Under Budapest (18 page)

“Miklos,” she shouts into the sewer grate. “Miklos Teglas, this is your wife, Margit. Do you hear me?”

She hears nothing. Nothing and nothing and nothing. Every twenty minutes, she calls. And waits. And calls, and waits. While the battles rage around her, she calls and she waits and she calls and she waits and finally, finally, she hears something. Not as clear as the last time—maybe he's farther down—but there's something. A clink. A murmur of a voice, more than one.

“Miklos, sooner or later, the revolutionaries will attempt to seize Communist Headquarters. I know it. I'm not hopeful they will win, but they will try, and when they do, you have to be ready.” And with that, Margit drops the pistol down. She counts to ten before she hears a watery plunk far, far, far below ground, and then she drops the bullets. “Shoot that door down if you have to, Miklos. But don't get killed.”

“Na.” Margit pushes herself onto her knees, and from her knees, one leg at a time, she stands. She looks toward the tanks. She brushes the dust from her coat front and her knees. She has done all she can do for her Miklos. Now, let the revolution do the rest.

Thursday, October 25

It's
Thursday.
And Agi is still here. All over the city, fires burn and guns shoot, but they need to eat so Agi goes out for bread. Along Szent Istvan, she walks past the corpses of three more AVO men hanging from their ankles from the lampposts. People are extinguishing cigarettes in their carcasses. She finds a bakery open. Waits in a line two blocks long as Soviet tanks crank closer and she tries not to give in to the fear that grows like a shriek inside her.

Agi was eleven when the Russians invaded Budapest twelve years ago. Their tanks screeched, metal on metal, grinding asphalt and pounding artillery that levelled whole blocks of buildings. Russian soldiers smashed through front doors, kicked over cupboards, and took what they wanted. Five hungry soldiers found Agi and her mother in the cellar. They hauled them both upstairs and four took her mother into a room while one of them, the fat one, touched her hair and talked to her as if she was his pet and made her suck. When the men came out of that room, they made fun of the one who'd stayed so quiet with the little girl. But he just shrugged, took out his still-wet dick, and pissed in the kitchen sink. The soldiers took their last potatoes. They took clothes, her father's watch, an alarm clock, a mechanical toy. They camped out in the house for days, four sharing her mother, while the fat one kept Agi all to himself. Somehow, the soldiers missed little Zsofi, curled up invisible under an old blanket in the cellar and during that whole time Agi kept Zsofi hidden, fed, safe. But now the tanks are back and Zsofi is missing.

Agi waits in line and tries to calm herself by reading the newspapers glued to windows and walls. Every surface on the street is papered with news—the usual newspapers but also other publications, without names, without titles, printed in haste. All these words, all of a sudden. It's a riot of print, hectic and urgent and loud. A man pushes a broadsheet into her hand. Janos Kadar has been appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee, replacing the feared and hated Soviet stooge, Rakosi. While the tanks are still grinding past, the loudspeakers announce: “Hungarians, put out the national flag. Raise the tricolour. Peaceful demonstration, this afternoon in Szabadsag Ter. Let's show them we want an end to the fighting. An independent Hungary.” Finally, Agi gets the bread and races home.

When she takes bread in to her mother with a couple of the newspapers, her mother stiffly unpurses her thin lips: “Thank you.” So unexpected, that thanks, it feels to Agi almost like love.

The first paper,
Szabad Nep,
announces: “We side with the insurgents!” The second,
Magyar Nemzeti
, the national newspaper, bears a message from the Revolutionary Council of University Students calling on the government to end the fighting, send the Soviet troops home. The third isn't a publication Margit recognizes, just some ordinary person's words, printed by the hundreds as if words were free. “Liberate political prisoners!” it reads. Followed by a list that includes her husband's name.
Miklos Teglas
. It stops the breath in her chest.

She reads it again. Miklos Teglas. And again: Miklos Teglas. Someone, somewhere, knows that he is still missing, that her husband is gone but that still he has a name. He is absent, but his absence is here noted. Miklos. She puts her finger on the name. She takes it away. She puts her finger on the name, she takes it away. Here you are, she thinks. A blade of hope, a thin nothing of a green of hope wavers inside her. She puts her finger on the name again, and takes it away. Nothing vanishes.

