Under Budapest

by Ailsa Kay

  “I’m Agnes Teglas. Zsofi was my sister.”

  “Zsofi’s sister? No.”

  “She was with you in prison? In 1956?”

  “She was,” the woman declared. “And in Vienna, spring of 1957.”

  “Vienna?”

  “That’s right. Zsofi and I escaped together. Through the tunnels.”

  “Mom. We’re not going to find it this way. Look, there’s the street. I’m going to see if I can call us a cab.”

  But hold on. There’s the angel. There, the honoured workers. And there, where two paths meet, the white mausoleum.

  “Persze, Tibor. You’re probably right.” Agnes places herself squarely in the archway of the mausoleum’s door. Shelter, she points. “I’ll just wait here for you.”

  He gives her a patient smile, meant to show her how nobly he endures, and jogs off, shoes squelching.

  The woman’s story was preposterous: she and Zsofi, digging, then a friendly prison guard, directing them into a hidden passageway. An entirely unbelievable story, yet here, exactly where she’d said it would be, exactly as the map specified, here was the exit of the tunnel through which Zsofi and this woman, Dorottya, had escaped.

  Agnes pushes at the door. Pushes with everything she’s got. Then sees the chain and the massive padlock securing it. It’s futile, she knows, but she yanks at the padlock. It leaves rust all over her new grey gloves, but it doesn’t give. She nearly cries with frustration—to come all this way, to be so close, and still so far from the truth. Then she realizes: why would anyone lock up the dead? If there is nothing in here but bones, there is no reason for security.

  So, she doesn’t have evidence of a tunnel, exactly, but then again, she doesn’t see the absence of tunnel either. It isn’t proof, nor is it proof to the contrary.

  The existence of the tunnels and underground prisons has never been proven. Searchers just didn’t know where to look, Dorottya insisted. “I don’t know how many tunnels there were. Endless tunnels. Miles of them. We lived in darkness. We saw light twice a day, at mealtimes. The guards carried lanterns. We all turned into moles. The light hurt our eyes. I stopped believing in my own hand; I couldn’t see it. There’s no darkness like it, the darkness of the earth. We talked to stay sane, but some people lost their minds, thought they were buried alive, in their graves. I still can’t stand the dark. But then, I don’t know what happened, some of us were conscripted to dig. The digging was awful, painful and hard, but at least we had light. At least we knew we were alive.”

  A guard helped them escape, escorting them through an underground maze to this exit. Here. Here, Dorottya and Zsofi emerged, close to the southern train station and close also to Koztarsasag Ter, Communist Party Headquarters, where the tunnels were believed to begin. The moonlight seemed like day to their eyes. They scrubbed their faces with snow. They melted snow in their cupped palms and drank it. Then they caught a train to Sopron, jumping off before the station to run through the fields and the forest to the border.

  Agnes hears the car pulling up behind her and shoves stained gloves into her pockets.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t find the grave, Mom,” Tibor says. He’s being tender, and she feels sorry this brief and uncharacteristic moment of empathy has been evoked by a lie.

  “Do you see the communist martyrs’ circle?” she says. “Martyrs,” she scoffs. It’s a clumsy change of subject, but it does the job. Tibor always has something to say about monuments. The cab leaves the cemetery, swerving through hard, wet traffic. When she tires of her son’s monologue, she can listen to the taxi’s two-way, a woman’s voice crackling with addresses: “Visegradi utca huszonkilenc a tizenharmadikban, ötödik kerület Oktober 6 utca tizennégy, Liliom utca negyvenegy a kilencedik kerületben.” The guard who helped them said there were other exits. That’s what Dorottya told her. An exit somewhere in the city park, near the Szechenyi bath. And one on Gellert, a natural chasm in the rock, another somewhere up on Rozsadomb. Dorottya didn’t have maps for those.

  Windshield wipers shush. Tires kiss the pavement. Agnes listens to the scrolling addresses and the rain as her son patters on.

  2.

  “Egesegedre.” Peter raises his glass. “What took you so long?”

  “Good fucking question.”

