Under Budapest (15 page)

She heard him once. Only the once, but what more assurance does a desperate woman need? It was two years ago, eleven months after his arrest, a beautiful May evening. If he'd been there with her, they might have taken a long walk on Margit Island, a lover's walk, hand in hand, laughing at their troubles and their joys. And this is what she said to him through the sewer grate. She said, “If you were here, it might be a beautiful evening, Miklos, you bastard. You bastard, for leaving me alone on this beautiful night. I am ruining. I am withering without you. I'm getting old, alone, and drying out from lack of love. Where is your hand, Miklos? Where are your arms when I need them?”

She was sobbing into the ground, that night. That was unlike her. She hardly ever sobbed anymore. Why bother when it eases nothing? But that night, some combination of the warm evening, the prettiness of the budding trees—they just keep budding, the idiot trees—and the pain racked her right through. And that's when she heard him.

“Margit,” a voice called from far, far below. “Margit, you are alive.”

That was it, just that:
Margit, you are alive.
Was it her wish or his voice? His voice. He's there because he must be there, because it is the only possible answer.

And then, in September, thin hope dared to poke through. Hundreds of political prisoners were released. An end to Stalinism. Hundreds who'd been executed were “rehabilitated,” some even dug up and reburied. A woman in her building, arrested for God knows what, came home. She was gone and then suddenly she was there, like Lazarus. She'd been held in some little prison near the Ukrainian border. Margit couldn't stand to look at her, at her family's happiness, the pain was so sharp. Why are you home? Why you and not Miklos? And the answer inside her was plain: because he's dead, you stupid, foolish woman. Your husband is dead.

So. Miklos might be dead, but, equally, he might be here. And so, in this space between what she knows and what is yet to come, she speaks through the stone, feels the warm, putrid updraft of the sewer against her cheek, and she pushes hope down with the pages and pages of letters she has written him these last few days through the sewer grate. In case he is under there and wondering whether there is still life up here.

Thursday, October 18

“It was incredible, Agi. You wouldn't believe it. Our first speaker was Karoly, you remember him? Big guy, big voice. I helped him write the speech, but it was good he spoke it and not me. You should have seen him up there. His voice filled the entire auditorium. And there were hundreds in the audience, must have been almost the entire university. He said that even though the lies and the violences of Stalin and Rakosi have been exposed professors still preach Stalinism. He said, ‘Why are we still being examined on party politics, rather than architecture, law, economics? This must change. We must be at the forefront of change.' And the entire audience erupted in applause. It was like letting the top off. Suddenly, everyone had a voice. One student after the other got up and reported what these professors had done in the name of communism. I sat there, and I felt like I was somewhere else. Were these the same students I'd been in class with for the last two years? It went on until eleven o'clock.”

This is why he didn't meet her on Margit yesterday. She sat there on her books in the park, arms around her knees by their tree, waiting and believing the worst. He'd been hauled in to the principal's office for questioning about some paper he'd written, too honestly. He'd been arrested on leaving the British Legation. He was right now sitting in some cramped room, refusing to answer questions. Or answering them. She waited the full two hours before giving up, the sun already set by the time she got home.

When they'd first met, just six months ago, what she loved was his daring. He was speaking quietly, but fervently, to a group who'd gathered round him at the entrance to the university. She had just started teaching at the high school nearby.

“We have been brought up amid lies,” he said. “We continually have to lie. We cannot have a healthy idea because all ideas are choked by our habit of lies. If we want to be truly free, we need first to have freedom of thought.” At that very moment, a professor passed and Gyula, without missing a beat, turned his talk to a recital of the latest Soviet accomplishments.

It wasn't just that he was an accomplished liar, but that he could turn it into such a lithe performance; he lied like a dancer. Her friend introduced them. He gave her a smile. She was smitten. That love could be so ready, that was another surprise.

Now, Gyula's arms about her waist, he's full of some new feeling. He vibrates with it. “We're meeting again tomorrow night, all the students. On Harmashatar Hegy. It's happening, my love. Something is happening. I don't know what, but even if what we accomplish is small, just a minor change at the beginning of many minor changes, that's something.” He's got his arms around her waist, but his dark eyes shine bright with future, his lank black hair blowing. “This is the time.”

