Under Budapest

by Ailsa Kay

  Now, Gyula’s arms about her waist, he’s full of some new feeling. He vibrates with it. “We’re meeting again tomorrow night, all the students. On Harmashatar Hegy. It’s happening, my love. Something is happening. I don’t know what, but even if what we accomplish is small, just a minor change at the beginning of many minor changes, that’s something.” He’s got his arms around her waist, but his dark eyes shine bright with future, his lank black hair blowing. “This is the time.”

  He and his co-revolutionaries—not comrades, no, revolutionaries—they’re planning manifestos, writing demands they want to put in front of government. This is no longer just talk; it’s plotting. “Gyula, you will be arrested.”

  “No. This time the change is real. Can’t you feel it? The press was at the meeting in the auditorium. The Szabad Nep and the Magyar Nemzeti. Did I tell you that?”

  But that was about confronting professors, Agi thinks, not the Communist Party itself. But she doesn’t have long to think because Gyula’s mouth is at her ear. “Don’t worry, Agi. I promise, I will be careful.”

  “One week,” she says.

  “And then we’ll be married, and I will take you to an actual bed and will remove every last bit of your clothing and kiss every last bit of your body.”

  She smiles so easily, sees this future so clearly. “Promise?”

  “I promise. And maybe by then even Hungary will be free. Can you imagine that, Agi? What a wedding present that would be.”

  Two hours later, Agi pushes fearless across Margit Hid into the wind, up Szent Istvan Korut, and dances left onto Visegradi Utca. In the bins of the vegetable store, the usual old potatoes, carrots, apples, the inevitable cabbage, turnip, kohlrabi. In Vienna, they will eat cake. In the window of a women’s shop, flagrant and drab dresses hang side by side, listless and ugly, but in Toronto, she’ll wear red. The butcher rolls down his shutters. Dog shit litters the asphalt sidewalk. She hops over it. Two men loiter, smoking and talking in front of her building. They’re old and colourless and they know nothing of love. Her keys clang as she unlocks the front door. The elevator is still broken, so she takes the stairs that curve round it to the fourth floor. She walks along the courtyard balcony to their door, noticing that Mrs. Nemeth’s kitchen light is on. She turns the key in the lock. Mrs. Nemeth would be peeking through her shutters now, to see who’s there. As always, ready and willing to report sus­picious activity. How suspicious is Agi, tonight? Very. Very suspi­cious indeed, with happiness glowing all over her face. So she tiptoes back to Mrs. Nemeth’s shuttered window and says clearly, “Good evening, Mrs. Nemeth.” There’s no answer, but Agi senses a soft, plump woollen step to the side.

  In the kitchen, Zsofi is cooking.

  “Is Mother home?”

  Zsofi nods toward the other room.

  “How is she?”

  What kind of question is that? Zsofi’s look says.

  Going into the next room where her mother sits, Agi clicks the radio on, tunes it to the National Radio, and turns it up loud so they can speak underneath it. “Anyu? I need to tell you something.”

  Pressing pen, pressing, pressing. Her mother doesn’t look up.

  “I’m leaving next Thursday. With Gyula.”

  Her mother doesn’t lift her pen from paper. Agi tries to remember the mother from her early childhood, the one who’d known how to smile. This mother’s lips have flattened and thinned to the width of the lines she writes relentlessly.

  “We want to make a life together but not here. It’s impossible here. Can you understand that?”

  Scratch, scratch on the paper. “Persze, Agi. Of course, I understand.”

  Agi counts the moments, the scratches irregular and furious.

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  Agi’s mother doesn’t put the pen down, but she holds it still. She looks at this daughter, this self-centred and stupid girl whom she loves so much she can hardly unclench her teeth enough to spit on her. “Is that all? I don’t even know this Gyula. I’ve never met him. And now you tell me that you ‘love’ him, that with him you’re going to run away and get yourself arrested or killed. What do you want me to say, Agi? Congratulations?”

  “You could say good luck.”

  “Fine. Good luck. If you survive, send me a letter.”

  Her mother goes back to her writing, and Agi to the kitchen where her sister waits, eyebrows raised.

  “I have to get out,” Agi says.

