Under Budapest (11 page)

A group from the conference decides to get lunch at a little csarda up the street: good soup and huge plates of schnitzel. They file in, gather around two small tables, barely enough room for shoulders, but there aren't enough coat hooks. Tibor folds his and sits on it. He thinks of his camera. He had searched his hotel room, his suitcase, the pockets of all his clothes, even (irrationally) the ones he hadn't unpacked. What if the police were right now huddled around his camera, ogling, making lewd jokes about her breasts or his technique? What if they put it on YouTube? He shouldn't have shot the video in the first place, but it was almost an accident, really. Spur of one hot, unzippered moment. He'd been showing her photos from his trip to New York, so the camera was just there, on his side table within easy reach. It hadn't taken more than one arm slipping over her hip to push a button and he was in permanent possession of Rafaela's orgasm all the way from
ah
to
oh god
. It was mostly blurry. No picture of her face. Just her breasts, hips, the top of his head. Her moans. His moans. She might have guessed it was on, but she didn't say anything. Maybe she liked the thought of performing. He'd had the stupid camera with him on Gellert, right until that moment. Maybe he'd dropped it on the path, before he'd ducked under the overhang. Maybe he should go look for it.

Peter elbows him, points at the small TV above the bar. The news anchor is talking. It takes a moment or two for Tibor to focus. Then the photograph flashes on screen—a young man in a black peaked cap, raising a beer stein to the camera and grinning his face off, scarcely recognizable.

“The head found on Gellert Hegy has been identified as that of Janos Hagy, a Canadian citizen. Hagy's father arrived in Budapest today to identify the body. He has appealed to the Canadian government to work closely with the Hungarian police. He says he received no threats, and no request for ran­som. He spoke to his son just hours before the murder is believed to have happened. His son was on his way to a party with a friend. He sounded happy and gave his father no indication that he was in any way in danger.”

“A Canadian,” someone says.

“Weird. I thought they said it was organized crime.”

“Weird.”

Everyone's looking at him.

“Tibor, you have to go to the consulate,” Ilona presses.

“That guy, Gombas, he was up on major corruption last year—a scam that took millions out of the public purse—and he got away with it. On the news after the trial, he was calm, so ordinary-looking, forgiving everyone for judging him wrongly and all we could do was laugh at the farce. Not a single witness would testify against him.”

The photograph is gone, replaced with the next news item. A reporter now stands in front of marchers wearing kokardas and waving red flags and shouting something about true Magyar.

Lucia looks as if she's waiting for something from him.

“No, you're right. Thugs like that, they can't get away with it.”

She nods. Exactly.

He knows he's on perilous footing here, taking such a defin­itive stance when really what he'd like most is to have a beer, talk about politics, and forget about young Janos Hagy and his gruesome end. But the way she's looking at him. And not just Lucia, everyone else too. They want him to step up. Their respect—no, their admiration—dangles like a fat, graspable peach just within reach. “And I'm the only witness.”

He stares wretchedly into his beer.

Peter doesn't believe him for a second. He laughs. “Really? Look, if these guys are really with Gombas, you don't want to be anywhere near it, and if you're wrong about this detective, you'll only be making a fool of yourself. Possibly sinking some poor harmless guy's career.”

“I'm not wrong about the detective.”

“Fine, so you met a corrupt detective.”

“A murderer,” Imre corrects.

“But if you go to the National Police, or to your consulate, what's that going to solve? You think they'll ride in and arrest your guy? Just like that?”

Tibor feels the upswell of something, some feeling in his chest. Pride? Anger? It feels warm. It feels good. “I don't think I have a choice, Peter. It's the responsibility of the witness.”

“Holy shit.” Lucia's focused on the TV. A platoon of black uniforms stomp, but they're not police and they don't look like soldiers. It's the Magyar Garda, the quasi-militant front of Jobbik. They were supposed to have been disbanded last year.

“My sister's husband joined them,” says Ilona. “It's unbelievable. Listening to him, you'd think it was 1938.”

Everyone stares as the march pushes forward. The marchers look calm, unworried, definitive.

