Under Budapest (25 page)

I reward myself with a very long drink of water to give them time to put it together. Yes, they're putting it together.

“Mystery solved, detectives.
This
is why you found me at four a.m. in a murderer's jacket and a murderer's shoes. Janos was happy to help. Pretend to be Laci Bekes for an hour? Shit, the kid nearly wet himself. Now, I recognize this wasn't the finest moment of my life, setting up an innocent to take my beating, but honest to God I just wanted to buy myself some time. Time to find the fucking original letter and work out some major butt-licking apology. Who'd have thought a guy like Gombas would give a shit. I mean, it's a
love
letter. From fifty years ago. Which means that twat has got to be seventy years old by now. As I say, I'm not proud. I'm not at all proud of what I did.”

I look at my feet, give them a good penitent and troubled stare.

“I told Janos what he had to say to pretend he was me, and I left. Found my loser brother waiting for me halfway down the street, mad as anything because I always choose Janos over him or some shit like that, because I never take him seriously, never let him in on the business. I shook him off. Told him to go home and cry to his mother. Should have been a bit nicer, I suppose, or I wouldn't be sitting here right now, taking his fall.”

You see how it all comes together.

There needs to be a pause, don't you think, after a realization like that? Do you taste it? Move on.

“You want to catch yourself a gypsy-murderer, you look for a Canadian kid named Janos Hagy, staying with his grandma in the Thirteenth District. I can give you the address. And when you find him, you'll find he's wearing a good quality brown leather coat, and in that coat pocket, you'll find both my wallet and my goddamn car keys.”

These detectives will have questions. Sure. I don't think we're done here. They might want to check out my cellar. See if the creepy room is real. Let them. I've got nothing to hide. And if Gombas is after my ass, this as good a place to be as any. And besides, my lawyer tells me an unidentified head was found on Gellert early this morning. Who the hell drops a head on Gellert? Gombas, that's who. So do these boys want to take me seriously? You bet. They
want
to believe Laci Bekes now. Yes, oh yes, they do.

After Budapest

Two weeks ago, he looked her up on Facebook and there she was: smiling radiant, Daniel's face next to hers, his arm outreaching, holding the camera, retarded kid nowhere in sight. How did some people manage to look so happy? He thought he was over her, but when he saw her there, Daniel's face mostly overwhelmed by her hair, he felt a blip of something and, in nearly the same moment, irritation. You idiot, Tibor. All those little fantasies about bumping into her, and how happy she'd be to see him. How they'd go for a walk, or sit side by side on some ordinary city bench somewhere, and he'd tell her everything that had happened in Budapest—the murder he'd witnessed, the cops who'd tried to frame him, his mother's sudden irrational fear of her old boyfriend. To Rafaela, he could confess, finally, how terrified he'd been. And her forehead would wrinkle in concern, and her eyes would look on him with forgiveness. Yes, forgiveness. Not because he deserves it, necessarily, but because he suffered,
is
suffering. Because he needs it.

The phone rings. He answers.

“Tibor. What are you doing?” Never
how
with his mother, always
what
.

Reflexively, he closes Facebook. “Working. I'm working, Mom.”

Outside his window, a fat grey squirrel travels an improbably thin branch. Tibor toggles up and down his lecture, a couple of pages, all crap. And not nearly enough crap to fill the two bloody hours alone behind that podium.

“Good. When you finish, you can come for dinner. I want to show you my pictures from Budapest. I made a slide show. With music.”

“That sounds great, but I'm at a rather crucial point in this lecture. I thought I might push through.”

“I don't know how you can work at night. I always think the best ideas come when the mind is relaxed, awake. You'd be better to work in the morning, after a good night's sleep.”

That's a laugh; he hasn't slept since Budapest. “I like working at night. No distractions.”

“I don't want to distract you, Tibor.”

And now it's raining. The squirrel huddles under its tail. Last thing he wants to do is make the trek to North York to see a slide show of Budapest. He was
there
, for fucksake. “How about tomorrow? I'll come for lunch. I'll bring you korozot from the deli.”

She pauses before replying. Just so he'll hear how selfish he's being.

