Under Budapest

by Ailsa Kay

  “No,” said Gyula. “Leave it. I’m fine.”

  Pavel’s right hand rests just below the knee and he nods, affable, teacherly, understanding.

  “Well, all right then. Whatever you say.” He leans over, as though to push himself up. He doesn’t look away from Gyula’s eyes, not once. Left hand chops down as the right yanks the leg straight.

  A Scream.

  Zsofi wakes, takes the key from the table where he’d left it, unlocks the door, and walks out into bright day. She hobbles a bit, favouring her injured leg, but she’ll go home to her mother, who will bandage her, feed her, hide her.

  Zsofi finds the key where it’s fallen from the table and unlocks the door and crawls through it and up the stairs, and she leaves the house, and in the garden she stops for a rest. A passerby sees her, takes pity on her, washes her, clothes her, bandages her wound, feeds her, and then calls the police. Zsofi, you can’t assume everyone’s on your side. For two weeks, all of Hungary was with you, felt your fervour, marched, and fought beside you shoulder to shoulder. But that’s over now and everybody has to pick a side eventually.

  Zsofi wakes and there is no key. Her leg is festering. She’s feverish, and those blue eyes flash with terror. Gyula? Why did you bury me, Gyula?

  Morning and the flat-nosed guard comes with breakfast. He has no name that anyone knows. He’s square-faced, straw-haired, dull-eyed.

  “How you doing today, boys? Holding up okay?”

  Gombas and Pavel play along. “What’s on the menu? No, don’t tell me. Surprise soup?”

  “How did you guess? Chef’s special.”

  “Excuse me, guard. My girlfriend is locked in the cellar of my parents’ house, 34 Verhalom, Rozsadomb. If you get her out, I promise, the house is yours.”

  Three prisoners bow heads to plates, pretending to have no interest in the answer. They swallow the watery soup, the rotting vegetables. The guard pauses. The dense, spicy sausage smell of his breath fills the cell. His uniform is rumpled and his hair greasy, but in the guard’s dull eyes, Gyula sees the bright feather-flash of a bluebird in a tussled green tree. He wants what Gyula promises. Who wouldn’t? He likely lives in a shared apartment in a dirty, narrow part of Pest, likely shares a bathroom with five others, likely hates this life.

  “You think I’m stupid?” says the guard finally.

  The door clangs shut. Keys rattle. Lock locks.

  As soon as the guard’s gone, Gombas dashes for the bucket. Explosive, spattering release. Hot and rich, the stench rises moistly, smothering. If he could have held it in, he would have, but when nature calls…It’s the food they give them. Rancid fat, onions starting to turn. God, they’d suffocate in here. Another explosion. Spatter.

  “Sorry about this,” he mutters. How could he not apologize? Even if apologizing forced him to own this stinking failure of the body. Better to apologize than to feel only how utterly, unredeemably disgusting he is. Apology at least is manly. Is the social part of man. Another cramp. Please, God, let it be the last. Let this pass. Let him stand, put a lid on it, and move away from the mess he’s made.

  Andras and Pavel put sleeves to nose, breathing through mouths.

  “Are you an idiot?” says Andras through his sleeve. “You’re a prisoner and an enemy of the state. Even if you ever owned that house, you don’t anymore. You think a guard wouldn’t figure that out?”

  Fuckyou.

  “What’s more, he could report you for trying to bribe him. And if he even believes you, he could take your information to the AVO, get Zsofi arrested.”

  Fuckyou. Fuckyou. Fuckyou.

  Next morning, flat-nosed guard is back. “How you doing today, boys? Holding up okay?”

  Gombas and Pavel play along. “What’s on the menu? No, don’t tell me. Surprise soup?”

  “How did you guess? Chef’s special.”

  “I have information on a very valuable enemy of the state,” Gyula breaks in.

  This was a good plan. A much better plan. Thank you, Andras.

  The happy guard swivels his bland, imperturbable face toward Gyula. Good cheer hovers, stranded.

  “She murdered an AVO, and I can tell you where she’s hiding.”

  “Okay.” Affable. Not insulting. Not anything.

  “What do you mean ‘okay’? Do you want it or no?”

  “Sure. Sure, I want the information.”

  “Her name is Zsofi Teglas. She’s at 34 Verhalom, Rozsa­domb. There’s a safe room off the cellar.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” says happy guard and turns to go.

