Strangers in Budapest

by Jessica Keener

  “Did Ivan come?” she asked, her voice strong. Steady.

  “Yes. He did. Yesterday.”

  “Good. How are you managing the heat? The paper said it was almost one hundred there. Can’t you buy an air conditioner?”

  “I don’t like them. They stuff up my sinuses.”

  “Dad, that’s ridiculous. You can take something for that. That kind of heat is debilitating. It’s dangerous for someone your age.” Nan was a surgical nurse, had seen the worst—head injuries, fractured spines, blood, guts.

  “I appreciate your concern. How about a pill to find your sister’s killer?”

  “Are we having a conversation? You sound tired.”

  “Did you hear from him?”

  “No.” She sighed. “I seriously doubt he will contact me again. I’ll call you if he does. You know I will.”

  “He’ll write again. His conscience will do him in. That’s how it is with these types. Time is their enemy.”

  “We’ve been over this. I don’t think that’s going to happen, Dad. You told him to stay away, remember?”

  Again she spoke a painful truth, and it silenced him.

  Get the fuck out of my house, he had said to Howard after the funeral. Howard, who was tall and lean as a vaulting pole, and ten years older than Deborah, bowed to him, spoke politely, and said, “Sorry I’ve upset you,” on his way out the door. Edward hadn’t heard from or seen him since. How many times had he been over this in his mind? Too many. He knew that. He wasn’t insane. But he didn’t understand that what he said to Howard was the final straw for Sylvia. That she couldn’t take it anymore. That she couldn’t or wouldn’t put up with his mouthing off anymore. That she had lost the will to fight. How many months ago now?

  “Christ! What a stupid fool I am!” he said aloud to the fan, and to the heat and the dusty sunlight that came through gaps in the window shades, and to his surviving daughter on the phone four thousand miles away.

  “Dad, give yourself a few more weeks, and then will you let this go? She’s gone.”

  “No. I won’t. Not in my lifetime.”

  “You can’t prove anything. There’s no evidence.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Nan sighed. “Listen, I called to tell you someone’s interested in your house.”

  “Interested or ready to write a check?”

  “It’s a couple with two children. They’re coming back to look again.”

  He got on a plane to Budapest before the realtor put the For Sale sign in the yard. He didn’t want to see it. Instead, Nan took care of the details. Her enormous strength surprised him. All those years of worry and fretting about Deborah while Nan carried on. She had his business sense. A solid head on her shoulders. He pictured Nan sitting at her kitchen table. Pale face, dark eyes, hair short as a boy’s crew cut. The smell of low tide a few blocks from where she lived in a two-family house that she and her partner, Patricia, bought as an investment. He saw her wearing a loosely fitting man-tailored shirt to cover her large breasts, breasts like her mother’s, his Sylvia. Sylvia dead four months after Deborah. Three months, three weeks, three hours. What difference did any of it make? Time was laughing at him.

  “Dad? Are you listening?” Nan, the practical one, the opposite of Deborah, whose voice used to rattle with emotion.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m coming to see you. I’ve booked a flight after Labor Day. Mark it down. Don’t tell me not to. I’ve made arrangements at work.”

  “You’ll have to stay in a hotel. There’s no room here.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “You won’t change my mind about leaving.”

  “No kidding. Like changing rock to water. Did it ever occur to you that I may want to see my father? I’m your daughter and I’m alive.”

  Her words punched him in the throat. She was right. In the silence of that truth they both didn’t say anything. He knew he should apologize. What had he done? He looked across the living room at his easel, his paintbrushes, his pile of London Times on the floor under the window, a smaller stack of the Budapest Reporter.

  “I’m sorry, Nan. It will be good to see you. How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you for asking. Weather’s hot here, too. I’ll call you tomorrow, Dad.”

  He put his cell phone back on the table. She was a good, solid girl. He didn’t worry about her. Never had. He stood and waited for his body to balance, then scuffed across the parquet floor to the kitchen for something to eat. In the refrigerator, he had a large block of cheese and salami. He made a sandwich and ate it standing at the counter.

