‘He has a lot to see in Budapest; he has never left Moscow before and he wants to see everything before dinner.’
‘Five o’clock?’
‘Five o’clock.’
‘Lock the door.’
‘It is locked.’
*
Valentin is half-asleep, a small smile fixed to his lips, his hair slightly dishevelled. He lays there, one arm beneath my shoulder and one hand resting on his torso, his fingers caught in the mesh of his chest hair. With my head resting on his shoulder, I watch the steady rise and fall of his chest. My body tingles; I can feel it reaching down to the ends of my fingers and toes. But satisfaction is denied me, for I can’t think of what has been but what is to come. I can’t bring myself to believe that what is now, will soon be confined to a memory; that what is in the present, will all too soon belong to the past. I can’t believe that what is so real will gradually dim with the passing of the years, that one day all that will remain of this wondrous moment will be fragments of remembrance – the scent of this, the touch of that. It frightens me how quickly memory evaporates the detail.
Valentin opens his eyes and looks at me with such tenderness I could cry. I have never experienced this sort of love. Josef’s love, when it existed, was a trickle compared to this torrent.
The small alarm clock on his bedside table reads three o’clock.
‘We haven’t long,’ he says, stroking my cheek with a gentle finger.
‘I know.’
‘One day we will be together again. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you believe it?’
I am close to tears. ‘Yes, Valentin, I believe it.’
But I don’t believe it. How can it be? We both live under a system that restricts and suffocates. We have no future; we won’t be allowed a future. We are together now; but our lives are a mystery to each other, for we exist for one another only in this moment of time. A moment of time that is perfect, but which has no past and no future. We have but the two hours ahead of us. It is all we have.
And then there will be nothing more.
Just me and a love that could have been; a husband that was no more; and, born three months before, a little girl...
Chapter 15: Eva
Anastasia was born in Budapest on the second of February 1949. She died on the eighteenth of February 1949.
She was just sixteen days old. Poor thing, she never stood a chance. Born eleven weeks early, she never left the hospital. Josef never had chance to hold her. Nor did I, not properly, never had the chance to feed her. Everything inside her tiny little body was underdeveloped – her kidneys, the lungs, the liver, her heart. Nothing worked as it should; the odds were against her from the first. I spent sixteen days and nights just staring at her, secretly praying that God would help her build up the strength to live, to survive. I cursed my womb for not providing for her.
Sick day and night for the first three months of the pregnancy, I became thin and lethargic, barely able to move, unable to nourish myself, least of all the baby inside me. After the period of sickness, came the pain, the muscular pain which seemed to permeate into the bone. A sudden movement and it would traverse through me. For weeks on end, I was unable to move. Josef ate at work, bringing me home small scraps of dinner, which I would heat up and stare at, unable to face swallowing such tasteless and uninspired offerings. It was a life of misery, compounded by the thought that the baby was suffering as much as myself. The birth itself, eleven weeks too early, was relatively easy; Anastasia slipped quietly into the world without a murmur. How I wished to hear her cry, to see evidence of lungs full of air. It was never to be; she fell silently into a coma and never woke up. She was conscious long enough to see me and her father briefly before her eyelids closed, never to open again.
I slept at the hospital. The hospital staff provided me with blankets which I would spread out on the chair to make myself as comfortable as possible, wrapping myself against the cold draft. I didn’t dare grumble, the hospital was a hospital only in name. It lacked virtually all essential supplies, and medicines were precious, used only in cases where the patient was important enough or ill enough to warrant it, but not sick enough to make recovery unlikely. My body seemed thankful to be rid of the torment that it had to endure all those months. I spent hours watching her, burdened by guilt, apologising for the inadequacies of my womb. I would make up little tunes, slow tunes in time to her laboured breath as I watched her delicate chest move up and down. My mind would repeat again and again the words plastered up on the wall of the delivery unit – To give birth is a girl’s glory and a wife’s duty. How those words mocked me.
