by Ailsa Kay
“He deserves to know.”
Really? The man wants to know what happened to his boy on that pitched, rocky, and heretical slope at the ass end of a Budapest night? In what way is this Tibor’s responsibility? He’s just so fucking tired he can hardly get through his day, never mind take care of this.
“It won’t help,” he says finally, tersely.
The rain pelts against the windows. They stare at each other across the kitchen in the warm, ordinary house that has been Agnes’s own, alone, for nearly five years now. Here is her son, her only child. He stands with the dishtowel in his hands, waiting for her to concede. She usually does concede, not because she believes him, but because he needs it so badly. Sometimes, in moments like these, she wonders, does she love this son of hers? And the answer is in her bones and in the emptiness at her centre that he once filled, as she and Zsofi had once filled the emptiness at Margit’s centre. She doesn’t believe in unconditional love, but she does believe in this, this love that happens without her permission, that slides beneath her better judgment. When Agnes’s father had disappeared, her mother crumpled up whatever love she had left, pressed it into something that allowed nothing in, a sharp bitterness that she nurtured. That substitution too likely happens without permission. While Agnes created a kind of moderate happiness here, found a man to love, made this son with him, her mother had filled the holes in her life with lists of losses. Agnes was not her mother. This was a relief. But neither was she her son.
“Come, Anyu,”—the diminutive, he hardly ever uses it—“let’s look at those photos.” And he leans over, puts his hand gently on hers. His father used to do exactly this when it was time to change the subject.
Everything is all ready to go in the basement office: two desk chairs positioned in front of the computer. They sit, side by side, stiffly upright. She clicks play.
Disconcertingly, the first photo is of Tibor on the airplane, fast asleep, book open on his lap, mouth slightly ajar. “Ha,” he says. And he has a visceral, somehow embarrassing sense of how much she loves him. And then, Budapest. Lights spangle the Danube at night and midday the parliament shines sugar white. The chain bridge spans, the castle imposes. Trees in the cemetery weep. It’s a beautiful city and there is Gellert Hegy, but from a safe distance. There is an old building. Another old building. A new building.
In Vienna, as they visited museums and pastry shops, it was as if Budapest had never happened. As if by tacit agreement, she didn’t speak of Gyula or her missing sister, and he didn’t speak of the boy’s head or Detective Sarkady. It was easier that way. It was bearable. They spent a fairly pleasant week touristing in Austria. He changed their flights, and they flew home from Vienna without a hitch. The Budapest police, it appeared, weren’t looking for him. Apparently, they didn’t need his testimony. Apparently, he was not being framed. He was both relieved and chastened by this realization.
Now, as the image shifts, strangely, to what seems like the entrance to a cellar, he says, “Who was Gyula, in 1956?”
“Gyula?” She shrugs. “He was any boy, a good liar. Sweet. He believed in his revolution.”
“But you didn’t?”
On the screen their hotel, modern and innocent, pots of blooming pink at the entrance.
“For a day, maybe. For a day or two, I did.”
She juts a chin at the screen: Margit Hid, yellow streetcars jaunting across it. “The first day of the revolution, we marched across that bridge. I was there.”
The next photo: the fountain in Szabadsag Ter that comes up out of the pavement in four walls of water, then suddenly sinks. “Zsofi was joking with the men in the tanks. Flirting, more likely. No one thought they’d fire.”
The wide boulevard of the Korut, bisected by the tram tracks, lined with imposing, nineteenth-century buildings in grey and yellow and green. On one, the pilasters lifting the corner balcony are Zeus, or some other strong, bearded God who holds things together. “I saw a man hung from his ankles at that corner. AVO. A woman set his hair on fire.”
Rows of cakes under glass. “That café was always busy, even when there was no coffee and no eggs for cake.”
The photos slide. Agnes narrates. And it helps with that feeling that she’d been living with since Budapest, the feeling that she was two people: one, Agi, the lover of Gyula and sister of Zsofi, and two, Mrs. Agnes Roland, inside this tidy bungalow enclosed in a green lawn, encircled by wide asphalt road. How impossible. How utterly impossible, to live a life so decisively divided.
