Strangers in Budapest

by Jessica Keener

  From the small washroom that managed to accommodate a bathtub and sink, she could hear Eileen and Bernardo laughing about pálinka, their voices too loud, as if they were putting on a show. Annie had seen them perform like this at numerous Fendix parties, but even when they were heading toward drunk, they never completely lost control of themselves, and really, why did Annie care? She had her own self-control to worry about, the dull ache in her head was intensifying. Will was in his pontificating, professorial mode, taking in the surroundings and noting historical artifacts as he liked to do.

  On the shelf above the sink, she found a container of aspirin from the States and next to it a liquid cough syrup in a plastic bottle. She opened the bottle and smelled it to confirm, then turned on the faucet and bent over to refresh the skin under her eyes. A small white oval pill lay wedged in a curl of the linoleum floor next to the tub. She picked it up and saw VICODIN stamped on one side of the tablet. Frightened, she placed the pill in her purse. She sat on the tub to calm her nerves, letting the water continue to run. What should she do?

  She listened until she heard Stephen chuckling to something Bernardo said. Scared but determined, she dialed Edward’s number.

  “Edward, I’m here.” She spoke softly, turning her back to the door.

  “You have it?”

  “It’s 9 Molnár utca. On the river, just like he said.” She spelled out the name of the street and explained that it was on a small back street. She spoke quickly, growing more terrified as the seconds passed. “The entrance is in the back. He’s on the fifth floor at the end. Last apartment on the right.”

  Someone knocked on the door, startling her.

  “Be right out!” Annie said, abruptly cutting off Edward without saying good-bye. Her heart was speeding.

  She stood and splashed more water on her face. There was nothing else for her to do. Edward had everything he needed now. She almost felt relieved. Drying her face, she opened the door. Stephen stood in the small hallway, waiting for her.

  Thirty-one

  He checked the chain and the door locks and with a great sense of relief walked back into his bedroom. Annie had given him what he’d come here to get. Street address. Phone. Apartment number. A ten-minute cab ride. He sat down on the bed and traced the route on his city map.

  Thank you, Annie. Thank you.

  This was his chance. Now. Van was there. Annie and the others would be gone by the time he arrived. Now may not come again.

  He heard faint sounds of a trolley making stops, starting up again, and the beeps and rush of cars heading for where? Parties on Saturday night. Dinners with friends. Tourists looking for action. Bars. Cafes. Clubs. Sex? It was all the same around the world. Budapest. Boston. Humans. Day. Night. Moon. Stars. Animals. Life. Death.

  He took in the still night. The moment. The room. A finite point in time and space; an intersection in the galaxy; a minuscule, infinitesimal tick. A temperate night. The breeze lifted the bottom of the window shade, a soft tapping noise each time. A sigh. He shifted on the bed, sliding open the night table drawer, lifting the gun out and holding it. Only good for close range, small and easy to hide. He laid the gun on the bedsheet and went to the window to look out, bending back a small section of the shade. At the end of the street, he saw a cab turn down another road that led to a maze of streets leading away from here. A month in this place. Long enough. The wait. Waiting’s what killed you in the war. He looked at his watch. He would force himself to wait a few minutes longer. The party would be over soon enough. Seven to nine is what Annie had told him earlier. It was 9:20 p.m.

  He returned to the bed and checked the gun once again as he had so many times before, turning it over in his hands. Loaded. Ready to go.

  Thank you, Annie. Thank you.

  A month or so ago he arrived.

  This is here, the boy, Ivan, had said. Welcome to your new home. Ivan had placed Edward’s suitcase in the tiny elevator and up they went to the second floor.

  This is here.

  That was the truth.

  This was here: four thousand miles across the sea, far from the graves of his dead daughter and wife, and yet no miles at all. They were here, too. Sylvia beside him, shouting, Edward, what is this? You’re not going to live this way! What are you doing?

  Here.

  He placed the gun in his pants pocket, then looked at his father’s watch: 9:28 p.m.

