Under Budapest (19 page)

“But he
is
an engineer.”

“Don't worry,” they repeat, the pompous children. “We will get him out. But you need to stay out of the way or you'll be hurt.”

The fighting is over, really. The building is mostly destroyed and the revolutionaries have taken it, and the communists are dead and the AVO too and many fighters and some innocent of violence entirely, and so Margit fights her way through the shocked and jubilant and fear-drenched crowd and back to the sewer grate and falls to her knees on it, calling down into its deep, deep hole: “Miklos, don't you dare die on me. Don't you dare.”

That night, the Soviet tanks withdraw. Columns of them make their way down the broad streets. The ammunition trucks too, long strings of them, puffing gaily as a parade. It's foggy on the Duna, and the tanks are leaving.

Have we won? Margit wonders, Agi wonders, the entire city wonders. Have we
won
?

Wednesday, October 31

Margit's body shut down when they took him from her and she was glad of it. Glad to feel herself drying out, getting lighter, thinner. It was the only way to deal with the blunt, drab wait. Everything was a wait. For food, for pay, for the streetcar. To start work in the morning, to get out at night. A wait at the post office, a wait for the meeting to begin, a wait until it finally ended, a wait until your daughters came home, safe. And underneath the various waitings with others or alone, the waiting for him. The worst waiting of all. Meantime, she didn't look at herself in the mirror, blindly twisted her hair back in the morning for the office work she did well enough. She didn't look down when she peed. She didn't watch the cloth as she bathed.

And yet now, her husband's hand washes her. A miracle. It trembles, but it remembers the round of her belly, the dip of her spine, the crook of her neck.

“It's different now,” she says.

“That's okay.”

“You can't leave me again.”

“I won't.”

“How can you promise that?”

“How can I not?”

The problem is he is a good man, mostly, and kind. She is the sharp one, perpetually dissatisfied, mad at life, and the last decade has only whittled her down. Down to this. She is only just past forty, but her knees sticking up in the tub are those of an old woman and the flame that used to lick her belly she'd doused. How can I not? he asked. He doesn't know how scared she's become. Years ago, when they married, she'd wanted dinner parties. She wasn't a frivolous woman and she didn't need riches—she'd shared his politics, after all. She'd
loved
his politics, their honesty and honour. But she also wanted laughs with friends under warm lights, a wedding anniversary every single year. He rubs her right foot, tucks thumb under arch, smoothes her toes straight.

“Do you want to tell me?”

He shakes his head.

Good. She can't bear to know.

Miklos had not been held under Koztarsasag Ter after all, but at Gyujtofoghaz prison. Yesterday, while Margit shouted into a hole, its doors had been flung open and hundreds of political prisoners poured out. A couple of strong young revolutionaries had brought Miklos home. She found him there, when she returned, in front of her door like a parcel.

She had bathed him first. Run the cloth over the burn marks on his arms, the smashed and twisted bones of his engineer's hands. He'd lain back in the tub as she raised one leg to wash, then the other. Legs so thin, they weighed almost nothing. Pulling the cloth between his legs, moving his slack penis from one side to the next, she'd bit the tears back. What right had she to cry? She helped him out of the deep tub and into a clean, warm set of clothes, too big. He lay in bed as she scrubbed the grey scum off the tub. He slept for six hours. When he wakes in the dark, he finds Margit in the bathtub crying silently in inches of water, and he takes the cloth from her hand.

Now the man who sits at the kitchen table fills the small room. Quietly, he thanks his wife for the bowl she puts in front of him. He barely meets his daughter's eyes, abashed before her sudden adulthood. He's skinny. He's lost teeth. The spoon trembles in his hand.

“Jo etvagyat,” her mother says, her voice like the spoon.

That morning, when Agi woke up, both her parents were still asleep, arms around each other. She had to find her clothes in the near dark of the shuttered room and dress in the bathroom, jumping on the freezing cold tile, trying not to look at the stinking heap of rags he'd dropped there last night.

Now he turns to her. “Agi, your mother tells me you're a teacher?”

“Yes. Mathematics.”

