Under Budapest

by Ailsa Kay

  He presses her back against a smooth-skinned plane tree. The sky seems bluer through its pale, spreading arms.

  “This hip.”

  He’s the only thing that stops her brain from whirring and worrying. Even as his finger reaches through layers of clothes and deep into her, he can make her laugh. Another surprise: that love can be hilarious. That it can be so easy and so pure. She’s taken him into her mouth and tasted him and felt no shame. She’s tasted herself on his tongue and marvelled. Joy could be both simple and possible. Now, dry leaves crackle under their feet. She’s trembling. Sun’s sinking. He buries his face in her hair and she holds him tight, so tight around his ribs, so tight the cold sky will have to crack from the sheer force of their love. One week and two days.

  This city where Agi and Gyula whisper is full of holes. Gaping craters where bombs dropped. In pavement, deep fissures left by tanks. Vast gaps blown into the sides of buildings. Windows shattered and not yet replaced. It’s all damage from the war, but the war’s been over for more than ten years and some houses that are now only shells, holes of houses, have become gardens. Weeds and poplars sprout where people once dined, slept, or danced, sprout through the wreckage where children are warned not to play. Agi wanders home past several of these holes, which she no longer sees because she’s forgotten what used to be there. As a result of the holes, there’s not enough room for the population. This is a paradox for engineers and rev­olutionaries both: how can it be, with so many holes, that there is so little space to breathe?

  At the beginning of the month, the government decreed to reopen a hole, an unmarked hole where bodies had been flung three years ago. Three years ago those same bodies were considered to be enemies of the state. The bodies were retrieved, names reattached, and political histories rewritten to reflect the valour these men had shown, and the true love they had harboured for the state that had executed them—wrongly, the state now admits. This is one of the reasons Gyula’s talk is braver these days: the reburial of Laszlo Rajk—Rajk’s redemption, you might almost say. On October 6, he and three of his unjustly executed comrades were given a state funeral. The newsreel played in every theatre in the city for a week. Rajk’s wasn’t the only rehabilitation. Since September, hundreds of political prisoners have been released, and Hungary’s Commun­ist Party swore that this was the end of Stalinism and of terror, its conclusion signalled by the digging of a new and proper grave. This may all be true and hopeful, but Agi still shares a single-windowed, dimly lit flat with her sister and their angry black knot of a mother.

  Agi turns the key just as the door flings open. Zsofi grabs both her hands and pulls her into the kitchen, where their mother sits gripping the wooden spoon, pot of soup on the stove forgotten. The radio is on as low as possible, shutters closed tight.

  “Szeged students have separated,” Zsofi whispers at full volume.

  Agi pulls her hands from her sister’s grasp—what scents has she carried in from the cold and from Gyula?—and she crouches on the other side of the radio. The announcer’s voice reaches them from somewhere beyond their borders. Students at Szeged University have separated from the Communist Youth Organization.

  Agi meets Zsofi’s eyes. “How?”

  In June, they heard that students in Poznan, Poland, had held a demonstration and the entire city had joined them. The city called for freedom and yet no one had been shot or arrested. So now, months later, the restlessness has reached Hungary. But Szeged? A small, inconsequential university town to the south—what made them do it?

  The soup is steaming the unheated room, filling it with the dense, digestive odour of cabbage. Gyula will be listening to the radio now too, and before long he’ll be on his way back over the bridge to Pest and to his plotting friends.

  Zsofi’s fired with hope, exuberant with it. “Do you think the same will happen here?”

  Abruptly, Margit clicks off the radio. “Jo etvagyat”—bon appétit—she tells her daughters, which is to say, “The walls have ears,” and she places full bowls on the table in front of them. Silently, they share a quarter-loaf of bread. Shoulders straight, silver spoons precisely balanced on slim fingers, they eat the soup that no one likes but that they’ve all gotten used to. The three pairs of hands are almost identical: long and gracious, blue veins close to the surface. Margit insists on formal table man­ners and a leisurely pace, even if there is only bread and cabbage soup. Agi looks sideways at her sister. Zsofi’s knees under the table joggle frenetically and she counts between spoonfuls to make it look right. When they finish eating, Agi clears the plates. Margit stands and picks up the radio to take it with her. She knows better than to leave it with Zsofi, who would turn it on and forget to keep it low and to listen for footsteps outside the window.