“Persze. And don't worry about the korozot, we'll just have the chicken paprikas I made for tonight. I can reheat it in the microwave.”

Tibor looks at the huddled squirrel. He looks at his unwritten lecture. Persze, he shuts down his computer. “Chicken paprikas? Why didn't you say so?”

The house smells like paprikas cooking. Like lemon furniture polish and old cushions. Like his mother and like rain because once every day, sometimes twice if there was company, and no matter what the weather she'd open the front windows wide to air out the house.

“Hallo,” he calls out. He drips on the hallway rug with his bag of korozot.

“I'm in here.”

He follows the voice down the short parquet hallway to the kitchen, where his mother sits at the kitchen table, already set with green oval plastic placemats, white paper napkins in the blue plastic holder, green cut-glass tumblers, watching the news on TV. She looks up with a smile and holds out her hands for his face to kiss.

“It's pouring out there. Your hair looks nice.”

He puts the korozot in the fridge. There is no need to present it to her. She knows he's brought it as he always does, and she will find it there tomorrow morning and it will be nice. It will be nice for her to sit in her yellow kitchen and eat the Hungarian korozot that she hasn't requested and that her good son has brought without expecting thanks. She waves her hand at the compliment, her eyes now focused again on the television news.

Two teenagers were shot last night. The suspect is described as black, average height, wearing a black head scarf. They show the parking lot where it happened, the TV lights glaring on the slick asphalt, a tarp that you know covers a body, a club at the end of a strip mall. Now, the day after, the story is focused on the police and the family. The family believes the police don't do enough. The police are increasingly worried about gangs in Scarborough. The mayor looks worried too.

Tibor spoons the rich, creamy stew out of the pot onto two plates placed ready beside the stove. In the oven is his favourite potato casserole. The bread is sliced and in a basket on the table. Beside the bread, a small bowl of minced peppers.

There's a comfort in the habits, he has to admit, in the not needing to be asked to serve the stew or to check the oven for the potatoes.

“Jo etvagyat,” she says.

As usual, there's little conversation while they eat. The TV news continues. He comments that paprikas is the perfect meal for a cold day, and his favourite potatoes are even more delicious than usual. They eat and they mop the last of the creamy sauce with their bread and they watch the news together. And then, a Hungarian accent. A middle-aged man, wide forehead crimped in two deep horizontal lines: “I am asking the Canadian government for help to solve my son's murder.”

The father pleads, heart broken, as the camera fixes on his face, which now fills the screen.

The reporter takes over. “Hagy's son's head was found in a park in Budapest, more than a month ago. The body has still not been recovered. Hungarian police believe the murder to be linked to the city's organized crime, but they will not say how. Here in Ottawa, a spokesperson from the Prime Minister's Office says Canadian officials are watching the case but will not intercede in the investigation.” Flash to the father, standing empty-handed in what must be his son's bedroom, before a poster of red Formula 1 Ferraris. “No news is sad news for a father who should be celebrating his son's twenty-first birthday today.”

At the table, the silence thickens. Reporters keep reporting. Iran. Afghanistan. People interviewed express anger, outrage, grief—the usual. And it's horrid that it's usual, but the world is not small, as people insist. It's huge. It has too many people and too many wars, too many disasters, and compassion only stretches so far. The bad news continues for approximately four minutes before the local weather.

“Rain! Expected to turn to
freezing
rain tomorrow!” There really is no Schadenfreude like a weather forecaster's. “Wet snow later in the week, turning to flurries by weekend. Don't pack away those boots just yet, folks.”

Tibor's mother clicks off the TV and turns her face toward her son, clearly expecting he should have something to say. Tibor stands, takes the dishes off the table. He runs the dishes under hot water before putting them in the dishwasher.

“I think we should contact him, Tibor.”

We? He presses start and is rewarded with the soft roar of pressured water. Tibor dries his hands on the faded floral towel. He feels more tired than he has ever felt, more tired than he thought it was possible for a human to feel. He hasn't slept since Budapest. Days just keep blurring into dusk, then into dawn. Last night, after finally drifting off at one, he woke at two, finally gave up at four, turned on his computer, and tried to work.

