Strangers in Budapest

by Jessica Keener

  An umbrella of clouds cooled the morning air as they walked across cobblestones soaked in gold-plated, invisible ether. Not a speck of litter anywhere. Annie couldn’t get over the enormity of the buildings and the opulence. No beggars or Gypsies—Roma—on the streets. Even the rooftops in the buildings surrounding the old square gleamed with glass that fronted striking penthouse residences she guessed cost multimillions. All this opulence a mere four-hour ferry or car ride away from Budapest. She thought about what Stephen had said and wondered what he was doing today.

  Free of the Russians after the war, Austria had prospered. In Vienna, trolleys circling on metal tracks didn’t squeak. They swished like ladies dancing in fancy ball dresses. Oddly, the city’s perfection felt antiseptic, as if it were missing something alive and breathing—as if the gestalt of energy and art had passed through the town years ago and moved on to somewhere else—possibly to rundown, messy, torn-up Budapest. In Austria, remnants of greatness left imprints like fossils: Mozart’s old residences, the State Opera House, grand museums. It gave her a different perspective of Hungary.

  “It’s so mixed up,” she said, thinking about how Budapest was once again trying to make a go at something, trying to get into the game of freedom and choice. She stopped to view a private three-story residence, the multiacre estate enclosed by an elaborate wrought-iron fence. A paved driveway circled around to the front of the house where two stone lions flanked a grand columned entrance and porch. She saw thick drapes framing French doors on the first floor.

  “Budapest is stretching out its neck, you know?” she said, turning to Will. “It’s taking a risk. It’s trying.” The realization about the disparity between the two cities and their own unsettled situation put her in a more forgiving mood. Thankful for this shift, she reached for Will’s hand.

  Twenty-one

  The molecules of air popped into light. On his bed, lying on his back, he watched as darkness moved like silt, draining from the ceiling, trailing silver across the room, the blue morning light drifting in from the window. This shifting of the earth and sun was the only mechanism in life that seemed to click into place. It made sense—like the wristwatch his father gave him for his bar mitzvah, the hands still circling after sixty-three years. He sat up on the double bed. Dazed. The foam mattress on a hard wooden platform felt good on his back and aching hips, the small night table with its convenient drawer and a reading lamp on top with a torn pink shade orienting him.

  He thought back to day one when he had walked around the three rooms with Ivan. The bed looked primitive to him, but he deemed it sufficient. What did a single man need? Running water. A stove. Ivan unpacked the groceries, filling the refrigerator as Rose had instructed. Coffee. Milk. Cheese. Bread. Eggs. Hungarian sausage, cold cuts. The basics.

  “Thank you. Thank you. I’m all set now. Take this.”

  Edward put an American twenty in Ivan’s hand.

  “But that is too much,” the boy had said.

  “Take it. I’ll see you in two days. I appreciate the help.”

  Then he had called Nan.

  “I’m here. Getting settled in,” he told her on the phone.

  “Give me the lay of the land,” she said to him. “All the details. Did you check the stove? Is the refrigerator working?”

  “I’ve got all I need.” Except for truth and justice, he thought.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Good. Okay. Thank you.”

  “Dad?”

  “What.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. I’m not a stranger.”

  THIS MORNING, EDWARD thought he smelled rain in the air. He stood, felt himself keeling, and found the wall for balance, pulling back the shade to peek at the dull gray sky. Patience. It was tricky. Hold on to something. This was the moment every day since Deborah’s death when the enormous tide of his battered life returned to him—a turgid river carrying the weight of all that went wrong. He would find the sleazeball who had killed his daughter. Lord knows he had stopped believing in anything after Deborah died, after Sylvia died. Except what was right. No one wanted to talk about a murdered child. His friends, the ones still living, the ones who had retired to condos in Florida, patted him on the shoulder, called him a few times a month. Come down for the winter, Ed. Spend a few weeks in the sun. It will do you good.

  Waiting.

  They waited for him to come around. Nan waited. But he had no intention of giving up.

