”

He goes to the far end of the cellar. Scrabbles about there for a few minutes and emerges with a flat shovel.

“One hour,” he says. “Show me the money.”

He unearths the ring she'd thought was the handle to a trap ­­door. It's a handle but to a large metal box, the size of a safe. She has to pretend that maybe her mother's jewellery is inside it, but when they get it open, it's full of paper—someone's banking receipts, envelopes, inventories, account books. When he lifts one out, it falls apart in his fingers. That was an hour. Forty is all the Canadian money she has.

He pockets it. “You gonna keep looking?”

The cellar now seems enormous, and her plan absurd, if not stark raving mad (as James might say). “Did you ever find a door down here? To a tunnel?”

“To one of those Soviet tunnels, you mean?”

Yes. The eagerness in her face.

“The ones that supposedly hid a thousand prisoners, a hospital, and a spa for the higher-ups, you mean?”

She feels foolish. She hates him for taking her money. Herself for giving it to him.

He leaves, chuckling, Cica at his heel.

Horrible, horrible country. She should never have come back. She's an old lady and it's not worth it. An old lady, driven by guilt (how original), pretending to be Indiana Ancient-Jones. She should go back to the hotel and sit in her room and not leave again until Tibor returns and then she should tell Tibor what she is really doing here. She should confess all the things she's kept locked in that black box in her brain all this time, not just this trip, but his whole life. Because what if she has a heart attack and dies? She doesn't want to die with that box of secrets unopened inside her. Even if you don't want to believe in a soul, as you get closer to dying, you find you do have one. And souls have to speak their secrets, release them into the world to be free of them. But she is not going to die today on Csengery Utca. She will turn back onto Andrassy Ut. Take the nearest subway back to the hotel room, blocking out the fact that for the minutes she's on the train she's
under
the Duna, under that wide, weighty flow that banks can hardly hold when it floods. Yes, she'll go back to the fancy hotel that makes Tibor hold his head like the world watches, and she'll order an overpriced lunch and charge it to her son. She's starving, suddenly. She's dizzy with hunger. She'll order the biggest dish on the menu, and she'll look out the massive window at the white parliament and will sort through the items in that unopened box and consider which ones to share with her son.

She turns onto Andrassy with these thoughts and this purpose clear in her mind, and as she does, looking neither right nor left, nor even seeing straight ahead of her, really, she steps into a living Duna of moving people. Flags snap. “Hungary for Hungarians.” “Slaves no longer!” The last words are from a poem that she hasn't heard since 1956, the poem of the revolution. “Now or never,” they'd shouted in those few heady days before tanks came in. “Slaves no longer!” But Hungarians have always been pushed around, pushovers, and that's why they shout it so stolidly. In orderly columns, the people push forward.

Marchers fill the street and she's pulled into its centre, borne forward, purse banging against her knees. Everyone but her wears the kokarda, that tricolour Hungarian rosette on their lapel, even though it's not a national holiday. When she looks behind, she sees the soldiers. Are they soldiers? Black boots stomp. A tall blonde girl locks arms with her. She can hardly see the sky for the shoulders and the banners. The marchers' pride is hard and shiny and happy. It snaps like flags. But an old lady like her, her bag so heavy, her heart so out of tune—she will trip. She will and they will walk over top of her because she is
not
a revolutionary. She never was. She left, you see. She left them all behind.