“So, you’re the bearer of bad news,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
Tomasz’s eyes wandered down Dora’s stomach to her hands. “The jamming, is that the schedule?”
Dora nodded.
Tomasz fiddled with the radio switchboard, putting Bartók’s Gyorspolka on the air.
“Apparently, with enough repetition, teenagers will like the classics just as much as The Beatles.” Tomasz sank into his chair and laughed mightily, almost to himself more than anything. “So besides delivering me this jamming schedule, what brings you here today?”
“I’ve been assigned to help you.”
“Lucky you.”
Dora liked that Tomasz openly displayed contempt for the work. Maybe there was an opportunity here, after all.
“We will be jamming every rock program at increasing intervals, starting with ten minutes at a time. That is, until March first, when complete jamming of the station will commence,” Dora said.
“Complete jamming?”
“That is correct.”
“I thought we were done with that.”
“We aren’t. We have to prevent Radio Free Europe from undermining efforts to provide citizens with high quality, socialist entertainment.” Dora sounded so much like Ivan in that moment, it scared her. She hadn’t formulated a plan to prevent the jamming, but she knew she couldn’t foster any suspicion in Tomasz before she really knew him. If he proved untrustworthy, then toeing the party line would give her the cover she needed.
In the hours that followed, Tomasz trained Dora on the inner workings of the radio system. She even orchestrated a test-run when Radio Free Europe broadcasted its Cars and Trucks program, which Dora always thought they could do without anyway. She hadn’t yet figured out an alternative plan for Eszter or Ferenc, but she knew she had to, at the very least, warn Ferenc that they were running out of time.
Dear Mike,
Thank you for your letters. Each one I read. Each one I will think about. And now I must confidently tell you some bad news. It appears my radio station will be officially jammed on March 1. No longer will you be able correspond with me as you do now. That means you must prepare for your departure from Hungary. Since Eszter has not revealed to you the exact details of the code, please visit her every day until you can persuade her to do so.
Sincerely,
Uncle Lanci
Trying to get Ferenc to read the letter as soon as possible, Dora made plans to meet up with him, as Anika, of course. She told herself it was only to persuade him to stop at Varga’s office, though she craved his presence. With Ferenc, she felt a lightness she had lived too long without, like turning a street corner to feel the sun directly hitting your face, after a long, dark winter.
They met at a café, though Ferenc didn’t sound too excited on the phone. Dora hoped his feelings for her hadn’t flagged. She needed his full attention now, for many reasons, but most importantly, for her mom. As Ferenc played with his carrot soup, whirling his spoon through the creamy broth, he avoided speaking to Dora. She sipped some tea, hoping his mood would shift enough so they could go on a walk past Varga’s office.
“Anika,” his voice faltered at the last vowel of her fake name. Reaching for her hand, Ferenc wove Dora’s fingers through his, one by one, making sure to touch as much of Dora’s skin as possible. Lifting his glassy eyes up to her, he said, “Will you come with me?”
“Where?”
“To Munich.”
Dora’s mouth went dry. Her tongue tried to formulate a response, but it felt like a beached whale flopping around on dry sand.
“Please, Anika.”
Dora knew she wouldn’t be able to go with Ferenc to Munich, but she didn’t want to say anything that would dissuade him from leaving either. “I will have to think about it.”
“That’s all I can ask for.” He leaned across the table and kissed her, leaving a slight dampness on her cheek. He had cried, but only a little.
For the first time, they made love that night. She kissed every part of him, savoring his skin, which tasted vaguely like nutmeg. He ran his fingers up and down her body, gently and methodically, as if he had never touched Dora before. He moved slowly into her, anticipating somehow that Dora hadn’t been with anyone for a while. She relaxed into the sensation until she wanted more.