  “So are you going to arrest her?”

  “I’m a guard, not police.”

  “But you’re not listening. You could use this information.”

  “No. You listen to me. I’m just doing my job here, and trying not to be an asshole.”

  “But you are an asshole. By definition you are an asshole: you’re a fucking prison guard.” Gyula’s shouting.

  Good cheer is gone. Vanished. Never existed.

  One step, two. The guard grabs the bucket, in one move overturns it on Gyula’s head. Yesterday’s shit runs down Gyula’s face. It catches in his eyelashes and ears, on his unshaven cheek.

  “By definition,” says the guard. He’s not laughing.

  Gombas strips Gyula’s shirt off and uses it to mop the boy dry as best he can. Shit smears, stinks. He gets him to drop his head over the side of the bed and pours what’s left of the day’s drinking water over his hair. With his fingers, he combs out the clots. Throughout, Gyula shakes, teeth chattering. It’s cold in here, but it’s not the cold that’s doing this. No one speaks. Even Andras keeps his mouth shut.

  When he’s as clean as he’s going to get, Gombas helps Gyula’s legs up onto the bed and Gyula curls as best he can around himself, pulls Gombas’s coat over his head. The coat is months of woolly sweat, a hole in the earth, an armpit. If he bites his lip hard enough, he can taste his own blood: salt and safety, a hurt that can’t hurt him.

  He wrote the note. Pen scratched over paper. He put it by her head, at first, where she’d see it when she opened her eyes. But no, that’s not good enough. He folded the paper. He put it in her hand so she would feel it even before opening her eyes. And he turned the key in the lock to open the door. Yes, he can get this far, to the turn of the preposterously heavy key, the tumble of the lock, the pressure of hurry, in his chest, the fear. She looked so pale. The hurry, the hurry. Have to get something for that wound, maybe find a doctor, maybe find someone, someone to help him. Go upstairs. It still smells. Don’t look into the living room where the bodies of his parents remain where they’d fallen, killed by the revolution. Don’t look. Get a coat from the closet. Disguise. Hurry.

  Don’t forget the key, Gyula. Don’t forget the key.

  Where did he leave it? Why had he not put it, with the letter, heavy and reassuring, in his lover’s hand? Why could he not remember?

  He must have dozed off. He wakes coughing. Gombas is at his side, offering him water. He props himself up on his elbow to take it. It must be night because the light is off. The water is good. He slurps, loses some down his cheek. He stops coughing, but sleep is gone. How many minutes until the sun gets turned on?

  Now. Sun is on. Gyula doesn’t eat his breakfast. He doesn’t sit up. He lies, facing the wall, shaking.

  “If he doesn’t want it, we should share it,” says Andras.

  It’s all Gombas can do not to get up and stomp his heel right into that shiny, arrogant face. “He’ll eat it.”

  The prisoners have lost their appetite for conversation. They take turns doing their jumping jacks, pushups, situps. The cell reeks of their sweat, but then as soon as they sit down, they’re cold again. Gyula coughs.

  He better not be getting sick, is what they’re all thinking. One man gets sick, we all go down.

  He coughs again.

  It doesn’t sound too bad. Could be just a cold.

  Pavel does some marching on the spot, knees lifting,
feet stamping. Andras does more pushups so he doesn’t have to look at their faces.

  The cough hurts Gyula’s lungs and the convulsion makes everything else hurt. When he tries not to cough, he only coughs harder.

  The day turns off. Gyula hacks and hacks. The bed shakes. Gyula’s body is so hot in the middle of the night that Gombas dreams of firesides.

  The bulb sizzles. Morning.

  Flat-nosed guard delivers breakfast. Casts one look at Gyula, huddled under Gombas’s coat. Says nothing.

  The man’s obviously ashamed, as he should be. False cheer is gone. Can’t meet anyone’s eyes. That’s not good. An ashamed man is dangerous, mean, cornered. You have to be nice, nudge him back into humanity. And so Gombas says, amicably, “Got a bit of an attitude, this kid.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  From under the coat, Gyula hacks and hacks. His skinny form shakes the bed.

  “It’s okay. He’ll learn.”

