by Andrew Ervin
Lights dotted the Buda Hills at the other end of the bridge like a low-hanging constellation. The island was dark, free from the intrusion of civilization. That was where he was headed. His hands were filthy and bleeding from the broken glass in the trashcan. He smelled like garbage now, like someone’s refuse.
The word sounded strange in his head: refuse.
The winter air couldn’t dissuade him from his rising confusion and anger. It was so obvious now. They wiggled a bit of pussy in his face and he lost his shit. Fucking stupid. Magda was in on it the entire time.
No—that wasn’t right. He was getting paranoid.
The wind on the bridge was astounding in its ferocity. The Hungarian flags flapped like they wanted to come loose and get carried away. The city lights of Budapest formed a spectacle downriver, a grid on which the paths of innumerable occupying armies and their brutal histories could be roughly plotted. Brutus was finally ready to escape his complicity with the most recent imperial conquest, his complicity with the Man. That had been the problem all along. There was just no getting outside of his complicity or outside the very language the army used to keep him in his place. There was once a Brutus in Rome. Even resistance oiled the machine. That would sooner brook the devil than a king. Only refusal would make it stop.
Brutus stopped at the stone balcony hanging over the river halfway between Pest and Buda. Car lights lined the banks of the Danube in streaks of white and yellow. The bag he carried and the keys, the false ones, were the emblems of all that was evil in his life, of the doubt and resentment and anger. Magda’s betrayal—that was what bothered him the most. Cast them into the water, and he would be free at last. Only without them would he be whole again. He was laughing out loud when he pulled the locker keys from his pocket and held them straight out in front of him in a fist. The metal and molded plastic cut at his skin. He let go, dropping them into the river. No light flickered off them; the water made no sound as it swallowed them. They simply vanished.
His body stopped functioning. There was only pain now. Check the date, he thought—I’m all expired. He leaned forward and the frozen, metal railing burned through his clothes and against his belly. Watching the twinkling lights of the skyline, a slow smile spread over his face. The cold felt good somehow. Glorious.
He hoisted the bag onto the railing with the very last of his strength. As long as he held onto it there was nothing anyone could do to him. Brutus had the government by the balls. He knew enough to get Sullivan locked away for the rest of his hateful life, but that was not going to help him. It was clear now—no authority existed that Brutus was willing to run to. And with that understanding came his deliverance. Refusal was the only solution. He wouldn’t play along anymore. With both hands shaking, he held the bag out in front of him over the water. It was full of poison, full of black magic ready to seep out. He was ready finally to let go of all the pain he had collected, all the violence in his life, and to move on. He would keep moving. That was all anyone could do. Find an island and live off the land. Opening his hands, Brutus watched the bag plummet toward the river. It fell for a full minute, for four hundred years, for an eternity, before it broke the surface of the water. Then it was gone, all of it. He took a breath and tasted the blood rising to his lips. It tasted like the freedom that had been there all along, his whole life, unnoticed until that moment.
THE EMPTY CHAIRS
1.
Independence Day was three hours old and only Melanie and Nanette remained, the last customers of a bar with no last call. Even the prostitutes had gone home. “Bedtime, ladies,” Jimmy said, pulling the plug on the jukebox and killing “Strange Fruit.” He returned to wiping down the countertop.
Melanie still had more than half a vodka tonic left, which she swallowed in one long and breathless gulp. Nanette smashed out the end of another cigarette. They slid out of their booth and rose, unsteady, holding each other for balance. Jimmy leaned across the bar to kiss them goodnight. He smelled like a grease fire and had the gaunt look of someone nearing the end of a weeklong meth binge. “Sleep tight,” he said. “See you tomorrow, heh.”
“It is tomorrow,” Melanie said. Her words sounded perfectly formed in her mind, yet she could feel her tongue slurring them. She needed to go home, get some sleep. She should’ve been in bed hours ago. She had a big day tomorrow. Which was today.
