Under Budapest

by Ailsa Kay

  Agi’s mother had always claimed there was a city down here, an insane negative of the world above, where her husband (against all odds) survived. Gyula pitied the woman for her irrational fantasies, pitied Agi for having such a mother. “She just can’t bear the truth,” he soothed, stroking Agi’s cheek.

  And yet here he is, dragged and hobbled, being carried deeper and deeper as if captive in someone else’s nightmare. They reach an open door, finally, and still draped over this stranger, he proceeds through it: -11. The hallway extends the length of a city block, at least. Door after door after door. Four at a time, men file off. It’s a dance, a measured courtly counting without music. A flat-nosed guard is in charge of doors. His keys rattle; locks unlock; locks lock. Rattle-rattle. He loves his keys. He hates these men. Cell 1108. You, you. Gyula’s new friend dumps him on a thin, uncovered mattress. Two men follow.

  “Welcome home, boys.”

  Keys rattle. Lock locks. “NO.”

  Gyula tries to push himself off the cot, but his knee buckles. “NO,” he screams again, as if he’s the only one condemned. As if anyone’s listening. “NONONONONO.”

  “Look at me.” The voice is stern, commanding, and in his face. It’s the man who carried him. “I am Molnar Dezso, but people call me Gombas. What’s your name?”

  Gyula swerves, veers, focuses on the face: ugly, deeply cratered, eyes black as a gypsy’s.

  “Look. You’re in prison, but you’re alive. You hear me? They haven’t finished you. Your name,” the man repeats, firmly this time.

  His name? What does it matter? He dropped it in the sewer, for Chrissake. They were eleven fucking storeys below ground and he’d never get out and if he never got out, Zsofi would never get out. A scream of terror gathers at the base of his skull, but the ugly face stays put.

  “Your name.” The man’s voice is a rope. It smacks him.

  “Gyula.” For one, two, three seconds, it’s true. “Gyula Farkas.” He is in a small, cold concrete cell, with this man and two others. The others stand; they, too, watch him. I am Gyula Farkas, and the world holds steady. I am Gyula Farkas, and the pain in his jaw when he says the words pins body and soul together.

  “Good to meet you, Gyula,” says Gombas. “We will look after each other in here.”

  Gyula nods, but he can’t breathe. The bare bulb in the ceiling pulses, erratic and accusing: You took the key, you idiot. You took the goddamn key.

  The first time his father pushed the wine rack aside and unlocked the hidden door was a few months before the revolution. He explained nothing at first, only motioned for Gyula to go first. Gyula still remembers the scurrying underground fear as he dropped to his knees and crawled into the dark. He felt the earth closing in and imagined he could hear the soft sift of dirt falling. And then his father was there beside him with his flashlight. A moment later, his father found the switch and the room lit up. The safe room was square, about eight feet by eight, the ceiling just high enough for Gyula to stand, its four walls lined with rows of wooden shelves stacked upon bricks. The shelves held all kinds of necessities, many of which hadn’t been seen in Budapest stores since before the war: canned goods—beans, ham, pickles, peas, peaches, sauerkraut; boxes of candles; stacks of fine white writing paper; rolls of rough grey toilet paper. At the centre of the room, directly below the lightbulb, was a small, cheap table—Gyula recognized it as the one that used to sit on their front porch—and a single chair. At the time, Gyula suspected his father must have his own reasons—smuggling, the most likely one—to create this safe, well-stocked room. He didn’t ask. Though his father didn’t explain why he’d suddenly decided to share his secret room with Gyula, the reason was pretty clear; Gyula’s politics were going to get him in trouble eventually. And Gyula felt a deep, uncomfortable gratitude for this man whose hypocrisy he despised.

  His father placed the key in the lock—a habit, obviously.