  They leave without dinner and without a word to their mother. They lock the door behind them. They walk bravely past Mrs. Nemeth’s window, skip down the stairs and into the misting night. Side by side they amble. In this neighbourhood, there’s hardly anyone out. A few people leave a warm csarda, closely huddled. One man up ahead walks his dog and smokes. On Szent Istvan, the streetcar trundles by. For lack of another destination, they follow it toward the Nyugati train station. Her mother nearly stole her happiness, but now, out in the autumn evening with her sister, she feels it returning. And tomorrow she will see Gyula, and together they’ll make more happiness and they’ll run away with their happiness, take it right across the border, far away from her mother, from this city with its holes that cramp and the fear that breeds mothers like Agi’s.

  “Can I trade you shoes?” Agi asks. “Not now, I mean, but Thursday?”

  Zsofi stops. “You’re really leaving, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Now that she’s told her mother, it feels more certain, more concrete than ever. “Yes, I really am.”

  Suddenly, like a child, Zsofi is crying. Fat tears roll down her cheeks. She hasn’t thought this through, or maybe it never seemed real, as it didn’t to Agi yet either. Leaving. It seems impossible, and yet Agi knows that people leave every day—are arrested, die, escape—while others are left behind. Everything here would remain the same, except Agi would be gone. The streets, the withered vegetables on Visegradi, Mrs. Nemeth hovering at her window, the men who stand smoking at corners, the crowded apartments and streets, and their mother. Their silent, angry mother would remain and Zsofi alone with her.

  “Zsofi.” Agi takes her little sister in her arms. “As soon as I find work, you’ll join me. I promise.”

  The other side of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, a group of students pours out of a side street. They’re not talking. As they separate, they shake hands self-importantly. Another meeting, talk and dreaming in a city where dreaming out loud has been for years forbidden. The students disperse. The city’s quiet. They can see right through the vast windowed wall of the train station where people hover, waiting, barely lit by the hanging lamps. The whole thing—the glass held together by black lines, the ordinary people getting ready to queue—at night looks strangely prettier than it is, and Agi thinks, I will miss this place.

  Margit hears her daughters go out together, and in the space they leave behind she thinks, So this is it. One day, it will be only her here. Because of course once Agi goes, Zsofi will follow. Agi is more mother to that little one than she’s ever been, not because she doesn’t love but because her love is stopped up inside her, wizening, and if it comes out, it comes out as spite, anger, a slap, a rebuke. It was different when Miklos was around; he could always find a way to make things easy, make her laugh, to find the lightness inside. They had ten years together before the war, and eight years after it. Eighteen years, all together. Shouldn’t that be enough? Shouldn’t you be able store up enough love and laughter and happiness, enough that you could mete it out and make it last to the end of life?

  Margit fills the pages, and minutes pass. She writes tighter and tighter, turning white to black. What can she possibly have to say to this husband likely dead? Everything, is the answer to that. Everything he’s not here for—or how will he know it, how will he understand what his wife is becoming, has become? He should know every hardship that touches her, every minute she waits in line, every time she fails her girls, every damn stupidity of that menial job typing and sorting at the Unicum factory tha
t is draining the last bit of intelligence she has, and the spying Mrs. Nemeth, and the house meetings and the things she has to say to be safe, and he’s not here to be her one true place in all these lies. Margit knows her relentless writing is in some way pathological. She read Freud before the war when she was young and had the time and the brain to read, and so she labels it: compulsion, sublimation, control, her own version of the fort-da game. In Freud’s story, a little boy, his grandson, replays the distress of his mother’s departure and return by repeatedly throwing his toy away and calling it back. He throws it away; his mother is gone. He reels it back—a miracle—his mother returns. Pain and then joy. Pain and then joy. Over and over again. Just so, but without joy, Margit writes Miklos away; she calls him forth. She refuses to believe he’s dead; she knows he’s dead. She writes to suppress hope; she writes because to write is a form of hope.