  “Anyu,” Zsofi pleads. Mom.

  No answer.

  Zsofi throws herself back in the kitchen chair theatrically, legs sprawling. As soon as her mother’s out of earshot, she leans forward. “Did you see Gyula? What did he say?”

  “He hadn’t heard yet.”

  “Lorand will do the same. They have to—they can’t let Szeged stand on their own—and then once Lorand separates, the rest will follow.” Eotvos Lorand is the university where Gyula studies engineering. Leaving Hungary means that he won’t finish his degree, but once they settle in Toronto, he can start again. He’s young, smart, and brave. Nothing scares him. He’ll learn English and he’ll work and he’ll go to school at night, and it won’t take long before he will be building bridges and skyscrapers in a city without history.

  Zsofi’s still talking. “God, I wish she’d let us out at night. I bet there are meetings happening right now, all over the city, and we’re stuck in here without even a radio. Doesn’t it make you crazy? I bet Gyula’s at a meeting.”

  “I’m sure we’ll hear all about it tomorrow.”

  “But what about now?”

  Agi runs the dishes under a trickle of cold water from the tap. “Now we’re here and we can’t do anything about it. Keep your voice down.”

  “How can you be so calm? How can you just pretend nothing is happening?”

  It’s hard to know these days if Zsofi is really angry or just putting it on—enjoying the colour of a new mood, a new spat, another new Zsofika, as Agi calls her when she feels soft.

  “Nothing is happening, Zsofi. And I’m not calm, I’m just not hysterical.”

  “I’m hysterical? Hysterical for wanting to go out at night? For wanting to see my friends and speak my mind? For hoping? Well, I’d rather be hysterical than be you. How long have you and Gyula been playing kissy-face on the island? You’re old enough to get married, but you don’t. You could leave tomorrow, but you don’t.”

  “Zsofi, please.” She waits for the drama to disappear from her sister’s eyes. “We’re leaving next Thursday. It’s all arranged.”

  “Oh, Agi,” Zsofi bursts, clasping her. And then, “When will you tell Mom?”

  “Tonight, I guess.”

  Agnes takes a long time with the few dishes, carefully drying each bowl, spoon, knife, and pot before putting it in its place. Zsofi has already sought out the warmth of the other room, where their mother sits writing—as she does each evening—to her husband who’s been gone three years. She writes in miniature script to save on paper and she keeps the letters in the small glass-fronted bookcase, one of the few items of furniture they’d managed to keep from their original home. She doesn’t complain anymore about the things she’s lost or sold—the elegant house in the Buda hills, the Herendi porcelain dinner set, the dresses, the mink stole, silk stockings, good leather shoes, fine cheeses and wines, the books (so many books) and the paintings, all liberated by the communists. She stopped complaining the day her husband was arrested. Agnes would prefer the complaints to the sound of that nib on paper.

  She has to tell her. Somehow, she must find the voice to say, Anya, I am leaving. With Gyula.

  But not tonight. Her mother snaps the lid on her pen, shuffles
the paper straight, and abruptly stands. She stuffs today’s illegible letter in her pocket. She takes her coat from the wardrobe and wraps a scarf around her head, checks that she has house keys in her pocket, and without a word to her daughters leaves, locking the door behind her.

  This happens sometimes. They can’t predict what day or time it will happen. They don’t know where she goes or what she does. Sometimes, she’s away for many hours, sometimes only one. Once, they tried to follow her, but she knew they were there and the look on her face as she spun to face them—lost, beseeching, needing mercy—filled them with such deep shame that neither had ever tried it again. She just goes and they know she’ll be back and in an unspoken agreement they don’t talk about where she goes because the room feels lighter with her gone and neither wants to admit such an ungrateful truth.

