I’m scanning the audience. My breath stops. Everything stops. I can’t believe I did not recognize her at first. Sitting there is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, even though I’ve seen her so many times. An angel. Have I died? “Dora,” my lips follow the once-familiar pattern of my daughter’s name, tongue instinctively curling up for the “D,” lips narrowing for the hard “orrrr,” and then releasing at the soft “a.” I say her name over and over again inside. It feels so wonderful. It feels like me. I missed her. I remember how sweet she smelled and how, when she was a baby, she used to watch me do everything and I knew she’d be so smart.
The present holds everything in its embrace, but then in the same instant, lets it go. She’s grown now. Dora, with her olive skin. It’s not fragile. I can tell it’s tough. Sometimes—no, always—too tough. Am I to blame for that? No, it must be Ivan, the one who holds the party line closer to him than his own blood. But where am I? I can barely recognize myself in Dora. She grew up to be not me. Isn’t that what I wanted? Her lips are beautiful and pink. Mine are thin, raw specimens, and I touch them to make sure they are still there. Her hair is straight and mine is gray, knotted, and I can feel it falling out.
After all of these years, Dora remains completely intact. She grew up fine, but love can’t be seen, especially when it’s loss of love. That’s harder to see. I raise my left arm, the one allowed to be in public, just slight enough to wave at her. She lifts her eyes, but only for a second before she stares again at the judge. Suddenly, I realize I must look disgusting. Still, I refuse to look away from her. Coming from the side, a voice bends down toward me.
“Eszter, we are here today to discuss your prison term,” the voice says.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell the voice loud to myself.
I am looking at my daughter. I am so thankful I survived for this moment. Tears. That’s what it looks like. Down her cheek, her tears tumble, and she never moves her hands to wipe them. She’s alone, since Ivan is absent. But I’m here. “I’m here,” I want to tell her.
Bending again, the voice continues through Dora’s tears. “Eszter, we have determined that you are a threat to this country. We will soon deliberate on your sentence, but first, do you have anything to say?”
Dora cries, but in small whimpers, which is even sadder because she knows that it’s not allowed and it never was, and I hate that no one is there to tell her it’s okay. I’m wanting and breathing my story to her. Can she hear it? I have never uttered the truth to anyone, but now Dora is listening. Boldiszar died, Dora, and that’s when I took leave of you, forever. I abandoned you, daughter, who thrived under one identity and nothing more. I remember the knock on the door. I remember your face the most, because I saw it when the police arrived. Your mouth hung limp and to the side. You stood there dumbfounded by the quickness of it all. You reminded me of the neighborhood dog that got struck by a car, and as he lay dying, he seemed so confused, wanting nothing more than for me to lean down and explain to him what dying was. Instead, he felt it. He felt it without any power to stop or control it. It happened to him, and it happened to you.
I explain to Dora inside myself why I threw our family away. If she could just see my side, she would understand. I never meant to kill anyone. It just happened. Just like being placed in that cell, in the basement of a cold building, just happened. Just like her staring at me, me staring back at her, and the together-apartness is just happening.
Sometimes, a long time ago, when I was in it, in it all, I imagined meeting up with Dora at a coffee shop and telling her about what it felt like to write a real story. No, not one that the bureaucrats approved, but one that comes from deep within me, and within others, in our realities. My stories still amass inside me. They feel heavy, but the heaviness is a comfort that reminds me I am not in control. It just happened, to me, to my Dora. After Anya’s call came in to go to Boldiszar, I became someone else. That was the someone else who now spends hours picking dirt out from underneath her nails, whose insides have been rubbed raw, who has no need for history. I was never right. Does Dora know this, and does that mean she will never love me again?
Sometimes, when it’s not all the time, I fantasize Dora will wake up one morning, throw off her sheets, and come rescue me, no matter what Ivan said to her. I know Ivan handed Dora her reality after I left. In parcels, he divvied up the information she’d receive and not receive. I was on the not-receiving end, I knew when the jail cell stayed empty, unvisited. Dora sees me now. I’m embracing her with my eyes. I open them as wide as I can. I even raise my lips in a tiny smile, a gentle one. I wonder how scary it would be if I went all the way, if I smiled. I have holes there, in my mouth. She’d see, and in seeing, would she be happy or cry more?
