“What are you doing here?”
“Who cares. What happened to you after the police came? I’m sorry I was caught up … I couldn’t help …. They took me to jail.”
Dora didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to talk about the incident with the police, fearful of where that may lead. Instead, she purposefully dropped the book in her hands, hoping it would give her an excuse to pick it up, and leave.
Ferenc beat her to it, stooping to the ground to meet Dora. “You’re reading a book on the Russian monarchy? That is completely ridiculous!” He leaned into Dora’s forehead and whispered, “Anika, it’s all bullshit, you know.”
Ferenc winked at Dora, who felt a lightness swirl inside of her.
“I have to go.” Dora shot up.
“Wait. Are you hungry?”
“No, I’m not, I’m sorry.” Dora hadn’t eaten since yesterday, her stomach too unsettled in the morning to permit her breakfast lately. Today she couldn’t get down lunch either. Dora prepared to excuse herself when she noticed how pale Ferenc looked.
“Are you okay?” Dora reached for his arm, helping him up.
“I’m sorry. I’m just … tired.”
“You need to eat.” Dora wanted to help him, and she knew she could justify it to Joszef—if something happened to Ferenc, they wouldn’t have anything to show for her work. She led Ferenc outside and bought him some chocolate and water. Dora watched as he regained the color in his cheeks.
“You know, I have been thinking about you.” Ferenc peeled back the wrapper on his second bar of chocolate. “I didn’t think I would ever see you again.”
Dora felt hopeful for a moment. It made her nostalgic. She used to feel it all the time as a child, especially when she was with Boldiszar. Dora took a deep breath and refocused herself. She could not allow her feelings for Ferenc to build. He was a work assignment.
“Well, it looks like you’re feeling better.” Dora stood up. “I really should go now.”
“Wait! I just really need help with one more thing …,” Ferenc looked up, his eyes seeming much more focused now.
“What?”
“You have to listen ….”
“Listen to what?”
“Shhhhhhh … just listen.” Ferenc grinned and looked at his watch.
Seconds later, a chorus of pianos burst from the building across from them. With tremendous force, the music careened out the windows, smashing into passersby who, struck and stunned, stopped dead in their tracks. Dora paused too—there had to be at least ten pianos in there playing at the same time, perfectly synced with one another.
“Right on time.” Ferenc smiled.
“How did you …?”
“I know the rhythms of this city.”
Dora felt a bubble of laughter try to make its way out and, before she could send it back down, she was laughing. She could picture Mike a Korvinközből pulling this ostentatious stunt. Dora was almost certain she remembered him mentioning this very move in one of his letters. They had been sitting across from Liszt Ferenc Academy, one of the most prestigious music schools in the city, and Ferenc knew exactly when the students practiced. He got lucky that today they chose such a bold Bartók composition.
“You know, Anika, there is nothing better than music,” Ferenc sighed. “But every day it becomes more impossible to reach the beauty in our lives that these musicians create. It’s as if they are taunting us.”
Dora didn’t know what to say—if she acknowledged the truth in his words, she would be creating an emotional connection with Ferenc. She couldn’t allow that. Yet, she couldn’t seem to completely ignore Ferenc either. As she watched his eyes search for some form of validation, Dora felt something click shut inside of her. Ferenc wanted much more than Dora would ever be able to give, even if she wasn’t pretending to be Anika. Even if she was just herself. He would want to have these deep conversations, just as he did at the bar and in his letters to Uncle Lanci. It wasn’t in Dora’s nature to engage at that level. She didn’t spend her time peeling back the layers of humanity and examining them closely. She never learned how, nor was it something Ivan raised her to value. And though Dora already promised herself she wouldn’t risk her career for Ferenc, she felt even more attached to that conviction now.
“I’m sorry,” Dora sighed. “This time, I really have to go.”
She turned around and left Ferenc before she could see his face fall. She felt it though, just as she felt her emotions assembling back into order, like soldiers falling in line at the command of their captain and, ultimately, state.