  She has a name, Agi’s mother—all mothers do, though never to their children. She is Margit, like the island that, leaf-shaped, splits the Duna in two. Her husband is Miklos, and tonight she goes to tell him the news about the students in Szeged: some change is coming, Miklos, again. But no change has ever held. It always turns back, turns bad. Better not to change at all because nothing ever comes of it but more terror, more blood, more loss. What will she lose this time? What straggly bit of hope should she stifle? Hope is the worst hurt of all. And yet, every time change seems possible, hope comes back. It sprouts tender green from what was black and shivers in the breeze as it reaches for light. And then something happens. Something always happens. The axe falls, the tanks thunder in, soldiers or police break down the doors and force their way in with their angry, fearful shouting voices, and everything is black again but worse because for a short time hope made her remember the feeling of love. She will not hope this time. She will not. That is what she plans to tell her husband.

  It’s a long walk. Sometimes she takes the streetcar, but tonight the weather is good, the air crisp. She’s there in just over forty minutes: Koztarsasag Ter, Republic Square. The buildings that surround the wide square are massive and magnificent—pillared, stone or stucco, where gods and angels bear aloft the weight of balconies and the pomp of nineteenth-century empire, now long gone. The Communist Headquarters is located in one of these buildings, but Margit isn’t interested in the buildings that form the periphery of the square but in the square itself. Or, more precisely, in one specific sewer grate at the far end of it.

  She’s a small woman. In a dress, on Miklos’s arm, she was right. People might not have called her beautiful, but pretty and stylish, with a sparkling sense of humour. If her daughters heard her described this way, they might not believe it, and if she stops for a moment to recognize that truth, it would make her too unbearably sad and she has enough sadness to bear already, so she doesn’t stop. She proceeds to the sewer grate, clenching the letter in her jacket pocket. When she gets to the grate, she ignores the armed guards at Communist Headquarters—they’re used to her—and she lowers herself to her knees. Placing her hands on the cobbles, she sinks until her whole body presses flat to the ground, her face just to the grate.

  “Miklos,” she begins. “I don’t want you to feel any hope whatsoever.”

  During the war, Margit had done what everyone else had done. She’d mended her dresses, used newsprint for toilet paper or stuffed it into worn boots for warmth. She’d cooked what was available, stretching out the spice and the fat, hoarding bits of paper, making balls of ends of thread and string. She’d stayed cheerful for the girls, sought the safety of cellars when the bombs fell, told them stories as the ground shook about heavy-footed giants, gods flinging fire, Athena springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. She’d prayed for her husband to come home safe from the front. And he did. Shrapnel scarred his left arm and chest purple, but his heart was still hers and it beat underneath hers so fiercely when she pressed herself onto him that first night that she felt the war end inside her and she cried—for peace, for ordinary happiness—long after the shudders had stopped. All would be right again, she’d believed, with her husband back in her arms.

  And then, eight years later, he was arrested and put on trial—a drama, a farce—and found guilty of plotting to sabotage the building of the Szabadsag Hid. He was the engineer in charge, and he loved that bridge—the utile grandeur of it, its purposeful, elegant, weight-bearing bastions. Plus, he was a good communist. Why would a good engineer and a good communist make a bridge that would only fall down? Though she was never told where he was held, or the length of his sentence, she knows he is here in Koztarsasag Ter, underneath it, lodged beneath the city in the prison tunnels that keep spreading, spreading, spreading, honeycombing the earth until finally, surely, the thin crust of surface would give way and all these once-grand buildings would fall in. She has no evidence that he is here, or that he can hear her, but in the total absence of evidence, she is certain. Of course, they would stow an engineer underground. Where else? Perhaps he is overseeing the digging of more tunnels, ensuring the structural integrity of the enlarging warren. Perhaps he is breathing through a long straw, catching the air that finds its way down through the sewer and finally into the underground cell where he lies, waiting.