“Fucking fascists,” says someone.

“It's frightening.”

“They're as frightening as we let them become. They're a fringe element.”

“It's true,” says Imre. “Why are we taking them seriously? We should be laughing at them.”

“Well, you're not Jewish, Imre.”

The black-vested men and women look straight ahead, soldierly and undistractible, following orders they invented themselves.

Tibor feels the warmth dissipate as attention swirls away from him, consumed now with the upsurge in anti-Semitism. Will the ultra right-wing Jobbik win the next election? He tries not to feel deflated. Only Lucia says, one more time, pressing her hand into his arm, “If you need a lawyer.”

After more conference and more beer, Tibor gets back to the hotel late and alone, despite what he thought was a pretty convincing effort with Lucia. He'd left a message at the front desk for his mother that he wouldn't be joining her for dinner. Easier that way. She was a grown-up after all, not a child. She could order her own dinner, entertain herself. When he gets to his hotel room, he turns on the TV. A pretty reporter is talking to the camera.

“Police have found evidence suggesting that the young man was being stalked. Warning that it's too early yet to say for certain, they suggest that it may be the work of a sexual predator. A friend of the murdered Canadian, Csaba Bekes, has come forward with information. The night of the murder, Bekes says, Hagy and Bekes attended a party together at this tear-down in Pest.”

As Tibor watches, the camera slides to reveal the squat, the last party house he and Peter had visited on his first night here. It looks different through a news lens—more like the wreck it was, amateur, adolescent, not at all cool. The pretty reporter continues.

“By night, this place is a bar, its rooms filled with young partygoers. The beer is cheap and its guests, like Bekes and Hagy, are just here to have a good time. But one witness says Hagy left the party at 2:30 a.m. shortly after he spoke with a middle-aged man, likely a tourist as the two were speaking English. And Bekes reports seeing Hagy getting into a black Mercedes-Benz.”

Tibor feels something sliding from underneath him: the facts, the ground.

He has the strongest urge to run downstairs right now, seek out the company of someone, anyone. To call Peter. “Peter, you ass. You skeptical, ironic fuck. I'm being framed.”

Tibor lies awake, eyes open in the dark, trying to put things in order. This city is making him paranoid. It breeds anxiety. He has argued this in at least one academic paper. Why did people believe, in both 1956 and 1989, that the tunnels were under Communist Headquarters and not under 60 Andrassy Ut, where everyone knew political prisoners were held, tortured, and sometimes executed? Now 60 Andrassy is a museum that memorializes these horrors while, at the same time, refusing any responsibility for them. Appropriately, it's called the Terror House and you can tour its cellar prisons. There are no tunnels.

Similarly, he might now ask himself, Why would a Hungarian mob boss order the death of a Canadian boy? More pert­inent: why would this Csaba Bekes concoct such a story about Tibor and how did the police know he'd been at the squat in the first place?

Answer: the camera.

4.

Tibor sleeps, or hovers just above sleep. There's an exam. He fails it. So they have to break him. First his foot. Then his hand. Then his knee. Then his elbow. He wakes when they get to the shoulder.

It's 5:17 a.m.

Agnes is also awake. She'd watched the moon rise over the right shoulder of the parliament. She'd packed her suitcase. She'd tried to sleep. At four, she'd risen, showered, dressed. Now, she sits in the armchair, waiting for the sun. The parliament building is an Austrian girl's fantasy, she thinks, a fairy castle for a princess. It was never so white. In 1956, it was as grey-black as everything else, coated in coal dust and diesel gas, and it was better that way, more truthful anyway, more like the rest of the city.

At six, she calls Tibor's room.

“Tibor? Could you please take me to the Canadian Embassy this morning? My passport has been stolen.”

She's pleased with the steadiness of her tone. Not a note of fear, not a tremor.

Tibor holds his hungover head in his palm, eyes closed. “Your passport? How?”

“I dropped my purse.” She'd explain it later, the cellar, Cica, the marchers in uniform who'd pulled her in.

“You didn't put it in the safe?”

“I was
trying
to be safe.”

“No, Mom. The safe in the room. That's what it's there for.” Remember? What Gabor said?