She and Nanette were American expatriates drunk on youth, overpriced Dutch vodka, and some sour substance they mistook for personal freedom. Eve and Adam’s served as a second home, or perhaps third, a kind of base camp for their various recreations throughout the city. It was located on the ground floor of a bullet-hole-riddled apartment building next to the Danube, on the Pest side. Because the dimmed lights made it difficult to see from one end of the bar to the other (“Atmospheric!” one guidebook said, alongside a photo Nanette had taken) and offered a view of the Danube (“Scenic!”), Jimmy charged whatever he wanted for watered-down Guinness and packs of broken Chio Chips. He played up his campy luck-o’-the-Irish brogue when tourists arrived with stacks of newly changed forints. It was Monopoly money to them. As Budapest’s only authentic Irish pub, Eve and Adam’s ranked among the city’s most tourist-infested and expensive bars, but it was definitely convenient. They lived just half a block down Katona József Street, up a mountain of stone stairs.
The cold air penetrated what few clothes Mel had on even before the lock clicked behind them and the round Guinness sign blinked off. Her hair, a thick, Ride of the Valkyries–blonde curtain, covered her whole back and was long enough to wear like a scarf, but even that couldn’t keep her warm. The bar’s exit was built into the corner of the block and faced southwest toward the southern tip of the island and the brightly lit Margit Bridge. The Buda Hills sat dark and dormant across the river. Living so close to the pub, neither of them had bothered to wear a jacket, though Nan did have a camera bag slung over her shoulder. Break-ins were a regular fact of life in Hungary, and the petty crime in Budapest was outrageous; she kept her most expensive and irreplaceable equipment with her at all times, and even there it wasn’t always safe from the Gypsies on the metro. A few of her lenses, from Germany or maybe Scandinavia, were worth more than their respective cameras. Melanie should have been equally protective of her violin, which she bought in Austria from the same venerable firm that supplied instruments to the Vienna Philharmonic.
Instead of heading home, and to sleep, Nanette dragged Mel by the hand through the park at Jászai Mari Square and to the körút. There was no traffic at this time of night. They followed the tracks of the 4/6 tram, which during the day careened down the center of the four-lane road. At the middle of the bridge, a small observation deck hung over the water. Sometimes, when the weather was warmer, packs of drunken expats stood up there and revealed various parts of their anatomies or even peed on the tour boats passing below. A small pilot light of vodka in Melanie’s belly emanated a pale glow that she felt all the way up in her face. They shivered and hugged each other for warmth, and Nanette tried without luck to light a cigarette. She got angry and threw her lighter into the dark of the river. Melanie had grown more or less accustomed to Nanette’s outbursts. Their affection had recently grown somewhat less reciprocal than it once was.
A tanker passed lazily beneath them. The loud, mechanical drone precluded any chance of conversation. The ship was dark, though, making it appear like an apparition, an abandoned ghost schooner making its way slowly down to the Black Sea under its own steerage. The streetlights from the bridge fell onto the boat like candle wax. In an hour or so, the city would shut off all the lamps along the Danube, even at the parliament building and on the Chain Bridge. Mel attributed her fascination with the ship to the advanced state of her intoxication. She tried not to think about tomorrow’s concert. Today’s. When she focused too clearly on it, another warm wave of nausea tipped her off balance. She shivered again and held Nanette tighter. The vessel disappeared downriver, and in the absence of external noise she
realized that most of the banging she heard had originated inside her own skull. This kind of intoxication, brought about by one vodka tonic after another, each intended to push her thoughts of the concert further away, carried with it a sickly, syrupy tinge. The queasiness was already starting to scratch its way up out of her stomach. She wouldn’t necessarily be ill, but there was something crude about vodka’s effects in comparison to, for example, the warmth of a nice burgundy or the gentle gravity of a Valium pilfered long ago from her mother’s medicine cabinet. She stared down at the water.
