One Day In Budapest

by J. F. Penn

  As he considered the symbol, trying to discern a pattern in the chaos, Zoltan thought about Castle Hill itself. It was the centre of the nation, a symbol of the might of Hungary as it had once been and how some wanted it to be again. While Pest was the realm of the past, the Ghetto, the Basilica and a Parliament that had become too left wing for many, Buda was the proud fortress of might, the dominion of the future. Surely a nationalist cause would want that symbol to be at the heart of their strategy, and something niggled at the back of Zoltan’s mind about the tunnels beneath the hill.

  He took out his mobile and dialed Georg, who answered quickly.

  “I need you to go back on the right-wing chat boards,” Zoltan said. “Can you see what you can find from 2011?”

  While he waited for Georg to search, Zoltan turned back to Morgan.

  “There’s an ancient labyrinth beneath Castle Hill. It was shut down a few years ago under suspicious circumstances, around the time when Eröszak was on the rise.”

  His attention returned to the phone. “Great, we’ll check it out.”

  Zoltan pointed to Castle Hill. “Let’s head up there, it’s the only lead I can think of right now.”

  He led the way up the wide boulevard away from the ferry port. Stopping in front of a giant billboard advertising the elections, Zoltan looked up into the face of László Vay. His scar contorted as his mouth twisted with anger.

  “This man knows nothing of honor, and he will do anything to further his pursuit of power. None of what has happened today is beyond him, for he wants to win this election, and I think he aims to waltz in on the back of a nationalist uprising. I knew him once, you know, we were friends … but then one day I discovered the true man behind that perfect smile.”

  As Zoltan spoke, he remembered that dark day in Bosnia, when his friendship with Vay was obliterated.

  ***

  Srebenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Spring 1995.

  “Come on, Zol. Seriously, you’re always so slow. You can’t do anything for it now, let’s just leave.”

  Zoltan didn’t look up from the body he was examining, this one just a boy with a gunshot through his forehead. He was used to the taunts of his friend, the dismissive attitude to the people they were there to protect. The child’s arms were curled around himself as if he had tried to find comfort in the moments before death. Zoltan found himself silently reciting the opening words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayers for the dead, even though the boy was probably Muslim in this part of town. Finally he rose.

  László was smoking a cigarette, his body relaxed. He lifted his face to the sun, caught in a brief sunbeam, and reveled in its warmth. There were no dark shadows under his indigo eyes, only the movie star looks that made him the envy of the other soldiers. Zoltan didn’t know how László managed to shrug off the deadening weight of sadness that he found engulfed him every day.

  They both worked as part of the peacekeeping force, seconded from the Magyar Honvédség, the Hungarian army, to help the Dutch United Nations team. But Zoltan knew that there was no way of keeping the brittle peace for long and he felt the palpable tension in the air. These people hated each other and there had always been violence in this region. It was a tribal place, united only by the fake lines drawn on maps that were as fragile as the paper they were inked on. Thousands of Christian Serbs, Jews and Gypsies had been sent to camps from here under the Nazis and after the war, Yugoslavia had been created. Now, it had broken down, as Muslim nationalists demanded a centralized independent Bosnia, Serbian nationalists wanted to stay near Belgrade-dominated Yugoslavia, and Croats wanted an independent Croatian state.

  “Do you even give a shit about this place, Laz?” Zoltan asked as he stole the cigarette from his friend’s fingers.

  “Of course not,” László said. “This land should be ours anyway. After all, Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a hundred years ago. Maybe if they all kill each other, it will be ours again.”

  Seeing the fanatical look in László’s eyes, Zoltan sighed and shook his head. His friend had always been an extreme patriot, harking back to the old days of Hungarian glory. They had been the best of friends once, when their fathers had been business partners in a chain of Jewish shops in Budapest and they had played war games amongst the sacks of goods while the adults talked and drank together. László’s mother wasn’t Jewish, which technically meant that he wasn’t either, but that hadn’t been important to the boys back then.

  A rattle of bullets startled the men and they flattened themselves against a wall. This area was known to be raided by Serb incursions and the sound had been close. Behind a nearby fence, Zoltan could hear the harsh laughter of a group of men, and then a woman’s cry. He instinctively raised his gun and stepped forward quietly. László reached out to hold his arm.

  “Don’t,” he said quietly. “It’s not your fight.”

  “Then what the fuck are we doing here?” Zoltan whispered, his rage rising at the impotence of the peacekeepers to stop any kind of violence. It didn’t matter to him which group was inflicting the pain, only that the suffering of the innocents would stop. This dirty war was marked by systematic rape as a weapon, mainly by the Serbs against the Bosniaks. Zoltan had heard them boasting of the ‘little Chetniks’ they would leave behind in the wake of abused women.

  The woman screamed again, but the noise was cut short by shouting voices and the sound of a fist slamming into flesh. Zoltan pulled his arm away from László, stepping forward through the rubble of the streets to peer around the edge of the fence. There were six men, wearing the uniform of Serb nationalists, surrounding a woman who was sprawled, weeping, across the body of a dead man. One of the men said something, nodding at the woman and began to unbuckle his belt.

