“Say what you have to say.”
The order was short and sudden. No greeting, no pleasantries, not even a question. Sándor was thrown completely off balance. Say what he had to say? Of the two oral exams he had witnessed while he was preparing for his own, he had gotten the impression that Lorincz style was more of a cross examination.
A vaguely condescending grimace slid over the professor’s face, as if silence was what he had expected. He raised his fountain pen and made a note on the yellow pad that lay in front of him. Sándor had the sickening sense that this was hopeless, that nothing he could say or do would alter the professor’s verdict.
The man raised an eyebrow.
A tiny, defiant spark of rage ignited somewhere within Sándor. He had worked for this. And he knew he could do it. Or, at least some of the time he knew that, when he wasn’t allowing himself to be reduced into a speechless, nervous wreck just because a man behind a desk looked at him with disdain.
He took a nervous, gasping breath and ventured into an explanation of supranational legal theory. His account was concise, well-structured, and laid out in order of priority. He put treaty law over common law, debated peremptory norms with himself, put forward hypotheses and arguments, drew conclusions. He talked and talked, and the professor didn’t interrupt him even once. He spoke for so long that he lost his sense of time, but eventually he sensed a certain restlessness among his fellow students seated behind him. Was there anything else to add? Not without moving off-topic, he decided. He repeated a couple of his main points by way of a summary, and then fell silent. Relief had already begun to spread through his body, and he was not without admiration for the arrogant, old academic behind the desk. With his seeming indifference, he had forced Sándor to give an independent presentation at a very advanced level, instead of steering him around the circus ring with questions. Sándor’s performance had been better for it, he conceded. But dear God, it had been uncomfortable in the beginning.
The professor made another note on his yellow pad.
“Fail,” he said, without looking up.
Someone behind Sándor dropped a pencil. He could hear the crisp little smack as it hit the table, followed by a clicking roll.
“Excuse me?” Sándor said, thinking he must have misheard.
The professor ripped the yellow page off the pad, folded it carefully, made another note on a grading sheet that was waiting next to him, and placed both sheets into a manila envelope. He pushed the envelope across the mahogany desk toward Sándor.
“If you have any questions, please direct them to the guidance counselor,” he said, his eyes already moving on to the next student. “Dora Kocsis.”
The girl stood up. She was deathly pale, and her skin looked clammy. Sándor could see the disbelief he himself was feeling reflected in her face. Maybe she was wondering what you had to do to pass if Sándor had failed.
“Please leave the premises,” the professor told Sándor. “Don’t forget your envelope. It contains important information about your situation.”
Sándor took the manila envelope with numb fingers.
“I don’t understand.…” he began, but he could tell from the steeliness of the arrogant face that his initial impression had been right: It didn’t matter at all what he said or did today. The outcome had been determined in advance.
It wasn’t until he reached the door that he received something that resembled an explanation. “Horváth.”
Sándor turned halfway around.
“A law degree is a weapon. The law itself is a weapon.”
Sándor still didn’t understand, not until the professor added:
“What makes you think Hungary wants to arm someone like you?”
HE DIALED LUJZA’S number and then found he couldn’t force himself to speak.
“Sándor? Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God. Are you … did they release you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
He didn’t say anything. There was so much distance between him and those words, between her and him. Someone like you.
“Where are you?”
“Home.”
“I’m coming over. Don’t go anywhere.”
“No. I mean, no, don’t come.”
“Sándor! Why not?’
“Because … I’m not going to be here by the time you get here.” Now it was her turn to be silent. He sensed her confusion, her hurt feelings.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just have to go home for a while.”
“Now? Don’t you have your exam?”
“No.”
He hung up, because he couldn’t bear to explain. She called back again right away, but he turned off his phone.
He sat on the bed, in just his underwear again. He had hung his suit neatly on a coat hanger; even now habit took over. He unfolded the three sheets of paper that had been in the manila envelope again.
One was a copy of the official grading sheet, where after Evaluation it succinctly said Fail. The second was the sheet with the professor’s notes from the examination. It said only two things. In the name field, the professor had written Sándor Rézmüves, not Sándor Horváth. And underneath that there was just one sentence: Has nothing relevant to say.
The third sheet was an official letter from the university informing him that since he was no longer enrolled, they had to ask him to vacate his room at the Szigony Dormitory by May 15. The name Horváth was crossed out and replaced with Rézmüves. He wasn’t sure if the administration office had done that or the professor himself.
He stood up and went over to his desk. All of his books and notes were gone, and the police had also confiscated his computer, but Tamás’s mobile phone number was still sitting on the slip of paper he had tacked to his bulletin board. He turned his phone on again. He supposed he ought to be glad they had let him keep that.
Tamás answered after two rings.
“Yes?”
There was static and motor noise on the line, and Sándor had the impression Tamás was in a car or a bus. “What the hell are you up to?”
“Sándor? Relax, phrala, it’s just a bit of—”
“You little shit. I’m on my way to Galbeno. And when I find you, I’m going to wring your fucking neck.”