  Miklos, Do you know what your self-centred daughter did today? She’s gone and fallen in love. She’s in love, no matter how much I warned her never to be in love because look what it does to you. She’s going to run away and get married. She’s been lying to me, Miklos, because she’s frightened of me. What kind of mother scares her girls into hiding? This kind of mother, Miklos, the one I’ve become, and I can’t be any other way because this life is hard without you and I have lost my love. I am angry so they reject me, so I get angry. Don’t you see? They used to love me, but now they don’t. Who wouldn’t be angry at that? And if you come home, you will be frightened of me too. That’s what I fear.

  She writes for hours. She writes the same information five times over, ten times over. She writes him away; she calls him forth.

  Monday, October 22

  Gyula comes to Agi at a run. Late but at least he’s come. She could cry with the relief of it. He’s fine; he hasn’t been arrested after his foolish meeting on the hill. He carries his coat in his hand in an afternoon suddenly warm as summer, loping across the bristled grass.

  “Gyula, I told my mother.”

  “Told her what?”

  “That we’re leaving. And you know what she said? She said, ‘Write me if you survive.’ Can you believe that? Can you believe a mother would say that?”

  “Who cares what she says. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter like we do.” He kisses her hard, but he can’t stay long. The Student Federation has presented its petition to the government. Among the fourteen items they listed, they called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. He grips her hands. “They have to listen to us, Agi. It’s time. They’ve come so far already, why not take the next step? They must agree to our demands.”

  She stops him. “You put your name to a petition against the government?”

  “Five members presented it on behalf of the federation.”

  Could he really be so foolish?

  “The time for hiding is over, Agi. It’s time to stand up for ourselves. As the poet says, ‘It’s now or never.’”

  “But petitioning the government, Gyula? Signing your name.”

  “We’ve been afraid long enough. Slaves long enough.” The poet’s words again. Illicit words. They were revolutionary words when they were first written, a call to arms to rise up against Austria. Look how well that went. But the statue of Sandor Petofi still stands in his park, his hair flying, the very picture of Hungarian yearning. Now Gyula.

  “Only three more days, and we won’t be.”

  He looks blankly at her. And then he understands. He sees her now, and she sees that he sees her, a focal centring. He’s planning what to say next.

  “Maybe we don’t need to go.”

  “What?”

  “If things change, Agi, we don’t need to run. We can be here and still have exactly what we want—freedom and hope and possibilities and…everything. Everything we want but here.”

  “But we’ve been planning for months.”

  “I know, but that was before.”

  “Before what, Gyula? Before you signed a petition?”

  “Agi.”

  “And now what do you think will happen? Really? That your petition will with one blow flatten the Soviet state?”

  “Agi.”

  “Stop the AVO from spying and torturing? Make everything right?”

  “They’re the ones who made the first move, releasing the political prisoners, talking about a new friendship with the Soviets. We’re all on the same side, mostly. Just get rid of Rakosi and Gero and things will happen.”

  “Get rid of Rakosi? For God’s sake, don’t be such a child.” Without realizing it, she is hitting his chest, pushing him off.

  “I’m a child?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m the child? All you can do is talk about your precious exit plan, what shoes to wear.”

  “It’s my plan now? Funny. Just yesterday, it was ours.”

  “Plans change. History is changing.”

  “I haven’t changed.”

  “So maybe you should. This is our moment, Agi. Hungary’s moment.”

  Wary even now, more than ever now, they fight in whispers.

  “Our moment? What about our marriage?”

  “For God’s sake, I still love you.”

  “But you’ll break your promise to me.”

  He’s extricating his fingers from hers. She grips.

  “I have to go, Agi. We’re meeting in”—the bastard checks his watch—“in fifteen minutes, and I have to be there.”

  He kisses her cheek. Tells her not to cry, they’ll work things out, everything will look better tomorrow, promise, promise, promise, I love you. And then he leaves, loping up the hill to the bridge and across the Duna to the spired grey parliament to learn the fate of his revolutionary hope.

  Later that night, after a wordless supper, after the dishes, she spills everything into Zsofi’s shoulder, trying to cry without a sound so her mother won’t hear. Zsofi pats her back, uncomfortable with this role and unfamiliar with her sister’s emotion. Finally, she says the only thing that occurs to her to say, and she hopes it sounds wise: “You have to let him be true to himself.”

  It’s not wise at all. It’s trite. An insult. But it’s also all that Zsofi is capable of. So Agi straightens, wipes the tears from her eyes. “Maybe you’re right,” she says.

