“Do we really want Nagy to be in power? Is he going to be any better than Gerő?” Laszlo faced me and Antal.
“He fell out of favor with the Soviets, which means he could want something different,” Antal said.
“But he is an old guard communist,” Laszlo snarled. “Even if we are victorious, what kind of government would he put in place? And how do we know he wouldn’t run right back to the Soviets?”
“It’s not about that,” I interrupted. “This is the intelligence we have, so we should report it.”
“Eszter,” Laszlo started, “How many times do I have to tell you we aren’t real journalists? We have a bias, an agenda, to bring down this regime. You already decided our fate should lie in this student march. Now we have to decide if Nagy is the right person to lead this movement before we print anything.”
“He already stood up to them once. He can do it again.” Antal stood between us.
“But he lost,” Laszlo said. “They ran him out of office.”
“We are stronger now.” Antal got closer to Laszlo and looked him straight in the eyes.
Antal certainly didn’t look stronger. I placed a hand on each of their shoulders, hoping it would calm them down to feel my steady, unflinching hands. “Nagy is our only chance,” I said. “And, maybe, even someone else will rise up through the ranks. There are only opportunities if we can unite people behind him, at least at first.”
“Yes, Eszter is right,” Antal bit his nails, something I had never seen him do before. He must have been excited. “And we can’t waste any time.”
I looked out the window and saw students walking together as the demonstration mounted. I imagined families bent over their radios, parents growing nervous, teenagers fidgeting in their fear, then excitement, then fear. And us? Like ventriloquists, we carefully threaded our hands through the strings that would lift the disparate parts of this movement into action. We felt invisible and invincible.
Antal began scribbling on a piece of paper, taking notes as he talked us through his plan. We would contact Radio Free Europe and tell them Nagy was ready to lead the student movement. We would also say Nagy was at home, waiting for the students to gather so he could appear and make his first speech as their leader.
“Radio Free Europe got us into this mess.” Laszlo scooped up Antal’s notes. “But Realitás will be the one that gets us out of it. If this is the demonstration’s only hope, then we will be the ones to deliver the news. It’s up to us now.”
Antal lowered his face into his chapped hands and sighed. “I am too tired to fight you on this one,” he said. “But just know that you better get this to everyone.”
“We know,” Laszlo said.
A brown, emaciated cat wound its way through our office, having hidden in the shadows since Antal came in. It rubbed its back against Antal’s legs, meowing until Antal picked it up. As he pet the crook of its neck, Antal closed his eyes and his breathing slowed to the pace of the sleepy cat.
“Why don’t you take a nap?” I made a move to grab the cat, but Antal held on tight to it.
“I should.”
“You can sleep over there.” I pointed to the orange couch, where newspapers and crushed cans sunk into weathered cushions. “With the cat.”
“Here is fine.” Antal lowered himself to the carpet and, balancing the cat on his chest, lay down. I would have insisted he move, but before I could even get up to clear off the couch, he had fallen asleep.
Once Antal began snoring, Laszlo searched Antal’s pockets and beneath the layers of his sweaters and coats.
“I don’t trust him.”
“Don’t wake him up.”
“He’ll be lucky if he wakes up.”
“What, for God’s sake, did he ever do to you, Laszlo?”
“He reeks of the party.”
“Obviously, he is a spy. That’s what they do.”
“A spy whose children and grandchildren live in the party villas.”
“So? It would look suspicious if he moved them out.”
“He could find a reason.” Laszlo finished searching Antal, finding nothing more than a few cigarettes and some tissue.
“Can we just focus on what we’re going to do now?”
Laszlo moved closer to me and took my hand. He pressed his lips to my ears. “Are you ready for this?”
“Yes.” I felt my body bend toward Laszlo, craving what he kept withholding. We had been together before, but it had been years. I fantasized about him constantly. I equated his gruffness with an irresistible masculinity, and it triggered in me a longing both carnal and mindless.