“We therefore will make a determination,” the voice is still bending toward me, “on your sentence in the coming weeks. It does not look good for you, Eszter.”
In an instant, the proceedings finish. Dora’s blinking and now is silent with her tears, but I can hear them rushing into me and through me. These pigs want to kill me, but they already did, I want to tell Dora. Fleeing, the judge exits with everyone else except the guards and Dora. She’s looking, and I’m looking more. My hand is behind my back when the young guard curls his fingers around my arms and my scratchy uniform and leads me through the center of the pews past Dora.
“Mom,” she says, not loud enough to make a scene. Good girl, I think.
“Dora!” I whisper back, which really means “I love you,” and she knows it because her face swells and she gets so red. The last vision of her I see, will ever see, is her scarlet head staring, void of tears, at me.
I am thanking her in my mind for coming, and I hope she can feel that she has done enough. I do not need anything from Dora because she deserves it all to be given to her, but she never had unselfish parents, and she never will. I wish that I could go back and just give her a different mom, because I was too scared to be one.
There is one thing I know, and in knowing gives me hope, so I have to share it with the little rat I just found. I bend close to him. Dora’s in love now, I reassure him. There’s no greater explanation as to why she’d come see me if someone hadn’t softened her. She’s beautiful, I tell my little rat, and I know he likes it when I describe how Dora looks because he wiggles a little.
The dripping dribbles of the leaky pipe sync with my veins as they push the blood through me. As long as I have myself, then this cell will not control me. I decide the up, the down, and as the days labor on, so do I.
*
I am waiting and waiting, and I do not know what they will decide, but I know they aren’t going to kill me yet. Their proceedings are going to take them weeks because that makes them feel proud and good: to stamp things, submit paperwork, and be so bureaucratic. I think the guards are coming for me, like they always do. Instead, they push through, on the ground, a small letter.
Dear Eszter,
I can help, if you let me. I don’t expect you to forgive me. I can’t even forgive myself. I thought about you every day after my escape. I should have brought you with me, but I was scared.
When I first got to Munich after that terrifying day in 1956, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You were in my thoughts when I woke up, when I went to bed, and all the time in between. And my feelings toward your beloved Radio Free Europe had changed. I was grateful to them for helping me get out of Hungary, and I found out quickly it was really Antal who betrayed you, not the radio station. Radio Free Europe was all I knew, and they were looking for exiles like me. So I went to their headquarters and got a job. But I couldn’t report on the news anymore. I was terrified I would let the same thing happen again. I became the rock ‘n’ roll DJ. Can you believe that? Me? A rock ‘n’ roll DJ.
When I realized I would be relaying the codes that would help people escape Hungary, I couldn’t turn the job down. I think, in the back of my head, I thought one day you might hear one of my
codes, and it would help you get out. Of course, I never consciously recognized these thoughts. Not for a long, long time.
You see, Eszter, I got used to my freedom. I didn’t want to let it go, and I feared if I helped you, the secret police would come find me, somehow, and bring me back to Hungary or just kill me here in Munich. After a few months, I consoled myself with the idea that Ivan must have rushed to your aid—I knew he would always be in love with you. I assumed he got you out and that you were living with your family again. We couldn’t find anything on you. I figured you probably heard me on the radio and that it had to be your decision not to speak with me. How wrong was I.
When news surfaced that you were alive and still imprisoned, I wasn’t shocked. I was infuriated with myself for ignoring the possibility that you never escaped the wrath of the regime. I got in touch with the necessary people to get this letter to you. I hope you get it. Also, I’m sure you haven’t heard yet, but Antal has died. He killed himself. It still makes me mad that I let him deceive us. I should have been more vigilant and acted more on my suspicions. It’s a mystery to me how he managed to enroll Anya in his scheme. An internal committee here ruled her as negligent and she resigned immediately. I guess that makes three of us who fell victim to Antal’s lies. The important thing is he’s gone now, though, and it’s time to be free.