  In the tiny bathroom, he uncapped his vial of heart pills. They were supposed to help his arrhythmia, but they made him sluggish, too. Jesus Christ. He’d survived a war. But this—he fumbled with the tiny bottle, pitched two capsules into the back of his throat, then swallowed and went to the night table drawer for his cell phone. The gun lay there, too, at the back of the drawer. Resting.

  GETTING TO THE doctor who prescribed his pills, Dr. Zoltan Igor—last name first in this backward country—was a royal pain in the ass: a bus ride up those steep Buda hills to the stop on the corner in front of the doctor’s mother’s house, a one-story stucco building, neat and clean, with trimmed hedges on either side of a pathway, an examining room in back of the house.

  Zoltan checked him out the week he arrived, wrote prescriptions. Next visit, if he needed it, Edward would take a cab. He was through with buses. The last visit put him out of commission for days. No. He shook his head at himself. Too angry to die—that’s what I am. God’s little comedy. Making him work for his death like it was something he wanted but couldn’t have.

  A WEEK AFTER shooting holes through a can of chicken soup that he had placed on a tree stump in his backyard, Sylvia told him to stop. What was he doing with a gun? she wanted to know. Who was he? She didn’t know her own husband anymore.

  “Sylvia, I’m still the man you married, but if that bastard shows up at my house again, I’ll shoot him in the neck.”

  “And what will that do for us, Edward? Get her back? You’ll end up in jail.”

  Edward lumbered across the living room and headed for the kitchen to make coffee. He knew he was mentally in the danger zone now, careening down those highways of thought that drove him across bleak, empty plains, deserts of nothingness.

  After the funeral, that shit of a husband held his hand out to Edward, his eyes looking like soggy pools of gray-green mud. This, in their kitchen in Newton. Too many people crowding the rooms. Edward ignored Howard’s hand.

  “I’m shattered,” Howard said. “I don’t know what to do. She was my life.” He bent over and started crying, sobbing.

  “Sit,” Sylvia told him, pointing to the kitchen chair.

  “I’m sorry,” Howard said. “I can’t believe this.”

  Edward heard the words, but his skin still itched. Something didn’t add up. This stranger who was ten years younger than his daughter. Deborah hardly knew him, and within months she was married to him. No wedding ceremony. No announcement. Just married. A phone call one day telling them.

  “Married? You’re married?” Sylvia said over and over.

  But, then, that was part of the problem: Deborah’s adult life was a secret. She’d had so many boyfriends, they’d stopped counting. How many fights had he had with her over this? Why can’t you settle down? What’s the matter with you? Then came the weakness in her limbs that turned into multiple sclerosis. After that, the medications and prescriptions. Expensive, too much money for her. But it seemed to sober her up. She called more often, asked him to come visit. He sent her a check once a month to help out. He put aside money. She took a new job at an insurance company downtown, one with benefits, paid vacation time. They didn’t mind her wheelchair, she said. They let her work at home sometimes.

  She said.

  Edward crossed the living room again, past the couch and the fans and into the bedroom, the shades pulled to the sill, the light still coming through, unstoppable.

  He sat on the bed and took the compact gun out of the drawer. Good and light, made for person
al protection, easy to conceal. That’s what anyone would think of an old man alone in the world, a man who had been robbed of his daughter. He told Sylvia he’d gotten the gun because he didn’t trust Howard, but she didn’t believe him. Ach. He put it back in the drawer. He’d shot a round in the backyard, into the woods behind his house where Sylvia never liked to go. Shooting came back to him like riding a bike. Easy. Automatic. The army had trained him well. Those twelve weeks in Alabama. Started off fat as an overripe pear when he left home, took the train from Boston and headed south. Three months later, his clothes fit another man twice as big. He was lean. All muscle.

  Edward got up again and went back to the kitchen; scoops of coffee grounds had spilled onto the countertop. Christ. What a mess. He was a mess. He looked down at himself. Soft. Gangly legs. A belly, from bread and years of overeating: deli sandwiches, Chinese food, butter. He sponged the black specks of coffee into the sink, poured himself a glass of water. Always, the water.