He grabbed my arm and led me into the closet. In the darkness, I couldn’t see a thing. We were so close I could smell his scent, a combination of fresh coffee and rain. His warm breath crept along my cheeks.
“Then,” Laszlo whispered into my ear, “Nagy it is.”
Our lips slowly made their way toward each other. He kissed me, the warmth of his mouth barely detectible through his chapped and hardened lips. He pressed his body into mine and I capitulated, leading us to the floor.
“Please,” I whispered to him. “Let it happen this time.”
Laszlo ran his tongue across mine, delicately unlocking my trepidation. He tugged at the bottom of my lip with his teeth and pressed himself into me. He dove into my breasts, kissing and massaging them with the aggression of someone who hadn’t loved in far too long. As he peeled back my pants, I could feel, against my thigh, Laszlo growing harder and harder.
Wishing he could erase, in this single moment, every time Ivan ever touched me, I raised my hips, beckoning him in. We collided, the years of holding back released from his body into mine, and mine into his. At that moment, writing and sex combined in one aphrodisiacal wonder. Writing had elevated us—we were responsible for shaping the world around us. Sex leveled us—we were human again, pawns to forces we couldn’t control. And then, for a few glorious minutes, we were nothing. Free.
Afterward, Laszlo said nothing. I pressed my nose into the small of his back, allowing him to warm me up. His breathing slowed as he fell asleep. There would be no grand statements or confessions. There would be no talk of “us” or a next time. Laszlo’s love was driven by physical desire, and once that left his body, it disappeared into the past and, I hoped, the future. I tried to hide my disappointment, diving into my work and leaving Laszlo to his dreams.
I focused on Nagy, creating a spectacular narrative on his ascent to leadership. I wrote on where to collect arms and how to organize militias. When Laszlo woke up, he began writing too. Antal was still asleep, his snoring long abandoned in the thick entrails of sleep. We worked in complete silence, putting to words something far bigger than us, which seemed much simpler than putting to words the complexity of our lovemaking. We printed a small pamphlet with Nagy splayed across the cover and a headline that read “Nagy to Lead Opposition.”
We planned to deliver Realitás to the workers close to the arms factories. They would need to start stockpiling weapons as soon as possible. We would also give the paper to our courier service to distribute to the towns outside of Budapest. They promised to deliver Realitás to the Kilian Barracks, a major army post. I had no idea how our words would impact those soldiers, but we had to try every avenue.
Laszlo placed a stack of Realitás in my arms and quietly opened the front door. I would go straight to the factories in hopes that some workers had reported in today. If not, hopefully I could catch some of them on the streets nearby. I left a note for Antal and a copy of Realitás next to him, for when he woke up.
I had an hour before the march began.
Dora Turján
January 17, 1965
Dora sat on a bench, surrounded by headstones that shot up from the ground like crooked teeth. Below them, weeds tormented the earth, uprooting the reluctant dirt, cracked and ugly. Webs of moss clung to the headstones, making it impossible to read the names of the deceased. It was in this graveyard that Dora allowed
her mind a few seconds of freedom—to feel the pain she spent her days denying. She thought about Boldiszar and imagined him buried in the ground, beneath the jumbled mess of stone and green. As far as Dora knew, his body was still missing. He could be beneath the rubble of an abandoned building or in an unmarked grave in the countryside, in the tiny flecks of ash accumulating on a windowsill or in the crevices of the sidewalk.
At first, and for many weeks after, no one spoke of how it happened or where. Boldiszar died in the revolution, somewhere. Ivan told Dora the news with the mechanics of a trained bureaucrat. When she begged him for details, he said Boldiszar was a Freedom Fighter who had been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Dora yelled at Ivan, demanding answers, but he only shook his head and walked away. Dora couldn’t believe this was the same dad who treated Boldiszar like his son.