  At the other end of the room was another door. “I was about eight years old when I found the tunnel,” his father said, motioning to this second door. “No, not this one. I was on Gellert, running away from bullies. I squeezed myself into a crevice to hide and found myself in what I thought was a cave. I had no idea at the time how extensive, but I came back later with matches and candles.” His fingers tapped a can of condensed milk on the shelf, and he looked at that rather than meet his son’s gaze. “I spent hours underground, and not once did I see signs of anyone else. No one knows about it, Gyula. It’s why I had the house built here. I’m sure there are kilometres upon kilometres of tunnel under these hills. So far, I’ve found only the one entrance, but there must be more. There must be, or they would have been of no use to them.”

  “Them?”

  “Our ancestors, Gyula. The first Hungarians. The real, true Magyars.” He looked to his son now, daring him to contradict or scorn his version of history as he opened the other door, the door to the tunnel. “Where did they go when the Turks invaded? Did you never wonder? They came here. Underground. I think they lived inside these hills, maybe for decades, maybe longer. They preserved our language, our culture, our Christianity.”

  Gyula expected that the second door from the safe room would open onto a beautiful and vast underground cathedral or a well-scaffolded hall that stretched beyond what he could see. But the door opened onto a narrow passage no more than three feet wide, five feet high where he stood, which dwindled to probably just two feet high.

  “Through there, Gyula, right through that hole, a whole network of ancient tunnels. We just have to find the way in.”

  What was clear to Gyula was that his father was mad, delusional. Kilometres of tunnels? A thousand years old? But, at the same time, perhaps tunnelling in search of tunnels was no more or less insane than what his father did every day, which was to send men to Siberia and then come home to dinner with his family, make love to his wife, help his son with his math homework as if with a clear conscience and whole mind.

  His father turned the key in the first door, from safe room to the cellar, and again motioned for Gyula to go first. Once they were back in the cellar that had once seemed so normal, his father placed the key in his hand. It was preposterous: ornate, too big to carry comfortably in a pocket.

  “Door locks automatically,” his father said. “I keep the key here.” And he went to a corner of the cellar, lifted a stone from the wall. At his father’s nod, Gyula snugged the key in.

  They were on their way to the safe room when she was hit. He couldn’t blame himself for that; it was so random. They were running, there was gunfire. But they made it. Yes. They made it to his parents’ home, and he found the key in its hiding spot, and he opened the door with it. He lay her down on the floor. He covered her with his jacket. She was shivering. And then he lit a candle and he put a note beside Zsofi’s head. My dearest love, gone to find antiseptic and clean bandages. Don’t worry, you’re safe here. Try not to move too much. I’ll be right back. I promise. xxx.

  Did he put the key in his pocket or had he left it? He checks. It’s not in his pocket now, but it could have fallen out. To exit the safe room, he must have used the key to unlock the door. And then? He’d put it in his pocket. Had he? Or did he instead leave it in the inside lock, trusting that by the time he got back, she’d be conscious and open the door for him? He knows he didn’t put it back in its hiding spot. He has no memory of that. So he must have left it. He must have. But what if he hadn’t?

  “Let me out.”

  Gombas knows who Gyula is, one of the student leaders. Gombas was from the Workers’ Revolutionary Council. Before all this, he’d been a mechanic at the Csepel factory; he fixed the machines when they broke. At fifty, he’d never been married likely because of his face. It’s how he got the name Gombas—looked like he had mushrooms sprouting on it. No surprise, girls didn’t like to kiss it. What a painful time youth had been. But you’d think—at least, Gombas thought—that when he got older, it would be different. Everybody’s faces wrinkled and bumpe
d, women included, so he kept hoping maybe even just one woman would look on him and not find him ugly. But for reasons he never entirely understood, it just hadn’t worked out that way. Or maybe he just didn’t meet enough women. But he wouldn’t change places with Gyula right now, not for anything. His girl locked in a cellar on Rozsadomb bleeding to death, that was a hell of a thing for the mind to bear.

  He’d had to smack the kid, once, twice—on the cheek that wasn’t purple—just to beat back the panic. And then he got the story. He could tell the other two didn’t want to know. Both of them looking off into space, like the people sitting next to you on the bus pretending not to hear your wife scolding you. And fair enough. Why take on another man’s terror when they each had their own?