  Gombas doesn’t even try to get Gyula to eat. The three men share the boy’s food without saying a word about it. Have they given up on him? Given up carrying him? They listen to his coughs and they spoon the foul stuff into their mouths, and they go on.

  He takes the key from the lock in the door. He feels its weight in his palm, which is stiff with her drying blood. He had managed to staunch the flow with the tourniquet. Thank God he’d learned that trick. Well, thank you, Russians, for youth camp. He has the key in his hand. He looks down. He’s wearing the same coat he’s worn for the three weeks of revolution and it shows: one arm shredded from when he squeezed through a hole in the wall, the buttons gone, bloodstain on the front where a dying man had landed on him. He covers her with this coat because she’s shivering. Find a new coat. Borrow your father’s coat. Go upstairs. Go upstairs, though you know what you’ll find because the revolutionaries who shot your parents were so proud of themselves when they returned to the dorm that night. They’d killed a true Stalinist. How could he be responsible for that?

  He put his coat over Zsofi. He knows this. But was the key in the pocket of that coat? He has no memory of putting it back in its hiding place. No memory of walking up the stairs. He saw his mother’s stockinged legs, at odd angles as if she’d fallen from a run. The soles of her crocheted slippers looked tatty. He remembers his mother’s slippers but not where he put the key?

  He coughs.

  He’s so deep inside his memory, he almost misses it: a responding cough. And not from inside the cell, not a manly cough. No. Definitely a woman’s cough.

  He holds his breath. Has he lost his mind? Is he delusional? Is he still here? Still real? His body still reeks, still hurts. So yes, he’s here. A moment later, he coughs again. And this time there’s no question: the other cough is in answer to his. So he coughs twice. In reply: two coughs. The same timing. Cough-pause-cough from the other side of that door.

  He tries it again: cough-cough-pause-cough.

  In response: cough-cough-pause-cough.

  He sits up. Gombas’s jacket falls from his shoulders. Clumsily, he levers himself off the bed, using Pavel’s shoulder as balance. He presses himself against the door.

  Zsofi.

  When he sees the flat-nosed guard the next morning, Gyula says nothing. Maybe Zsofi was here because the guard did file a report. Maybe it is coincidence. He isn’t willing to bet either way just yet and he has no inclination to be grateful.

  Time is now divided, split into two halves: pre- and post-cough. Day of first cough is Day One. Every night after that, he goes to sleep with a feeling of anticipation he hasn’t felt since the days when he used to run to Agi on Margit Island. Eventually, another cough will come. Isn’t it marvellous that day comes after a night, even in here? And the door, when you look at it, is only a door. And this room provides enough space, after all, for four men to live. The lightbulb glares down. The slops arrive. It’s all evidence, of a sort, that there is a world out there. If there were no outside, there would be no electricity, no food. On the other side of that door are more prisoners. Food is made and carried and cigarettes are smoked and Zsofi carries her shit bucket to the latrine to empty. And if there’s an outside—which, without direct sensory evidence you just have to believe in—then why couldn’t Zsofi be part of that outside?

  So when he wakes, he does his best to tidy himself. He combs his hair with his fingers. He spits into his shirttail and rubs at his face. As if she’s going to notice. This is not a date, but it feels like it. He almost laughs at himself. He brushes his teeth with his index finger. He pisses and he’s ready. He would put all his love into this cough, all his longing, his devotion, the memory of their sex.

  Gyula stands by the door like a suitor: hands behind his back, eyes facing the door as if he can see through it. Of course, there’s no knowing if it’s Zsofi. It could be someone else, but somehow he’s certain. He just knows, the way a lover knows. When he hears the guard’s keys, and Zsofi’s approaching step, as he concentrates on the metal door, it’s as if he can see her. There she is, beautiful despite everything. Should he cough first or wait for her? He is the suitor. Of course he should go first. He breathes in. Holds it. When she’s right in front of him—yes, he can see her—he coughs. And in quick return, two short coughs. Two.

  He grips his palms before him as though in prayer. She’s understood. And she still loves him.

  But wait. It’s not over. After she empties her bucket, she’ll come back. He counts the seconds to the return of her step, the guard’s jangling. This time she should be the first. Will she know this?

  Aha. She does. He nearly slaps the door in sheer glee. But no, Gyula, contain yourself. Don’t give her away. Cough sweetly, so that only she can hear. Zsofi was never one for self-restraint, but now they will both be careful because this is too thin a thread to yank.