There existed any number of mythologies concerning the Danube, many of which had floated downstream from Vienna—which, since the death of Webern, she felt safe to regard as the least musical of all the so-called “musical cities”—and were evidenced in such novelty hits as “Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald” and “An der schönen blauen Donau.” One legend had it that the Danube only appeared blue to those who were in love. The river, called the Duna in Hungarian, defined and redefined Budapest every day, making it two distinct yet parallel cities divided by a shared mythos. Buda, on the right bank, was a land of large hills, grassy valleys, and vast stretches of dense forest. She and Nanette lived at the inner edge of Pest, the city’s—the entire nation’s—congested, urban core.
“Baby,” Nanette said through chattering teeth, “I’m afraid that one of these nights the Creature from the Blue Danube is going to climb up here and drag you away.”
“I hope it’s tonight,” Melanie said.
“Rrraawwrrr,” Nanette growled, and broke free of Melanie’s grip in order to swat at her with large amphibian hands. Melanie ran, hollering for dear life, chased in monster-like slow motion by Nan’s extended arms and curling claws. She arrived panting at their building, but Nanette had the keys so she cowered at the doorway, waiting. When the creature finally approached, its mouth opening and closing like a fish’s, Melanie put her hands to her frozen cheeks and let out a wide-eyed Hollywood-starlet scream. The sound reverberated down the street and bounced between the tall buildings. They cried with laughter as Nan fumbled with the lock. Melanie felt giddy and nauseous.
Their fin de siècle tenement filled the city block opposite Eve and Adam’s. The proximity and height of the building across the street ensured their flat was in total and perpetual darkness even during the sunniest days of summer. A huge Coca-Cola advertisement perched atop their roof like a crown, visible all the way from the top of the hills. They could see the runoff light reflected in the other building’s windows. When they threw parties, they simply told people to go to the Coke Building and look for their buzzer. Holes like the craters of Mars still pockmarked the façade where, in February 1945, it absorbed a significant quantity of German and Russian bullets while those two armies fought for control of the city. Nan finally unlocked the huge metal door and filled the entranceway with the same red light.
The elevator was broken again, or was still broken, so they hiked up the stairs to the third floor, which would have been the sixth floor in any other nation in the world, considering they needed to climb up six flights of stairs to get there. Their laughter and footsteps resounded through the inner courtyard, which was surrounded on all sides by landings that led to the apartments. Climbing the stairs never proved any easier drunk. Nanette had grown accustomed to dragging her camera bag to the top of everything from cathedral steeples to the rooftops of the prefab commie-condo high-rises of Békásmegyer, but each step required more and more effort of Melanie. She envied Nanette’s athletic frame, but not enough to accompany her to the gym every night or for the occasional run around the island. Practicing her violin sometimes six hours a day, plus full rehearsals with the opera orchestra a few afternoons each week, took up way too much of her time for that. Every spring she swore to lose fifteen pounds, but obsession with her artistic growth, or her perceived lack of artistic growth, had so far prevented her from flattening her stomach. She felt distinctly fat all the time, especially in comparison to her sexy roommate.
Nanette possessed a rare, elemental beauty, the kind that made both men and women do surprisingly stupid things for her attention. Consciously or not, she flirted with almost everyone she met. Melanie saw it happen dozens and dozens of times at Eve and Adam’s and all over the city. But Nanette was also violently possessive of Melanie. She had made threats in the past about hurting herself if Mel were to move out.
The scent of stale smoke greeted them in the kitchen, where dishes and glassware, empty wine bottles, and countless photographs covered every flat surface. Melanie’s faces looked up at her in disappointment from the clutter. A doorway led to a short hallway and their bedroom, guest room, a spacious living room, bathroom, and water closet. Sometimes Melanie felt uneasy about being sandwiched in the middle of a monolithic apartment building, surrounded on all sides by a thousand people and their pets, but at least their building had the advantage of offering many other targets to any would-be burglar. All the same, they had added an extra bar-lock to the door to protect her violin, jewelry, and her massive CD collection.