Over the next few days, Dora immersed herself in her mission to follow Ferenc. After enough time practically living his life, she nearly forgot about her own. Neglecting even her friendship with Marta or her visits to the cemetery, Dora found herself getting hungry when Ferenc did, tired when Ferenc felt fatigued, and highly focused when he was sharp, quick-moving, and determined to complete a task. She had gotten so far into Ferenc’s head that she could anticipate his next move. If he looked agitated at work, she knew he would walk the long way home, to blow off steam. On a good day, he would stop at the store and buy something for Adrienne.
Dora listened more and more to Radio Free Europe by default, too. She witnessed the moments when The Beatles or The Temptations gave Ferenc a certain buoyancy. Under their spell, he would pay the biggest compliments to women, speak the loudest about his future, and work the quickest on his cars.
It was in those moments, Dora understood why rock ‘n’ roll scared people like Joszef and her dad so much. Radio Free Europe didn’t defy the government. Rather, it existed beyond the government. Hungary was the last thing on people’s minds when they listened to rock ‘n’ roll. They forgot about the identities forced on them by the regime. For a few minutes at a time, they were free—weightless and nationless.
Ferenc hadn’t mailed any letters yet. She assumed it took him a few days to write his detailed letters, but she needed something soon. At her check-ins with Joszef, he badgered her for a letter or any indication that Ferenc was exhibiting suspicious behavior. Dora discussed Ferenc’s daily habit of listening to Radio Free Europe and that he frequented the bars that played rock music, though she knew that wouldn’t satisfy Joszef. She considered telling him about Ferenc’s fantasy of going to Germany, but she decided to avoid sharing that information. It precluded her current mission, and if Joszef worked hard to determine when those plans surfaced, he would learn Dora withheld information from him, or worse, that she stole from him.
Finally, one night just as she readied herself to walk away from her post, she saw Ferenc turn in an unfamiliar direction. She maintained a steady distance from him, but his footsteps were so far away and so soft that the sound of Dora’s own heartbeat overpowered them. She couldn’t tell if he stopped, or started, but she made sure to keep her eye on him. Tracing his path, Dora came upon the post office miles from Ferenc’s apartment. An expansive window spanned its façade—the perfect lens to watch Ferenc commit the hoped-for deed.
Squatting behind a car and allowing it to cover most of her body, Dora observed Ferenc hand a letter to the employee behind the counter and hurry from the door. This time, she didn’t follow him. Waiting until he disappeared, Dora rushed in and presented her badge.
It only took her a minute to find Ferenc’s letter on top of the pile labeled “outgoing.” Dora’s heart beat frantically, shaking her hands and rattling its way to her conscience. She felt almost manic. She hoped Ferenc’s letter would exonerate both of them, finally and officially. Maybe jail had hardened Ferenc against his dreams to flee Hungary and find his mom. Dora carefully placed the letter into her pocket, making sure the incongruities in her coat’s stitching didn’t disturb its descent. She walked to a covered bench nearby.
“You can do this,” Dora said to herself. “This is work.”
She closed her eyes and ran her fingers along the edges of the envelope, savoring what could very well be the last time she came in
to contact with one of Ferenc’s letters. If he wrote anything subversive, he’d be taken away again, she was certain. She scooted closer to where the streetlight hit the bench and pulled the letter out of her pocket.
Inch by inch, she slid her finger through the envelope’s adhesive, trying to keep it intact as much as possible. She unfolded the paper, so thin it hardly made any noise. As she read the beginning of the letter, Dora knew Ferenc confessed enough to send him back to prison. Not only did Ferenc bring up leaving Hungary again, but he found someone who would help him do it—he would probably attempt to communicate with the prisoner again.
As Dora read on, she grew more and more horrified by the strange and disturbed woman in the basement. Soon, she forgot about Ferenc’s plight, her mind imagining and re-imagining the poor woman’s rape. She knew Hungary had a long history of injustice. She heard once of a boy, Péter Mansfeld, who was taken into custody for his participation in the revolution at age seventeen. He was too young to be executed, so officials waited until he turned eighteen, then, in secret, hanged him. But Dora thought those days were over. She had made peace with the government’s past indiscretions, dismissing them as the growing pangs of a system attempting to establish order.