  When he told Nan he was moving to Budapest, she called the chief of medicine at her hospital and got a referral for a young physician in Budapest who practiced out of a house in the hills. So far he hadn’t needed him. As long as he stuck to his diet, kept off cookies, stayed away from pasta and beer, remembered his daily shots of insulin, he kept the diabetes in check.

  Back to the sofa, he sat down in front of the fan. “What are you looking at?” he said to the whirling blades.

  Nan, in her straight-talking way, was the person who handled him best. Maybe it was the training she got as a nurse—all those years working in critical care units. Nothing fazed her. Or maybe it was the fact that she was a lesbian and had to deal with living a secretive life that hardened her. No, it preceded all that. She was born that way. When she fell off a bike, she got right back on.

  Deborah, on the other hand, came out of the womb with a wandering eye, literally and figuratively. The surgeon fixed her eye at six months. Later on, in her teens, she couldn’t walk past a beggar without handing the man or woman a coin. At seventeen, Deborah showed up with a homeless poet she met in Cambridge—cracked front tooth, hair tangled, smelling of oil and metal, stunk as if he slept in the subway, and probably did. Edward walked into the house after a day on the road selling, saw this drifter holding hands with his daughter, looked at her with her brown hair down to her waist, hippie skirt, ruffled blouse, her dark eyes wide open to the injured, and told the man to get the hell out of his house.

  Get the hell out of my house. Get the hell out now!

  Dad! What are you doing? How dare you? Deborah ran off and didn’t talk to him for weeks. It was just one of many blowups about her choice of boyfriends.

  In college, Deborah moved in with another doozy—a pot-smoking, hippie bicycle mechanic who finally went on a cross-country bike trip and left her with three months’ unpaid rent, which he—Edward Weiss, the father and fool—paid. And now he had to deal with Howard. Worse than a boyfriend. Her legal widower.

  Seven

  What do you mean, they set you up?” Annie asked.

  Will was kneeling on the restaurant floor, looking under their table for his wallet.

  “It’s probably at our flat,” Annie said, turning the jogger and pointing it toward the door. She paid for lunch with cash she had on hand and was ready to leave when she saw Stephen coming over to her.

  “Everything okay? I was just heading out.”

  “Will seems to have misplaced his wallet.”

  Will stood up. “Or someone stole it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stephen said. “If it’s stolen, you should report it to the police.”

  “I doubt it was stolen,” Annie said. “It’s probably sitting on his desk at home.”

  “You won’t be the first,” Stephen said. He gave her a look of confidence as if to say he knew about these things.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know it’s upsetting when it happens, but it happens, especially to Americans.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ukrainians. They target Americans. Americans are easy prey. Call me if you need help. Was your license in it? That could be a nightmare,” Stephen said. “But I can help you with that.”

  “What kind of nightmare?” Annie surveyed the crowded room.

  “The license. You’ll have to go to the police and get some
thing to replace it. You’ve got my number there.” He pointed to his card on the table. “If it’s not at your flat, call me and I’ll meet you at the station.”

  “We’ll manage. Thanks,” Will said. “We should go, Annie.”

  “Thanks very much,” she said. She released the brake on the stroller.

  “Hold on. Let me talk to the waitress in case it shows up.” Stephen flagged their waitress who came over to him. He spoke rapidly in Hungarian, his words soft and fluid, spilling out without hesitation. Annie was impressed and comforted at the same time. The waitress frowned, shaking her head. Stephen said something else and the waitress walked away looking irritated.

  “She thought I was accusing her,” Stephen said. “You have to speak firmly about these things. Let’s hope you left it at home.”

  “Thanks. That’s likely where it is,” Will said.

  Stephen bowed and headed toward the door. Annie looked at his card. It was bare bones. Black lettering on white: his name and cell phone number with country and city codes for Hungary and Budapest. No company name. No address.