  Zoltan felt his heart beating hard in his chest. In some way, this tiny scene represented a microcosm of this conflict, and of every injustice against the vulnerable. Zoltan had heard the stories of Budapest under the fascists, then the Communists, how friends had given each other up in exchange for another day of freedom. He couldn’t alter his own country’s past, but perhaps he could change this woman’s future.

  He stepped out from behind the fence, his gun relaxed by his side. Knowing that he and László were outnumbered, it would be better to reason with them.

  “You’re a long way from your camp, guys,” Zoltan said as the men swung round to look at him. Their faces were hostile, and they raised their guns as they formed a phalanx around the woman, claiming their prize. Her sobs filled the air before one of the men spoke, his English halting.

  “You … go. This,” he gestured at the woman. “Ours.”

  Zoltan stepped forward, his left hand outstretched in a gesture of placation. His heart was hammering, but he knew that if he walked away now, the woman would be brutally violated. He still had a chance to stop it.

  “This woman is under UN protection,” he said. “So I think you had better leave.”

  One of the group laughed and turned away, saying a few words and reaching down to pull the woman off the body of her husband by her hair. She screamed again. Zoltan raised his gun and immediately, the other men had their weapons readied. Zoltan’s senses were heightened, the metallic smell of weapons overlaid with the stink of the soldiers’ sweat thick in his nostrils.

  He felt rather than heard László emerge from behind. A surge of gratitude washed over him at his friend’s belated backup. But then he heard a click near his ear, and realized that Laszlo’s gun was pointed at his own head. A flush of betrayal rocked him.

  “We’re sorry for the intrusion,” László said, his voice smooth, as if they were at a gentlemen’s club, not on the broken streets of Srebenica. “My friend here was just leaving.”

  The Serbs laughed and lowered their weapons. Zoltan felt László pulling him backwards as the six men turned to their prize, two men of them now unbuckling their pants, as the woman wept at their feet.

  Zoltan felt as if the world slowed in t
hat moment, his brain frantically searching for a solution. His eyes fell on a pile of weaponry that the Serbs had left discarded to one side.

  A grenade. It was the only way.

  He felt almost manic, desperate to get to the woman and stop the soldiers. László wouldn’t shoot him, he knew that, but he also knew that his friend would always choose the easy way out. There would be no back up.

  The Serbs had their backs turned and as two men held the woman down, another bent to pull off her lower garments as she sobbed in desperation.

  “Just walk away, Zol. You can’t help her.” László’s voice was honey, tempting him with the easy path, but the words of Simon Wiesenthal, the persecutor of Nazi criminals, echoed in Zoltan’s mind. For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

  Zoltan broke away from László’s grip, running for the pile of weaponry, his eyes fixed on a grenade. He heard swearing and then a gunshot but didn’t flinch, steeling his body and flinging himself down behind the pile as he grabbed a grenade from the top. Looking back briefly, he could see Laz ducking back behind the wall, his face turned away. Zoltan knew that he had mere seconds before the men advanced to kill him, so he pulled the pin from the grenade and launched it, throwing it far enough away that it would explode against a nearby building.

  The soldiers shouted and ducked as the grenade landed and then exploded, raining debris down from the scarred and shattered tenement block. They turned towards the weapons pile just as Zoltan pulled the pin and lobbed another grenade. This time the soldiers scattered, firing behind themselves at him and the weapons pile. The last soldier pointed a gun at the woman’s head as he turned away. Zoltan leapt from his hiding place and charged the man as the gun went off. His eyes had flicked up at the movement so the bullet just missed the woman’s head as she curled into a fetal position.

  An explosion rocked the little square and as masonry began to fall, Zoltan threw his body over the woman, trying to protect her from the rain of hell. As the other soldiers ran from the scene, he felt a slicing pain in his cheek and a burning on the side of his face as he lay there, hoping that he could just save this one innocent.

  ***

  Zoltan touched the scars on his cheek as he looked up into László’s face on the billboard, remembering that day. After the incident, their friendship had finally ruptured and split. László had inveigled himself into an officer’s position, allying himself with nationalist interests and eventually pursuing a political career. He was the embodiment of what most would consider success, becoming wealthy and influential in the public arena. Zoltan had followed his moral compass, giving up the pursuit of power to stand up for those who could not defend themselves.

  He felt a light touch on his arm, and turned to see Morgan’s face, a question in her eyes. Zoltan knew that he could trust her, their fast friendship built on a shared belief in humanity that men like László would never understand or honor.

  “Sorry,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Let’s go. The march will start early and as dusk falls, I fear that evil will stalk this city again.”

  CHAPTER 10

  When they reached the tourist-ridden precinct of Castle Hill, Zoltan led Morgan away from the throng down a dogleg alleyway.

  “There’s an old entrance for the labyrinth workers back here,” he said. “Tourists used the official gateway but that’s been closed since 2011.”

  “Why did they shut it down?” Morgan asked.