She felt so safe with him and she saw, in his eyes, that same feeling of security, the letting go of his silliness and his toughness, all at once. It stung her to know that this was, in some way, a sham. She wished she could have made love to him as Dora and not Anika. She wondered if he would ever forgive her for the betrayal, especially now that they had been so intimate. She would tell him when the time was right, and with the right words, but the closer she got to him, the more she dreaded it.
Afterward, he walked Dora home, saying very little. As they bid each other goodnight, he asked again if she would consider going to Munich with him. Dora kissed him, cherishing the transitory mark of their love, and his devotion to her. She never responded directly to his question. She hoped he would understand.
Sauntering through the door of her apartment, her body made lackadaisical by pleasure, Dora saw Ivan in the kitchen. He sat at the table, staring at the opposite wall, his fingers tracing the mouth of an empty glass. Dora edged back toward the door, but he saw her in time.
“Come over here,” Ivan said, his voice so low that Dora would need to get closer to him.
“Is everything okay?”
“They’ve done it.”
“Done what?”
“Your mom.” Ivan buried his face in his hands. “They decided that …,” he gasped, “that she is to hang.”
Dora tried to say something, but she couldn’t. Her legs started cramping, her head spun, and she felt like she would never get up again. She fell back against the wall, slumping to the floor and taking with her some of the peeling, gray-checkered wallpaper.
“It’s going to happen in a week, but it could be sooner. That’s all I know. They make sure it’s a surprise on purpose,” Ivan sobbed, nose-diving into the table.
“I thought we had time,” Dora whispered. She assumed it would be weeks, maybe even months, before they carried forward her mom’s sentence. How foolish she had been for thinking that they would act reliably slow when history showed a quickness to execute, to swiftly erase those who stood in the way. Her mom only had seven more days to live, at most, and Dora couldn’t even get up. She didn’t have a plan in place. Radio Free Europe faced a future of eternal jamming, and this elusive code remained trapped in the brain of a woman succumbing to madness. Her mom was going to die, and there was nothing Dora could do to stop it.
Dora wanted to melt into the kitchen tile and disappear. She just wanted to take leave of her family and this situation, all at once, and in feeling that urge, she realized that was just what her mom would have done. Dora had promised she would do better. She always thought that not being Eszter meant following the rules of the government, staying under the radar, and keeping herself—and her dad—safe. Now, she realized, it was quite the opposite. It was standing up to the repression, doing exactly what her mom did, but with one difference: her family would come before anyone, and anything, else. She collected herself and went to her dad. Hugging him, she felt his tears on her arms. They were wet and cold.
“Well, what will we do?” Ivan clutched Dora’s arm.
Backing away from Ivan, Dora straightened her back, lifted her chin, and prepared to address him. “We’ll help her.”
Ivan grunted. He shook his head. “So little we know of her and why she did it,” he said, as if he was already giving Eszter’s eulogy. “Maybe she deserves to die.”
“We don’t deserve for her to die,” Dora said.
“It’s not up to us.”
In that moment, Dora knew Ivan had given up. She readied herself to make her plea to stop the jamming of Radio Free Europe. But as she saw her dad launch into another fit of sobbing, she realize
d that would just give him a reason to snap out of his grief. He’d take up the cause of stopping Dora from doing anything that would put her in danger, just as he had done for the past nine years. It would be his excuse to, once again, forsake Eszter.
So Dora sat by Ivan’s side until she heard his crying stop, replaced by a heavy silence as, in his sleep, he breathed through the remains of his tears. She wondered if that was what it would sound like when her mom hanged—a terrible cry, extinguished.
Mike a Korvinközből
February 25, 1965
Dear Uncle Lanci,
You already know that things have changed. How could you neglect to know? The presently familiar screeching of the jammed radio has overtaken it. Every minute or so, I leap up and start pacing, cursing, making shits. With the jamming happening so often, I am perplexed into personal fear constantly.
I’m doing all that you instructed, with regards to our plan. I visit Eszter all the time, going almost every night. The final night that made a difference, Uncle Lanci, was last night. When I sulked into Eszter’s capsule she was living with fever. Her body eliminated cold and was composed entirely of heat. I was certain that my hand would completely fall off its chain the second I placed it on her forehead.