One night I dreamt of horses, grey horses galloping riderless through dark forests, zigzagging past trees, jumping over fallen branches and exposed roots, their manes and tails blowing dramatically in the wind. When I awoke, Anastasia had died. It was the final betrayal. Just as my body had failed her during gestation, my consciousness had deserted her at the point of death. I never saw her slip away, never held her match-like fingers to comfort her as she drifted from this miserable world into the next. I’d barely had the chance to say hello and now I’d missed the opportunity to say my farewell. I prayed that God would accept her and give her the love and security I’d failed to provide. Once, believing myself to be a good communist, I had tried to deny my God, pretended that I didn’t need religion. Sometimes I believed I had renounced it for the illusion that the Party said it was. But if I didn’t need it, Anastasia certainly did. I couldn’t bear the thought of her going from one darkness to another in such a short space of time. I needed her to have an afterlife to make up for the miserable sixteen days spent in a cold bleak hospital in Budapest. I’d expected to cry and yes, I mourned for her, but the tears did not come. Whatever grief I had was tempered by the relief that her troubles were over.
The staff removed her from the cot where she had spent her short existence, and carefully placed her in a small wooden box, lined with a faded shawl. They were about to take her away into the depths of the hospital but I insisted on taking her home with me. I wanted to save her from the indignity of the hospital’s incinerator. Josef hired a car from work and came to pick me up and drove me home, disgusted that I should want to bring Anastasia back. I remembered how delighted he was when I first became pregnant, thankful that at last I was doing my patriotic duty. But he soon lost interest when it became obvious that things were not as they should have been. He spent longer at work, unable and unwilling to face his miserable wife at home. After the birth, he came to see me three, maybe four times and would pace up and down asking if I was ever likely to give birth to a normal child, a future communist. I was a disappointment to him, and I don’t think he ever looked at Anastasia; she was too much an embarrassment, lying there oblivious to the distress she caused him. I was always relieved when he left and found myself apologising to her for his abruptness. My only other visitor was Agnes – she came every other day, bearing fruit and a sympathetic word.
As Josef drove me home, I sat silently in the back with the wooden box on my lap. I stared out of the window, watching the huddled figures going about their business, the long pointless queues, the shop fronts with nothing to sell, the blocks of flats, bleak and grey. Everything seemed so damn grey. And so I brought my baby home, back to our tiny apartment. It wasn’t, of course, quite how I imagined it to be.
*
‘A Christian burial, eh? That’s a rarity these days,’ said Father Aczel, looking at me through his spectacles perched precariously at the end of his nose. ‘You’re very lucky I haven’t renounced the cloth, I’m a dying breed you know. Literally.’ I felt sorry for him – the Party ridiculed the church, depicting the clergy as sexual perverts or money-grabbing thieves.
I had rung Father Aczel the day after coming home from the hospital. I waited until Josef had gone to work before phoning him. Before leaving, Josef declared he wanted to see that “grisly box” gone by the time h
e got home from work. I had no intention of doing otherwise. I opened the lid and peered at her and stroked the strands of bronze-coloured hair – she would have been a redhead, like me. It was the first time since her birth that I’d looked at her without cursing God and begging His intervention at the same time. Now, I just cursed Him. But if I had been unable to provide her with life, at least I could oblige her with a proper send-off.
And so I rang Father Aczel and told him about Anastasia and my desire to grant her a proper Christian burial. I feared it was short notice but, as he said, he was in little demand and was glad to accommodate me. I then rang Agnes and asked whether she would accompany me. Together, in her husband’s car, we drove the five or so kilometres towards the east of Pest and a small church beyond the City Park. The three of us stood beside the church alter, the small box resting in a nearby pew. At the back of the church kneeled an elderly woman dressed in black crossing herself ceaselessly, otherwise the church remained deserted. ‘You sure it won’t compromise you, Father?’
‘Just being here is compromising enough, Eva. There’s fewer of us by the day.’
‘But you’re still here, Father,’ said Agnes. ‘Your church is still standing.’
‘Yes, and for every day it survives, I thank the Lord, but sometimes I wonder how long I can go on. It’s only a matter of time until they come for me. Shall we go? I’ve arranged for a grave to be dug and I’ve got a small wooden cross. Well, Eva, what did you say the infant’s name was?’
As Father Aczel wrote out Anastasia’s name on the cross, I smiled at Agnes – she’d tied her hair back into a bun, accentuating the roundness of her face. I wanted to thank her for coming but I knew I couldn’t express how grateful I was that she was there. How pathetically grateful.
