Radio Underground

by Alison Littman

  A thick, red velvet curtain separated the kitchen and hallway, and Dora, terrified yet needing to know every single detail, peeked out through it. She watched as Ivan combed his hair to the side five times, straightened his shirt, and opened the door. Three policemen, in thick coats buttoned to their necks and rifles strapped across their chests, stood in front of Ivan.

  “Is this the home of Eszter Turján?” one of them asked.

  “It is,” Ivan confirmed.

  “We are requesting to see her. Now.”

  “Wait just one moment.” Ivan closed the door and hissed at the armoire in the hallway, “What did you do now?”

  “I’m not here,” Eszter said, her panic muffled by the armoire’s thick wood.

  Before her dad could respond, the police kicked open the door, sending Ivan flying back against the wall. The police took one look at the armoire, grabbed the top of it, and slammed it to the ground. Eszter trembled, her back and palms pressed against the wall, as if she could just blend in with the dark blue walls.

  “Get her to the floor,” one of the officers shouted.

  Ivan positioned himself between Eszter and the officers. “No, please, let’s all sit down like adults and talk about this.”

  “We know who you are, sir,” an officer said. “We have a message from our superiors that it would be best for you, and your daughter, if you just stay out of this.”

  At the mention of Dora, Ivan completely shrank, fixing his eyes on the floor. An officer nudged him out of the way, and Ivan slunk to the corner of the hallway, not looking up once.

  They moved in on Eszter, grabbing her and wrestling her to the ground. One of them straddled her while the other two stood over her pointing guns at her back. Pinned, with her belly to the floor, Eszter tried to break free, flailing like a tortured mermaid. Dora dropped to the floor too, somehow finding comfort in being at eye-level with her mom. She remembered thinking that, despite her anguish, Eszter looked beautiful. Her thick brown hair, normally in a taut bun, flowed wildly over her shoulders. Her skin still had just the right balance of tan and white. It stretched over her small nose and tall cheekbones, making a perfect stop at her eyes, which curved up at the corners. She seemed so indestructible.

  Maybe she was. For a moment, Eszter’s arms shot out from under her, pushing her torso off the floor. It looked like she might buck the officer off her back when a baton struck her hand. Dora heard the smack of flesh. She felt the burning pain on her own hand and Eszter’s screaming inside her head, though Eszter didn’t make a sound.

  Eszter clenched her teeth and turned her head in Dora’s direction. When their eyes met, Eszter stopped trying to wriggle free, though neither of them really showed any signs of recognition. No one mouthed “I love you,” or nodded or cried. Wide-eyed, and in shock, they just looked into each other’s eyes as if trying to find the answer to a question they didn’t know how to ask.

  Dora wanted to say something that would somehow encapsulate the anger and love she felt all at the same time. Dora hated her mom for doing this, whatever it was—putting herself in a place where she could get arrested and the police could be standing in their living room ready to inflict something terrible on her and their family. But Dora also desperately felt the urge to run out and hug her mom. She wanted to cling to her, smell her hair, and run her fingers along her stubbly legs, like she did when she was little. She wanted Eszter to know that Dora needed her, no matter what, even if Eszter was gone most of the time. Knowing her mom would come home, at some point, had been enough for Dora. She hated Eszter for not instinctively knowing that. Staying in Dora’s life should have been her top priority.

  Without warning, Eszter’s eyes disappeared. In jarring thuds, Dora heard them drag her mom across the floor. The terrible sounds of struggle—scuffling, grunting, a body slamming into a doorpost—echoed in the kitchen, until the door slammed and silence, mixed with Ivan’s dry, gasping sobs, took its place.

  Dora ran to her bed and pressed her head into her pillow. She cried so hard that her entire body convulsed, tossing her back and forth, as tears poured down and around her. She didn’t stop crying for hours, until pain shot through her temples every time she tried to let out another tear. Dora thought it couldn’t get any worse.

  Now, years later, she wondered if it just had. Her mom had been taken away to a secret prison where she was continuously and mercilessly raped. Dora would never wish that upon anyone, let alone her mom.