  Did he have everything? What else? He booked a room at the new hotel downtown. He sent for a cab. Soon it would be here.

  Here. He surveyed the bedroom, turned off the bathroom light.

  Before he left, Nan begged him not to go. What about his illness, his state of mind, his family? “What about me? Your daughter. I’m still here. I count.”

  “You count plenty. You have a life.”

  Nan had a partner, worked at a good hospital in Boston. His Nan and Sylvia, both dependable as rain. Not Deborah.

  He took another peek out the living-room window at the empty street. He patted his other pocket. Wallet. Cash. Plenty of American cash.

  “Nan, dear. You will be fine. That’s how it is with you.” Why? He didn’t know. Born like that. Born gay, too. When she’d told him on the phone, she said, You feel differently about me, now, don’t you, Dad?

  No. No. He did not. He felt exactly the same. He shrugged at the memory of it. Surprised? Maybe. But she was a boyish child. He loved her. Nan was Nan. No. His feelings didn’t change. Sylvia struggled with it. If they’d had a son, he might have struggled. Sylvia came around. Their daughter was their daughter. It made no difference.

  Gay. What was that? It was an orientation. Isn’t that what they called it? An orientation? What did that mean? Some kind of position, like a boat tacking in the wind. Every human being had an orientation, an attitude, a belief. Everyone crossed the waters of life, one way or another.

  He stood at the fan in the living room and let the breeze stream through his shirt. It felt good. Then he turned it off and the air conditioner, too, and listened to the silence.

  For a moment he heard nothing.

  Then their voices again. All of them, his family, streaming in his ears.

  I wanted to tell you.

  Nan met her friend Patricia in the surgical unit at the hospital. When Nan moved in with Patricia to share an apartment, he didn’t catch on until Nan spelled it out.

  I’m gay, Dad.

  The kids—they teach you a few things, more than a few things, and some things you didn’t want to know.

  He picked up the photo of Deborah and removed it from the frame. On the back of the picture, he wrote Nan’s number, and Josef’s number in the States, then creased the photo and put it in his pants pocket. Yes, Nan. You are here with me, too.

  Funny. Both his kids needed to fix people. Maybe they got it from their mother. Sylvia was always donating clothes or food on the Jewish New Year and Hanukkah, delivering presents to immigrant families from Russia. She didn’t like to throw things away. Something chipped? Cracked? A little glue worked magic, she would say. She fixed everything, except her broken heart after Deborah was killed.

  Welcome to your new home, Ivan had said.

  Home.

  What was home? He didn’t have a home. He was homeless. A homeless Jewish man. A homeless father. A homeless husband who used to have a wife. A homeless man who used to own a house in the ’burbs. Home was where his heart was. Oh. Yes.

  Home was here, where his daughter’s murderer walked and talked, lived and lied.

  Was alive.

  He went back to his night table drawer and removed the torn photo of Van. In the kitchen, he turned on the gas stove and held the photo over the blue flame. The flame grabbed the paper, sucked it up in a yellow flash before collapsing into ash. As it should be. He turned off the stove and went to the living room and took in the view of his easel and stack of paintings, the couch and TV, the curtains, the worn-down parquet floors as familiar to him as if he had lived here for years. He shook hi
s head, settling the pieces of the puzzle in his mind.

  Josef told him about the apartment fifty years ago. Five decades gone in a flash.

  It was right after the war. Fall of ’45. The liberation. Edward was twenty-six, an army lieutenant overseeing a small internment camp in Allied-occupied Austria, trying to keep peace among men and women grouped in cabins. He could still smell the flakes of paint, the air filled with crumbled leaves and dust, the odors mixing with the nearby woods. The Americans supplied food to those men and women from Slovakia and Hungary.

  And Josef, the Hungarian first in line with a request. They all had requests. The women throwing themselves at Edward, desperate for food, offering sex for favors.

  His unit was there to keep peace and order. That was the American directive. But the whole system was not established, no structure, only desperation.