She’d believed that in Budapest she would bridge it. She thought she would find the tunnels, and in this act, this foolish act of belief, she would somehow across the span of years and politics recover the girls they used to be. Such beautiful, such difficult, such girls they’d been. Every year, looking at long-limbed, glossy-haired, smooth teenaged Canadians, she’d thought, I was that young once. And every year, it became more remarkable. That young? That young, they had been each other’s safety. The feel of those skinny, childish arms around each other, Zsofi’s shoulder blades just under the surface, the strength of that wrap.
Decisively divided only because—all because—faced with her sister’s conceited, immature, unfounded, and smug claim to a love that should have been her own—that had been her own—she’d thought, Fine. You think love will save you? Learn the hard way.
When she knew, she knew, that if she’d kept talking, Zsofi would have come round. She always did. Eventually, the posturing would have dropped, reality would have penetrated, the utter and terrifying futility of a teenaged girl standing up to Soviet tanks. Agi could have—should have—forced the issue, argued longer, made her understand, but she didn’t because she was mad. Mad-jealous, mad the way only a sister can make you mad. Making that dash across the road, through the forest with so many other frightened souls she’d been fuelled not by desire for freedom but by fury. Furious with Gyula, with Zsofi, with her mother. They had put her in this position. They had left her to do this alone. That injury, that resentment had propelled her, had filled her lungs and pushed at her back like a mob. The colour of resentment is not red but violet as bruises, and it smells of others’ sweat.
Thanks to two angers—Zsofi’s hot, hormonal, and jealous, and Agi’s foul, spiteful, and dark—one sister had been swallowed by war as the other stumbled to freedom. And Agnes had lived with that while raising this child. She’d felt, in the gestures that were her mother’s, in her lovemaking with a husband who was not Gyula, in laughter she did not share with Zsofi, the incommensurability of their fates, and the irredeemably locked door of the past. She had left. She was no longer that girl. No one here called her Agi. And while she sometimes tried to reason with her past—it would not have been better for anyone had she stayed; Zsofi would still have disappeared, imprisoned or killed; Gyula would still have been arrested—how could it have turned out any differently for a murderer and a revolutionary?—she remembers her anger and she despises her stupid young self.
Perhaps Zsofi had escaped with Dorottya to Vienna, only to suffer a more ordinary violent death—hit by a car, caught in a house fire, drowned in a boating accident, strangled by a boyfriend that she, Agnes, had never met. Or maybe Dorottya had the wrong Zsofi. Maybe Agnes’s Zsofi had been shot by the Russians along with dozens of others, her body tipped anonymous into the Duna, the floor of which must surely be thick with bones. Maybe she died of a gunshot wound on the street, was buried in a park, the grave unmarked. There were as many ways to die as to live, no doubt, and some secrets are never known, but what Agnes knew, what she had always known, was that Zsofi was dead. How it happened, when it happened, who did it—all these questions were inconsequential, in the end. Zsofi had been gone for more than fifty years. She had only lived sixteen. At some point, the vacant mass of unlived life outweighs the lived. She was a child, she’d died a child, and Agi had gone on.
“There is the building where we lived,” she says. “That day that Zsofi killed the man, we were fighting. A
bout Gyula, if you can believe it.”
This is more than his mother has ever shared with him. She did all this, went to these places, revisited old terrors, all the while taking pictures like any tourist in walking shoes. He wouldn’t have expected this of her, somehow, this directed and purposeful retracing of steps.
The field by the university. “Rebel stronghold,” she says, and it sounds medieval.
As Tibor leaves, he says thank you. “Thank you, Anyu. Csokolom.” And she knows he is, truly, thankful and that he would like to say more but doesn’t know how because after all he is her son, and she is his mother, and this is the best they can do.
At 4:00 a.m., as usual, he’s awake. He hauls himself from bed to desk, flicks on his desk lamp, jabs the computer on. He opens his unfinished lecture. And he writes:
My mother lost her sister during the revolution. She doesn’t know what happened to her. The sister simply disappeared. As happens in any war, some victims are never accounted for. My mother also believes, along with many other Hungarians who lived through first the war and then the revolution, that the Germans, and then the Soviets after them, constructed a network of tunnels deep under Budapest. In the period of Soviet occupation, Hungarians thought that the party bosses had stores of luxury foods down there, that people were imprisoned deep underground, that the building of the subway, which halted before the revolution, was only a pretence, a grand entranceway to a parallel, underground, secret city.