Dora had known Boldiszar her whole life. When she was five, Boldiszar’s mom came to Ivan and Eszter, begging them to help her with her son. Ever since his dad died, Boldiszar refused to eat dinner, play with his friends, or even leave the apartment, save for going to school. Ivan decided to give Boldiszar a distraction—he would be Dora’s babysitter. At ten, the boy was barely old enough for the job. Still, without fail, he collected Dora every day after school. Dora would be the first to line up to leave, just so she could have the first glimpse of Boldiszar. On their way home, Boldiszar always asked Dora for every minute detail of her day. Lifting her up on his shoulders, he took Dora to the park and pushed her so high on the swings she had to beg him to stop. On hot days, he bought Dora ice cream, getting her two scoops instead of one. And it was clear Boldiszar could sense Dora’s disappointment when, every day, Eszter failed to show up in time to see Dora before she went to bed. Many nights, Boldiszar stayed behind to play with Dora, trying to keep her up late enough to see her mom. Most of the time, Dora fell asleep, and Boldiszar did too.
A few years after his death, Dora tried to find Boldiszar’s body. She visited the Bureau of Missing Persons and anonymously filed a body location request. Ivan, with his expansive bureaucratic tendrils, found out immediately about Dora’s efforts. Waiting for her outside the office, he chided her for associating with a Freedom Fighter in such an obvious and public fashion. As if Ivan had planned it, he pulled from his pocket a tattered photo. Wincing as he lowered it to Dora, he showed her a picture of a bloodied heap of flesh. Dora could make out the black fluff of curly hair on the dead man’s forehead.
“This,” Ivan said, “was Boldiszar only a few hours after he died.”
Dora’s stomach disappeared. A weightlessness overtook her, like she was falling down and up at the same time.
“No,” she whispered.
“Yes, Dora. It’s hard for me too,” Ivan said.
“Where is he?”
“We really don’t know, Dora.”
The certainty of Ivan’s words suffocated the small, breathing creature of hope inside of her.
“Here.” Ivan handed Dora the picture. “Let this be a reminder to you.”
“I don’t want this reminder.” Dora started crying.
“I carried it with me for years. I’ve made us safe. That’s always been my priority. You have to make yourself safe too, Dora.”
Dora grabbed the picture and looked at it closer. It was undeniably Boldiszar. She could see the scar on his right hand, which was bent up by his head, as if he was about to go to sleep. She couldn’t believe her dad had shown her this. She wouldn’t take it with her everywhere like he did. It didn’t make her feel safe. It made her feel that, at any moment, whatever love she had left in her life could be savagely killed.
After Ivan so brutally informed Dora of Boldiszar’s death, she started sneaking off to cemeteries to mourn for him whenever she could, the process giving her some relief—at least she was doing something to honor Boldiszar’s memory.
Dora grabbed a rock and placed it on a nearby grave, a mourning tradition she saw others do at the cemetery, when she heard the thud of clumsy footsteps behind her. Clad in a chunky sweater with neon green stripes emblazoned across it, Marta stood above her with a goofy smirk. Marta was Dora’s childhood friend and colleague, a frumpy sidekick with protruding teeth and bangs that, by the end of the day, strayed in opposite directions. She sat down next to Dora and brushed her hair out of her eyes.
“I thought you’d be here.”
“Yeah, I needed it today.”
“Me too. I got another suicide.”
“From who?” Dora feigned interest, wishing her friend could allow her a few more moments of quiet. But subtlety was not one of Marta’s strong points, and her emotions typically required immediate attention.
“A woman in Szeged. She said she’d kill herself tonight.”
“That sounds depressing,” Dora said, though they received letters like that every day. This was just a normal work conversation, but Dora knew Marta needed these discussions for her own sanity.
“Who was the letter for?”