“He deserves to know.”

Really? The man wants to know what happened to his boy on that pitched, rocky, and heretical slope at the ass end of a Budapest night? In what way is this Tibor's responsibility? He's just so fucking tired he can hardly get through his day, never mind take care of this.

“It won't help,” he says finally, tersely.

The rain pelts against the windows. They stare at each other across the kitchen in the warm, ordinary house that has been Agnes's own, alone, for nearly five years now. Here is her son, her only child. He stands with the dishtowel in his hands, waiting for her to concede. She usually does concede, not because she believes him, but because he needs it so badly. Sometimes, in moments like these, she wonders, does she love this son of hers? And the answer is in her bones and in the emptiness at her centre that he once filled, as she and Zsofi had once filled the emptiness at Margit's centre. She doesn't believe in unconditional love, but she does believe in this, this love that happens without her permission, that slides beneath her better judgment. When Agnes's father had disappeared, her mother crumpled up whatever love she had left, pressed it into something that allowed nothing in, a sharp bitterness that she nurtured. That substitution too likely happens without permission. While Agnes created a kind of moderate happiness here, found a man to love, made this son with him, her mother had filled the holes in her life with lists of losses. Agnes was not her mother. This was a relief. But neither was she her son.

“Come, Anyu
,
”—the diminutive, he hardly ever uses it—“let's look at those photos.” And he leans over, puts his hand gently on hers. His father used to do exactly this when it was time to change the subject.

Everything is all ready to go in the basement office: two desk chairs positioned in front of the computer. They sit, side by side, stiffly upright. She clicks play.

Disconcertingly, the first photo is of Tibor on the airplane, fast asleep, book open on his lap, mouth slightly ajar. “Ha,” he says. And he has a visceral, somehow embarrassing sense of how much she loves him. And then, Budapest. Lights spangle the Danube at night and midday the parliament shines sugar white. The chain bridge spans, the castle imposes. Trees in the cemetery weep. It's a beautiful city and there is Gellert Hegy, but from a safe distance. There is an old building. Another old building. A new building.

In Vienna, as they visited museums and pastry shops, it was as if Budapest had never happened. As if by tacit agreement, she didn't speak of Gyula or her missing sister, and he didn't speak of the boy's head or Detective Sarkady. It was easier that way. It was bearable. They spent a fairly pleasant week touristing in Austria. He changed their flights, and they flew home from Vienna without a hitch. The Budapest police, it appeared, weren't looking for him. Apparently, they didn't need his testimony. Apparently, he was not being framed. He was both relieved and chastened by this realization.

Now, as the image shifts, strangely, to what seems like the entrance to a cellar, he says, “Who was Gyula, in 1956?”

“Gyula?” She shrugs. “He was any boy, a good liar. Sweet. He believed in his revolution.”

“But you didn't?”

On the screen their hotel, modern and innocent, pots of blooming pink at the entrance.

“For a day, maybe. For a day or two, I did.”

She juts a chin at the screen: Margit Hid, yellow streetcars jaunting across it. “The first day of the revolution, we marched across that bridge. I was there.”

The next photo: the fountain in Szabadsag Ter that comes up out of the pavement in four walls of water, then suddenly sinks. “Zsofi was joking with the men in the tanks. Flirting, more likely. No one thought they'd fire.”

The wide boulevard of the Korut, bisected by the tram tracks, lined with imposing, nineteenth-century buildings in grey and yellow and green. On one, the pilasters lifting the corner balcony are Zeus, or some other strong, bearded God who holds things together. “I saw a man hung from his ankles at that corner. AVO. A woman set his hair on fire.”

Rows of cakes under glass. “That café was always busy, even when there was no coffee and no eggs for cake.”

The photos slide. Agnes narrates. And it helps with that feeling that she'd been living with since Budapest, the feeling that she was two people: one, Agi, the lover of Gyula and sister of Zsofi, and two, Mrs. Agnes Roland, inside this tidy bungalow enclosed in a green lawn, encircled by wide asphalt road. How impossible. How utterly impossible, to live a life so decisively divided.