He and his co-revolutionaries—not comrades, no, revolutionaries—they're planning manifestos, writing demands they want to put in front of government. This is no longer just talk; it's plotting. “Gyula, you will be arrested.”

“No. This time the change is real. Can't you feel it? The press was at the meeting in the auditorium. The
Szabad Nep
and the
Magyar Nemzeti
. Did I tell you that?”

But that was about confronting professors, Agi thinks, not the Communist Party itself. But she doesn't have long to think because Gyula's mouth is at her ear. “Don't worry, Agi. I promise, I will be careful.”

“One week,” she says.

“And then we'll be married, and I will take you to an actual bed and will remove every last bit of your clothing and kiss every last bit of your body.”

She smiles so easily, sees this future so clearly. “Promise?”

“I promise. And maybe by then even Hungary will be free. Can you imagine that, Agi? What a wedding present that would be.”

Two hours later, Agi pushes fearless across Margit Hid into the wind, up Szent Istvan Korut, and dances left onto Visegradi Utca. In the bins of the vegetable store, the usual old potatoes, carrots, apples, the inevitable cabbage, turnip, kohlrabi. In Vienna, they will eat cake. In the window of a women's shop, flagrant and drab dresses hang side by side, listless and ugly, but in Toronto, she'll wear red. The butcher rolls down his shutters. Dog shit litters the asphalt sidewalk. She hops over it. Two men loiter, smoking and talking in front of her building. They're old and colourless and they know nothing of love. Her keys clang as she unlocks the front door. The elevator is still broken, so she takes the stairs that curve round it to the fourth floor. She walks along the courtyard balcony to their door, noticing that Mrs. Nemeth's kitchen light is on. She turns the key in the lock. Mrs. Nemeth would be peeking through her shutters now, to see who's there. As always, ready and willing to report sus­picious activity. How suspicious is Agi, tonight? Very. Very suspi­cious indeed, with happiness glowing all over her face. So she tiptoes back to Mrs. Nemeth's shuttered window and says clearly, “Good evening, Mrs. Nemeth.” There's no answer, but Agi senses a soft, plump woollen step to the side.

In the kitchen, Zsofi is cooking.

“Is Mother home?”

Zsofi nods toward the other room.

“How is she?”

What kind of question is that? Zsofi's look says.

Going into the next room where her mother sits, Agi clicks the radio on, tunes it to the National Radio, and turns it up loud so they can speak underneath it. “Anyu? I need to tell you something.”

Pressing pen, pressing, pressing. Her mother doesn't look up.

“I'm leaving next Thursday. With Gyula.”

Her mother doesn't lift her pen from paper. Agi tries to remember the mother from her early childhood, the one who'd known how to smile. This mother's lips have flattened and thinned to the width of the lines she writes relentlessly.

“We want to make a life together but not here. It's impossible here. Can you understand that?”

Scratch, scratch
on the paper. “Persze, Agi. Of course, I understand.”

Agi counts the moments, the scratches irregular and furious.

“Is that all you're going to say?”

Agi's mother doesn't put the pen down, but she holds it still. She looks at this daughter, this self-centred and stupid girl whom she loves so much she can hardly unclench her teeth enough to spit on her. “Is that all? I don't even know this Gyula. I've never met him. And now you tell me that you ‘love' him, that with him you're going to run away and get yourself arrested or killed. What do you want me to say, Agi? Congratulations?”

“You could say good luck.”

“Fine. Good luck. If you survive, send me a letter.”

Her mother goes back to her writing, and Agi to the kitchen where her sister waits, eyebrows raised.

“I have to get out,” Agi says.