  Mike a Korvinközből

  February 9, 1965

  Dear Uncle Lanci,

  There’s more to tell you now and I’m so overwhelmed, even though I have rolls of paper ready to go for your letter! My hand endures shakes as I write this. If anyone should happen upon this letter, besides you—which is a great chance—I’m going to not survive. They’ll take me away instantaneously. I heard stories about people who underwent interrogations for letters to you, and I take one hundred percent culpability that by writing this letter now, I may become one of those people. But to keep this inward would be to live a different life, and I’m so bored at pretending.

  I have just one wish—the wish that you would write me. Instruct me on what to do. Help me get out of Hungary. I am just as desperate as I was before. The more far I get from that basement, the more sound my mind will become. Until then, I am continuously beckoned back to Eszter and continuously launched into more danger. I am waiting for your reply so I can flee all of this.

  My life has been plagued by mostly evil in the past weeks. Eszter appears in my dreams, then evaporates and appears in a repeated fashion. The sounds I recollect are one hundred percent burdensome. The grunts and slaps, the tangles and wails, the pleading and groaning are the sounds of Eszter losing. My nightmares of her become daymares, and I walk around living all that’s occurring to her.

  Imagine having to tell my family of these events. It was awful, Uncle Lanci. It was mere hours after I returned home from jail and all were asleep in the apartment. Neither Adrienne nor my father harbored awareness of my return. I went to sleep with Adrienne so that I could heed her breathing and I could witness her dance with her dreams. I always do that so I can take dreams, but not for my own. I take them from her so that I can give them backward to her. Not when she is sleeping, but when she is awake.

  When we awoke, we rambled into the kitchen where our father sat and I explained in vague terms the actual events that transposed. I informed Adrienne and my father of my imprisonment. My father’s reaction proved more vague than I would have ever guessed. Adrienne uttered not much. She just stood in place, staring at Father, who munched his beans that dripped secretly out the side of his mouth. I mentally side-noted to approach him later concerning this particular topic rather than detail it in Adrienne’s presence.

  Of course, Adrienne did the honor of offensing Father wholeheartedly. “Father, why does it make no impact on you if Mike enters jail? Should I enter jail and you will not care?” she asked.

  I had a proud moment as Adrienne spoke. She assembled an utter perseverance to determine how events work and the consequences that follow them. Our father swallowed the entire mouthful of beans he had been nurturing and scratched his napkin atop his face. We could hear his little hairs jarring the napkin like sandsheets. His lips lunged for another bite. And another bite. He failed to glance me in the eye, but he knew Adrienne would bore into him without relenting.

  “Inhabiting jail for a single night could be beneficiary to Mike,” he said. “A grown man should get slaps on the hand a few times just to remember who is hitting him. He should know he needs to abide to the rules. And, Adrienne, if the plays you run at these KISZ meetings barrel on in full force, you may be exposed to what it feels like to disobey, too.”

  In that instance, I wanted to slap, stab, I don’t even know what, to my father. Inspiring fear in Adrienne inspired vomit in me. I wanted to open my mouth far greater than anyone could see and release the context of my stomach all over my father.

 
; Adrienne dissolved, and I could perceive what transpired within her. She is just learning how words can stop up tears or, to the worse, make them rage.

  “Adrienne.” I stepped in front of my father to obstruct his plans to deconstruct Adrienne. “Soon, I will be going to Munich and avoiding all the rules that people like our father strive to live beneath. It is no use in fighting him. Even if he is just requiting these rules for our own safety, it’s not who I am or who you are to just accept and commence forward.”

  You see, Uncle Lanci, that’s why you’re so important to my efforts. I have my sister to impress upon and doing that will mean so much to her life, as you can tell. I want Adrienne to learn that what she desires does not constitute disobedience. It’s okay. It’s for humans. Adrienne quelled, swiveled, and then stared at me in an endearing but honestly confounded manner. It always flees my mind that she is nearing the age of achieving full adulthood.

  “Mike,” she said to me, looking me straight in the barrel of my arteries, “I know you are striving to accomplish a nearly impossible task. I am capable of comprehending how near insanity it is to flee this country and then to enter the West.”