He has never, in a lecture or at a conference, or in a published paper, spoken of his mother’s experiences of Budapest. Only now does this strike him as odd.
He remembers when he first realized that she must have emigrated in 1956. “You stood up to Stalinism,” he enthused. He must have just taken his first class in Eastern European history.
“What do you study? Stalin was dead by 1956.”
The revolutionary taking of Communist Headquarters had been documented in Life Magazine, which he pored over at the university library. Black-and-white photographs of the violence, a blond uniformed man, maybe AVO, his head launched back with the force of a revolutionary bullet. Faced with these photos, Tibor realized he had to reconsider everything he thought he knew about his mother—and he’d made his decision, then, that he would figure out what happened during those brief weeks of freedom. This was how he thought of it at the time. He, Tibor Roland, was connected in the first person to these brave young men and women who’d fought and lost. He now understood that these events shaped not only his mother—and that bowl of silence she carried imperturbably through all the rooms of her life—but his own past, his self. He was a child of these circumscribed facts, of all she’d left behind. And he felt, well, he felt that it added something to him. Not mystery, not quite, but something.
“But Stalin-ism, Mom.”
“Ism did not drive the tanks.”
“So you fled when the tanks came in.”
“I left,” she corrected as she sliced an apple or folded a tea towel. He can’t remember a conversation with his mother when she wasn’t also doing something else. She pours cream into the chicken paprikas, or polishes the table with lemon oil, or takes a sharp knife to the crusty accumulation between kitchen sink and counter as if there was not enough time in her day to simply talk.
“I walked across the Austrian border with dozens of others. There were Red Cross trucks waiting for us on the other side. And that was that. So”—brushing crumbs from the table—“I have no revolution stories.”
“But what about before you left?”
On her gleaming table, he opened the folder he’d brought with him: photocopies of images from the November 1956 Life Magazine.
She folded the damp cloth in her gloved hands. She wiped the seat of the vinyl chair. She hardly glanced at the photo of that blond man hauled out, blood streaming.
“I wasn’t there,” she said. “I had nothing to do with that.” Removing yellow gloves, placing them neatly over the side of the sink, parallel with the blue J Cloth—as if such precision mattered.
He asked her so many questions, that time and others, and rather than answer she just busied herself around them not because she wasn’t there, he now realized, but because she was, if not at Koztarsasag, then other places. She’d seen a man hung by his ankles and burned. He’d somehow failed to imagine this.
It’s hard when reading the past to remember that in the middle of war, the survivors don’t know they will survive and no one knows which side will win. From the distance of now, it seems the winners and survivors are protected from the start, tethered already to a future safely assured. As a historian, he should know better. He writes:
Here are two witness accounts of the events in Koztarsasag Ter the day that Life Magazine so famously photo-documented. The first is from a revolutionary leader:
I was with a group of revolutionaries who captured an AVO secret policeman. The others wanted to kill the man, but I only wanted to interrogate him. I’d learned that underneath the Communist Headquarters, which bordered Koztarsasag Ter, was a secret prison. Arrested students were being held there. As we stood there debating the fate of this secret policeman, I felt pounding coming from underground. The prisoners were right there. Right under our feet. Before I could take the AVO away for interrogation, another revolutionary struck the man with his rifle barrel so hard that the man’s skull burst, smattering us all with his brains.
The second account comes from an architect involved in the building of the Communist Headquarters who insists the crowd of revolutionaries in Koztarsasag were all seized by some kind of mass hallucination.
These people said they could hear sounds from buried prisoners. When even bulldozers couldn’t unearth the secret prison, the revolutionaries sent a message over the radio, asking for anyone who knew anything about the prison to call the radio station. One of my colleagues called in to report that our firm designed the building, so a soldier came to my office requesting information. I reviewed all the building plans of the Headquarters. There was no prison. I called the original architect and engineer, and they agreed with me: there was no secret underground prison. There never had been.