“Tibor. Come here
now
, Tibor. I need your help.”

Fuck.

Click. She hangs up.

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

Pants. Shirt. Shoes. Keycard.

Knock.

Unlock.

She looks like she's on her way to the mall, for her mall-walking club.

He looks like he drank too much.

“Don't look at me like that, Tibor. I know you have things to do. That's why I thought we could go early. I did not lose it on purpose. It was stolen.” She will not cry.

He sits. Out of frustration and fatigue, not to prompt a longer conversation.

“It was a mob. The fascists, the Arrow-Cross, they were marching.”

“You were there? What were you doing there? ”

“I was minding my own business, and one of those fascists stole my passport. There were so many people.”

“Calm down, Mom. It's okay.”

“I need to go to the Embassy. I need to go to the Canadian Embassy and then I need to go home.”

“Our flight's not until the end of next week, Mom.”

“I know that, Tibor.” Why does he always assume she's losing her marbles? When she loses her marbles, she will tell him. “I will get a new flight. I don't want to stay. I want to go home. Today.”

What on earth is she on about? He's the one in trouble, not her. “Fine. I need a shower first.”

“Persze.” But where had he been last night? Last night when she needed him?

Like a drill through the centre of his fucking forehead.

Tibor pictures how this will happen. They will go together to the Canadian Embassy: his addled, paranoid senior mother in her spotless Adidas shoes and pink velour track suit, and him, the addled, paranoid prof in his nostalgic Doc Martens and ski jacket. She will claim a fascist stole her passport while he insists that he is being framed by the Hungarian police for a murder that he
witnessed
. He can see it now: a disbelieving bureaucrat with perfectly aligned pens and eyes that barely flicker as he leans his polished head back to laugh—Hahahahaha—at the tourists. “You've been watching too much bad TV, my friend. Now go. Enjoy your holiday. Take your mother on a boat ride up the Danube. It's a beautiful city, even in this shit-grey month.” And who could blame the guy? If it wasn't happening to him, Tibor wouldn't believe it either.

“I'm not losing my marbles,” says his mother.

In the lobby, Gabor calls them a cab. “Ten minutes,” he tells them. “However, as Hungarian taxis are quite prompt, it is best to wait near the door. Keep your hat on, as they say.”

They stand by the revolving door. Tibor reads his newspaper. Agnes looks out for the cab, wishing to be home. When will it ever be the right time? she wonders. There is no right time. If she starts talking over lunch, it will seem rehearsed and it will take too long. It shouldn't be a conversation. She doesn't want him chewing while she unravels her past. He would no doubt take it personally, consider it
his
history as well. Strictly speaking, he'd be right, but is she willing to give him that?

“Tibor, I told you what happened in 1956.”

He doesn't glance up from his newspaper. “Yes?” he says. Turns the page.

What could be so preoccupying him? Agnes slaps the underside of the paper. “I'm talking to you, Tibor.” How familiar is that look on his face. It always makes her want to give him a little smack. “This is important.”

Another look. He wants to smack her back.

“But I didn't tell you what happened to Zsofia.”

“Zsofia?”

“My sister.”

“Oh. Right.”

The taxi pulls up. He gives the cab driver the address, then settles back into the seat. She can feel, without looking at him, that he's irritated.

“She fell in with the revolutionaries.”

He is studiously not reading his paper.

“She killed an AVO officer, a member of the secret police. And then she disappeared.”

“No. You didn't tell me that. Why didn't you tell me that?”

A good question. There is no answer, really. It just happened that way. Bad memories are not for sharing, especially with children. There's enough talktalktalk in this world already. She'd tried to write it once, but she burned her efforts. She never wanted to be like some she knew, holding on to those bad memories as if to let them go might cause disintegration. She wanted to live, to be happy in the most ordinary way. She does her best to explain this to Tibor, who fixes her with a vexed, irritable stare. She wants to tell him what she is doing here, searching for evidence of an escape. She thought it might feel good to finally confess what she had done. To explain why she had to be here. Why she had to search. But this is Tibor and he never listens.