Under Budapest (6 page)

“It must have seemed that way.”

“They were preparing for war. Many people died building those tunnels. Country people. We learned that later.”

She always did this, corrected him, as if to remind him that no matter how much history he studied, his knowledge could never match her real-life experience. She ambushed him with her past. In a grade six geography class, he learned about borders. Distraught, he confronted his mother after school: “Hungary is part of the Soviet Union?”

She looked at him, confused. She was peeling potatoes into the sink and when she turned, one pink-rubber-gloved hand held the peeler, the other the potato. “What are you talking about?”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Well, where did you think it was?”

He was at a loss. He felt how hot his face was, how sweaty because he'd walked so quickly all the way home just to ask her this. “But people are poor there. And you can be arrested just for speaking your mind. It's like a prison, and there's an iron curtain all the way around it.”

“That's true. Now aren't you happy you are Canadian?” She went back to peeling potatoes. “Na. What did you learn in French class?”

Now she fiddles with the crinkly paper of the bouquet. “My mother was only sixty-three when she died. I'm more than a decade older than my own mother. Can you imagine?”

The subway jostles. “She was probably about forty when I left. She seemed so old. Old and angry. My God, always angry. We couldn't do anything right. Zsofi and I, we used to go out at night just the two of us, sit in the courtyard, or wander up and down Szent Istvan Korut, just to be free of her.”

As his mother rambles, Tibor turns his mind to the coffee house near Ferenciek Ter—its elegant round tables and soaring ceilings—and the reading he'd brought with him. If they spent thirty minutes in the cemetery, an hour even, he could still salvage the late afternoon. She'd need a rest and he could get away, finish his paper, join his friend Peter later for a drink, as planned. Tibor wanted to talk to him about this paper he was working on, about the tunnels and the creation of fear, fear and far-right paranoia. He and his mother ride the rest of the way without talking.

“Here we are.” His mother pats his thigh. Grasping the rail, she stands while the train is still moving. It shudders to a stop and she sways, finding her balance.

Forty minutes later, Agnes picks her way along the rough stone paths of the old graveyard, map in hand. The map is drawn in blue ballpoint on a sheet of paper torn from the kind of little notepad only old ladies carry in their purses. It's getting soggy in the rain.

“Mom, can I just take a look at that?”

She hadn't asked him to come. She hadn't asked for a lecture on Soviet architecture or his solicitous hand at her elbow. She doesn't need his help reading the map, though he's already twice reached out his hand for it. “I am fully capable of reading a map, Tibor,” she's said each time, but she doesn't want to seem secretive or raise his suspicion. He'd never believe her, for a start. He has his own ideas about history. That's fine. Historians tend to miss the point.

“I don't think we're going in the right direction, Mom. Could you just let me see the map?”

The rain had started almost as soon as they'd exited the subway. A cold, thick winter rain. She'd worn waterproof boots, in expectation of slush. Tibor had not, and his suede walking shoes were getting soaked through. She says nothing about his impractical shoes or the slush or the creeping cold. Neither does he, though they've been wandering in circles for more than an hour.

Agnes looks around. Nothing is quite as it should be. The paths veer left where they ought to be straight. Trees obscure what she'd been assured were obvious markers: the sculpture of a couple, dressed in 1950s workers' garb. A tall angel, wings spread. The rain is creeping under the collar of her jacket, and her umbrella is next to useless. A fool's errand, made worse by her son's immaculately contained seething.

The map is from a Hungarian woman she'd met in Toronto at a funeral. It was funny, the way it happened. So coincidental, she couldn't help but think it must mean something. The service was over and Agnes was downstairs in the church basement, eating a sandwich. The Hungarian accent was the first thing she noticed.

“We were four women to a cell. There was me, Klara Lengyel, Marta Horvath, and Zsofi…Zsofi Perec? No. Zsofi
Teglas
. You see, I tell you their names because—”

“Zsofi Teglas?” Agnes shouldered someone aside, grabbed the woman's wrist. “Did you say Zsofi Teglas?”

There were crumbs on the woman's black dress, a half-eaten egg sandwich in her left hand, a half-smile on her face.

“I'm Agnes Teglas. Zsofi was my sister.”

“Zsofi's sister? No.”

“She was with you in prison? In 1956?”