  Father huffed a big chunk of beans that flew out of his mouth and rested directly on my sleeve.

  “You are imagining pure illusion!” Father grumbled through the mashed up beans in his mouth. “Stop convincing Adrienne to accept a part in it. The moment I believe that you will succeed is the moment when your mom is standing here before me.”

  I had a storage unit full of words to launch forth toward my father, but I am grown now to recognize the anger within me needs a home, not an outlet. It resides inside me and propels me forward toward the promises I make to myself and to Adrienne. I will make sure she is aware that I will make things one hundred percent for her. She will not have to persist in a world that is only seventy or sixty percent, like I did my entire existence. She will feel everything good and complete. I do not mind I am barred from that if I can accomplish this for my petite sister.

  I reaffirmed Adrienne when I said, “There is no necessity to discuss this matter any further. I decided my mind, and I will be glued to what I believe. I will find our mom.”

  Munich is where you reside, Uncle Lanci, and I know that your connections can provide aid to me in this venture of mine to discover my mom. And, Uncle Lanci, please enlighten me how you know this Eszter. Is she correct that you announce pinpoints to flee Hungary on the radio? I implore you to tell me all you know on these topics. Will you aid me escaping Hungary?

  I’ll permit you some time to ponder my request. It’s something that stalls my happiness every day, to know that your eyes may never read this. In fact, almost every second I can’t pardon the unhappy anxiety cresting on my mind.

  I think I can manage to find her too, with all the intelligence I have collected on my mom. I read about her on a daily basis. My father is unaware of the espionage that has been transpiring underneath his own roof. In the back corner of his closet resides my mom’s diary. She left it, along with everything else, when she fleed from here. My favorite part is when she talks in reference to how she had to rescue me from the backyard where I engaged in football with my friends, because I had lost and was leveled to sorrow. She picked me up from the yard and carried me inside. She had donned her favorite shirt that night and my secretions had destroyed it one hundred percent. She said it didn’t matter to her, though, because she would continue to don it as a testament to the necessity of her presence in my life. (I do not know what is sadder, Uncle Lanci—a mom who needs a reminder of her loyalty to her son, or a mom who would disregard the shirt in the trash.)

  My mom suffered from love amnesia. Things that would be loved, or memories that the mind should crave, she would forget with no hesitating unless she remembered to install evidence of its existence (the shirt). That’s why Mom would trot around town in clothes that bore copious gobs of tears or snot exertions. No one knew why she would wear such abhorrable shirts. In that way, my mom kept us to herself. She became the solitary landlord of her love for us. But it couldn’t stop her from searching for more trinkets of love, anywhere she could.

  She took up violin because it was her mom’s, and our grandmom had died. She carried the violin with her in all places. Even when we went to the opera! At various times, she’d awaken me in the middle of the night and force me to accompany her to Liszt Ferenc’s music academy to sit in a room, solitary, with the violin.

  When I emitted tears for being too tired to take part in her exuberant manifestations, she would glare at me like I was preventing the world’s offerings from her. Her eyes quieted my tears, but made me so scared that I would not be able to sustain her. By three in the morning, I’d fall asleep on the floor of the music school, my drool crafting a neat pool at the bottom of my arm. Mom would pick me up and say she was sorry. When I woke in the morning, I would fabricate that the night previous never had a stake in reality. At breakfast, Mom nudged me a little and delivered me a cup of coffee as she realized how tired she had forced her petite son to become.

  Soon, Adrienne, only five, became aware of the secret nights at the academy. It was impossible to pass through anything with her. But Mom possessed her time with Adrienne too. Once, when Mom took Adrienne and I to the Széchenyi baths, she asked us both if we would like to participate in the whirlpool taking place. I plunged immediately into the center of the pool to demonstrate my bravado. Adrienne looked fierce, then constipated. I thought she would need to go toward the toilet, but then tears exuberated from her eyes. Mom took Adrienne’s hand and I thought she would convince her join me in the divine whirlpool. Instead they escaped back into the baths. Fine, I calculated, I did not mind. I would be on my own and push forward into the whirlpool. After twirling around with men twice my size and with their fat globbing onto me like nodes of peanut butter, I ventured into the baths to discover Adrienne and my mom.

