Strangers in Budapest

by Jessica Keener

  “Nem. They stay separate. That is their way.”

  “Are you afraid of them?”

  “Nem, not afraid, but they are from different world,” Sandor said, tipping his head. “It is worse since Russians leave. There is more stealing. Sorry about Mr. Gordon’s wallet.”

  “The police said it was a racket.”

  “Igen,” Sandor said. “I think so.”

  “Are you saying you want the Russians to come back?”

  “No, no!” Klara and Sandor said simultaneously.

  “But it is a probléma,” Sandor said. “The old way and the new way.”

  “Who knows if it’s the Gypsies? That’s an assumption.”

  Sandor smiled and shook his head. “Gypsies are a probléma.”

  “But they are not treated well here,” Annie said. “I saw skinheads attack a little girl.”

  Sandor knelt down and set the toy upright for spinning. “It is a long way why they are in this situation,” he said.

  “Yet they’ve been here a long time. A thousand years! That’s why I don’t understand it.”

  “I will try to tell you.”

  Sandor twisted the toy, winding it up and releasing it until it spun, making gentle bell sounds as it twirled. Leo shrieked. He loved it. They all watched the toy until it fell on its side. Sandor spun it again. She could see he was trying to organize his thoughts to explain the Gypsies to her, so she waited.

  When she first met Sandor back in the spring, he reminded her of a soft-spoken, lanky folk singer who might have lived in a yurt in Vermont had he been born in America, not someone raised in an orphanage in Budapest, the son of an alcoholic mother. Klara told her that Sandor had never met his father, had no idea who he was.

  “The Roma are a special group who moved from Asia to Europe to Hungary,” he finally said. “It is typical for Gypsies to be moving. They are with horses. They didn’t have houses. They collected what they could. It is what you say an attitude, a life mode not to work and to try and live. It is a problem from the past.”

  “You mean it’s a philosophy,” Annie said. “A belief system.”

  “Igen. There are three groups: The first group lives here for generations in Hungary. They are the best. The second group comes from Romania. They are the worst. They live in the woods. They are dirty. And the third group have no social place. Gypsies are not educated. They cannot find good jobs. For example, Gypsies love the children and if the children don’t feel well or want to sleep late, they say, okay. You don’t have to go to school.”

  Leo sat between the talking adults, playing with his spinning toy, trying to push the top to make it turn, not succeeding but not giving up.

  “Is it true that they steal?”

  “Igen. They steal.” Sandor pushed the top and showed Leo how to hold the handle. “They live in a culture where it is easier to steal than to work. They are looking for the easiest way. They have a problem with rules. They don’t follow the rules. They keep their own way. There is very much prejudice against them. Gypsy and thief in Hungary—it is the same word.”

  Seventeen

  Edward positioned his easel so that it formed a triangle in front of the window. He was alert this morning—as he was most mornings before the weight of his life and the sadness that infused it moved down through his body. He sat with legs open on the chair and dabbed blue paint on the canvas, working quickly, not one to repaint and fiddle. Attack the canvas with an image in his mind or picture from a magazine photo. Get it done, impatience working for him, working faster than his critical thoughts. The view out his window looked like crap—was crap. Decrepit buildings. No money to clean and repair them. The air, the curtains, not red but a muddy brown. They called this city the Pearl of the Danube. Bull. Bloody Danube is what it was. He coughed. He knew the history of this place. Night ghosts barfing up Jews murdered on the riverbanks. Bodies pushed pell-mell into the water. Made them take off their goddamn shoes. Shoes. Bloodied shores. That’s what he saw when he went outdoors once in the evening and stood on the path under the trees by the river. He couldn’t stomach the sight of it. Pearl of cruelty.

  He rubbed his leg to help the blood circulate, to prevent thrombosis. One more ailment to add to the others—his heart palpitations, which started after Deborah’s murder. He had pills for his heart and insulin now to keep his diabetes under control. What difference did it make?

