Until I Say Good-Bye (12 page)

Budapest

O
ur special place was Budapest. When John and I talked about the past, as we often did, our thoughts always came back to this city where we spent our first two years of marriage. The place where we laid the foundation for our lives together.

After the wonder of the Yukon with Nancy, Budapest was the place I thought of first. It was our twentieth wedding anniversary that year. I wanted to spend it with John in the place where our married life began.

Whatever the future, John and I told ourselves, we have today. We have old memories to rekindle and new memories to make.

The Hungarian cold hit us hard. John and I were used to south Florida winters and had forgotten how chilling Budapest in February could be. I was a tropical girl. Why, I wondered, was I always traveling into the cold?

Then we heard the warm laugh, booming across the airport. A memory from two decades before.

“
Szervuszstok!
” our old friend Feri Der shouted, greeting us in Hungarian with hugs and kisses. John had met Feri during our first stay. They played on a baseball team together, a Hungarian passion at the time (though John was only one on the team who knew all the rules). I had not seen Feri in Hungary for twenty years, and there he was.

“
Szervuszstok
, my friends.
Szervuszstok!
So good to see you. I'll get the car.”

When we left Budapest in 1994, Russian and East German autos had chugged along its streets. One, the Trabant, powered by a mix of oil and gas, spewed so much pollution that building facades crumbled. Feri drove a truck called a Barkas, a classic piece of East German technology that always broke down.

This time, as John helped me to the curb, we noticed a white Cadillac Escalade. “Man, that's odd to see here,” John said.

And out of the Caddy hopped Feri, laughing.

On the ride from the airport, we saw the effect of twenty years. Gas stations, German groceries, billboards, giant box stores, and—Lord help me—strip malls. Once-dark streets awash in neon. Renaissance buildings with shiny new drugstores on their first floors.

Don't miss the old, I told myself. Embrace the new.

In 1994, Feri had been living in a shanty in a Budapest suburb, building his dream home. The shanty was little more than a plywood box with a cot. Feri scraped together money bill by bill. John had helped him build clay walls nearly two feet thick with a trowel and shovel, one foot at a time. One day, they went together to the forest and selected the home's master beam.

Now we pulled up to the completed dream: a square, two-story traditional farmhouse in the middle of Budapest. A piece of the past in a post-Soviet world.

Feri showed us each detail: the scalloped roof tiles, heated floors, custom bread oven, a woven-branch fence that offered a relief from the chain fences that fronted the other yards. Feri had wrought the iron window latches himself. “A hundred and twenty-four of them!”

And his sweetest spot—a large underground wine cellar. The walls were made of special stones brought from Hungary's winemaking region. On them grew a black mold that imparts taste to the wine.

In that cellar, Feri made magic—red, white, sweet, dry, and a Hungarian firewater called
pálinka
. In no time, we were taste-testing.

“Relieve your glasses of their air!” he shouted. “It's so good you're here. It's like you never left.”

All of Hungary was around us. All our memories. The opera. The historic buildings. The Parliament. The countryside. Yet there was no place I'd rather be than the wine cellar with my husband and our best Hungarian friend.

The occasion called for a special Hungarian stew, Feri said. Traditional, cooked over an open fire. “Tomorrow we slaughter the rabbits. John, you will do so as well.”

“You going to do it?” I asked the next morning in Feri's guest room, as John buttoned me into my coat.

John is a gentle soul—never hunted, never handled a gun nor wanted to, and certainly never bashed in a rabbit's head, strung it up by its hind legs, and slit its throat.

“I guess,” he said with a deep sigh.

John helped me into my long black coat, my boots and brace, and parked me outside on the porch so I could watch.

After some
pálinka
shots, Feri selected the first rabbit to die, a twelve-pound gray-and-white, the largest of his collection.

He bashed it to break its neck, strung it up, and sliced.

“You now,” he said to John.

Together they killed three rabbits, skinned and gutted them, chopped them in pieces, John grimacing most the time.

As I watched, I thought more of John than of the kill, of how bizarre it was to see him doing something I had never seen him do before. And how comforting the sense it gave—that he will have another life one day, without me, full of new adventures.

Feri's partner, Vikki, brought fixings for the stew: a mound of chopped onion, tubes of spicy paprika cream, a block of lard.

She made dumplings by hand. Feri boiled the rabbits in a cauldron over the fire, adding wine and water and the fixings.

He brought one of his finest wines from the cellar, a cabernet, liquid velvet. We huddled round the fire, our glasses propped in the snow.

I am so glad to be here, I thought. I am so glad to be alive.

Feri spent several days with us, laughing, breaking into show tunes, playing his accordion. He took us to public medicinal baths, drove us around his city, helped suit me up in winter gear. He was a constant presence who lifted our spirits—and occasionally my body, too.

He stuffed us—with wild boar, a smorgasbord of
kolbász
from venison and other animals, and sour cherry dumplings he fell in love with while working in Russia.

“Eat, eat,” he would say. “There is always more.”

Feri had been an executive with Avon, soaring to success on ingenuity and pluck. As their general manager in Russia, he raised sales by $100 million.

“The Russian women, they must eat lipstick for breakfast,” he said, grinning.

Feri told John and me of a seemingly intractable personal problem he was having.

“Well, if you can't change the situation, change your attitude,” I told him. “You are the master of your mind.”

“That's so American,” Feri said, rolling his eyes.

But he kissed and hugged me all the same.

I
t snowed hard. That was another difference in Budapest this time around, the big, wet snow. John and I had been in Budapest snows before. But we had never seen her gray, gray streets frosted pure white.