“Good. That's very good.”

They hear gunfire and shouting, boots pounding on cracked stone. How can he ask such questions when the world is falling apart?

“Mathematics.” He nods. He's run out of things to say, looks to his wife with a helplessness she's never seen before. At the sharp sadness in her eyes, he pulls it in. “Margit, how on earth did you make such a responsible, intelligent woman out of the hooligan I used to know?”

“I had nothing to do with it,” says her mother. Her tone ends the conversation. They finish their bread in silence. If anyone's still hungry, no one says so.

Agi dries and stacks the plates. From the other room, the low mumble of her parents' voices. Her mother seems no happier now than when he was gone. There was no rejoicing last night at his return, no signs of joy on her mother's face this morning, only the same tight knot of a forehead. And Agi thinks, Why am I still here? Who am I waiting for?

Thursday, November 1

At 10:00 a.m., Gyula appears at her door. Gyula! For a moment she forgets. And then she remembers. He pulls her out of the apartment, away from her mother, but there's nowhere else to go so he shuts the door behind them and they stand there under the shadow of the balcony above. He holds her hands. Into her ear, he says, “The word from Vecses is that the tanks have turned around. They're pointed back toward Budapest. They've been playing with us, Agi. They're preparing to invade. Almost certainly, and probably very soon.”

He's afraid but trying not to show it, acting strong, for her. “The Revolutionary Council is meeting tonight. Everyone needs to make his own decision, whether to stay or get out. You need to go, Agi. Just like you planned. If you go now, you can likely make it through. The borders are still open, you can get to Austria.”

She looks at him, her Gyula. He's still
her
Gyula, isn't he? For one instant, she imagines Zsofi has never said what she said. Imagines stepping into his arms, the relief of that letting go because he would hold her just as he used to and everything would be fine. “Did you tell Zsofi that you love her?”

The question takes him by surprise. “What are you talking about?”

“She believes that you love her.”

“But that's crazy. She's crazy. Are you listening to me, Agi? There's no time for this. You need to get your things together and go. Today.”

“You didn't kiss her? Make love to her?”

“For God's sake, Agi.” His hair needs a wash. At least six grenades hang from his belt. His hands are black from shooting the gun that hangs from his shoulder.

“Zsofi's dramatic, but she doesn't lie. It's one of her weak­nesses.”

But Gyula lies. He lies all the time. He lied to his father about her; he lied to the school about his ideology; he lied to the police who stopped him coming out of the British Legation; he loves to lie. Did he lie to her? All that time, promising to come with her, pretending that escape was his dream too—was it just another lie? No, looking at him now, here in front of her, she knows that much, at least. He is a sincere man, a true man who feels deeply. Maybe he hadn't lied to her but hadn't chosen her either. When it came down to it, he chose this revolution. That didn't stop her from wanting him. It only made it impossible, and the one thing she will never do is love like that, love grievingly, love for what is not. She knows what that love looks like: it leaves holes inside a person deeper than life, so deep if you fell in you'd never crawl out.

“I love you, Agi. You.”

“It doesn't matter anymore,” she says, taking a step back.

“Come on, Agi, it was one kiss. In the heat of battle. A moment. That's all. ”

One kiss, that's all. Of course it didn't matter, not to him. And it should never have mattered to Zsofi.

“Where's Zsofi now?”

“What did I just say?”

“No, that's not what I meant. I mean, I can't leave without her, Gyula. I have to find her.”

“Oh. I don't know for sure. Likely the student housing near the Vermezo.”

“Thank you,” she says.

He leans in, touches his lips to hers. “My love,” he says, and his voice drops right through her. As if nothing has changed. She bristles, he brushes. How can love possibly end? How can it? She wants to hold him so tight. Wants to hold him and never let him go. Wants his arms around her, and his heart, wants his soul, his touch, his breath.

“Agi, I'll come find you. I promise. When all this is over, I'll find you.”

Moments later, from behind the closed door, she hears him go.