  “I am Josef Szabo. I am Jewish like you. I speak your language. You see? I have training in research medicine. Please. You are Jew. You can help me get to America. I have a cousin in United States. Family. We help each other. I give you our family flat in Budapest. I speak English. Parlez-vous français? I speak French. I will not return to my country. You are Jew. You understand this. You must help me.”

  “You and everyone here—all six hundred of you. I don’t need your flat.”

  “But I am Jew. And you are Jew. You cannot deny me America.”

  Josef was short, his chest thick as an oak tree, his eyes on fire.

  They stood in the officer cabin—a plain, wood shed with a bed, a desk, a wooden floor, a pile of cigarette butts on the desktop. Edward chain-smoked then. He lit up a cigarette for himself and this Hungarian man.

  Josef shook his head. “You give me America. I give you my family’s flat. It is a promise.” He took a pen, then tore a strip of cloth from his shirt, and wrote on it. He signed his name, wrote down the Budapest address, and his cousin’s town in the States: Stow, Massachusetts.

  Josef’s handshake was firm, earnest—insistent—like Edward’s grandfather who came from Russia, the old country. Maybe that was why Edward gave in. Josef reminded him of his grandfather, the peddler. The one who opened a grocery store in Boston. He couldn’t say which of those things convinced him, but he got Josef on a ship to America.

  “Don’t forget my promise,” Josef said on the day he left. Edward kept the piece of cloth in his duffel bag while he traveled around France, Austria, and Switzerland for eleven more months before returning to Massachusetts. He was American, a demigod in Europe after the war. What a feeling. He inhaled a long breath, remembering.

  Outside, Edward heard a car alarm go off and begin its sequence of inane melodies. Whoop! Whoop! Doo-ah doo-ah. It chimed rhythmically like a giant, alien cicada in the Budapestian night. When the noise stopped, he unchained the door and leaned against the door frame until the mild dizziness subsided. This old geezer wasn’t dead yet.

  Edward looked down at himself and laughed. No wonder Annie took to him. He was a homeless, displaced American Jew in baggy pants, a wrinkled blazer. No different than those six hundred Hungarians and Slovakians in the Displaced Persons camp in 1945.

  After the war, displaced persons like Josef were guests of the Allied armies. They were there to rehabilitate themselves. Get back into life. They had helped the Allies in some way. The Allies were charged with helping them return to their communities.

  Edward rubbed his eyes. He was an old, displaced American man, wanting justice, wanting to set things right. He kept that piece of cloth with Josef’s name and address in Budapest—this address. Here. 647 Károly utca. And Stow, Massachusetts. All of it on a torn piece of shirt that he kept for fifty years, stashed away in his drawer of valuables—a diamond tie clip from his grandfather, a pocket watch. His younger self, the one that existed back in 1945, didn’t understand why he bothered to keep it, but his older self, the one looking at himself now, the one that existed even then, his older self must have foreseen the day he would need that piece of cloth. One day, a few months ago, he tracked down Josef in Stow, Massachusetts, the town where Josef’s cousin gave Josef his start and where Josef and Rose remained to this day. Found his name in the Stow white pages. It was that easy.

  “Because one day I will help you,” Josef had said to him then. “You live on my promise. I am a good Hungarian. I don’t like Nazis. I speak English. You see? My English is good. You will help me go to America.”

  Edward opened the door and stepped into the dark hallway, into shades of gray and brown. It was 9:26 p.m. The minutes were passing quickly. He needed to hurry now. This is what it came to: these moments you wonder about your whole life. And it is not what you had imagined.

  Not at all.

  Thirty-two

  You okay?” Stephen said, standing in the hall. “I heard you talking.” He looked intently at Annie, an expression of concern or suspicion, she couldn’t tell.

  “Yes, fine.” She rushed her words, the lie catching in her throat. “I was checking in with my babysitter.”

  “Your son okay?”

  “Yes. All is well. I didn’t realize how late it was.”

  “Don’t worry about the time. Come with me. I prepared some Hungarian sandwiches. I hope you like cheese and salami.”

  “I do.”