  Zoltan shrugged. “There are many conspiracy theories, because it was stormed by the police and the Inspectorate for the Environment one July day. The tourists and workers inside just had to leave, with no reason given. Some say that the company running the place didn’t have the right permits, but others hint at something darker here, criminal activity or the occult. From what Georg found in the chat rooms, this could well be a secret Eröszak meeting place.” He stopped in front of a nondescript wooden door. “This is it.”

  Pulling the tire iron from his bag, Zoltan levered the door open, cracking the lock mechanism as it splintered in the frame. A metal staircase led down into the earth, and already Morgan could feel cool air flowing up from below. Pulling torches from the pack, they trod lightly, but their footsteps still made a soft clang as they descended into the dark.

  At the bottom, a tunnel carved from the rock stretched into the heart of the hill. They stood silently for a moment, the sound of dripping permeating the damp atmosphere. Water welling from the depths of the earth under Budapest had brought with it healing properties, feeding the rejuvenating hot spring spas, and over millennia, the waters had also carved out a complex of subterranean tunnels and caves. Now Zoltan and Morgan followed one of these tunnels into the labyrinth, and in the chill air, it felt as deserted as it would have been when it was created.

  They walked quietly, listening for any hint of what might lie before them. Morgan reached out a finger to touch the cool wall of stone, remembering the catacombs of Paris where she had run from Milan Noble’s men. But those corridors were walls of bone arranged in tribute to the millions of plague dead, whereas this place was ancient, perhaps already here when humanity was born. It would still be here when the span of human existence ended, when the wars exhausted themselves and the earth could rest again.

  “The company that ran this place created a bizarre tourist trail in the labyrinth,” Zoltan said, his voice low. “It was meant to be a journey into the history of Budapest and also a kind of spiral path into the self.”

  “I can see the attraction of the symbolism.” Morgan whispered back. “In Jungian psychology, the labyrinth is a powerful symbol of the unconscious. We protect our secrets even from ourselves by winding them in deep, hidden mazes. In myth, the labyrinth held the Minotaur, the beast we must all slay to reconcile our true selves.”

  Zoltan grunted softly. “Enough of stories. There may be real beasts down here.”

  Their torch beams flickered around the tunnels running off to the side. A shadow of a figure loomed suddenly from the dark, and Morgan started suddenly, her hand moving instinctively to where she would normally carry a weapon,

  “It’s OK,” Zoltan reassured her. “It’s just one of the statues they have down here, called the Guides of the Soul. The weird red figures are everywhere. It’s an odd place, with different galleries according to the time period and even a cafe, deserted now of course, which makes it perfect for a ready-made bunker in the heart of the city.”

  They continued down a long corridor with carved stone heads atop life-size pillars on either side, their faces featureless, similar to the giant statues of Easter Island.

  “This is known as the Axis of the Earth,” Zoltan said. “People would come alone to spend the night here, considering their lives.”

  They rounded another corner into a cavernous room, the stone walls bare of decoration. Dominating the room was a stone pillar carved with two faces, one leonine and the other like some mythical dark elk.

  “This is the double faced shaman, the táltos,” Zoltan whispered, and Morgan heard a touch of reverence in his tone. “The ancient Hungarians believed in soul dualism, a bodily soul for this physical realm, and another that roamed free in the world. The shaman had a watcher spirit that guarded his physical body as his powerful soul traveled.”

  Morgan played the torch over the figure, dual faces with harsh lines, a powerful embodiment of the shaman, while leaves and branches curled down the pillar. Zoltan saw the movement of her light and explained.

  “The tree of life connects the worlds of Magyar myth, the upper home of the gods, this middle world where we dwell and the underworld entwined in its roots, where Ördög dwells, creator of all evil.”

  Morgan felt her skin crawl at the pronunciation of the name of the Hungarian devil, for in Zoltan’s mouth, the myth seemed to live, and they were down in his dark realm now. There was a palpable sense of menace, as if the walls themselves exhaled a poison. She almost expected to see dark shapes oozing from the stone, shap
es that demanded another soul to gorge on.

  “The souls of the táltos could travel between the realms, drenching the ghosts and interceding for humanity with the gods, some say preventing the destruction of all by the ravaging of demons.” Zoltan paused, running his fingers down one branch of the tree. “But their strength has disappeared along with the people’s faith in them. And where were they in the dark days of the ghetto?” he murmured.

  Rounding a corner, Morgan saw a massive head emerging from the earth, his crown a grotesque bulk that pushed out of the ground. It was a giant buried by the mountain, a fallen king, perhaps representing the fall of Austro-Hungary, Morgan thought, a once-mighty empire that struggled to rise from the dirt of history. In her mind, she saw the figure shake itself free to rule again. At first he would be noble and just, dealing fairly with his faithful subjects. But this king had twisted plans, and soon after he emerged, he would bring his giant club down upon the people.

  Zoltan stopped suddenly, putting his hand on Morgan’s arm, his fingers clutching it with a tight grip. He flicked his torch off and she followed suit. They stood in the dark, barely breathing. Then Morgan heard it too, a pair of voices raised in argument ahead of them. Zoltan slipped off the backpack and pulled out the camera case Georg had given them. Carefully, he inched the zipper down and freed the device, pressing a button so that a tiny red light glowed in the dark.