  “Of course I’m right.” Zsofi replies, pleased with her achievement and the conclusion of this small crisis. A moment later, she is watching herself in the darkened glass of the window, pulling her hair into new coquettish twists. “The thing is, he’s very inspiring. His speeches, I mean. To the federation, he’s invaluable.”

  To the federation? They’re a bunch of idealistic, naive, careless, dangerous, big-talking children. And what does Zsofi know about it?

  “People are quoting him, you know. He’s a real leader. Everyone loves him.”

  Everyone? What everyone? What kind of love? Abruptly, Agi stands, furious with the superior look in her vain little sister’s face, this dispensing of wisdom as she admires her own beauty in the glass.

  “I’m going to bed.”

  Tuesday, October 23

  Agi doesn’t need a radio to know that something is happening. Her students are buzzing with it: the university students have gone out. Not just Lorand, but the Technical University too. They’re marching. Thousands of them. Her classroom empties. One girl shoves a flyer at her. “Come, Miss Teglas.”

  In her vacant, windowed classroom, sun glaring in, Agi reads the leaflet the girl has given her. It lists eleven slogans, and she can read Gyula’s overblown urgent rhetoric in each of them.

  Poland sets the example; we want the Hungarian way!

  New leadership, a new direction, requires new leaders!

  Children of Father Bem and Father Kossuth, let us go hand in hand!

  Children of workers and peasants, we go along with you!

  We demand a new leadership; we trust Imre Nagy!

  We shall not stop halfway; we shall destroy Stalinism!

  Independence! Freedom! />
  Long live the Polish people!

  Long live the Polish Workers’ Party!

  Worker-peasant power!

  Long live the People’s Army!

  The day’s too warm for a coat. She leaves her jacket on the hook, screws the leaflet into her cardigan pocket, and joins the stream of students and teachers.

  On the grassy Petofi Ter, it’s louder and more chaotic than any parade or festival. Messy placards—“Independence, Equality, Friendship!” “A New Policy, A New Direction Calls for New Leadership!”—picket around the statue of Sandor Petofi, whose banned words Gyula recited at her yesterday. Hungarian tricolour flags wave from open windows, their red, green, and white stripes torn at the centre where the Soviet red stars have been slashed out. The shouts and cheers are joyfully terrified, like children on swings, a hundred thousand children on a hundred thousand swings, urging heels to sky. She can’t see Gyula in the throngs that pour into the small square from all directions, yet he’s made this happen. How? Somehow he’s done this, he and his fervent, political, and careless friends. As she scans the crowd for Gyula, a student climbs the statue. He shouts the illicit words of the poem. At first, it’s just him. Just his one voice, swinging wide over the crowd: “On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls!” But before he reaches the next line, the others have it: “The time is here, now or never! Shall we be slaves or free? This is the question, choose your answer!” Agi, too, joins in. “Slaves no longer!” they declaim, Agi declaims. “Now or never!”

  They’re moving. She goes with the mass, a stranger takes one arm, another stranger the other. And now she’s marching. Marching with elated strangers, marching up the broad, veering Kossuth Lajos Utca to Bajcsy-Zsilinszky. At every step, the crowd swells. From apartment windows flags wave, holes where the star used to be. People step out of little shops and businesses to cluster onto the sidewalk, shouting, “Eljen!” Long may you live! The shouting voices ricochet, brace, and bounce. In this whispering city, people yell, “Now or never.” Agi yells. For the possibility of freedom, and the end of lies, but also at her mother and her mother’s fury. At the things taken away and the things too ugly to save. At the broken plumbing and the unfinished subways, and the ones locked away, and the ones returned. At the men who took and the men who lied for those who took, and the women hollowed out with the pain of it. And then, at some point, someone, somewhere, from some window starts throwing paper. Paper flutters down on them. It takes a moment to understand and then she sees: they’re Soviet pamphlets, Soviet books, Soviet words, and people are throwing them out their windows. Marchers cover their heads and laugh. They march over this ripped-up stuff, this meaningless, featherweight, ephemeral stuff—for it has no more heft and far less might than a thousand, a hundred thousand, Hungarian voices unleashed.