  He’d left his mother in her hotel room with a blanket over her knees and a bowl of soup ordered from the restaurant on her table. She was fine. She’d be fine. This is his night. Eight years since Tibor had last been here, on a research grant. At the time, Peter was doing his Ph.D. at the Central European University and working part-time at the Open Society Archives associated with the university. Now, Peter’s still a teenager in a faded green concert T-shirt, jeans that seem rarely washed. And yet he’s married and he’s got a five-year-old boy. “You still in that one-room place near the university?”

  “No. Moved to a panel apartment out in the Eleventh District.”

  Tibor winces.

  “It’s not so bad. More space than downtown. But what about you? What happened to that woman you told me about, with the name?”

  “Rafaela.”

  “Rafaellaaaa.”

  “Tragi-comedy. She found out I was her husband’s best friend. The end.”

  Peter slams the table with his beer and guffaws. It is kind of funny, when you think about it. Why doesn’t he have friends like Peter in Toronto?

  Peter is fun. He knows all the places to go. He leads Tibor down deserted black streets that Tibor will never remember, and doesn’t try to, into clubs that aren’t really clubs but condemned apartment houses turned into parties. Courtyards become tented lounges. Apartments are smashed open, graffitied, paint slopped on parquet floors. In one, a bathroom has been made up to be its own museum exhibit, glass-fronted, decorated with pages from communist-era textbooks. Tibor feels counterculture and cool. In another, the woman they call the veces neni (the washroom auntie) has a sign in twenty-six languages. She says hello, and here’s your toilet paper, and two hundred forints please, in twenty-six languages. Her Russian is sullen. Her English perfect. Her Japanese about as good as Tibor’s.

  “Stop.” Peter puts his hand in front of Tibor’s camera. “You can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you look like a tourist.”

  “So?”

  Tibor takes a picture of the veces neni and of Peter, frowning, of a girl leaning over a balcony, smoking. The smoke hangs so heavy in the air, it looks like someone’s barbecuing. Of a room full of laughing faces. Of feet on coffee tables. Of hands around steaming mugs of tea. A bartender’s haircut. A video screen showing a bikinied lady with a huge, bouncing balance ball.

  Peter is the best friend ever. He invited him to this con­ference that would save Tibor’s soul, and now he’s reminding him how great life can be in a decaying post-communist, economically bereft, precariously employed nation. “My soul is Hungarian,” Tibor declares over waves of reggae.

  “Your soul’s a stupid loser?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And that’s why you chose to specialize in our irrelevant history?”

  “Exactly. Because Hungary is the guy who never gets the girl.”

  Peter is sardonic and depressive and hilariously fun. Spontaneous and sincere and worn out. “I hate that Hungarian-loser rhetoric,” Peter says.

  “Because it’s true?”

  “Because it breeds monsters like Jobbik and the Magyar Garda.”

  “You know what I hate? I hate that I’m on vacation with my mother.”

  “You really are Hungarian.”

  Tibor feels younger by the minute, but it’s their fourth romkocsma, his sixth beer, and it must be getting late. He checks his watch: only eleven-thirty. “Fuckit. Jet lag.”

  “I’ll call you a cab,” says Peter.

  It’s 4:12 a.m. The room hums. His comforter itches. He scratches his ankles, his rib cage. Fibreglass? Crackers.

  Christ.

  Tibor sits. Heaves one leg af
ter the other over the side of the bed.

  In the bathroom, he flicks on the light, sheltering his eyes (too late) from the glare. Bleary-eyed, he fills the tumbler with water and drinks with his eyes closed. He fills it again, trying not to see himself in the very large mirror. When did he get that sag above his hipbone? My God, it’s not just the hip either. It starts from his spine, then overflows. Putting down his water glass, Tibor grabs his rolls, one in each fist. Holy Christ. How could he ever have believed that Rafaela might have loved this? This pale, wistfully slack waist. These insufficient arms.

  Tibor turns his back on the mirror and stands over the toilet, watching his urine hit the glossy toilet bowl and pool.

  He could try to go back to sleep, but he knows from experi­ence that trying to go back to sleep is the worst thing to do. He’d just lie there rehearsing his talk and audience reactions to his talk. He’d get nervous. He kept the anxiety at bay all yesterday, and all yesterday evening with Peter. I am not worried, he says, sternly. I’ve always excelled at conference papers.