Tamás just laughed and hung up.
“I mean it,” Sándor said to the empty room, which was no longer his.
HE BUS HAD to slow down to 20 kph to maneuver its way down the pot hole-riddled road. Eventually, there seemed to be more holes than asphalt, Sándor noted. He leaned his head against the dusty windowpane, feeling the vibrations through the glass.
The rage he had felt when he spoke to Tamás two days ago had long since evaporated. Maybe it would come back again when he saw him, but right now he couldn’t feel anything other than a thick, gray sense of failure. What the hell was he going to do when he arrived? Galbeno wasn’t “home,” even though that was what he had told Lujza. It hadn’t been home since … no, he couldn’t actually put a date on it, not even a year. He knew when he had been taken away, but he couldn’t nail down the moment when his inner compass had stopped pointing to the green house in Galbeno whenever someone asked him where he lived.
Grandpa Viktor had roared and raged that day, and the policemen from the white cars had needed to restrain both him and some of the uncles. One of them had his hands full just trying to manage Grandma Éva. Sándor had also scratched and kicked and struggled when they put him in the minibus with Vanda and Feliszia and little Tamás, but it was no use. The door closed, and there was no handle on the inside. Finally they drove away, up the same road where the ambulance had taken his mother, and through the rear window he could see Grandpa Viktor running after the vans, but he couldn’t run fast enough.
They had driven for a long time, without anything to eat or drink. There were two other children in the bus besides Sándor and his siblings, a boy and a girl. He had
never seen them before; they must have been from another village. They held hands and didn’t speak. Neither did Sándor. The boy had peed in his pants, and it didn’t smell good.
Then the van drove through a gate in a fence and up the driveway to some tall, gray buildings. The door of the minibus was opened, and an adult stranger, an old bald gadjo in white clothes, pointed at Sándor and the other boy.
“Those two go to the blue wing,” he said. “The girls go over to the red wing, and the little one needs an exam at the health clinic.”
It took a second before Sándor understood that the gadjos wanted to split them up.
“No,” he said then. “I’m going to take care of them.”
“We’ll do that,” the bald gadjo said. “Now you just go over to the blue wing with Miss Erzsébet. That’s where the big boys live.”
Miss Erzsébet took his hand. She was young and pretty and also gadji, but he didn’t want to hold her hand.
“No,” he said. “I’m their brother.”
But they wouldn’t listen. A gadji lady, who was also dressed in white, had already picked Tamás up and was starting to walk away with him. Another woman had taken the girls by the hand, one on either side. Vanda’s face was swollen because she had cried the whole way, but now she was quiet. Her eyes were dark and frightened. Feliszia just looked confused. She hugged her pink stuffed rabbit, filthy as it was.
He tore himself away from the Erzsébet woman, but she grabbed him again, this time by the arm, hard. Then he bit her.
He could still remember the feeling, the tiny little hairs on her arm poking softly into his tongue, the salty taste of her skin mixed with a soapy bitterness he later learned was moisturizer. As he bit, he felt the skin break, and the saliva and blood mixed in his mouth.
So many years and he could still remember that, maybe because that was his last true act of rebellion.
You’ll take care of the girls and Tamás, right?
Mama, I was only eight.
The bus stopped at the end of the line, and he got out.
GALBENO WAS STILL Galbeno. Most of the houses had electricity now, but otherwise not much had happened in the past fifteen years. A small valley with a creek at the bottom, dusty grass and prickly shrubs, the odd fir tree that survived the quest for firewood because it was so full of resin that it would be foolhardy to toss it into the fireplace. Up on the eastern slope sat the cemetery with its crooked, white headstones, with a bigger population now than the village, which for a long time had been a dwindling cluster of houses along a road that didn’t go anywhere.
His arrival was instantly noticed by at least twenty people. An older woman who was sweeping in front of her house. Seven or eight kids in the middle of a water fight at one of the village’s three communal water pumps. Two men who were fiddling with an old, rust bucket of a car, three others who were watching and commenting. He knew they recognized him.
“Szia,” one of the men by the car called out, raising his hand in a casual greeting.
“Szia,” Sándor called back, without knowing who he was talking to. It could even be Tibor; Sándor wasn’t sure he would recognize him now. He had forgotten so much. Only a few names lingered in his mind.
He hoisted his duffel bag over his shoulder and started walking down the road toward Valeria’s green house. He hadn’t brought his suitcase or the cardboard boxes he had packed his things in because he didn’t want it to look like he was moving in. True, he had no idea where he would be living after May 15, but it wouldn’t be here; he had made his mind up about that. He might have to spend a few weeks here until he found something else, but he wasn’t moving in. Ferenc had been generous enough to store his boxes for the time being, though it meant he practically had to climb over the furniture to make it from one end of his room to the other.
Two little girls raced past him, giggling, and he knew he wouldn’t make it to the house unannounced. He could already hear their high-pitched, excited voices: “Valeria, Valeria, Sándor’s home!”
His mother appeared in the doorway. Then she came out to meet him, her arms outstretched.