  She heard him once. Only the once, but what more assurance does a desperate woman need? It was two years ago, eleven months after his arrest, a beautiful May evening. If he’d been there with her, they might have taken a long walk on Margit Island, a lover’s walk, hand in hand, laughing at their troubles and their joys. And this is what she said to him through the sewer grate. She said, “If you were here, it might be a beautiful evening, Miklos, you bastard. You bastard, for leaving me alone on this beautiful night. I am ruining. I am withering without you. I’m getting old, alone, and drying out from lack of love. Where is your hand, Miklos? Where are your arms when I need them?”

  She was sobbing into the ground, that night. That was unlike her. She hardly ever sobbed anymore. Why bother when it eases nothing? But that night, some combination of the warm evening, the prettiness of the budding trees—they just keep budding, the idiot trees—and the pain racked her right through. And that’s when she heard him.

  “Margit,” a voice called from far, far below. “Margit, you are alive.”

  That was it, just that: Margit, you are alive. Was it her wish or his voice? His voice. He’s there because he must be there, because it is the only possible answer.

  And then, in September, thin hope dared to poke through. Hundreds of political prisoners were released. An end to Stalinism. Hundreds who’d been executed were “rehabilitated,” some even dug up and reburied. A woman in her building, arrested for God knows what, came home. She was gone and then suddenly she was there, like Lazarus. She’d been held in some little prison near the Ukrainian border. Margit couldn’t stand to look at her, at her family’s happiness, the pain was so sharp. Why are you home? Why you and not Miklos? And the answer inside her was plain: because he’s dead, you stupid, foolish woman. Your husband is dead.

  So. Miklos might be dead, but, equally, he might be here. And so, in this space between what she knows and what is yet to come, she speaks through the stone, feels the warm, putrid updraft of the sewer against her cheek, and she pushes hope down with the pages and pages of letters she has written him these last few days through the sewer grate. In case he is under there and wondering whether there is still life up here.

  Thursday, October 18

  “It was incredible, Agi. You wouldn’t believe it. Our first speaker was Karoly, you remember him? Big guy, big voice. I helped him write the speech, but it was good he spoke it and not me. You should have seen him up there. His voice filled the entire auditorium. And there were hundreds in the audience, must have been almost the entire university. He said that even though the lies and the violences of Stalin and Rakosi have been exposed professors still preach Stalinism. He said, ‘Why are we still being examined on party politics, rather than architecture, law, economics? This must change. We must be at the forefront of change.’ And the
entire audience erupted in applause. It was like letting the top off. Suddenly, everyone had a voice. One student after the other got up and reported what these professors had done in the name of communism. I sat there, and I felt like I was somewhere else. Were these the same students I’d been in class with for the last two years? It went on until eleven o’clock.”

  This is why he didn’t meet her on Margit yesterday. She sat there on her books in the park, arms around her knees by their tree, waiting and believing the worst. He’d been hauled in to the principal’s office for questioning about some paper he’d written, too honestly. He’d been arrested on leaving the British Legation. He was right now sitting in some cramped room, refusing to answer questions. Or answering them. She waited the full two hours before giving up, the sun already set by the time she got home.

  When they’d first met, just six months ago, what she loved was his daring. He was speaking quietly, but fervently, to a group who’d gathered round him at the entrance to the university. She had just started teaching at the high school nearby.

  “We have been brought up amid lies,” he said. “We continually have to lie. We cannot have a healthy idea because all ideas are choked by our habit of lies. If we want to be truly free, we need first to have freedom of thought.” At that very moment, a professor passed and Gyula, without missing a beat, turned his talk to a recital of the latest Soviet accomplishments.

  It wasn’t just that he was an accomplished liar, but that he could turn it into such a lithe performance; he lied like a dancer. Her friend introduced them. He gave her a smile. She was smitten. That love could be so ready, that was another surprise.