Under Budapest (7 page)

At the foot of the hill, Tibor checks his watch: 5:00 a.m. and still no dawn, no stars either. The clouds and the city lights together conspire to turn the sky an even purplish blue. He jogs on the spot, to keep his heart rate up, looks up the stairs that lead to the paths through the wooded hill. Poorly lit. Deserted.

So what are you afraid of?

Tibor feels the rush of adrenalin. A flood of endorphins. Exactly: what am I afraid of? A lonely hill? Bad guys lurking in caves? Those are just phantasms, irrational night terrors, as are all fears when it comes down to it. It's all in your head. It can be mastered. Yes, mastered. Master it, Tibor. Master your fear. Run up that ancient hill, and show your fears who's boss. Who will deliver a resoundingly perfect paper? Who will soon publish an article that will revise dominant thinking about post-communist Hungary? Who kicks ass? And with that thought, Tibor leaps up Szent Gellert's stairs, three at a time.

He stops not quite halfway. Above him, the statue of Hungary's first Christian, Szent Gellert, floodlit and white. He pulls the camera from the pocket of his windbreaker. He loves this camera—the size of a cigarette case but also capable of shooting video. Also gives him an excuse to catch his breath, which plumes in gusts. To be fair, he used to run the hill from the other side where the slope was less steep. He hears a loud creak. Likely just a tree in the wind. No reason to linger, though. At the top of the stairs, a gravel path. His thighs are burning. His calves too. His breath is louder than anything else, fighting to catch up with the arrhythmia of his stomping step. He is whipping this fear. He is kicking it.

Where the path splits, Tibor chooses the second, the path less trodden—always the choice of the fearless—which curves round the front of the cliff face. What is that smell that comes out of the brush at night? Even when the ground is mostly frozen there's an alteration in the air, some kind of nighttime exhalation. The bushes are brambles of dry twigs. They chatter dryly in the wind. The few, sparse evergreens shudder. Below him, the Danube coils darkly. The black road follows it. Along the black road, the occasional car flies, headlights bright.
Zoom
. As it takes the curve. Tibor slows, the footing precarious with protruding roots, jutting rocks and to his left a drop steep and sudden and unforgiving. Puny guardrails keep him safe and he feels the delicious, tautening effort of awareness. His skin, his eyes, his ears, even his hair is sentient. His soul stirs. I'm coming back from the dead, thinks Tibor. I am Tibor Roland, master of Gellert.

He's past the halfway point where the hill juts out hard into the curve of the river, the wind picking up, when his self-congratulation is broken by a sudden ruckus of sliding gravel close above him, a muffled cry. Tibor freezes.

“Nice try, idiot. Where d'you think you're going?”

“No. No, please,” a voice blubbers. “Please, I'm not Laci.”

“So you say.”

There are three Hungarians up there, up above him somewhere under the trees, on a different path, two frighteningly steady and calm, one younger and terrified. Tibor hugs the curve of the cliff wall. If he shouted, would the bullies back off or would they come for him? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, I am not a hero.

“Please,” says the one voice in thick sobs. “I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything.”

“That might be true, but for me, I don't care. I do my job. I get my pay.”

A heavy, butcher-counter sound of flesh being hammered, bones cracked.

“Where's the letter?”

“I'm not Laci.”

Thunk.

“Where's the letter?”

“I don't know.”

Crack.
A muffled scream.

“Where's the letter?”

“Laci lost it.”

Two voices move away. The young, broken man must be lying not five metres above him. Are they leaving? Tibor hears the electronic ping of a cellphone being dialled. The one man must be speaking into the phone. “Look, he looks like the photo in the driver's licence, but he's got another wallet in his pants pocket and he keeps saying he's not Laci. I'm starting to believe him.”

Closer to Tibor, the injured man is starting to move. Brush crackles and scatters against hard ground.

Still speaking into the phone: “A risk? Maybe.”

A pause.

“Done.”

One dull thud, the movement stops.

Tibor has stopped breathing.

“Jesus. What the fuck?”

“He said take care of it.”

“He's the wrong fucking guy.”

“True.”