  The street at 4:25 a.m. is empty. Streetlights, strung from overhead wires between buildings, cast watery, meagre light on ice-frosted asphalt. He steps out. Enjoys the first slap of cold on his face, in his lungs, and heads off toward Gellert. Eight years ago, he ran Gellert Hegy twice a week. He could jog all the way to the top and over, without stopping. He isn’t as fit as he was then, but he could try. And if he could get there by sunrise, he’d get some great photos. He carries his Canon digital in his jacket pocket.

  At the foot of the hill, Tibor checks his watch: 5:00 a.m. and still no dawn, no stars either. The clouds and the city lights together conspire to turn the sky an even purplish blue. He jogs on the spot, to keep his heart rate up, looks up the stairs that lead to the paths through the wooded hill. Poorly lit. Deserted.

  So what are you afraid of?

  Tibor feels the rush of adrenalin. A flood of endorphins. Exactly: what am I afraid of? A lonely hill? Bad guys lurking in caves? Those are just phantasms, irrational night terrors, as are all fears when it comes down to it. It’s all in your head. It can be mastered. Yes, mastered. Master it, Tibor. Master your fear. Run up that ancient hill, and show your fears who’s boss. Who will deliver a resoundingly perfect paper? Who will soon publish an article that will revise dominant thinking about post-communist Hungary? Who kicks ass? And with that thought, Tibor leaps up Szent Gellert’s stairs, three at a time.

  He stops not quite halfway. Above him, the statue of Hungary’s first Christian, Szent Gellert, floodlit and white. He pulls the camera from the pocket of his windbreaker. He loves this camera—the size of a cigarette case but also capable of shooting video. Also gives him an excuse to catch his breath, which plumes in gusts. To be fair, he used to run the hill from the other side where the slope was less steep. He hears a loud creak. Likely just a tree in the wind. No reason to linger, though. At the top of the stairs, a gravel path. His thighs are burning. His calves too. His breath is louder than anything else, fighting to catch up with the arrhythmia of his stomping step. He is whipping this fear. He is kicking it.

  Where the path splits, Tibor chooses the second, the path less trodden—always the choice of the fearless—which curves round the front of the cliff face. What is that smell that comes out of the brush at night? Even when the ground is mostly frozen there’s an alteration in the air, some kind of nighttime exhalation. The bushes are brambles of dry twigs. They chatter dryly in the wind. The few, sparse evergreens shudder. Below him, the Danube coils darkly. The black road follows it. Along the black road, the occasional car flies, headlights bright. Zoom. As it takes the curve. Tibor slows, the footing precarious with protruding roots, jutting rocks and to his left a drop steep and sudden and unforgiving. Puny guardrails keep him safe and he feels the delicious, tautening effort of awareness. His skin, his eyes, his ears, even his hair is sentient. His soul stirs. I’m coming back from the dead, thinks Tibor. I am Tibor Roland, master of Gellert.

  He’s past the halfway point where the hill juts out hard into the curve of the river, the wind picking up, when his self-congratulation is broken by a sudden ruckus of sliding gravel close above him, a muffled cry. Tibor freezes.

  “Nice try, idiot. Where d’you think you’re going?”

  “No. No, please,” a voice blubbers. “Please, I’m not Laci.”

  “So you say.”

  There are three Hungarians up there, up above him somewhere under the trees, on a different path, two frighteningly steady and calm, one younger and terrified. Tibor hugs the curve of the cliff wall. If he shouted, would the bullies back off or would they come for him? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, I am not a hero.

  “Please,” says the one voice in thick sobs. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything.”

  “That might be true, but for me, I don’t care. I do my job. I get my pay.”

  A heavy, butcher-counter sound of flesh being hammered, bones cracked.

  “Where’s the letter?”

  “I’m not Laci.”

  Thunk.

  “Where’s the letter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Crack. A muffled scream.

  “Where’s the letter?”

  “Laci lost it.”

  Two voices move away. The young, broken man must be lying not five metres above him. Are they leaving? Tibor hears the electronic ping of a cellphone being dialled. The one man must be speaking into the phone. “Look, he looks like the photo in the driver’s licence, but he’s got another wallet in his pants pocket and he keeps saying he’s not Laci. I’m starting to believe him.”

  Closer to Tibor, the injured man is starting to move. Brush crackles and scatters against hard ground.