“She was,” the woman declared. “And in Vienna, spring of 1957.”

“Vienna?”

“That's right. Zsofi and I escaped together. Through the tunnels.”

“Mom. We're not going to find it this way. Look, there's the street. I'm going to see if I can call us a cab.”

But hold on. There's the angel. There, the honoured workers. And there, where two paths meet, the white mausoleum.

“Persze, Tibor. You're probably right.” Agnes places herself squarely in the archway of the mausoleum's door. Shelter, she points. “I'll just wait here for you.”

He gives her a patient smile, meant to show her how nobly he endures, and jogs off, shoes squelching.

The woman's story was preposterous: she and Zsofi, digging, then a friendly prison guard, directing them into a hidden passageway. An entirely unbelievable story, yet here, exactly where she'd said it would be, exactly as the map specified, here was the exit of the tunnel through which Zsofi and this woman, Dorottya, had escaped.

Agnes pushes at the door. Pushes with everything she's got. Then sees the chain and the massive padlock securing it. It's futile, she knows, but she yanks at the padlock. It leaves rust all over her new grey gloves, but it doesn't give. She nearly cries with frustration—to come all this way, to be so close, and still so far from the truth. Then she realizes: why would anyone lock up the dead? If there is nothing in here but bones, there is no reason for security.

So, she doesn't have evidence of a tunnel, exactly, but then again, she doesn't see the absence of tunnel either. It isn't proof, nor is it proof to the contrary.

The existence of the tunnels and underground prisons has never been proven. Searchers just didn't know where to look, Dorottya insisted. “I don't know how many tunnels there were. Endless tunnels. Miles of them. We lived in darkness. We saw light twice a day, at mealtimes. The guards carried lanterns. We all turned into moles. The light hurt our eyes. I stopped believing in my own hand; I couldn't see it. There's no darkness like it, the darkness of the earth. We talked to stay sane, but some people lost their minds, thought they were buried alive, in their graves. I still can't stand the dark. But then, I don't know what happened, some of us were conscripted to dig. The digging was awful, painful and hard, but at least we had light. At least we knew we were alive.”

A guard helped them escape, escorting them through an underground maze to this exit. Here. Here, Dorottya and Zsofi emerged, close to the southern train station and close also to Koztarsasag Ter, Communist Party Headquarters, where the tunnels were believed to begin. The moonlight seemed like day to their eyes. They scrubbed their faces with snow. They melted snow in their cupped palms and drank it. Then they caught a train to Sopron, jumping off before the station to run through the fields and the forest to the border.

Agnes hears the car pulling up behind her and shoves stained gloves into her pockets.

“I'm sorry we didn't find the grave, Mom,” Tibor says. He's being tender, and she feels sorry this brief and uncharacteristic moment of empathy has been evoked by a lie.

“Do you see the communist martyrs' circle?” she says. “Martyrs,” she scoffs. It's a clumsy change of subject, but it does the job. Tibor always has something to say about monuments. The cab leaves the cemetery, swerving through hard, wet traffic. When she tires of her son's monologue, she can listen to the taxi's two-way, a woman's voice crackling with addresses: “Visegradi utca huszonkilenc a tizenharmadikban, ötödik kerület Oktober 6 utca tizennégy, Liliom utca negyvenegy a kilencedik kerületben.” The guard who helped them said there were other exits. That's what Dorottya told her. An exit somewhere in the city park, near the Szechenyi bath. And one on Gellert, a natural chasm in the rock, another somewhere up on Rozsadomb. Dorottya didn't have maps for those.

Windshield wipers shush. Tires kiss the pavement. Agnes listens to the scrolling addresses and the rain as her son patters on.

2.

“Egesegedre.” Peter raises his glass. “What took you so long?”

“Good fucking question.”

He'd left his mother in her hotel room with a blanket over her knees and a bowl of soup ordered from the restaurant on her table. She was fine. She'd be fine. This is his night. Eight years since Tibor had last been here, on a research grant. At the time, Peter was doing his Ph.D. at the Central European University and working part-time at the Open Society Archives associated with the university. Now, Peter's still a teenager in a faded green concert T-shirt, jeans that seem rarely washed. And yet he's married and he's got a five-year-old boy. “You still in that one-room place near the university?”