They leave without dinner and without a word to their mother. They lock the door behind them. They walk bravely past Mrs. Nemeth's window, skip down the stairs and into the misting night. Side by side they amble. In this neighbourhood, there's hardly anyone out. A few people leave a warm csarda, closely huddled. One man up ahead walks his dog and smokes. On Szent Istvan, the streetcar trundles by. For lack of another destination, they follow it toward the Nyugati train station. Her mother nearly stole her happiness, but now, out in the autumn evening with her sister, she feels it returning. And tomorrow she will see Gyula, and together they'll make more happiness and they'll run away with their happiness, take it right across the border, far away from her mother, from this city with its holes that cramp and the fear that breeds mothers like Agi's.

“Can I trade you shoes?” Agi asks. “Not now, I mean, but Thursday?”

Zsofi stops. “You're really leaving, aren't you?”

“Yes.” Now that she's told her mother, it feels more certain, more concrete than ever. “Yes, I really am.”

Suddenly, like a child, Zsofi is crying. Fat tears roll down her cheeks. She hasn't thought this through, or maybe it never seemed real, as it didn't to Agi yet either. Leaving. It seems impossible, and yet Agi knows that people leave every day—are arrested, die, escape—while others are left behind. Everything here would remain the same, except Agi would be gone. The streets, the withered vegetables on Visegradi, Mrs. Nemeth hovering at her window, the men who stand smoking at corners, the crowded apartments and streets, and their mother. Their silent, angry mother would remain and Zsofi alone with her.

“Zsofi.” Agi takes her little sister in her arms. “As soon as I find work, you'll join me. I promise.”

The other side of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, a group of students pours out of a side street. They're not talking. As they separate, they shake hands self-importantly. Another meeting, talk and dreaming in a city where dreaming out loud has been for years forbidden. The students disperse. The city's quiet. They can see right through the vast windowed wall of the train station where people hover, waiting, barely lit by the hanging lamps. The whole thing—the glass held together by black lines, the ordinary people getting ready to queue—at night looks strangely prettier than it is, and Agi thinks, I will miss this place.

Margit hears her daughters go out together, and in the space they leave behind she thinks, So this is it. One day, it will be only her here. Because of course once Agi goes, Zsofi will follow. Agi is more mother to that little one than she's ever been, not because she doesn't love but because her love is stopped up inside her, wizening, and if it comes out, it comes out as spite, anger, a slap, a rebuke. It was different when Miklos was around; he could always find a way to make things easy, make her laugh, to find the lightness inside. They had ten years together before the war, and eight years after it. Eighteen years, all together. Shouldn't that be enough? Shouldn't you be able store up enough love and laughter and happiness, enough that you could mete it out and make it last to the end of life?

Margit fills the pages, and minutes pass. She writes tighter and tighter, turning white to black. What can she possibly have to say to this husband likely dead? Everything, is the answer to that. Everything he's not here for—or how will he know it, how will he understand what his wife is becoming, has become? He should know every hardship that touches her, every minute she waits in line, every time she fails her girls, every damn stupidity of that menial job typing and sorting at the Unicum factory that is draining the last bit of intelligence she has, and the spying Mrs. Nemeth, and the house meetings and the things she has to say to be safe, and he's not here to be her one true place in all these lies. Margit knows her relentless writing is in some way pathological. She read Freud before the war when she was young and had the time and the brain to read, and so she labels it: compulsion, sublimation, control, her own version of the
fort-da
game. In Freud's story, a little boy, his grandson, replays the distress of his mother's departure and return by repeatedly throwing his toy away and calling it back. He throws it away; his mother is gone. He reels it back—a miracle—his mother returns. Pain and then joy. Pain and then joy. Over and over again. Just so, but without joy, Margit writes Miklos away; she calls him forth. She refuses to believe he's dead; she knows he's dead. She writes to suppress hope; she writes because to write is a form of hope.

Miklos, Do you know what your self-centred daughter did today? She's gone and fallen in love. She's in love, no matter how much I warned her never to be in love because look what it does to you. She's going to run away and get married. She's been lying to me, Miklos, because she's frightened of me. What kind of mother scares her girls into hiding? This kind of mother, Miklos, the one I've become, and I can't be any other way because this life is hard without you and I have lost my love. I am angry so they reject me, so I get angry. Don't you see? They used to love me, but now they don't. Who wouldn't be angry at that? And if you come home, you will be frightened of me too. That's what I fear.