  In the living room, he shuffled to the window and tilted his easel, pulling up the shade for a full view of the redbrick building opposite his and of the wedge of sky above a break in the trees and, farther down, a glance at gray, pitted buildings, a memory of what was once grand like everything else around here. Memories of disaster, loss, stunted dreams. Even the boy, Ivan, only sixteen, looked old and serious.

  He turned to his half-finished painting of a landscape, the thin handle of the brush smooth, easy to maneuver, the stiff bristles jabbing grays and blues, creating his version of the sky and then the dark hills, adding a dip of cream into the mix and merging the edges, because nothing was sharp. The sky shaped itself into a silken surface—fuzzy and distant, the smell of oil paint rising, taking him away.

  Twenty-two

  While he painted, he waited for Annie to come. She would be back from Vienna now. It was early, but she would run here. He was confident of that. A few days and she would forgive him for getting angry. Damn words. He was done with words. Standing at the window, the fan blowing, he shifted the easel just so—to make the day’s humid light splay evenly across the small canvas. Already, the sun was pushing through. He believed she would come. He knew she would.

  He painted because it took words away. He painted landscapes because they took him away from people. Landscapes spoke the truth. A hill was a hill. A sky was a sky. A cloud was a cloud. Simple. Goddamn truth.

  He dabbed the upper corner of the canvas, the stiff brush dipped in steel blue now. The gun safely stored in the bedroom drawer. No words for that.

  Dad. Please. Give it more time, Nan had said when he told her he had to go to Hungary. She didn’t know about the gun.

  You come to the end of your life. Time ends. Pffft.

  He began painting again after Deborah died. He had been a dabbler in high school. After the war, he’d settled into the serious business of getting married, making money, raising a family—two daughters. He didn’t have time for paints. Now time was all he had. Time was all anyone had in this life. That was the goddamn truth.

  And then Sylvia had a heart attack, and his wife gone, too, within minutes. Never got to the hospital. Now he was deaf to the world, his heart screaming. His mind unable to sleep.

  You lose a child, you blame each other. Sylvia left him, then she died. They hadn’t planned on that. Married forty-nine years. Jesus.

  After he buried Sylvia, he went to the rabbi to talk. He couldn’t make sense of it. What kind of curse is this? My older daughter and my wife?

  “Edward, this will sound like pabulum, but in times like these, what you’ve been through, you have to reach inside yourself and forgive. It will lead you through your terrible pain.”

  Pain? What did this young rabbi know of pain? Edward sat on a wooden chair in the rabbi’s study, the gun in his pocket a satisfying weight. A simple transaction at a gun show. Unbelievable. Easy as buying a mouse trap at a hardware store.

  No effort at all.

  Forgive?

  This man, this rabbi in his forties, pontificating. Words. Forgive? Forgive whom? God?

  Bull crap.

  Just then he made up his mind. No time for waiting. You take action. He’d learned this from his business. Sales taught him that. You picked up the phone, you made that cold call. If the person on the line said “no thanks”—and most did—you hung up and dialed a new number. You didn’t think, now what? You made another call. You didn’t wait.

  He put his brush down.

  Fatigued and only midmorning. He considered the idea of going out. He could walk by the river. Sit on a bench. Wait. Watch for a chance to spot Howard. Howard lived by the river. He lived by the river. He lived by the river.

  Foolishness. He knew it. He shook his head, exhaling. The circulation in his legs. Dangerous. Stupid. He knew this. He had to come up with an alternative plan. These things happened in business. You get a flash of what you need to do, and then you realize it’s too expensive to implement or you don’t have enough manpower. So you regroup. You come up with something different. Another approach. Often, a better one.

  Edward felt his heart. He took his glass of water, tipped it, stared into the clear reflection of liquid, the thick line rimming the top, draining it.

  And the vision repeated itself.

  He slid open the peephole cover and saw him standing with his hands at his side. The boy stood in the kitchen. Edward waved at him to be still.

  “It’s Van. Van Howard, sir.”

  Edward opened the door.