So listen to me now, Eszter. Everything is the same, in terms of the code. You can go. It’s the same from when I left. Listen to the radio and you will be safe. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to get out of there.
Sincerely,
Laszlo Cseke
The guards read this before me. I know, because it smells like grease and cigarettes. I realize they think I will die. It has to be, or else the guards would not have delivered this letter to me. So they are taunting me. They could have written this letter themselves. Except, I know this is from Laszlo. I know his handwriting, the messy cursive where every letter bleeds into the next, except for the letter “A,” which he capitalizes for some absurd, endearing reason.
I smile. He wants to save me, so I’ll let him. I smile too because Antal is dead. His children, in their fancy Buda apartment, are wiping down his ashen skin right now. They’re shrouding him in white. They’re preparing his body to burn, burn, and I hope he is still a little alive to feel it. I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at Laszlo. He could have helped me. “I’ll always hate you,” I scream to the letter loud enough for myself and my rat. He is bound by my hatred at all times, even if he doesn’t know it. He broadcasts to us in his singsong voice, but the thing at the bottom of him constantly holds him back. It’s the thing he sometimes feels when he gets bored or when he wakes up in the middle of the night. That thing is me who he walked away from. I gave him the code so that he could help me too, but he failed.
Laszlo saw them taking me away from my home. I was not right then. That was the beginning of my not-rightness. I shouldn’t have gone home, where I could have been ambushed. And, Laszlo, he must have been hiding in the alley. When our eyes met, he looked right back at the soldiers and nodded to them, as if they were doing the right thing. He could have tried to deter them, to wrestle me down, except he cowered. I am going to be free soon, and he never will.
Finally, Ferenc is here, upstairs. Happily, I listen to him and his friend. I savor their conversation and its lovely, bouncy youthfulness. Otherwise, I only hear the hushed conversations of the prisoners to themselves. Those wicked conversations make it more of a hell here than these cell walls, the mold, or the guards eyeing me up and down with the threat in their eyes apparent as if they wanted to say, “If I choose, you would be mine. If I choose.”
As the boys work, I lie down on the cot and listen to their radio. Soon I’ll have my own if the boy listens. He’ll listen. Oh, how their radio changes everything right now. All this time, the radio has been the one conversation I was openly invited to, where no one whispers or says things that confuse me. It’s the one conversation they haven’t stifled, because they don’t know I’m having it.
Putting me to sleep, with their melodic voices and music, I’m absorbed in the boys’ youth-hope. I bet all his life, Ferenc had been told being content is the greatest prize of all. But he figured it out. It’s no prize if you are lying. It’s no prize if fitting in means not being you. Ferenc tries to defy it all, but he won’t succeed. Not if the government has its way. Those bureaucrats, like my Ivan, sow doubt into your conscience. You spend your days living, breathing, and utterly denying all that they say. But at the end of the day, no one says much unless it’s steeped in sarcasm. You don’t work out any epiphanies about the system because beneath it all, you are too scared to trust yourself.
I wish I could be a cat, climb up there, nudge myself in their arms, purr, and suddenly look up at them and say, “But it’s not that way at all, you see. You can leave here if you need.” Except that’s not reality. It’s not reality at all.
Someone is coming for me, but I am half asleep. He sits beside me now and I endure the urge to reach out and squeeze him so tight. I want to squeeze his hope out of him and lap it up with my short, squatty tongue. He’s a scared kitten, and the more he acts like it, the more I become the alpha cat, the lion. The rush invades me as it always does, and did. Filling me up with power, his presence is dizzying and exciting. He’s listing slowly and he’s tired. He knows that I have a way to get out, that I have it locked up inside of me. But to reveal the code right now would only make him abandon me here. I roll over and go back to sleep, pretending he is not there. He needs to want this so badly, he’ll go to any length to help me.