“Her son. He lives in Budapest,” Marta said. Tears began accumulating on the edges of her eyes, but she held them in. “She told him that she was sorry she couldn’t make it to his graduation from university. She was sorry, too, that she bought him the wrong Christmas gift and that she tried to pretend that he wasn’t in love with their neighbor, Maksim. She understood him more now than she ever would and that when she closed her eyes for the final time tonight, the whole picture of him, and who he is, will be in her mind.”
With some research and a phone call, they could have alerted the son of his mom’s crisis. No one would be shocked that someone read her letter. Most people harbored suspicions of the government’s censoring practices, and it was normal for these suspicions to be confirmed at times.
Instead, suicide threats accumulated on their desks like frothy dishwater festering above a clogged drain. And Marta would, like they all did, simply record the author’s lists of laments into a chart, redact any “subversive” information, and send it off on its way. Dora consoled Marta by telling her that it wasn’t their role to alter this woman’s life and that, while painful, being a bystander was the best thing a censor could do for the people. No one wanted their letters intercepted, and the more they could remain hands-off, the better.
“Dora, I’m just glad we’re in this together.” Marta put her head on Dora’s shoulder.
“Me too.” Dora patted Marta’s head. “Although apparently things are changing for me here.”
Dora told Marta about Ivan’s new censoring initiative, producing Mike’s most recent letter.
“It didn’t say anything serious, did it?” Marta adjusted her sweater, which, to Dora’s bewilderment, always seemed to reveal some part of her bra, even in the middle of winter.
“Just more fantasies for his beloved Uncle Lanci. It looks like he is still our Romeo.”
“Well, Dora, if that’s enough for him to qualify as your Romeo, then I know some men I can introduce you to. Although I’m not sure their English would be as…entertaining.”
Offering her friend a tightly bound smile, Dora explained, for the third time that week, she had no plans to meet someone. Though Dora attracted men on a regular basis, she never gave them a chance. When suitors approached her, she would cross her arms, as if binding the layers of her personality to herself. Sometimes she felt like she was saving her love, though she didn’t know what for. She felt it moving inside of her, pushing her toward extreme emotions—sharp pains of sadness when a song touched her or intense joy when the sun hit her face. In those private moments, she felt the promise of love and decided that was better than knowing real, human-attached love, with all its fragility and unwieldiness. Marta sometimes could push Dora to be more social, but Dora rarely made new friends and never a boyfriend.
“So what sort of wisdom did Mike grace us with anyway?” Marta tousled Dora’s hair. “Who has he slept with this week? What song is he requesting today?”
Dora divulged the details of Mike’s letter, concl
uding he wouldn’t be considered a threat under Ivan’s new initiative. As she said it, a slight tightness gripped her chest—a barely discernable sign that she was lying. She sensed a subtle change in Mike, one that would go unnoticed by any other letter-reader. He had mentioned something that Dora long suspected could eventually lead him into trouble—his lost mom, which he brought up for the third time in a month. She worried Mike might make plans to find her.
The surviving Freedom Fighters were safe, as long as they stayed in Budapest. In case the thought to search for his mom ever crossed his mind, and Mike was indeed a Freedom Fighter, he may be denied a visa. Dora knew he wouldn’t quit looking for his mom because some stuffy bureaucrat decided he couldn’t travel. He would make “plans,” as Ivan called it. After that, it wouldn’t take long for them to find him.
“If this stuff is benign …,” Marta snatched Mike’s letter out of Dora’s hand. “Why not just submit it to Joszef so that you can prove we have nothing to worry about? You could probably take Mike off the list of potentially subversive candidates.”
Dora considered Marta’s suggestion—it wasn’t a bad idea. She had never thought to classify Mike in any way. Over the course of the years, he had become a fictional character over whom Dora had no bearing. She wasn’t the author of his life, just a thirsty subscriber.
“Or,” Marta continued, “maybe you can report him for luring women away from their communist morals because they’ll have to viciously compete with each other for his attention?”
“That would be one list he wouldn’t ever be able to get off of.”
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