“Jesus, fuck. And you had to do it here? What're we gonna do with this? The car's like a kilometre back.”

“Yeah, well. Gimme the fuckin' axe.”

“Here?”

“You'll see.”

Tibor hears a dull crack.

“Ugh. Christ.”

“You fucking buzi.”

Another thunk. Then five more dull crunches. Tibor counts them.

“All right, gimme a hand.”

Crush of branches as they walk but not far.

“Watch this.”

Scrape of something heavy, moved. A pause.

“What the hell? How deep is it?”

“I don't know. Deep enough. Trust me, no one will ever find him down here.”

Less than two minutes of activity and then underbrush crackling, twigs snapping, as something rolls, bounces, downward and right over Tibor's head, coming to a halt somewhere in front of him.

“Fuck,” the men shout in unison.

Silence.

“Oh, man,” says the one. “Oh shit, shit, shit.”

“Shit, do we look for it?”

“Down there? Fuck, man, for all we know it's halfway to the highway.”

“So what do we tell Gombas?”

“Tell him it committed suicide.” High, breathless, juvenile laughter.

“It's a jumper.”

The laughter spins itself thin and stops.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

Tibor hears their footsteps trudge up the hill. He's dropped to a crouch, and now he sinks, legs giving way entirely. Maybe he'll never get off this hill. As the sky pales, tree branches seem to separate, differentiating themselves from night. Lights go out. The river turns grey. Far below, and through the trees, Tibor can see the old church by the bridge, the rows of headlights as people start out for work. Normal life is down there. But directly opposite Tibor, caught in the prickly undergrowth not two metres below, a head, looking up at him, eyes open. A young blond head. A kid, without his body.

In the lecture hall, Tibor's audience waits. Someone coughs. Feet shuffle on low-pile carpet. Here and there paper rustles as notebooks open. Tibor looks down at his paper. His right hand is shaking. Yet he doesn't
feel
nervous. His feet in their Doc Martens—not the iconic counterculture boot but the sturdy, thick-soled shoe—feel grounded. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth: he learned this from the yoga classes he took a couple of years ago, precisely to get him through situations like this. With each breath, he feels his substance reasserting itself. He presses his trembling palm flat on the podium. He begins.

“Long before the revolution of October 1956, the word was that the Soviets were tunnelling. Their tunnels spread with the speed of rhizomes…”

He couldn't say how he'd found his way down the other side of the hill to the Hotel Gellert, where he grabbed a cab. Back in his room, he dumped his clothes in a huddle and stepped straight into the shower, where he stayed for a good twenty minutes, leaning his head back into the pummelling water. After calling his mother to wish her a good morning and excuse himself from breakfast, he ate a bread roll and cheese in his hotel room, got on the subway, and emerged here.

His audience seems to be listening. One man nods approvingly at a critical juncture. A woman in front of him squints, then jots in her notebook, clearly stimulated by what she's heard. Good. Now he's established his context and the urgent question that his research will answer, now he can just let it happen. The magic. Taking his hand from his pocket, he elaborates a planned aside and turns back to the words on the page.

The type blurs. He blinks, rubs his eyes. The ideas seem strangely foreign, the sentence structures impossible to antici­pate. Where does he pause? When does he breathe? When he looks up, the faces in the front row are frowning. Do they think he's wrong or just stupid? Are they impatient with his argument, his hand-in-the pocket posturing? His heart pounds and his chest tightens.

Page two. Keep going. “As many of you are perhaps aware, the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security was opened in 2003. This signified an end to secrecy—and perhaps the end to rumours of tunnels. Security documents are housed there, but they can't be accessed by just anyone. If you were one of the many ‘observed' by state security informants, you can read your own files, and know the names of those who observed you, arrested you, or tortured you. If you were, yourself, an informer, agent, or torturer, you can be assured that only your victims can know this about you.”

Tibor prickles with sweat, his chest so tight he can hardly lift his arm to turn the page. Fear is all in the head. Master your fear. “This creates a curious quandary. In a state where complicity was demanded and rewarded, where so many ordinary and otherwise decent people turned information on others for the sake of their own safety, the archive must not be vengeful.”