  Like two sisters, they luxuriated in a petite room that shot forth from the main one. Adrienne had her hands in my mom’s, and my mom played at examining them, then continued forth in painting them with an imagined nail polish. Flames of jealousy erupted before me. (I realize, now, Uncle Lanci, they were completely petite of me to even possess. I thought since I was my mom’s initial born that I should fill her to capacity.) But there Adrienne perched like a queen, and my mom served her so. They laughed and then Adrienne took her turn painting my mom’s nails with the imagined polish. I wondered how frequently those interactions took place. That’s when I realized a world existed beyond me, one that was reserved just for Adrienne and Mom, and I have zero accessibility to it. And it’s that world I desire more than anything to bestow upon Adrienne. If I could just show her that it is still existent, just walking around in another country, then she could believe in it again.

  When I later appeared at the Ministry of Interior for my cleansing duties, I felt the fear I endured while pent in its confines. All the memories that sifted through my forgetfulness remerged in my consciousness. Andras laughed at me when I started emitting tears. It forwarded me to anger since he escaped seeing what I saw.

  I persevered hard to contain the sum of my knowledge on Eszter within me. Of course, I indulged Andras in the other gorrisome details of my imprisonment, like getting beaten upon. Andras endured an hour in prison that night, so he listened with such enthusiasm. I couldn’t even detect his broom meeting the floor while I persisted my mind so hard to decline the image of Eszter below us crying. I know she has become mixed up, Uncle Lanci, because she had to.

  I appreciated when your music, Uncle Lanci, beamed on, precisionly “The Sound of Silence,” which indulged shivers in me. Do you feel mourned for Eszter in the slightest? She said this was her radio station. I experienced mourning while listening to your music, and anger avenged me for what I heard occur to her. Andras peered at me again and asked if my experience in prison really was that immense. He is a firm friend, after all. He would not permit me real pain without assisting me to o
vercome them.

  I burst into an explanation of Eszter. Holding that in was more perilful to me than I knew. I began to tell him the sum of everything, especially regarding how Eszter succumbed to the upmost horror I ever heard. Andras, who I knew would maintain our friendship most loyally, sat straight forward and made his back extremely long. For a many number of minutes, Andras uttered zero words and glanced at me peculiarly like I was sideways. I thought for a second I had incited resignation in him. Or worse, anger.

  “Mike,” he said, and I could see these little invisible beams of sadness fleeing from his eyes, “Did you know that once I viewed what you heard? I viewed rape and I did zero about it. I witnessed it but refused to step into action.”

  “That must have invoked pain in you,” I said.

  “Is there anything we can achieve for Eszter?” he asked. “We must go down to assist her. We must.”

  I was shocked that my friend would be so forceful about this. But, he kept looking downward, as if he knew all along that something was there. And now that it was confirmed, he would never unfixate from it. I doubted we could venture down there with the sparse keys I owned, not to mention the foreboding guards.

  But then I reminisced on Adrienne’s eyes, her petite, squeaky voice and all that she hoped for when I promised I would flee to Munich. I also understood this was probably what Eszter wanted, or at least what the sane division of her wanted. She desired for me to come back. That’s why she uttered the escape story.

  Andras persevered studying the bottommost portions of the office. Immensely, Andras finally pointed to the vent below us. He gave me that look … you know, the one in the movies when both characters know what the other one is pondering. It was that look and we knew: that’s how to get to Eszter.

  We used a screwdriver in our pockets to wrest open the latch. Andras attached a rope to me that he retrieved from the maintenance closet. If Andras had not existed during this plan, I have heavy doubts I would have succeeded in my descent. It is so luxurious to have friends who maintain smarter wits than you. This whole ordeal was not thrilling to me, but so burdensome. Especially when I spied Andras’ downcast eyes as I spiraled down the shaft. He looked like a little raccoon in the night.