She wondered if the eyes she met that day were those of the forsaken inmate. They floated in front of her now, blinking back at her. Their blank and vacant expression was simply a defense mechanism—the numbness required to survive daily abuse. Dora couldn’t keep reading.
She felt both sick and weak. Her hands trembling, she started folding the letter from the bottom up. That’s when she saw it—her mom’s name. It was just sitting there, on its own, scribbled in the inky, sloppy handwriting of Ferenc.
Dora was certain Ferenc didn’t know anyone named Eszter. Maybe one of the prison guards had that name. Maybe Ferenc had found one of his mom’s old friends, and her name was Eszter. Either way, Dora felt the familiar, yet unwelcome, tug toward the name. She pried open the letter and read the remaining paragraphs until she came to her mom’s name again. “Eszter.”
Dora brought the letter close to her eyes and stared at the name, unbelieving, and yet, also knowing who was stuck in that basement.
It was her mom.
Eszter Turján
January 25, 1965
It’s happening and unhappening in a loop in my mind. Every night when I go to bed, it happens. When I dream, it unhappens. And when I wake up, it happens again, until I’m gone. Because reality is mine, not theirs. This grotesque horror is just a series of different events stacked up on top of one other, but none of them are real. Or some of them are real, but I say which ones.
Sometimes, when I look out the window, I see people. This window is actually not in my cell—it’s far away in the head officer’s cell. He spends his own time with me when he says it’s time. Time is time, but to me, time is nothing more than the reality of others. For me, time is in the past when I was Dora’s mom, even though I wasn’t really there. These stupid soldiers don’t realize that. They think I am suffering in here. They look at me like they can do anything to me because I am miserable anyway, but I am not in pain when I go back, which I do whenever I want.
Right now, I am putting Dora to bed after reading to her because she asked me to do it, and though she is a teenager, I’m so grateful that she still wants to spend time with her mom in this affectionate way, like she’s a kid. I wonder if she does it just for me—to let me think she will always be my baby because she knows how abandoned I would feel otherwise—and I love her for that. And I smell her hair, which smells delicious, because I infused her shampoo with cherries I picked from my friend’s garden. I’m just crafty like that. All of Dora’s friends come over to our apartment to hang out, so they can talk to me about their crushes and school and the fights they’re in with their friends. And I am totally fine with being that type of mom because I am so generous, and Dora’s friends distract me from the goals I never reached because who wants to pursue goals when you’re happy, anyway? And then I just look at Dora and think about who she has become because of me, and the time I devoted to her, and I get fulfillment from that. They say the greatest gift is being a mother, and in that moment, I know it is.
It’s that easy. It’s that easy to live in that time even though the time that most people know is different. Sometimes when they are hurting me, the way they do—the hurt that goes deep inside—I travel to distance centuries and realms. I imagine I’m Cleopatra or Aphrodite, and that makes me laugh. That makes them hurt me even more. Sometimes I am in a place where no time exists, only blackness, which is on the inside of my eyes, even though they force me to keep them open. I think they like my eyes, or they like to see the pain in them, because when I close them they yell and shout, and once an officer stooped over me and propped open my eyes with his fingers. That’s how I know eyes are important to them, so I go to other times with my eyes open.
I found a little rat, and I named him Antal. The rat is sick, like Antal is old, and he sits and stares like he is waiting for me to forgive him, but forgiveness isn’t something I can give out. You can’t forgive when you haven’t been forgiven yourself.
“I’m not scared,” I tell the rat, because I could get any of its diseases and it wouldn’t matter because I’ll never leave this cell and it will never leave me. Even if I crawl out of this hole, I will still be in it. “I know what you did,” I tell the rat, who is Antal. I hate Antal. I found out Gerő’s men almost killed him in the alley that day I found him bleeding. They told him if he didn’t turn Boldiszar in, they’d go after him and his family. I know Antal, and I know he didn’t think twice, even though he knew Boldiszar’s connection to my Dora. Then he used me. I was just a casualty along the way. I heard Antal had never been working for us in the first place. He had sided with the Soviets from day one.