  “He can’t keep shrieking like that,” whispers one of them, the handsome one with the full head of shiny hair, Andras. Gyula’s asleep, thank God. Some respite.

  “If I was him, I’d be shrieking too,” murmurs the other one, Pavel.

  “Yeah, well, if he keeps it up, he’ll get us all in trouble.”

  “He’ll be better tomorrow,” Gombas asserts. He might be wrong, but why should he have to listen to a handsome man’s worries? And sometimes when you’ve got no choice but to keep living, you have to just say things like that. You muscle down your irritation, and you do what you can not to make things worse. The bulb in the ceiling goes dark. They could call it night, and it might be.

  “I have to talk to the guard.”

  The lightbulb has only just gone on, and the clanking in the corridor suggests breakfast. Andras shakes his head, looks at Gombas. What’d I tell you?

  “What do you want to say to the guard?” asks Gombas.

  “I was thinking he could get a message out for me.”

  “Right.” Gombas nods, pretending to consider it. “But, Gyula, right now the guard doesn’t know who you are, yeah? You call attention to yourself, and he realizes he’s got a member of the Revolutionary Council in his range, you’ll end up in interrogation. You understand?”

  That’s a whole other level of terror. Had the kid not even thought about it before now? By the look on his face, apparently not.

  Keys rattle. The door opens. A guard—not the flat-nosed one from yesterday but another, this one black-haired but equally plain, young, and blunt (do they all look like they just stepped off the farm?)—shoves two plates at Pavel, who’d stood up to take them, and then two more at Gombas. He closes the door and locks it.

  Gyula’s shaking, chest heaving, eyes fixed on the door. Gombas watches him.

  “Here. This looks like shit, but you need to eat.”

  Gyula doesn’t reply, doesn’t move, so Gombas plants himself in front of him, bends down so his face is on a level. “You’re okay, Gyula. You’re okay. You just need to eat. That’s all.”

  “GUARD.”

  Jesus Christ.

  “Shut. Up,” Andras shouts.

  Gyula’s trying to manoeuvre himself off the bed. The plate lands on the floor. What the hell?

  “GUARD.”

  In one step, Pavel’s reaching past Gombas to put a hand over Gyula’s mouth. Together, they hold him down on the bed.

  “If your girlfriend’s still alive, shouting at a guard isn’t going to help her.”

  Gyula bites into Pavel’s thumb.

  “Christ.” Pavel pulls back.

  “GUARD.”

  “For God’s sake. Your girlfriend’s dead, man.”

  In all the commotion, Andras hasn’t moved. He sits on his corner of the cot and tosses his comment over top of Gombas and Pavel. He ignores the looks from Pavel and Gombas, focuses only on Gyula, who stares, uncomprehending.

  “I’m sorry, but if she was bleeding, there’s no way.”

  “She’s not. She has food, water. I bound her wound.”

  The thing is, Andras thinks, the others are here because they were deluded into believing they could change the world, or change the Russians, which is all the same thing. He, on the other hand, is here for a totally different but equally stupid reason. He’d been at the border, almost across, and then at the very last minute he’d stopped. It was night. He crouched in a line at the edge of the woods with five others, waiting for a cloud to cover the moon. Across that field was Austria and freedom and a new life. Behind him was his world, everything he knew, his professional reputation, his nice-enough apartment, his local csarda, his language—every nuance of which he felt in the very creases of his soul. Across that field, he’d be nobody. Or he’d be shot. So that was it. When the others dove forward, blind and hopeful, racing over clotted frozen ground for their uncertain prize, he’d stayed put. And when the field lit up bright and sudden in the white glare of headlights, five dark figures dropped one after the other mid-flight, but not him. For him, instead, this ending: a single shit-bucket between four men. These three were willing to be deluded. He wasn’t. He never had been. It takes courage to tell the truth sometimes. Even if it wasn’t true, it was better this way. Better to think she was dead than to think of her dying.

  The kid’s still staring at him, half out of his mind. “She’s not dead. She’s not dead.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Gombas soothes. “Food, water, and air, all a human needs to live, right? She’s alive and for now, there’s nothing you can do except keep your strength up. You can’t let her down, right? So just sit, have a little bite of bread, that’s right. Just a little.”