“No. Moved to a panel apartment out in the Eleventh District.”

Tibor winces.

“It's not so bad. More space than downtown. But what about you? What happened to that woman you told me about, with the name?”

“Rafaela.”

“Rafaellaaaa.”

“Tragi-comedy. She found out I was her husband's best friend. The end.”

Peter slams the table with his beer and guffaws. It is kind of funny, when you think about it. Why doesn't he have friends like Peter in Toronto?

Peter is fun. He knows all the places to go. He leads Tibor down deserted black streets that Tibor will never remember, and doesn't try to, into clubs that aren't really clubs but condemned apartment houses turned into parties. Courtyards become tented lounges. Apartments are smashed open, graffitied, paint slopped on parquet floors. In one, a bathroom has been made up to be its own museum exhibit, glass-fronted, decorated with pages from communist-era textbooks. Tibor feels counterculture and cool. In another, the woman they call the veces neni (the washroom auntie) has a sign in twenty-six languages. She says hello, and here's your toilet paper, and two hundred forints please, in
twenty-six languages
. Her Russian is sullen. Her English perfect. Her Japanese about as good as Tibor's.

“Stop.” Peter puts his hand in front of Tibor's camera. “You can't do that.”

“Why?”

“Because you look like a tourist.”

“So?”

Tibor takes a picture of the veces neni and of Peter, frowning, of a girl leaning over a balcony, smoking. The smoke hangs so heavy in the air, it looks like someone's barbecuing. Of a room full of laughing faces. Of feet on coffee tables. Of hands around steaming mugs of tea. A bartender's haircut. A video screen showing a bikinied lady with a huge, bouncing balance ball.

Peter is the best friend ever. He invited him to this con­ference that would save Tibor's soul, and now he's reminding him how great life can be in a decaying post-communist, economically bereft, precariously employed nation. “My soul is Hungarian,” Tibor declares over waves of reggae.

“Your soul's a stupid loser?”

“Precisely.”

“And that's why you chose to specialize in our irrelevant history?”

“Exactly. Because Hungary is the guy who never gets the girl.”

Peter is sardonic and depressive and hilariously fun. Spontaneous and sincere and worn out. “I hate that Hungarian-loser rhetoric,” Peter says.

“Because it's true?”

“Because it breeds monsters like Jobbik and the Magyar Garda.”

“You know what I hate? I hate that I'm on vacation with my mother.”

“You really are Hungarian.”

Tibor feels younger by the minute, but it's their fourth romkocsma, his sixth beer, and it must be getting late. He checks his watch: only eleven-thirty. “Fuckit. Jet lag.”

“I'll call you a cab,” says Peter.

It's 4:12 a.m. The room hums. His comforter itches. He scratches his ankles, his rib cage. Fibreglass? Crackers.

Christ.

Tibor sits. Heaves one leg after the other over the side of the bed.

In the bathroom, he flicks on the light, sheltering his eyes (too late) from the glare. Bleary-eyed, he fills the tumbler with water and drinks with his eyes closed. He fills it again, trying not to see himself in the very large mirror. When did he get that sag above his hipbone? My God, it's not just the hip either. It starts from his spine, then overflows. Putting down his water glass, Tibor grabs his rolls, one in each fist. Holy Christ. How could he ever have believed that Rafaela might have loved this? This pale, wistfully slack waist. These insufficient arms.

Tibor turns his back on the mirror and stands over the toilet, watching his urine hit the glossy toilet bowl and pool.

He could try to go back to sleep, but he knows from experi­ence that trying to go back to sleep is the worst thing to do. He'd just lie there rehearsing his talk and audience reactions to his talk. He'd get nervous. He kept the anxiety at bay all yesterday, and all yesterday evening with Peter. I am not worried, he says, sternly. I've always excelled at conference papers.

The street at 4:25 a.m. is empty. Streetlights, strung from overhead wires between buildings, cast watery, meagre light on ice-frosted asphalt. He steps out. Enjoys the first slap of cold on his face, in his lungs, and heads off toward Gellert. Eight years ago, he ran Gellert Hegy twice a week. He could jog all the way to the top and over, without stopping. He isn't as fit as he was then, but he could try. And if he could get there by sunrise, he'd get some great photos. He carries his Canon digital in his jacket pocket.