  “What are you doing here?” He talked over the chain holding the door, blocking the opening.

  “I’m living here. You know that. In Pest. Near the river. Nan gave me your address but not your phone. Did she tell you?”

  “Yes, she did. What took you so long?”

  Edward leaned his shoulder against the doorframe.

  “In her letter. A few weeks ago. I wanted to give you time to settle in.” Howard looked behind him in the hall. “Could we talk inside?”

  Edward stepped aside.

  “What are you doing, Howard?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Howard gave off an odor of sweet aftershave. It infuriated him. Edward said, “Do you think you can get away with it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Howard shook his head, then opened and closed his hands. Edward stepped back into the room, glad the boy was still in the kitchen.

  He wished he had said, Ivan, come here. He wished the boy had come to his side and held out his hand to Howard. He didn’t expect to act out of fear.

  “This is Ivan,” Edward said now, then watched Howard shake the boy’s hand.

  The idea that Howard might try to murder him stunned Edward; the thought bolted through his body. He didn’t expect that. He was an old man. Howard could strangle him and no one would notice. He could slip drugs into his coffee. But Ivan was there. He acted in fear. Blew it.

  “I’m afraid I’ve upset you. I’ll come back another time and we’ll talk.”

  Howard turned.

  “You’re not a talker. You’re a liar. Get out!”

  The words propelled out of his mouth like a mortar, exploding. Bang. Oh, he had a long, long history of this. Words. Stinking up the whole goddamn business.

  “You won’t get away with this! Do you hear me?” he yelled at Howard as he watched him run down the stairs, out of sight.

  He went through this scenario again and again. Hating himself. Days went by. Six. Then a miracle. Nan called to tell him: another letter from Budapest. PO box. Zip code. A clue.

  Dear Nan,

  As I wrote previously, I hope your father will come to understand that there are more sides to this story. Thank you for letting me know where to find him. He was not receptive.

  With the best intentions,

  Van

  Outside, trucks were moving down the street, making deliveries. He heard the brakes, the shifting gears. It was the noise of the city, the urban mac
hine cranking into operation for another day of commerce. Time passing. Time he didn’t have. Maybe you didn’t know Deborah the way I did, Howard had said to him when Edward questioned him after the funeral.

  Edward headed back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee, his last for the day, his heart skipping and skidding without brakes. He waited for the fluttering to stop, then turned toward the window and set the dial on the air conditioner to high. It dripped a small pool of water on the kitchen floor. Leaning over, he wiped it up, his body an axis around which the universe swirled and pivoted. She would show up soon. After her run.

  Back in the living room, he took in the larger view of things, his paintings stacked on the floor. He took a step toward them, then stopped and went over to the couch. The apartment fan blew warm air across his neck, its motor making a dull, clattering sound, a sound he liked. It was part of his silence. Still, he could hear Nan’s voice. Dad. Please.

  What?

  He turned his ear toward a sound of knocking, a gentle knocking on his triple-bolted door.

  Twenty-three

  Through the peephole, she lifted her hand in greeting.

  “One minute.”

  He unbolted the chain, opened the door, waited for her to enter, then locked the door. She was a pretty young woman, a good six inches shorter than his Deborah, who slumped because of her height.

  “I’m here to help,” Annie said.

  He nodded. “Good. I thought you would.”

  He pointed toward the kitchen. “Help yourself to coffee. Sugar. Milk. It’s all there.”

  She looked at him and smiled, not moving. “I’m all set. Have you been out today?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I wondered if you ever went out.”

  She shifted her weight onto one leg.

  “Sometimes. How was your trip to Vienna?”

  “It was okay.”

  “You don’t sound excited.”

  She shrugged. “Seemed like a caricature of itself. Like everything had already happened there. Anyway, I’m glad to be here to help you. I had time to think about our conversation. If I were in your shoes, I’d want someone to help me. Not be afraid. Isn’t that the point of all this? Not to be afraid?” She put a hand on her hip. She looked almost girlish—not a wrinkle on her face or neck. “I tried to imagine if someone took my son.”