  All sensations of belief or hope or faith in something had long passed, gone since Deborah, his Deborah, had died and left a hole in his heart. He lived with fatigue, the emotional sludge of rage. Except when he painted: he dabbed his brush and made quick strokes until a mountain emerged in the distance under a sky that seemed empty and full at the same time. The sky a free place. His flesh untethered, until the mental image of his daughter unmoving on her bed resurfaced. Jesus. His chest clenched. He shut his eyes against a swarm of self-hate, a sensation of his body listing. He opened his eyes again and looked out the window at a fruit truck, the Hungarian lettering familiar to him now.

  He saw Deborah lying there when he walked into her basement apartment in Boston, a late January thaw. No snow. A bright, cold sun. January 23. The fucker standing in the hall to greet him, to comfort him, the fake husband, the piece of lying shit, his blond bangs and those greenish eyes. He had called to tell him she was gone.

  “I thought she was asleep,” the liar said. Edward bent his fingers into his palm. He’d strangle him if he could.

  Deborah had said, “We’ll be gone four nights. It’s one of those deals to Nassau. I need to get away. Don’t worry about me, Dad.”

  But that’s not where she went. He killed her instead.

  After Howard’s call, Edward sped to Boston, down Commonwealth Avenue. Sylvia was getting her hair done. He couldn’t get hold of her. Didn’t know the name of the damn salon. He called Nan on the North Shore. She headed down.

  Outside Deborah’s building, a young policeman stood on the sidewalk—guarding what? The truth? The secret? The policeman went into the kitchen, looking dazed. Fresh out of the police academy: buzzed hair; smooth face; lean, straight legs.

  Deborah lived in a two-room studio in Back Bay. A garden apartment, she called it. Garden of lies. Garden of death is what it was.

  Dad, I told you. It’s fine, it’s great.

  What about safe?

  It’s Back Bay. It’s safe. Totally fine. Stop already.

  He swatted the air. He didn’t stop.

  The policeman sat down and filled out some crap police papers, using Deborah’s kitchen table to get it all down. Deborah sprawled on her bed, her limbs awkward, her lips caught in a grim line.

  Trying to shake the memory, Edward leaned over between the legs of the easel and with effort picked up his coffee mug from the floor. Cool now, he finished it off. The prospect of getting out of the chair again unappealing. Can a heart feel like an anchor? Sure. Dead weight but not dead. That’s how he felt.

  Months ago. Minutes ago. It was all the same. And he would find Howard. He screwed up, let him get away. But he was here. Howard was here and that American girl. She could help him if fear didn’t stop her. She had looked scared when she left. Maybe her husband would interfere. But now he saw the error of trying to do it alone. He could use their help. He would plan this. He would wait a few more days.

  He leaned forward in the chair, studying the picture forming: a musty-blue sky with a dark cloud congealing in one corner. He smeared tears from his eyes, his thumb across his cheek. Jesus. The images didn’t fade. They grew worse. His Deborah’s murder, her memory forever a part of him. It killed Sylvia, too.

  Sylvia would agree with him on that. No amount of time would make it right. Like the war. Like those bones piled up when he walked through Dachau’s gate and saw them—logs, logs with faces, legs, feet. Bones. Gone fifty years. Gone yesterday. Thirty-five years of selling medical equipment in his downtown Boston office didn’t bury those skeletons of murdered Jews. Sticks, elbows, femurs, skulls,
eye sockets. Bone hell.

  Deborah lying on her back in bed, her mouth turned down. Her flesh still the color of the living, but lifeless.

  He reached for his glass of water on the floor and drank, then sucked a fist of air into his mouth. He had to keep on.

  First time he saw Sylvia, she’d worn that blue dress, tight on her hips and those breasts she couldn’t hide. Great smile, that Sylvia. He married her right after the war. When he came home, they bought a ranch in Newton. New Jewish ghetto, highfalutin suburb west of Boston. They joined a temple. Had gotten engaged during the war and married right after it. Where was the sense in that? None. But that’s what they did back then. Everyone did it. Stupid. Practically strangers. Racing to begin a new life at home.