So I sat by the side of her and pet her hair. I gave her water to drink through a petite straw. She began to drift toward sleep, but she snapped from it to say, “Thank you, Laszlo,” very softly into my elbow.
“You are welcome,” I told her. I had the compassion to be kind to her because then maybe she would tell me the code.
“I am going in two days,” I told her as I matched my eyes up against her.
“I am going to miss this.”
“I will too,” I said, though I was still making to be you.
“How are you going to get in touch with your mom?” she asked, now seeing me for me.
“Well, my father finally broke down and told me all he knew about her,” I lied. “She’s a teacher at a school in Munich. She is the most one hundred percent teacher and she has discovered her life’s passionate work. Why my father kept this from me, I do not know,” I imagined on.
“Moms are moms, are moms, are moms. Their happiness is theirs, not yours,” she said.
“I’ve been practicing your code,” I made more lies, but I could see that Eszter accepted what I said as one hundred percent truth, the battle in her majorly exhausted. “I have also been witnessing people getting on the envoys. I go every day to see them.”
“Oh, yes? And who are they? What do they look like?” She began picking at her fingers like I had made nerves in her. Her hand is full with scabs and blood. It brings worry to me as I think about the rat too, whose diseases could merge into Eszter.
“They made appearances like everyday people. There was an older man, with gray hair, and a younger one that was my age, and she carried a folder with her,” I said.
“I wish I could go with you,” Eszter said in petite voice, more petite than I had ever heard her use. I wondered if Eszter even had a true desire to flee her capsule or if maybe she was with major fear of being in the real world.
“Do you know what happened to me?” she asked and nestled her head against my arm. “I’m going to be hanged,” she said in a voice for a baby, or maybe a lover.
I felt sick at this. Was she happy at this news? Was it the reality? I couldn’t know. She elonged her eyes at the patch of brick next to me. We both said nothing, but I felt my opportunity coming. “The code can help you. I’m exuberant that I know it, of course, but I have been having some glitches with it.”
Holding my breaths, I watched Eszter as she rose and then peered at me awkwardly and from her mouth, at initial, I thought she would vomit but then the most illustrious words rambled out.
“The code,” she crept her voice along the lines of revealing, “… is problematic, Laszlo.”
“Yes, or maybe I just am not remembering it with one hundred percent accuracy.”
“You are always careless with your memory,” she sneered, and her decaying teeth flashed me.
“I know, I know …. I wish it was not having its problems,” I said again.
“Are you starting with the third song of the midnight broadcast?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“And you know the first word in the title will be part of your location,” she said.
“Yes,” I lied times two.
“Well, then you should be able to figure this out. You are not stupid, Laszlo.”
“Okay,” I said, sullen.
“Argh,” Eszter burst out. “You forget things so quickly, but I love you,” she said, and she curled her finger around my hair.
“Please,” I begged, “Help your little Laszlo remember,” I said, mirroring the petite baby voice she used earlier.
“Okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay,” she said, very rapid fire like. “The third song, remember that, is where you start. It’s in the midnight show. It’s the first part of your location. The third word in the fourth song will be the second part of your location. Except, you must walk three blocks south of this location, and intersect with the first location. The time is always the same, every day. It’s seven in the morning, but the day is not revealed. You try every day. You arrive every day until you find them.”
I jumbled for joy inside that I had made an acquire of the code. “Your Laszlo thanks you,” I told her, but my mind was racing to process the code. I said to myself it one hundred percent of the time, over and over, to stop from forgetting.
“You are most welcome.” Eszter proceeded to don a half smile and curl to a ball.
When she entered her extra layer of sleep, I exited through the vent, as always. It had already reached five in the morning. I remembered too the midnight broadcast repeated every single hour until six in the morning. Eszter probably did not know of awareness with that. If I could make it toward a radio, and it was not jammed, I could hear the location of the envoy leaving today. The time for action was upon me, Uncle Lanci. This was momentum.