  Under the pads of his fingers, unbudging cold metal. He is a man. It is a door. The other side of it, the woman he loves moves away.

  Stay, stay, fragile happiness. Don’t leave me. Not just yet.

  How will he bear a whole day, or two, or three, or four without her? Or, how can he do anything other than bear it? How could they live like this, so close and yet unable to talk or touch, or look? A love expressed in phlegm: is this it? Is this to be their lot? But better than what he feared. Oh yes, better by a trillion times than what he feared.

  Gyula tries to hold on to joy, tries with his clumsy broken fingers not to crush it, to palpate it gently, to keep it for himself.

  Gombas watches this spidery young man clinging to the door, coughing tenderly as a poem.

  None of them interferes.

  If he wants to believe that his lover is here, just the other side of that door, and that she has chosen to contact him in a Morse code of coughs, let him. Why couldn’t it be true? It is about as plausible as anything else these days—plausible as revolution, as public burnings on Andrassy Ut, as being locked in here. Sure. Why not? And true or not, it keeps him quiet. The racking cough is gone. He is sleeping through the night. He’s stopped making trouble with the guard. Yes, this is fine.

  Three days, and then a cough. Fifteen minutes, another cough. Then a day, a day, a day, Zsofi day. No other days have names.

  A cough. Return cough. A cough. Return sneeze.

  It makes him laugh. Variety: the spice of love.

  Another day. He humbly waits. He prays, even. What’s the point of atheism when you’re locked in a room? It becomes as ludicrous as belief.

  From the other side, a cough. Pause. Two coughs.

  My love. He presses palms and forehead to the door. She’s there. Inches away.

  “What makes you so sure it’s her?” asks Andras.

  Gombas and Pavel glare, but really, aren’t they wondering the same thing? How is it possible that a man can be persuaded by a cough? More than that, how can he be happy?

  Gyula goes back to his spot on the bed. It’s getting easier to move. Bit by bit, the pain in his knee is receding. That’s love’s ef
fect. One day, scientists will prove that men in love fare better in battle because their love protects them. It makes them stronger and fills them with hope.

  “I just know.”

  Andras scratches his beard. He hates facial hair, itchy and animal.

  “Why don’t you ask the guard?”

  Ask the guard? Open his mouth, his heart, to the guard?

  Clearly, Andras is just trying to get a rise out of him. For what? Entertainment? Well, it won’t work.

  “I mean, honestly, for all you know you’re coughing at an old, axe-faced peasant. You must want to know. I mean, really know.”

  “Leave him alone, Andras,” Pavel cautions.

  “You should get him to open up the door when she coughs. And then you could lay eyes on her again. Don’t you want to see her?”

  Gyula lies down, turns his back on Andras. He knows it’s her. She’s alive, and for now that’s enough.

  Days without a cough. More days than usual. Is she sick? Has there been an accident? Gyula tries to pace, but the others stop him. “There’s no room,” says Pavel. “Do some situps or something.” But he’s so worried and his worry chases him like slavering dog and yet there’s nowhere to go.

  And then, finally, after ten days, he hears the guard’s clomping boots and, beside them, the girlish steps. And then, three loud hard coughs, one after the other: COUGHCOUGHCOUGH.

  Gyula starts up, hugely grinning, but before he can reply, Andras starts banging.

  “Guard. Guard, open up. We have an emergency in here.”

  “What’s going on in there?” A hurried jangle of keys.

  “No.” Gyula leaps. He lands on Andras, smacks his head slam into the edge of the door as it is thrust in. His body goes slack so suddenly.

  Zsofi, it wasn’t you. Another girl, your age, blue-eyed, like you, staring at me the way I stared at her. Each of us the death of the other’s hope. I wanted to die. It is too hard, this pain. I didn’t mean to leave you. Please don’t be scared, Zsofi. I’ll make it right.

  I might be a prisoner, but I’m an engineer and if I can’t build up, I’ll build down. You remember how buildings reflect in the Duna? If you look at it from the bridge, it’s like there’s a whole world down there, upside down. When I was little, I imagined living in the Duna. Shimmering windows open into watery rooms. Stairs spiral deeper and deeper, but nothing goes wrong and no one ever falls.