“Sándorka! My darling.”
She embraced him and pulled his face down so she could kiss him warmly on both cheeks. Then she did it again, just to be sure.
“Mama.”
She was so small. It had come as a shock to him the first time he had seen her once he was a grown up—she was a tiny woman who didn’t come any higher than the middle of his chest. She was thin and more sinewy than he remembered her, her face tauter. There was something birdlike about her lightness, as if she had air in her bones where other people had marrow.
He knew women in their forties in Budapest who looked like young girls, and often behaved like that, too. That was not the case with Valeria. Her hair was still black, and she was so small that her T-shirt and jeans would fit a twelve-year-old. But no one who saw her face would mistake her for a teenager. Life had left its mark on her. There was a determination and a will to survive in her that weren’t the result of hours spent at the gym.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“Yes, yes.”
“When?”
He couldn’t help but smile in spite of everything that had happened.
“Mama, I ate.” An apple and a sandwich from the kiosk at the bus station, but that was plenty. His stomach couldn’t handle anything more.
“Well, then we’ll have some coffee. And you can tell me why you’ve come.”
Because naturally there had to be a reason for him to show up like this, in the middle of exams.
“Where’s Tamás?”
“Tamás? He’s not here.” Her eyes darted away as she said it, and he guessed it was because she wanted to hide something from him. Did she know what Tamás was up to?
“Mama, where is he? Do you know what kind of a mess he is in?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“Have a seat,” she said, pointing to the bench by the door. “I’ll make some coffee.”
“Mama!”
“He left, Sándorka. He has to earn money, too, doesn’t he?”
“Doing what?”
“The violin, of course. But there’s no one willing to pay around here anymore. Do you know how many men in the village have jobs?”
Sándor shook his head. How would he know that?
“Fourteen. And eight of those are just doing temporary work paid for by the council.”
He knew things were bad, but not that bad. From what he remembered from his childhood, nearly everyone had jobs most of the time. “People used to have jobs,” he said.
“Yes. When the Communists were in charge, the Roma had no trouble getting work. Now it’s just the Hungarians. And hardly anyone hires musicians these days. So Tamás is abroad now.”
“Where?”
“Germany, I think. No, wait.… Somewhere up north. I think it was Denmark.”
It would be nice to think that Tamás had only nicked his passport because he didn’t have one of his own and wanted to go to Denmark to play his violin and earn some money. But Sándor remembered the interrogation room and the questions the ever-patient Gábor had asked him, over and over again. Are you interested in weapons, Sándor? Why did you go to hizbuttahrir.org—you’re not a Muslim, are you? Where does your money actually come from, Sándor? For seventy-two hours.
NBH wasn’t in the habit of wasting their time on street musicians.
THE HOUSE’S ONLY habitable room was home to six people. Sándor’s stepfather Elvis didn’t live here anymore. He and Valeria had split up several years earlier. Both Sándor’s sisters were married now, but neither of them had actually moved out. Vanda used to have an apartment in Miskolc, but then the building was renovated, and some of the apartments combined into something larger and more “in keeping with the times,” as the property owner put it; when the tenants were due to move back in, for some reason or other there wasn’t room in the lovely, remodeled building with tiled bathroo
ms, renovated kitchens, and steel balconies for the three Roma families. So Vanda was living with Valeria again with her two little boys while her husband worked as a painter in Birmingham to earn money so they could get another place. Feliszia, who was seventeen now, had married a boy her own age from Galbeno, just a few months ago; he and his father were putting a roof on one of the abandoned houses on the outskirts of the village “so the young people would have somewhere to live.” Valeria quipped that at the speed those two were working; the young people would be middle-aged before they could move in. And besides, it wasn’t what Feliszia wanted. She wanted to move to Budapest or at least Miskolc, but certainly away from Galbeno.
“There’s nothing wrong with dreaming,” Valeria said as she made a bed for Sándor in the spot that was actually Tamás’s. And Feliszia noticed the hint of sarcasm in her tone right away.
“Tamás promised he would help,” she said defiantly. “He’s going to lend me the money for that hydrotherapy course, and then I can work as a carer for people with disabilities until I can afford to start my own clinic.”
Those weren’t just dreams; they were plans. Sándor looked at the determination his suddenly grown-up little sister radiated and wondered where it had come from. A year ago she had been a quiet, mild-mannered girl who was the most cautious of all the siblings.
“It’s easy for Tamás to make promises. And anyway, he doesn’t have any money,” Vanda said.
“He will. When he comes home from Denmark, he’ll have money.”
“How much does the course cost?” Sándor asked.
“Two thousand six hundred euros.”
Sándor did a quick conversion. That was more 700,000 forints. Where in the world did Tamás think he was going to get that kind of money? Certainly not from performing on street corners. Not even if he were lucky enough to get a job in a restaurant. He usually just played for tips and maybe food—if he was lucky.
“And what does Bobo say to your big plans?” Vanda asked. Bobo was Feliszia’s husband. “What does he say to a wife who wants to open her own clinic in Budapest?”
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