I know it’s true. I’m going for his neck, and he bites me and claws me, but I don’t care. I’m piercing every single fingernail through him. The rat starts bleeding. As the holes open wider, my hands get slippery. The wounds become serrated as Antal groans from the pain. I don’t understand why, why he did this, because I never, ever believe in evil even though it is around me and within me. Laszlo believed in evil because Laszlo sees it like it’s a different dimension that I don’t live in. I miss Laszlo and I still love Laszlo, but I hate Laszlo too, maybe more than I hate Antal. He didn’t save me and he could have tried to use his connections. But what about Ivan? Well, not like I expected him to even try. He would have found out that I picked up that gun, and I shot that Soviet soldier, and I shot Boldiszar.
I can’t travel to the place where Boldiszar is still alive, because I believe in death, so I know that I will never be forgiven for Boldiszar’s murder. Dora will never forgive me, if she even knows that Boldiszar is dead—if she is still thinking and seeing and being, like she was when I was taken away.
They say things are moving here, but I’ve been here and I’m usually gone, and things are happening and unhappening always, so where are things going? I don’t know, but I know that I get to say what is, and what isn’t, and I hear something … I do. Is it her? Is it her? Yes, it is—it’s Dora and she just got home from school, and she is crying because she just failed a math quiz, and I have cookies ready for her, and all night to tutor her. She looks at me with those probing, dark eyes. I feel like I could just jump into them and keep sinking and sinking, forever. And she tells me she loves me and I say, “I love you too.” I will always love her. She is my daughter.
Dora Turján
January 25, 1965
Dora felt complete despair, as if she had reached the end of a world she trusted to be round. Standing on the edge of a cliff that dropped into a dark expanse, Dora wanted nothing more than to turn around and go back, but she knew she’d never be able to. Dora had recognized those eyes in the basement. Distantly, she knew them, and now she had proof. No, they were not Boldiszar’s—he was dead, and that much she knew. Their catlike shape, the trace o
f beauty Dora now realized she saw around their edges, was unique to Eszter. They were her mom’s.
“Mom.” The word felt so clunky as it moved through her brain, making her uncomfortable and even a little sick, especially when she remembered there was not one glimmer of recognition in those eyes. Their owner looked out at a complete stranger, who was her daughter.
How could Dora continue standing or walking on the street, and then leave, go to sleep, wake up, eat or do anything, when another gruesome and bruised world existed beside hers? In fact, it existed below her. Beneath her feet, her mom suffered a terrifying existence.
Dora had long suspected Eszter committed some sort of murder. She also long suspected her mom had been imprisoned—the fate of many arrested during the revolution. She would never forget the night they came for Eszter.
*
The revolution exploded outside, and Dora was inside studying for a math test when a thunderous knock rattled the front door. Thinking maybe, somehow, it was Boldiszar, Dora ran out of her room. She knew something was wrong when Ivan didn’t acknowledge her and marched straight for the door. Watching her dad drew Dora into a panic, making her heart pound hard, like it was trying to choke her.
“It’s the police,” Ivan spat, staring straight at Eszter.
“I’ll hide,” Eszter whimpered. “Don’t tell them I’m here.”
Dora felt like she might stop breathing. “Can’t we just not answer the door?”
“Dora, get out of here,” Ivan snarled.
It felt like someone was stomping on Dora’s chest, pressing all the air out of her. When she didn’t move, Ivan scooped her up and sat her down in the kitchen. “Do not say a word.”
“Please, don’t let them take her,” Dora cried, clutching her dad’s hands.
“I’ll try my best,” Ivan said, getting Dora a glass of water. “Drink this and take deep breaths. They won’t be here for long.” Ivan stomped off, leaving Dora trembling and sobbing.
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