No resonance imaging has ever shown any evidence of the tunnels’ existence. And so the tunnels remain a mystery, riddling the modern post-Soviet city. It’s tempting to call them an urban myth, born of wartime terrors. And yet . . .
Tibor looks up. The sun is still hours from rising, but the city radiates its own bruised yellow glow. And yet?
And yet he knows because he was there, that there are tunnels under Budapest, deep holes in the surface where the murdered go.
The woman who pours his double-double looks Ethiopian. Tibor invests his “thank you” with extra special warmth. I see you. That’s what his thank you says: I recognize that you’re worth more than this. Half his brain is making these reflexive, habitual social moves. The other half hates himself, so he stops.
He chooses a table at the window facing onto Davenport, as far from other customers as possible. Hagy was the one who suggested this Tim Hortons on the side of a busy main artery into town. At three, cars sit bumper to bumper waiting for the light to change and dirty March snow wetly falls.
Tibor doesn’t want to be here. He wants to be anywhere but here. But here’s the thing: sometimes, at night or during the day, some random, sharp-cornered memory of Budapest forces its way up—of Gellert’s night slope, of Detective Sarkady, of that panicked dash from the embassy over ice, his mother’s fall, the obscene head—and he has to stand or do pushups or walk to the store or drink till he finally sleeps. But there is no way to dodge the sharp soreness that has insinuated itself like a splinter in a softly willing region of his brain because he is the witness and if he walks away, he will still be the witness, and the murdered may or may not stay buried, but he will still be the witness and the murderer may or may not go free, but he will still be the witness because the witness remains and this is his shame.
He knows this now.
>
The man who enters is similar to the one on the news but shorter. On the TV cameras, his shoulders and grief had seemed to fill the screen. In person, he no longer fully inhabits himself. His black leather bomber inflates a less stocky build. His jeans bag. At the door, he pauses and looks around. He strains with the effort of normalcy, hands shoved in pockets, shoulders thrown back with habitual confidence, but as his scanning eyes finally land on Tibor, he looks like a man willing his knees not to give.
Somehow he walks. Calmly, he takes his seat in front of Tibor. He folds his broad hands on the table. He looks straight into Tibor’s face. And he waits.
Under
Gyula’s spade hits rock. Get under, thrust it out. Soil crumbles. Should be flooded down here, but it’s not. It’s dry. It’s dry because it has a roof and walls and they’re waterproof. So the tunnel is waterproof. He’s sweating. Take the coat off. That woman upstairs is finally quiet, her yapping and pounding done. It takes time for people to accept their fates, and then they do and there’s just silence. His throat is dry from the dust and he wants water, but why should he be so kind to himself? His muscles will give him hell for days and his conscience maybe too for the woman upstairs who so kindly let him in, but this is nothing. Hell is nothing. He’s been there once before and he survived. Fucking Laci Bekes. His spade goes deep. He hefts it out. To forge Zsofi’s handwriting? To show him the cellar and this goddamn room, to treat Gyula Farkas like he’s some doddery, sentimental old man, all the time pretending to be respectful, pretending to have some fucking message from the dead. To forge it? No, Laci Bekes does not get to walk away from this. Not from this. Laci Bekes has seen him on his knees, on his goddamn knees at this pile of earth. Well, very soon that piece of shit will be on his knees, begging for mercy at the top of Gellert Hegy. Each time Gyula rams his shovel into earth, he feels the shock of contact travel up his arm and into his shoulder. He used to think of Zsofi Teglas every day. In prison, he thought of nothing else. Locked underground without another human voice for months, he had only his guilt and his love. One had to win out. On his release, he didn’t come back to this house, didn’t come knocking on the door, demanding entrance to the cellar. He didn’t look for her because it no longer mattered. He was not the same Gyula. Underground, he lived without light. He ate whatever crawled on him. He thought he was dead, but when he felt his own urine hot against his thigh knew he was alive, and forgotten. It is not possible to emerge from that darkness intact. In the end, here’s all he knows: people hate and people die. Some are set on fire. Some have their beating hearts dug out. Some are tortured until there is nothing left of the human inside. Some are buried alive. The end doesn’t matter. Gyula Farkas survived because he is a survivor. He survived because surviving is all that remains. And that doesn’t bear thinking about either.