He's breathing too fast. So fast, he can't catch his breath. The room is breathing, its walls swelling and shrinking, and swelling. Tibor staggers away from the podium, pushing through the heavy side door, gasping for air. Outside the classroom, he sinks onto a bench in the hall. He leans forward, presses his right hand to his heart. Just breathe. But it hurts to breathe with a three-pronged fork stuck in his lung. Maybe he's dying. Dying of cowardice—is that possible? A woman with a neat ponytail and turtleneck, one of the conference organizers, has followed him out. Ilona. That's her name. Ilona crouches worriedly at his side and puts a hand on his back. “Are you all right?”

He sees his academic career, his entire future, crumbling. From fear. From bad timing and bad luck. “Food poisoning.” He grimaces.

Kind Ilona calls him a cab. Passively, he takes her arm as she leads him to the door. She puts him in the cab and gives the driver the name of his hotel, pays his fare. Huddled into the backseat, breathing like an asthmatic, Tibor screws his eyes shut, trying to block out the humiliation.

“I don't understand. There was a mugging at the conference?”

Tibor's mother hasn't left the hotel yet. Dressed and coiffed, she'd just finished her breakfast—delivered by room service; apparently, she was getting the hang of this hotel lifestyle—and was in her room, watching TV, when he knocked. He meant to sound competently unperturbed, and he concealed the actual, horrifying event for her sake, but obviously he's not being clear. He has decided to report it. Tell someone about it, get it off his chest. It is the only way to get over the shakes that assaulted him this morning.

“Not at the conference, Mom. When I went for a run this morning.”

“So you witnessed a mugging
before
you went to the con­ference?”

“That's right.”

“Thank God it wasn't you, Tibor, out there before dawn by yourself. This isn't Toronto. You know they found a head on Gellert Hegy this morning? Just a head. It was on the news. But where was the mugging? Was anybody hurt?”

“Oh, not far from here. It was just a little scuffle.”

“Not far from here? Did you tell the people at the front desk? Maybe we should change hotels.”

“No, no. I mean, it wasn't that close. And you're right, it was stupid of me to be out jogging in the dark.”

His mother's eyes have gone back to the TV: an advertise­ment for the new right-wing political party, Jobbik. “Hungary for Hungarians” is the party line. Twenty years after the end of Soviet communism and somehow this rhetoric is gaining traction. It's the economic downturn, after a too-short period of optimism. It's knowing that the too-high taxes, which more than 70 per cent of the population avoids by working at an official minimum wage and receiving the rest under the table, end up in the pockets of corrupt politicians. The story has just broken: money that was supposed to pay to modernize Budapest's transit system, its buses and its highways, had landed in someone's pocket. This has nothing to do with Jews or with the Roma, but Jobbik's propaganda suggests that they are the ones ruining Hungary.

“They think it was an organized crime, the head on Gellert.”

Not
an
organized crime, Mom.

“But they don't know who it belongs to. His poor family.” She tsks. “But I suppose if it's an organized crime he was probably a murderer too, or a drug dealer.”

“Probably.”

“So. He got what he deserved.” Decisively, she changes the channel.

Tibor feels a cautious relief. If they've found the head already, then he is off the hook, isn't he? It's too late to save the boy, after all. And he has no need to play the hero. No, his first impulse was the right one: stay out of it. So, maybe he'll go back to the conference this afternoon.
Or
he could use his food poisoning as a reasonable excuse to take the day off, go to the baths, as he planned to do yesterday. Today would be men's day at the Rudas. But the Rudas is at the foot of Gellert. There would be police. Reporters. But why should he worry? No one knew he was up there, witnessing. A long, hot steam followed by a cold plunge, a soak. His mother is still talking.

“…meeting him for coffee. But if you want to come along, I'm sure he'd love to meet you.”

“No, no, thank you. I'll just head back to the conference. After I speak with the police, I mean.”

“I don't know how we'll recognize each other. After fifty-three years. I told him I'd wear a maple leaf pin on my lapel. But did you get a good look at the man? Even in the dark? All right then, have a good time at your conference. And I'm glad your presentation went well. You've always been so good at public speaking.”