I ventured off to my pastimes swimming locker room, where I knew Andras and his team would prepare for swimming practice by listening to Radio Free Europe. I crossed the river to Buda where the dawn illuminated the hills. In the locker room, I slipped behind sleep-filled huddles of men. I saw Andras, but the second he spied me I placed a finger betwixt my lips, indicating that he should be quiet lest I become discovered. He nodded and then I pointed up toward the radio and his eyes grew. The first song that came on was the typical: “Twist and Shout.” You are so predictable, Uncle Lanci! I waited until the third song, which was “King of the Road.” Then came “This Diamond Ring.”
Placing them next to each other, it became clear and easy. King means Király in Hungarian and Ring, well that could only mean Oktogon, the circle street area just three blocks north of Király út. The location was on Király, three blocks south of Oktogon. The simplicity of the code seemed more than I could bear.
I made it to the meeting place on time and, to my surprise, I saw people converging there. Many fled to work at this hour, but through them, I peered a stubbly man who looked to be in his middle life bent over a large box that he hustled into the back of a car as a woman with exceptional breasts and blond hairs whispered to him. They looked as if they were producing traditional business transactions in a place where that happened most days.
It could have been nothing, of course, but then I noticed an old man, this one with white hair, exit the car and inform himself to the man and the woman as if they had just encountered one another. I spied underneath the interactions of the woman, and the two men, lurked a strained hurry. They barely said words to each other. The blond woman tossed about her eyes here then there to investigate the scene, and the stubbly man refused to look up. I was almost sure these were the exact people who heard the code.
I am so extreme with excitement, Uncle Lanci, because I have accomplished it. I have procured the code and saw it occur. Your guidance proved
with fruit, but now the question is, Uncle Lanci, how is it that I actually get passage to one of their missions? Am I to know again an extra code? Is someone supposed to alert them of my presence on board? Did you fixate that for me? I cannot walk up to them all alone and simply ask to come. They will mostly assume their mission has been confiscated. Maybe that is the explanation for you insisting I carry with me Eszter. It is becoming with clarity that I need her more than I wish.
When I viewed the car departing, it became a reality that I was inching closer to departing Hungary too. Once I do, I can’t make a prediction of when I will return home, and I know that there are people I cannot leave behind, and some I have to.
I wrote a note to Anika. It was my formal request that she partake on my mission. I wanted her to believe me with one hundred percent confidence. When I talked to her about leaving, she defied responding. I could see doubts going through her head, and I wanted to pluck them out and discourse them in the trash. I would do anything for Anika, but she is not of the romantic persuasion as I am. And I don’t know of whether I possess time to convince her. I must make tries, no matter, because she is a person of genuinity and kindness. She makes me feel braver than I was ever meant to be, but also more aware of what I am capable of. That is truly the most high gift a person can give you.
Adrienne has halted from asking me questions about my plans because I think she is with fear that they are moving forth. When I returned home this morning, she beckoned me forward to her room. Her radio buzzed and churned out effluence like a gagging dog with grass caught in its throat. She maintained she was listening to “Downtown,” her new number one song, when the screeching overtook it. She said it worried her with immensity because she knows how important it is that the radio stays clear for me. I believe this was her petite way of telling me she supports my departure even though she cannot join.
I fashioned the antennas in a particular position that enforced their ability to carry signal. Out came some music, of the classical persuasion, and not Radio Free Europe. I couldn’t reach it no matter how strange I twisted the antennas. Adrienne rolled her eyeballs and asked me if I would come back in ten minutes to try again. She kissed me on the cheek and told me I am her most favorite person. I assume she used this same strategy with Father recently and that explained why his radio stood in her room. I relented, of course, but I could not get Radio Free Europe even after five more efforts this morning.
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