  Still speaking into the phone: “A risk? Maybe.”

  A pause.

  “Done.”

  One dull thud, the movement stops.

  Tibor has stopped breathing.

  “Jesus. What the fuck?”

  “He said take care of it.”

  “He’s the wrong fucking guy.”

  “True.”

  “Jesus, fuck. And you had to do it here? What’re we gonna do with this? The car’s like a kilometre back.”

  “Yeah, well. Gimme the fuckin’ axe.”

  “Here?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Tibor hears a dull crack.

  “Ugh. Christ.”

  “You fucking buzi.”

  Another thunk. Then five more dull crunches. Tibor counts them.

  “All right, gimme a hand.”

  Crush of branches as they walk but not far.

  “Watch this.”

  Scrape of something heavy, moved. A pause.

  “What the hell? How deep is it?”

  “I don’t know. Deep enough. Trust me, no one will ever find him down here.”

  Less than two minutes of activity and then underbrush crackling, twigs snapping, as something rolls, bounces, downward and right over Tibor’s head, coming to a halt somewhere in front of him.

  “Fuck,” the men shout in unison.

  Silence.

  “Oh, man,” says the one. “Oh shit, shit, shit.”

  “Shit, do we look for it?”

  “Down there? Fuck, man, for all we know it’s halfway to the highway.”

  “So what do we tell Gombas?”

  “Tell him it committed suicide.” High, breathless, juvenile laughter.

  “It’s a jumper.”

  The laughter spins itself thin and stops.

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tibor hears their footsteps trudge up the hill. He’s dropped to a crouch, and now he sinks, legs giving way entirely. Maybe he’ll never get off this hill. As the sky pales, tree branches seem to separate, differentiating themselves from night. Lights go out. The river turns grey. Far below, and through the trees, Tibor can see the old church by the bridge, the rows of headlights as people start out for work. Normal life is down there.
But directly opposite Tibor, caught in the prickly undergrowth not two metres below, a head, looking up at him, eyes open. A young blond head. A kid, without his body.

  In the lecture hall, Tibor’s audience waits. Someone coughs. Feet shuffle on low-pile carpet. Here and there paper rustles as notebooks open. Tibor looks down at his paper. His right hand is shaking. Yet he doesn’t feel nervous. His feet in their Doc Martens—not the iconic counterculture boot but the sturdy, thick-soled shoe—feel grounded. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth: he learned this from the yoga classes he took a couple of years ago, precisely to get him through situations like this. With each breath, he feels his substance reasserting itself. He presses his trembling palm flat on the podium. He begins.

  “Long before the revolution of October 1956, the word was that the Soviets were tunnelling. Their tunnels spread with the speed of rhizomes…”

  He couldn’t say how he’d found his way down the other side of the hill to the Hotel Gellert, where he grabbed a cab. Back in his room, he dumped his clothes in a huddle and stepped straight into the shower, where he stayed for a good twenty minutes, leaning his head back into the pummelling water. After calling his mother to wish her a good morning and excuse himself from breakfast, he ate a bread roll and cheese in his hotel room, got on the subway, and emerged here.

  His audience seems to be listening. One man nods approvingly at a critical juncture. A woman in front of him squints, then jots in her notebook, clearly stimulated by what she’s heard. Good. Now he’s established his context and the urgent question that his research will answer, now he can just let it happen. The magic. Taking his hand from his pocket, he elaborates a planned aside and turns back to the words on the page.

  The type blurs. He blinks, rubs his eyes. The ideas seem strangely foreign, the sentence structures impossible to antici­pate. Where does he pause? When does he breathe? When he looks up, the faces in the front row are frowning. Do they think he’s wrong or just stupid? Are they impatient with his argument, his hand-in-the pocket posturing? His heart pounds and his chest tightens.

  Page two. Keep going. “As many of you are perhaps aware, the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security was opened in 2003. This signified an end to secrecy—and perhaps the end to rumours of tunnels. Security documents are housed there, but they can’t be accessed by just anyone. If you were one of the many ‘observed’ by state security informants, you can read your own files, and know the names of those who observed you, arrested you, or tortured you. If you were, yourself, an informer, agent, or torturer, you can be assured that only your victims can know this about you.”