  She followed him down the hall, shaken that she was almost caught in the act of calling Edward.

  “How long did you say you’ve lived here?” Annie asked, grasping for something to normalize their conversation. Her right toe was starting to ache. She wasn’t used to wearing heels, or a dress for that matter. She straightened up and followed him into the kitchen.

  “Less than a year.”

  “Not so long,” she said, dissatisfied by his answer. Less than a year was vague. She wanted to know exactly how long, but she didn’t want to raise his suspicions by asking again.

  “No. But it feels like home.”

  In the kitchen, Stephen opened the refrigerator and began assembling the ingredients of the sandwiches on a small square table next to the window. The window offered another stunning view of the statue across the river.

  “I started doing this earlier,” he said, apologetically, “but I ran out of time.”

  She stood beside him and helped arrange the sandwiches in a circle on the platter. She wanted to bring up his wife again but wasn’t sure how. “Are you planning to stay here permanently?”

  “I think so.”

  Then she noticed on the windowsill a framed photo of Marta lying naked on a bed. It was embarrassing and irritating.

  “She’s a nice girl,” Stephen said, gently putting Marta’s photo facedown on the sill. He brushed a tendril of hair from Annie’s face as if to tell her, It’s okay. We’re both embarrassed. Let’s ignore it and carry on.

  “I’m sure she is.” Once again his intimate gesture unnerved her, his ability to be so familiar with her, and in response, she felt emboldened to ask more questions. “When did you two meet?”

  “When I moved here. She’s been a comfort. You know. After losing my wife.”

  “Your wife died young,” Annie said, facing him. “Do you mind telling me what happened?”

  “Multiple sclerosis.”

  “I didn’t realize you could die from that.”

  “Yep.”

  Stephen finished his glass of wine and set the empty glass on the counter. “It is what it is. In the end, my wife couldn’t feed herself. Truth is, she wanted to go—like your brother, like my father.”

  “No. My brother didn’t want to go,” Annie said. “He was depressed. And he was drinking.”

  “Well, my wife did. It was her wish, and it angers me because people don’t understand that.”

  She could hear Edward yelling bullshit. “You mean society or your family?” Annie said, seeking clarification.

  “She didn’t want to live a compromised life in a wheelchair. That was not who she was.”

  Annie neatened the sandwiches on the platter, pushing them toget
her so they overlapped like flower petals. What was Stephen saying? He was putting forth a totally different explanation for Deborah’s death—not murder, not accidental overdose, but suicide—assisted suicide.

  “Not many people consciously make that kind of decision,” Annie said.

  “You’re not my wife.”

  “That was insensitive of me. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I understand,” he said, touching her bare arm. “I get upset about this. Sorry for what I said about your brother.” He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of pálinka. “This stuff is great when it’s cold.”

  In the other room, Eileen laughed gaily at something Bernardo said, and she could hear Will laughing as well.

  “Deborah—my wife—she had a big laugh.”

  Stephen opened the pálinka and poured himself and Annie another glass. “She helped me in so many ways. I wanted to help her, if you understand what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.” She took a sip of the pálinka and it numbed her tongue again. She was too stunned to eat. Everything was beginning to sound like doublespeak. Help her how? Help her kill herself? Help her die, so he could collect the insurance and move here? Or simply help her die?

  “How did she help you?” Annie said. She wanted to slow the fast currents of emotions flooding her thoughts.

  “She wanted me to follow my dream of living here. She insisted on it. She believed in me when others didn’t.”

  “She sounds like an extraordinary person. I don’t think my brother knew what his dreams were.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stephen said.

  “Me, too,” Annie said.

  Stephen picked up the tray of sandwiches and took a decisive step toward the living room, but Annie put her hand on his arm to stop him. “Are you close to your wife’s family?”

  “Funny you should ask.”

  He paused at the burst of laughter coming from the other room—Eileen again.

  “That’s a conversation for another time. Come on. Let’s join the fun. I don’t want to be a downer. Marta’s eager to show you her earrings.”