  Deborah came eleven months later. July 3, 1947. She was born at two in the morning and was trouble from day one. Colic. Then a wandering eye. At two years old, running onto a main highway while they vacationed in Vermont. Oblivious. Her oblivion continued. She struggled at school. Bright but disinterested, she sought out troubled friends. She liked the streets, the real world, the troubled world. At twenty-one, she graduated from Northeastern University in Boston, a miracle in itself, barely passing, and she moved to the South End. Everyone talked about Boston’s South End, how it was changing. She rented a studio in a renovated brownstone. Next door, heroin addicts slept in the doorway. He’d practically stepped over one the first time he visited.

  “What are you doing? Trying to ruin your life? Get yourself killed?” he asked her. “This is crazy. I don’t get it.”

  “I didn’t ask you to.”

  She had her mother’s chin, and when she had something to fight for, she led with it, stretching her neck as if to see better.

  Murdered in a garden apartment, a basement, a below-street-level room. Back door opened to a brick patio the size of a king bed. “Perfect for the chair,” she told him. “We can park the car in back.”

  We. Her favorite word.

  Deborah bought the apartment using the twenty-thousand-dollar gift he’d given her for graduating college. A mistake. If he hadn’t done that, she wouldn’t have bought that basement place. Maybe it would have delayed something.

  And then her sister, Nan, born four years later. The opposite. Nan didn’t run out into streets. Nan liked school. Nan avoided trouble, just as her mother had.

  But not Deborah. Deborah approached the world as if it owed her something. He coughed again. Leaned over in the chair, grabbed the ledge of the easel for balance. He and Deborah were more alike than he understood.

  Deborah picked boyfriends who mumbled, who felt the world owed them something—boys who didn’t look at him when she introduced them. They didn’t talk. They had problems. Every six months, someone new, her mission of the month: help the nobodies in the world; excuse the miscreants. Offer a reason why boyfriend number 19 went to jail for stealing a car.

  “His father beat him up every day,” she said, as if that made stealing acceptable.

  Bullshit.

  Nan had friends, lots of girlfriends. Studious, never out of line. Nan went to nursing school in New York, then took a job back in Boston, moved to the North Shore.

  “You should see the marshes in spring, Dad. The colors are glorious.”

  Spring. What did it matter? Nan was a surgical nurse at Children’s Hospital in Boston, married to the emergency room, while Deborah worked at drug rehab facilities and rape intervention centers in Boston. Then the back pains started. First, she thought the slip on the stairs caused it—those stairs to the beach in Gloucester near her sister’s house. But rehab didn’t help. Chiropractor couldn’t fix it. After that: back surgery. A few months of rehab, she still hurt.

  Numbness, then weakness in her legs. Another doc thought it was Lyme disease. Antibiotics for six months. Didn’t fix it. Finally, the diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. White female in her late twenties. Aggressive type.

  After the funeral, Sylvia lit a cigarette and started smoking again. First one, then straight to a pack a day. Maybe the smoke set off her heart problems. She started sneaking smokes in the basement at night, then spraying the place with perfume. Between his cigars and her cigarettes, what did it matter? Bah. She was funny that way, laughably funny.

  He smiled and ached at the memory. Sylvia dead, too.

  Deborah’s death wasn’t on the books as murder. Her death certificate said overdose. Vicodin. A lie is what that was. How many certificates recorded these lies? Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. The world turned on lies.

  Deborah found a new mission: how to change the world from a wheelchair. “People don’t look at me,” she said. “They talk to Van as if I’m not there. They think I’m a mute or stupid because I’m sitting down. Makes me burn.”

  “People are stupid. People don’t know crap,” he told her.

  He knew war vets that came home in wheelchairs and they wheeled themselves into oblivion. Might as well have been a death sentence. Some took their lives when they got home. What did the world know about these people? He despised humanity. There were a few good people, yes. But they were aberrations. Josef. He was one exception. One in a billion. He had Josef to thank for the apartment.

  Sylvia was good, too. Too good for him. After forty-nine years, she walked into the den. He was smoking his after-dinner cigar when she said, “Edward, I’ve had enough. I’m moving out. I want my own space.”

  “What are you saying, Sylvia? What are you saying?”