  STEPHEN HÁZY

  c. 36 1 438-5629

  She put it in her shorts pocket. Everyone in Budapest had a business card to hand out, including Will. Everyone was looking to cash in or make a deal or a connection.

  “That was nice of him to want to help.”

  “I can handle this, Annie.”

  “Of course you can.”

  She watched Stephen exit. He walked with a sure, balanced gait, his hair tousled in an appealing, friendly-dog kind of way. Despite what Will said, part of her wanted him to stay to help them.

  “Let’s go,” Will said.

  Outside, they retraced their steps from the flower stand, which was now closed for the day, to the phone booth four blocks down the side street. Will opened the folding door of the phone booth, which she now resented and blamed as the cause of their current trouble and which looked very much like the ones in the States except for its bright red color. He searched under the seat. Nothing. They headed back toward the bridge and home.

  “Don’t you think we should go back to Mr. Weiss’s to see if you left it there?”

  “I think he would have called,” Will said. “It’s either home or those men fleeced me.”

  “But what if you dropped it on the way? Mr. Weiss was so out of it, it could be on the floor next to the door. He may not have seen it.”

  “I didn’t drop it. I either left it at home or it was stolen. Call him if you want to.”

  “We didn’t get his phone number.”

  “He has ours. If he finds it, he’ll call.”

  “Why don’t I run back to his building, check the sidewalk where we walked, and rule it out. I’ll catch up with you.”

  They arranged to meet on the other side of the bridge. In her heart, she hoped Will had left it at the apartment. When she reached the brick building, she hesitated, then pushed open the exterior door with the broken lock and quickly ran up two flights into the dark hallway. If Mr. Weiss saw her, if he was walking out for any reason at this moment, she would stand tall and tell him the honest, embarrassing truth. As it turned out, no wallet appeared in the hall or on the steps or on the sidewalk. She chided herself for being rash and ran out to the street again, feeling more foolish than disappointed in the heat and sun. If the wallet had fallen inside the apartment, she hoped that Mr. Weiss would call like Will said, but her greatest wish was that Will had simply left it in his sock drawer. The fax was so disorienting this morning. They had rushed out . . .

  Running back toward the bridge, she kept her eyes on the sidewalk, passing clothing stores, appliance stores, offices —all of them closed on Saturdays for the rest of the weekend. Since the spring, however, more convenience stores had opened, another sign of free enterprise taking hold. Restaurants and cafes—that’s where the crowds went. Still, after all these months, she expected all the stores to remain open—her American psyche lunging out like a hungry child, demanding access to the toys she was used to back home. She spotted Will with Leo standing on the other side of the bridge under the shade of a tree.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  They resumed the trail back to their flat.

  “Who were those men? What did they look like?” she asked.

  “Two tall guys with dark hair. It happened so quickly I didn’t see their faces. They bumped into me on the sidewalk. I didn’t think anything of it, except that it seemed odd because they were holding a bag between them and that’s what I knocked into. Instead of slackening their grip, the bag caused me to fall forward. They didn’t say anything, no apology. That’s what bothered me. Now I get it.”

  “You didn’t say anything when you came back.”

  “I brushed it off as being rude or the craziness of the crowds and the heat. It didn’t occur to me that they were trying to steal my wallet.”

  Now she felt irritated and angry. As they walked away from the river toward their street, Annie reminded herself that this would not be the first time Will or she had left something behind: a key to the apartment door, the battery charger for their cell phone, and now, she hoped, his wallet full of cash.

  Back home in the States, Will would never think of carrying that kind of cash in his wallet. But here everyone dealt in cash, expected cash, except for the better hotels and restaurants, which catered to tourists and took credit cards. It made sense to keep a stash of money on hand. In fact, it was prudent. In Hungary, cash was king. No one wrote checks. Banks didn’t use credit cards. And ATM machines didn’t exist here. It was hard to believe but true.