For three straight days, I feel Ferenc hovering over me. Sometimes he strokes my hair or sings to me. His innocence is arrogance to me. He thinks I am interested in his fate, but I am old, and I am sick. He doesn’t see that, because he thinks he deserves my help. Being good and being sweet doesn’t make you deserving, I want to tell him.
He starts shaking me, and I cower in the hole that created me, in this prison that created me. He tries to straighten me out, but I explain to him it’s beyond his control. On the third day, he leaves the radio. I am thrilled he relented. It’s a rush going through me.
I know my mind has a short window of time until it begins contorting and twisting again. I sit up to face him. Looking away, he acts like he barely cares. Doesn’t he know that my attention is special?
“Ferenc!” I scream, because his arrogance blows angry breath into my lungs. I don’t even care if the guards come. He tells me the radio has been disrupted. While listening to his favorite program, it suddenly went blank. Off. Just like that. The story almost makes me nostalgic for when jamming hit our little radios with regularity. I know this is a sign. They’re cracking down.
“Please,” he pleads. “I need to know how to solve this. This can’t be the end. The radio cannot be jammed or else we cannot get the code.”
He wants to know my diagnosis of the situation, but I am busy calculating. He nudges me with his palm. How many times has it happened? What does it sound like? I can tell he trusts me when he hears these questions of mine. I am his answer. He is mine, my portal to escaping this jail cell before I’m hanged. If I can wrest myself free from jail, I can see Dora. I can touch her, smell her, and hold her. She will be my daughter again. But I am not going to give Ferenc the code without being sure he will take me right away. Until he is desperate. I need a way to guarantee he will climb down here and get me. I have a couple of weeks, that I know, because the rat told me and I told the rat. So I hold on tight.
“Well, it is complicated,” I say to Ferenc as my tongue tastes my teeth. The familiarity of plotting invigorates me like it had the night of Boldiszar’s death. There’s a chance, and I must find a way to get on that envoy. Would they recognize me? I’m not the same. But they would be able to tell who I am by my eyes and voice. They would kneel before me and kiss my head and revere the woman they had forsaken. “First, you must find a way to unjam the radio.”
“But what is the code?”
“Just keep coming down here,” I demand.
“Why won’t you tell it to me now?”
“I will work at my own pace.”
“I am in a hurry though,” he pushes.
“You will wait.”
He quiets, and I can tell he has consented, but only because has no choice. He will get the code when he deserves it. Not on my own, surely, but with his help, I’ll climb up through those vents and into my freedom.
Mike a Korvinközből
February 20, 1965
Dear Uncle Lanci,
You professed to aid me, and yet there is no aid occurring. I have liasoned with Eszter and it’s to no use. I even gave inward and brought her a radio. Each time I adventure forth to her, she does not compose sense. And yet you exclaim that she holds the code to the freedom I am so abundantly seeking. I do not comprehend why you cannot write me the code since we are now deliberating in secret. I know the secrecy you bear, but at this junction, does it matter? You will maybe be surprised to know that jamming has been brought forth on the radio now. Do you understand? Your code will not go forward if the jamming makes continuous.
I am feeling the anger now since I know that Eszter may not have many weeks to live. Are you aware of her trial? I have shits that the regime is abusing her as an example because they want us to know that they will combat the counterrevolutionaries still. She makes appearances that she does not care for their maneuverings at all. It’s like she already gave into dying.
They even made a print of her circumstances in the paper, and when I saw it I wanted to throw up the context of my insides. At this junction, now all my actions are stooped in illegal. Even when I returned home, my petite Adrienne was making a discussion of Eszter’s trial, and Father made an explanation that it was a monster sham the government would utilize for our fear. When I turned the color of paper at his phrasing, he turned to me and said I should not make a fear because I harbored too much weakness to ever get up caught in their masses. I yelled at Father, but I postponed myself from going beyond, because I knew he would see soon that I am not weak. I am the one holding this family in the reins to bring Mom back.
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