Two hours later, maybe three, the sound of a key fumbling in the lock and Zsofi bangs into the kitchen, a bandolier strung across her chest, a tommy gun in her fist. She looks scared. Filthy. She drops the gun and throws open the cupboard door. She gulps the milk, tears hunks of bread in her teeth as Agi watches. She's crying and eating at the same time. Tears course down her cheeks.

“It was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration,” she says, mouth full. “To celebrate the government's change of heart. To persuade them to let us be. There were old people there. Children. Little children.”

Agi looks to where she knows her mother sits, on the other side of the closed door, not moving though surely she can hear her daughter's distress.

“The Russians were waving at us, being friendly. They don't want to fight, they were saying. ‘We don't want this fight any more than you do.' Some girls climbed up on the tanks. Pretty girls. So pretty, and they were flirting. And then. And then. And then they fired. I don't know who fired first, Agi, the AVO on the rooftops or the Russians. But the tanks were firing and the guns. There must be a hundred dead on that square, Agi. Hundreds, maybe.”

Hundreds. But not Zsofi. Not Zsofi. Agi takes her little sister in her arms and rocks her as Margit sits silent in the next room with the newspaper on her lap, finger on her husband's name.

Saturday, October 27

“Radio Free Europe supports the revolution. Britain, America, France—we are with you.” All that day, the cars with the loudspeakers cruise the streets. People emerge for food, which they carry back in their net bags, dodging corner to corner, from one safe wall to the next. Implausibly, postmen appear. But everyone knows they're informants, and no one opens their doors to them, not even Mrs. Nemeth.

Zsofi and Agi keep to the kitchen, Margit to the main room. They don't bother keeping the radio on low, but turn it up, to listen to the revolutionary station, the Free Students' Radio, now somehow broadcasting, which calls on everyone to continue the general strike until Soviet troops withdraw.

“Agi. Have you seen Gyula?” Zsofi asks at some point —surprised, as if the question only now occurs to her.

Agi nods, terse. “Yesterday.”

Zsofi fidgets. She stands, looks out the window across the courtyard where nothing's happening and the air is grey. “He's staying at the student housing by the Vermezo,” she says. “All the revolutionaries are there.”

“Oh?”

Zsofi looks everywhere but at her sister. At the clock. At the stove. At the calendar on the wall. “I can't stand it, this waiting around for something to happen.”

She's assembling the gear she'd brought with her—gun, bandolier. She's tying her hair on top of her head in a rough knot. “I can't just stay here, hiding. Not while others are risking their lives.”

That is directed at Agi, pointed and harshly adolescent. Where is it coming from? Zsofi gets mean when she feels guilty. She's halfway out the door, this younger sister with her weapons and her blue eyes and her young, untouched skin when Agi thinks it. Just thinks it.

“Where are you going?”

No answer. Zsofi in her sturdy shoes tromps away. Agi follows. Grabs her by the shoulder. “Look at me.”

“Don't blame me. You're the one who gave up on him.”

They're face to face on the balcony overlooking the courtyard. Everyone in the world can hear. Their mother. Mrs. Nemeth. The postmen informants.

“Says who?”

“Says Gyula. He told me it's over between you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You heard me. It's over because he loves me. Because unlike you I'm not going to desert him.”

He what? He
what
?

“How dare you!” Agi shouts.

Zsofi's already turned her back, so Agi lunges for her hair, yanks her back, but the knot comes undone in her hand and Zsofi twists away, races down the stairs ahead of her, hair flying, her ungainly shoes and the gear all clattering. She pulls the gun from her back for speed, reaches the ground floor four steps ahead of Agi. A man is walking through the door from the street toward them. He wears the revolutionary armband: red, white, green. “Now or never,” Zsofi greets him. Exuberant. Alive. He slings his rifle to the front. Aims. A moment of uncertainty—befuddled by Zsofi's beauty, maybe her love-bright happiness—and Agi screams, “AVO.”

The burst of gunfire.

A terrible stillness.

Seconds pass before Agi can see what's in front of her.

The man's on the floor, bleeding. The heavy door bangs shut behind the fleeing Zsofi, and Agi sinks to her knees.