Constant exposure to classical music constituted a big part of Melanie’s job, of her art, and the fact that Nanette didn’t fully appreciate that was a big reason why they had been fighting so much lately. The current, unsteady truce stipulated that Nan only listened to hip-hop when Melanie wasn’t home. Nanette lacked the sophistication to appreciate the European art music—née “classical”—tradition, though she knew better than to complain about the extraordinary renditions of Bach recorded by the likes of Gertler and Heifetz and Serly. Melanie had long since given up trying to get Nan to appreciate serious music.
Something about the polluted fishbowl of expatriate life helped Melanie form lifelong friendships with people like Nanette, whom she very likely would never have associated with back in Boston. She still loved Nanette in a way, sure, but she also understood that her love was a matter of attraction among opposites. It was a love based on dissonance rather than harmony, with little more than passing, polite interest in each others’ artistic careers. Melanie hadn’t even bothered to invite her to the big Independence Day concert. No point, really.
In just a matter of hours, she would perform in the world premiere of an opera titled The Golden Lotus, by the world-renowned but way-overrated composer Lajos Harkályi. It would be broadcast live on national television and recorded for commercial distribution. If it turned out anything like Harkályi’s other albums, it was guaranteed to sell millions. Not that she would see any of that money.
Nanette rinsed out two korsós, stolen from one bar or another, and poured both of them glasses of flat mineral water and totally unnecessary Unicum nightcaps from the freezer. They ate stale pogácsas; in the morning it would be Melanie’s turn to run out for fresh bread.
There was nothing on TV at that time of night except soft-core porn, so she put on a Bartók album instead and forwarded it to the burlesque Kicsit ázottan. It was a private joke.
Nanette came in and promptly fell asleep on the couch without brushing her teeth. Her cellphone rang from the bedroom; at this hour it was either a jilted former lover or an editor asking her to go shoot a crime scene. Melanie didn’t wake her. Instead, she finished her Unicum and then drank Nanette’s too. When the Bartók ended she listened to Kodály’s Székely fonó until she started to pass out as well. Rather than rousing Nan and dragging her to bed, Melanie let her stay where she was. She neglected to kiss her good-night.
Tomorrow was a big day. It was already tomorrow.
2.
Melanie lingered over a slice of thickly buttered toast and too-weak Meinl coffee until Nanette finally emerged, fully formed for the day, from the bathroom. Her third cigarette of the morning hung from the corner of her pouty lips. Hartmann’s Concerto funèbre trickled from the living room stereo, barely audible in deference to Melanie’s headache. “I’m getting my hair cut,” she announced, fully aware that Nanette wouldn’t believe her.
And she didn’t. In Nanette�
�s defense, however, Melanie had made many similar threats in the past. For months she had been talking about getting it lopped off, but always backed out at the last minute. This time she really meant it, though. Apart from the occasional decapitation of split ends, which she did herself, she had not had a real haircut since tenth grade, though recently she fantasized about stringing a violin bow with it. She wanted a new look. Plus, it was a complete hassle—an hour to untangle and dry it every day.
Nanette stuck her head into the kitchen and gave Melanie that glare of hers, an aggressive combination of disbelief and unwillingness to brook any dissent whatsoever. She was like that sometimes.
The night they met, the previous summer, a fight had broken out during a birthday party held on a boat docked on the Buda side of Margit Island. Melanie had noticed Nanette around town at Eve and Adam’s and the usual expat hangouts—it was difficult not to—but they had never spoken. At that party, they found themselves at the same table, right next to the dance floor, and they hit it off over innumerable korsós of free beer. Nanette spent most of the evening dancing with an American soldier. A small group of them, on landlocked shore leave, showed up quite uninvited. They grew rowdier as the night progressed, shouting and slam dancing and trying to feel girls up while dancing with them. Nanette played along. She rubbed herself against one of them; they slow danced together for hours to the endless techno beat, and she returned to the table every so often to take a big drink from the beer glass that, unbeknownst to her, Melanie kept refilling from the keg. At some point, late in the evening, Nanette slumped into the chair next to Melanie and picked up a plastic instant camera that had been abandoned on the table. “I fucking hate these things,” she said. “It’s not yours is it?”