She makes it across the city in good time, without having to run to avoid shooters or explosions or armed or fleeing crowds. If it's true the tanks have turned, that this is, in fact, the eve of a new invasion, there's no sign of it. Budapest is calm, the air strangely quiet in the aftershock. People rest, bury bodies in parks and empty lots, line up patiently for food, walk at an ordinary pace, greet with an ordinary voice. In the housing by the meadow named Field of Blood for a different battle, she finds students massed, lounging, crowded in, dozing five or six to a room. She walks the hallways, takes it all in. The feeling of it. The youth and the camaraderie. They share cigarettes, food, clothes, ammo, and hope. They huddle for warmth. They dream of a future that will thank them. Of course they shared love. How could they not? They are joined together in this making of new epic stories where love runs ready and hot as blood. But Zsofi is her sister and that is love too.

“Zsofi Teglas?” Agi asks the first group she sees.

Shrugs.

“Zsofi Teglas?” she asks a woman in men's pants, coming out the door of a crowded room.

“Sorry.”

Down one hall and up the next, Agi wanders. She has all her forints. She carries food and water in a bag. She wears the only shoes she owns; they'll have to do. On her head, a hat, and under the jacket she's borrowed from her mother a shirt, two sweaters, two skirts. She'd made all her preparations as her parents watched. Her mother's anger was ebbing, finally, running out and drifting around her ankles with the pages and pages of ink-etched paper that she kept letting go. Her father held one hand in the other, listening to the voices of his daughter and his wife and hardly hearing them. “Are you leaving for good, then?” he finally asked, after she had twice explained to her mother the plan, the route, how she would evade the guards at the border, how she would write as soon as she was safe. In Vienna.

“For good,” she answered. And she kissed her father's cheek, the cheek of the man who'd once towered over her, but who had never been able to protect either his daughters or his wife.

“Zsofi,” she calls.

Her sister lies curled into the arm of another girl the same age. They're dozing fully dressed on a bed, with their shoes still on their feet. She calls again, “Zsofi. Wake up.”

Zsofi pulls herself out of sleep, blinking to make sense of the world. “It's me. Come on. Get up.”

“What are you doing here?”

“It's time to go.”

“Says who?”

“I don't want to fight with you, Zsofi. Please. Just come.”

The other girl has woken now too, and three others in the room watch them.

“I'm not going anywhere.” Agi knows that tone: stubborn Zsofi, digging her heels in, especially in front of an audience.

“Gyula came to warn me. The tanks have turned around. He thinks the Russians will invade.”

Around them, a scuffle, a flurry of questions—“What? Turned around where? Where are they? When?” Zsofi, though, has heard only the first part of what she's said.

“Gyula came to you?”

“To warn me, Zsofi. If we can leave today, now, we can be to the border by tomorrow. It's still open, he says.”

“But
he
's not leaving.”

“No, Zsofi, he's not. But we can.”

“If he's not going, I'm not going.”

Zsofi flings her arms in front of her chest. Proud, fearless lover is what she means to project, but what she does project is stupid, foolish, lovesick girl with gritty crumbs of sleep in her eye. Agi steadies her voice, makes it warmer than she feels right now, tries to draw the better, smarter, realistic Zsofi out from behind this face. Like tsking for a kitten, offering plates of warm milk.

“He can join us, Zsofi. He said he'd join us. After. But he wants us to be safe.”

“Grow up, Agi. He wants you to be safe; he wants me by his side.”

Grow up? Since when…
? She buttons the anger. “He doesn't love you, Zsofi. Not the way you think.”

“Really? Then why did he make love to me?”

“He
kissed
you, Zsofi.”

“Yes, and since then, we've been lovers.”

The word sounds obscene, engorged in her sister's mouth.

Zsofi turns to her bedmate: “Isn't that right, Anna?”

“Gyula
adores
her,” says the witless child.

Okay, enough. Agi grabs Zsofi's wrist. “You're coming with me.”

“Am not.” She kicks.

“Yes, you are.” Agi drags her half off the bed, but Anna holds tight to Zsofi's other arm.

“She said she's staying!” Anna shouts.

“Zsofi, listen to me. This revolution is over. You have to stop pretending.”