Sunday, October 28

The day before, when Agi went back upstairs to tell her mother what happened, Margit collapsed in tears. Agi couldn't remember seeing her mother cry since her father's arrest. She reached a hand out, thinking to comfort her, but Margit pulled away. “Why Zsofi? Why my little girl?”

That night, the entire building gathered as three men dragged the body onto the street. They ripped the tricolour armband from him, and with his own blood they painted on his back:
AVO
. They left the body there for others to hang. All the while, Mrs. Nemeth stayed inside her apartment. She'd been there for days now. How she ate, no one knew. But she wasn't coming out. On her window and across her door, someone had written in large black letters:
Informant
.

Sunday, Agi retreats in humiliation. She can't move her head without thinking of them, the two of them, together. Can't put a hand out in front of her without seeing her sister's on his skin. She only has room in her chest for one feeling, and that is the wrenching degradation of her own replaceability. She has only one desire, and that is to know what happened. Precisely. In the minutest detail, with nothing left out. Zsofi never lied, but she may have misunderstood. What did Gyula do to make her believe it was love? Did they kiss? Make love? Did he predict Zsofi's body the way he'd predicted hers? Was the substitution so easy?

Then, that afternoon, the unbelievable announcement: “Soviet troops will withdraw from Budapest.”

Monday, October 29

There's word that there's chicken at the market, and meat. All exports have been cancelled; the food is needed for Hungary. Margit goes out with a neighbour, big-boned Mrs. Lomax, with whom Margit had hardly spoken before now. She's one of the peasants transferred from the countryside to Budapest at the beginning of the 1950s, and she has never gotten over the shock of it. This morning she knocked firmly at the door to tell Margit and her family about the food. It was a kind of gift—“We know your girl is one of ours.”
Ours
. One of our fighters, she means. Margit accepts it, bitter and grateful.

Since the announcement of Soviet withdrawal, the rattle of machine-gun fire has calmed. The corpses of AVO still hang from the lampposts, but as Margit and Mrs. Lomax pass, a group of men starts cutting them down, throwing the stinking bodies into a cart. Garbage litters streets and piles up in empty corners: tins, cinders, paper, broken glass. The women pause together as the tanks roll past back over Margit Hid to Buda. The radio hadn't lied. They really are retreating.

The meat is unlike anything they've seen in Budapest for years. Thick cuts of red meat and plump, young chickens. It takes them nearly three hours to get to the front of the line, and they try not to think it might be gone by the time they get there. It's not. Each hands over the forints, accepts a chicken from the butcher, who grins. A hesitant happiness hovers over everything.

“Maybe it's over,” Mrs. Lomax volunteers.

Margit doesn't want to burst her bubble. “Maybe,” she says.

Tuesday, October 30

The revolutionaries storm Budapest Communist Party Headquarters in Koztarsasag Ter. The soldiers in the tanks guarding the headquarters switch sides. They fire at the building. They blast holes in it. The men who hid inside the building emerge. They're shot. More men emerge, one bearing a white flag. They're also shot. Shooting isn't enough. One man has his heart torn out before he's hung upside down from a lamppost. Margit has come, as she has come for years, to drop letters down the grate. She watches from a corner and feels her own heart wrench. It doesn't make the pain better, but it does something, maybe, to even the balance.

“Where are you, Miklos? Where are you?”

The revolutionaries are in the building. Someone shouts that they're battering down into the cellars, into the prisons.
Soon, soon, Miklos. Soon
. But then word from the revolutionaries emerges: “We can't find them.”

What?

“There's breakfast for hundreds down there, but no prisoners. We can't find them,” one man shouts. “We heard a voice though. The voice said, ‘There are one hundred and forty of us down here.' We have to get them out. We have to dig.”

Margit pushes past the man who's just dispensed this information, angling toward the turned-round tanks, toward the blasted building, striding over the dead and the nearly dead. And she forces her way through the revolutionaries too. “My husband's down there,” she cries. “My husband is imprisoned down there.”

A boy and a girl take her, one at each arm, and carry her out. They say, as if they were the grown-ups here: “Don't worry. We'll get him out. We're calling in the engineers.”