We wanted to be out in the enchantment, even though walking in snow was like walking through cookie dough for me.

No bother. You only live once.

John suited me up: coat, brace, boots. This was another good thing about living in Florida, we realized. Warm-weather clothes are easier than cold, especially when you cannot use your hands.

I've kissed cold weather good-bye forever now.

But that day it was magnificent. White. New. Barely touched.

We set out in the city to hunt for a restaurant we had eaten at many times. We couldn't remember its name, only its enormous portions of goose and sweet cabbage with apples worth traipsing through anything to eat again.

And I remembered the location, on a small avenue off a large central square called Deák Ferenc Tér—a place I passed daily when we lived here.

We traipsed and traipsed, around icy spots on the sidewalks, down cobblestone streets, trying not to slip, trip, or otherwise fall. I grew tired. Could barely lift my feet. John wiped snow off a bench and left me there to scamper ahead and scout the scene.

But no matter how we approached Deák Tér, we could not get our bearings. We could not find the little avenue. The billboards on the square and new shops made it unrecognizable to me.

We abandoned the search, saying, “Ah, well, probably closed anyhow.”

After all, the newspaper I'd helped start, the
Budapest Sun
, had folded three years before.

One day we met up with a former colleague from the
Sun
, Steve Saracco. We asked about the restaurant. He pointed it out, exactly where it had always been, as he walked with us to the subway at Deák Tér.

John and Steve helped me down the stairs to the subway entrance. It smelled just as it had twenty years ago, of fried dough and fuel. We bought the same little flimsy ticket, punched it in the same little machine, boarded the same grimy escalator cycling too fast. We waited on the same platform, underneath the same hideous orange ceiling for the same blue train.

Sadness hijacked my spirit. We bid good-bye to Steve, and I wept uncontrollably.

“Why are you crying?” John asked.

“I can't even find words to explain.”

O
n our wedding anniversary—Valentine's Day—John and I set out alone. A special night, arranged by Feri, in a suite at the Hotel Gellert.

The art nouveau Gellert, completed in 1918, was like a beautiful grandmother. Worn, outdated, but with classic style. Its stained glass and wrought-iron accents were a delight, even overlaid with Soviet-era eyesores, fluorescent lighting, and bulbous sign lettering from the 1970s.

Feri had snagged us the Richard Nixon suite, so named after the president who laid his head there twice.

“I know. I know. No Tricky Dick jokes,” John said to me.

The room's small balcony overlooked the Danube River, ice floes drifting upon it.

We donned the bathrobes provided, and John carried me down the stairs to the spa. We parted into the steamy, sex-segregated indoor baths.

I sat alone in the 100-degree water, nestled as close to the font of the thermal mineral spring as possible. Above me were blue-and-green mosaic-tiled domes. Honeyed light streamed through glass ceiling tiles into the steamy, cavernous room.

I studied the women—young and old, bulbous and sinewy, naked and suited. I studied how they glided across the wet tile floors, how they descended the steps into the water so gracefully, how the light glistened upon their muscled limbs.

And I wondered how the hell I was going to get out.

My trips weakened me. I realized that even before Wreck Beach. They broke down muscles that would never grow back.

But they strengthened my mind. My heart.

A fair trade?

By Budapest, I was limping badly. Every time I lifted my left foot to step, the front of it dropped, causing me to trip on my own toes.

I wore a brace, which helped prevent that. But there in the women's-only bath, I had no brace.

And no husband to lean on.

I sat back in the pool. I had time. This, after all, was the Budapest I loved. The city sits on a vast network of hot mineral springs and is renowned in Europe for its medicinal baths. Baths centuries old, saunas and thermal pools, salt rooms and steam rooms designed to cure any number of ills. Baths are such an integral part of health care that some offer dental services on-site.

I thought of that day in Canada's Yukon Territory with Nancy, and our magical dip in the outdoor hot spring. There, for a moment, I saw myself old.

Here, I felt myself young.

I exited the pool, clutching the brass handrails at the stairs. Stepped onto the wet tile in the honey-lit center of the room. The ladies in the pools stared as I struggled in the spotlight on the slippery stage—focusing my cosmic zoom on each step, trying not to eat the tile floor.

This is one of those moments I have to choose, I told myself. To feel sorry for myself or not.

I chose the latter.

“How'd ya do?” John asked when we met up again.

“Fine,” I said, excising any drama.

Upstairs in our Tricky Dick suite, we bathed, our first moments completely alone and at peace in a long time.

As he shampooed my hair, I asked John if he was okay with our decisions thus far—not to go Google crazy and hunt false ALS cures, not to clamor to be part of a clinical trial only to receive a placebo, not to falsely hope a drug would come.

Our decision to just be. Accept. Live with joy. And die with joy, too.

“I don't know how you do it,” John said. “If I were you, I would probably drive myself into a tree.”

“I have thought of that,” I said.

“Please don't.”

“I won't. Because the children would never understand.”

“Good.”

“Absent that, I would free you of this burden.”

“It is not a burden,” John said. “The least I can do for you is everything.”

He lifted me from the tub, dried me, combed out my snarled hair, fastened my bra. “This is the one I hook on the loosest notch, right?”

“You are getting good at this!” I smiled.

For the first time, John put stockings on me—silken black ones so sheer he could easily punch a thumb through. “Careful!” I said.

He slipped a sweater dress over my head, knelt, and directed my feet into my brace and boots. “Toe curled?”