  He doesn’t eat, but eventually he stops shaking. He turns so he’s facing the wall, wraps arms around his head, and tries not to see the pictures that swarm when he closes his eyes.

  There are too many hours in a day under a bare lightbulb in a room not big enough. They take turns walking the T formed by the two beds, hitting the wall and turning back. Gombas and Pavel talk about their ordinary, pre-revolutionary lives. They don’t discuss Gyula. Pavel was a gym teacher, it turns out. So that explains why he’s so fit, still, at forty-three. They don’t invite Andras to take part in their conversation, and he doesn’t try to join.

  Andras takes his turn walking, then tries jumping jacks at the foot of the beds—just enough room. When he’s done, Pavel stretches his body between the beds and does one hundred and seventy-five pushups, huffing his count. Gombas follows suit but only makes it to sixty.

  They try not to listen to Gyula, who mutters, incants, rocks. Which version of the safe room was he in—Zsofi dead or Zsofi alive? As long as he doesn’t know for sure which version is real, each is equally possible.

  The flat-nosed guard opens the door. “Good day, boys. It’s bucket time. Who wants shit duty?”

  Gombas volunteers. A chance to stretch his legs.

  He gets back. The bulb goes off. Night. Only one meal per day in here, apparently. What if they are forgotten? What if the Americans come and bomb the shit out of the Russians, and no one knows they’re here? Stop thinking, Gombas tells himself.

  Andras imagines food. Warm, crusty bread. Red, spicy goulash so rich the oil pools on the surface. Tiny, luscious pieces of beef. The meal he should have had the day he was arrested—Tanya always had a handle on black-market meat. That woman was worth everything he gave her. Don’t think about her. Don’t think about tits, ass, cleaving her. Don’t think.

  Pavel pictures the place on the ceiling where the lightbulb was. Eventually, it will come on again. Until then, he’ll fill that invisibility with some other gaze—God’s maybe. God. Really? Well, if you’re going to find religion, this would be the place to do it.

  Bulb goes on. Day Three. A black-haired guard comes. Gyula doesn’t stir. The guard leaves. The three men look at each other. Pavel shrugs. They eat what they’ve got. Gombas tries to get Gyula to eat his. When he refuses, they divvy up what’s on his plate.

  Hours pass. Maybe. No one has a watch. The arresting officers took them. They take turns on the floor—pushups, walking, jumping jacks. Pavel does situps on the cot. The shit bucket stinks, but no guard comes.

  Gyula final
ly stops knocking his head against the wall and rolls over onto his back. He pushes himself to sitting, then tries to lever himself off the bed. His leg is huge, ballooned. He stiffens against the pain. “Gombas? Bring me the bucket.”

  Andras pretends not to see as Gombas puts the bucket in place, then helps Gyula to stand. It takes both Pavel and Gombas to suspend him over the bucket from the armpits. When he’s done, they help him with his pants and ease him back onto the bed.

  “Can I take a look?” asks Pavel, gesturing to the leg.

  In his years as a gym teacher, Pavel had knocked displaced shoulders back into place, bound sprained ankles and wrists, splinted bones, and in the last few weeks, he’d helped out at the hospital. He learned a few things there: how to drain a wound, how to pincer a bullet out of muscle, how to hold a man to the table when there was no anesthetic to do the job. He took Gyula’s lack of response as a yes.

  Pavel puts a hand on the ankle first, then feels his way gent­ly up, eyes on Gyula’s face. When his fingers reach the knee, Gyula arches away.

  “Good thing you don’t have to go anywhere on that. Your kneecap’s popped right out. I can’t tell if anything’s shattered in there, but I can at least push the patella back in for you. You can’t heal with it like this.”

  Pavel has seen this look often over the last three weeks, this transfiguring fear as the whole person tries to retract from the body, from sensation, scuttling backward, inward, nowhere to go. The injured hated him in that moment, even if he was trying to do them good. They hate you, and then they feel better and they love you and their gratitude is deep.