  They walked into their dark, smelly foyer—the one aspect about the building that repulsed her—and passed their building superintendent sweeping the entrance. The super looked the same every day: a bony, chain-smoking middle-age woman who Annie guessed was in her forties. Here was an example of Hungarian resistance to outsiders. Even after eight months, Annie, who had tried to be friendly from day one, did not know the woman’s name because the super refused to talk to her.

  “Hello,” Will said.

  The bony woman averted her eyes and pulled on her broom.

  Annie smiled at the bad comedy of it and said hello, and as usual, the super turned away—sentry to her broom and rum and angry-looking teenage son who lived with her on the first floor. Annie smelled liquor now, an odor like wet pennies in the stale air.

  Will headed for the elevator and hit the call button.

  Twice a day, sometimes more, the super swept the foyer’s entrance. Once in the morning; once at night, occasionally midday like today. Those first few weeks, Annie had tried to make a connection, but the woman with cropped dyed-red hair would not allow it. With each hello, the super shook her head to indicate she didn’t understand a word Annie was saying. After that, she turned her back when Annie appeared. Annie, out of some perversely American impulse to be liked, insisted on saying a perfunctory hello. Every time. It felt like a game at first, but now it had become a source of irritation.

  The elevator was taking a long time. They waited for the doors to open.

  Despite the super’s twice-daily sweeps, the entranceway remained grim—dull cement floors weathered by grit, no windows, and those smelly garbage barrels stacked in a little storage room to the right of the entrance that emitted the foul odor of rotting food. Their modern apartment building—modern for Budapest—was seven stories high, three units to a floor. The building itself, tall and narrow, was tiny compared to those behemoth concrete complexes the Russians built just outside the city center, ugly blocks of gray with tiny windows and flat facades, nothing at all warm or welcoming. By comparison, she had come to think of her building as a pretty good find. A small garden next to it gave them something green to look at from their bedroom window on the top floor.

  Finally, the elevator doors opened and they went in.

  “I bet she could use the money,” Will said, meaning the super. “Her son, too.”

  “Are you
thinking they took it while we were out? I don’t think so. That’s paranoid.”

  “Shhh. Lower your voice, Annie. She has a key to our place.”

  “The wallet could be in your underwear drawer.”

  “My theory is that she’s a leftover brick.”

  “A communist informant? I don’t believe it,” she said.

  “She hates Americans. That’s clear.”

  “Fine. But she’s been harmless all year. Why now? It’s too risky.”

  “Why not?”

  The elevator made its slow, steady way to the seventh level and shuddered to a stop.

  “If it’s not here, then it was those two men outside Luigi’s. The money’s gone. I’m sure of it. We won’t find it here.”

  Annie had a feeling Will was right.

  The elevator doors slid open and they walked out into the small hallway outside their door, Leo heavy in sleep in the jogger, his ragged carnations resting in his lap.

  “She could use the money, but I doubt it’s her,” Annie said.

  Sometimes she thought of leaving money in an envelope and slipping it under the super’s apartment door—an anonymous gift. But the woman looked nervous, even paranoid. Annie was convinced she was an alcoholic. That would explain her behavior—using Coke cans to hide daily rations of cheap rum. Once, Annie thought her face looked bruised. Her teenage son appeared as miserable as his mother. The son, with his short orange-dyed hair, wore straight-leg jeans and black thick-soled shoes. It was a kind of punk / car mechanic / rebel-skinhead look. A possible skinhead. Right here under her nose. The son also avoided looking at her whenever Annie ran into him in the hall. She had wanted to help their sorry, miserable lives, but after so many rebuffs and what she had seen that skinhead do to that little Gypsy girl, she couldn’t summon up any feelings of sympathy for his empty, twisted, repressed life right now.

  Annie wheeled Leo inside their flat. “I’ll look in the front rooms,” she said. A shaft of bright sunshine greeted them. She thought of Mr. Weiss, again wishing she had his phone number, wishing the wallet were miraculously lying on the old man’s floor.