  “You heard me. I need peace. Time for me. Myself.”

  “What? I give you time. You’ve got it. Here.” He waved his hand in the air to show her, his cigar smoke emphasizing his point. “What did I do?”

  “I can’t explain it,” she said. She stood at the door dressed in black slacks and a red blouse. “I don’t need your permission. I don’t need to report to you or anyone. I don’t want to have to be anyone anymore. I’ve lived my life for other people. I’m done with that. Done. You think it’s selfish? So be it. From now on, Edward, I’m done. You’ll have to do your own laundry. Shop, cook. You’ll figure it out. My life is passing, Edward. I’ve made up my mind. I don’t hate you. I just can’t live with you anymore.”

  He knew it was about Deborah. Their Deborah. When you lose a child, you fail forever. There’s no getting out of that. No fixing.

  “What about this house?” He looked around at the dark wood-paneled room that smelled of his cigar smoke. He looked at the worn plaid couch, the one they bought on sale two decades ago. Furniture. Like it mattered. The family room.

  What family?

  “We’ll sell it,” she said. “I’ve looked into it. We’ll split the money.”

  “Then piss it away on separate apartments? What’s the point?’

  “I’m going to work at Harriet’s store.”

  Harriet was Sylvia’s best friend from the temple. She owned three clothing stores: Harriet’s, Harriet’s Too, and Harriet’s Three.

  Sylvia stood at the doorway, hand on her hip—she was thicker in the waist since menopause, but she worked out at the gym a few times a week. She looked good. She still liked sex. How could she leave him?

  “Doing what?”

  “Selling clothes. It’s doesn’t matter. I’ll earn commissions. If I do well, I’ll manage the store.”

  That night, she moved into Harriet Bloom’s garage apartment, one town over. God, he hated that. His Sylvia living in a maid’s quarters.

  He tried to put the brush on the easel and missed the ledge. The brush dropped to the floor, a blue smudge, one of many that had dried in spots on the floor, like bird crap.

  “Christ almighty.”

  He leaned over and rubbed the paint, a streak blending into other streaks, telling another story at his feet—the colors of previous paintings, more images from the past collecting at his feet. What did it matter? Dirt. Grime. That’s what it all came down to, not the bull-crap decorum that most people shoved into their lives—fake Louis XV bureaus and pressed-wood bed
room and dining-room sets.

  Deborah kept her place spare. It surprised him every time. One double bed. One lamp. One table. Except for her candles. Too many candles. Candles on the windowsill, on the floor, in the tiny bathroom where guests could slip and kill themselves on the porcelain ledge of the sink.

  When he walked in that day, he knew she was dead, he saw her through the bedroom door. She lay on her back, her face tilted toward the window, her dark bangs oddly neat as if someone had combed them straight. Deborah looked up at the ceiling toward the window: not answering him, sun shining in. What was the sun telling him, that the world didn’t care?

  Oh! he called out, his voice failing him, his chest falling through the sky, the one that filled his mind.

  He dabbed the canvas again, pushing dark blue into the top corner. He’d painted these landscapes over and over, as if painting them again might open up something he couldn’t get at, needed to get at, but . . . What was he looking for? A way out of life? A way to find that piece-of-shit Howard? The man was a fraud, and now Edward was certain he would find Howard again, one more time in his lifetime. He’d made it here. He would do it. He was an ass for losing his temper, but he’d get another chance. Howard was somewhere near. So close he could feel him. He clenched his face and grunted. Then wept.

  Outside the Budapest apartment, a fruit truck backed out of a parking space. It was a dirty city, this Pearl of the Danube. Dirty. Smutty. Loud. Nothing got filtered here. Everything did. A city of contradictions. A city of waste. He fit right in.

  Eighteen

  The following morning, after her disturbing visit with Edward, she still hadn’t said anything about it to Will. Instead, she finished her morning run around the park and then headed over the bridge to the Kempinski Hotel to see if Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, had indeed arrived as the Radio Free Europe station had announced. On her way out the door, Will had offered a disinterested response: “That’s good. Have fun.” Klara was also blasé about the superstar, but that was Klara.