Outside, the dark clouds swept across the sky and the wind whistled in the trees. We stood beside the grave that had been dug next to the churchyard wall, the spade still standing in the mound of fresh earth. Father Aczel clutched his bible, his robes blowing in the breeze, his honeyed voice washing over me. ‘We pray, o Lord, that Anastasia may be taken into the Kingdom of His Almighty God and that there she may find peace in the company of angels. We pray that God in His mercy may take her into His realm and deliver her the peace she was so cruelly denied in this mortal world...’
As Father Aczel lowered Anastasia into the ground, Agnes took my hand and squeezed it. And finally, I was able to cry for my precious little daughter, the daughter who had only caught sight of her mother for a few brief moments before resigning herself to the darkness; whose passing existence I shall always remember. I cried for her blighted life, her sixteen days on this earth, her frailty, her helplessness. She never heard me call her name, never tasted her mother’s milk, was never held by her father. I cried for myself, as a mother denied the opportunity of seeing her daughter as a proper being, denied the sound of hearing her baby cry, denied even the tactile presence of her lips against my breast. My baby, my poor little baby. May we meet again, my darling.
PART TWO: MARCH 1953
Chapter 16: Zoltan
She simply sat there, a look of determination in her eyes, ignoring the pen and sheet of paper on the desk in front of her.
‘You have to sign,’ said Zoltan.
‘I will not.’
He slammed his palm on his desk. ‘Just sign the fucking piece of paper.’
‘I will not put my name to this pack of lies.’
‘Yes, we both know it’s a pack of lies but that’s not the point, surely you must see that. We need your signature on this confession and if you don’t sign it now, I’ll have no option but to...’
‘But to what?’
‘You know damn well.’
‘I shall never sign it.’
Zoltan slumped on the desk; he felt exhausted. He couldn’t bear the thought of her pretty face being pulped, of her innocence shattered. She was quite the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, with her blue-grey eyes and her little upturned nose and perfect lips of natural vermilion. She reminded him of a young Petra, when they’d first met. This girl was prettier still but there was something about her, the way she spoke, the way she conducted herself that drew him to her, that was very Petra-like.
Her crime – to have had a grandfather who’d invested carefully and bought a huge country house, a few miles south of the city and had left it to her mother. The mother had already been arrested as a bourgeois speculator and now, this girl, Elizabeth Vas, was being made to suffer for her grandfather’s unfortunate provision. Her second crime was to have an older cousin who’d escaped the ‘People’s Democracy’ and now lived in Connecticut. She maintained she’d hadn’t spoken or written to this remote cousin and had forgotten all about him until, that is, the AVO reminded her of the fact and accused her of using her cousin as a recipient of the information that she gathered as a spy.
‘Look, I’m begging you. I don’t want to you to get hurt –’
‘In that case, you can use your authority to inform whomever needs to be informed that I am totally innocent of these charges, that you don’t have a single piece of evidence to show that I am a spy, and that I should be released from this... this mockery.’
‘I haven’t got that sort of authority,’ he said quietly as her words impacted on his self-esteem.
‘I thought you were important.’
‘I am. It’s just that...’ He didn’t know how to explain, perhaps because she was right. Five years in the job, an early run up the promotion ladder and then what? A bloody football game. ‘For Christ’s sake, just sign the bloody thing.’ He jumped up from his chair, circled round the table, and sprang in front of her, clasping the back of her chair behind her, his face inches above her’s, as she shrunk back from him. ‘You think you can beat the system, don’t you? You think you can stand up to us? But you’re wrong, they’ll destroy you, they’ll have you so that death can’t come quickly enough. God, you’re beautiful but it means nothing here, nothing.’
‘You think because I’m beautiful I’m vulnerable.’
‘Stop being so fucking stupid, you’re vulnerable because you’re here.’
‘I’m not signing it.’
He slapped her. He hadn’t meant to but the frustration got the better of him. Her head twisted to the side, her eyes clamped shut. Immediately, he regretted it. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.’
‘Do you think I give a shit for your apologies?’
He paced to the window, fighting back the hurt she’d caused him, a pain he knew ran deeper than the sting on her face. The red imprint of his hand was clearly visible on her cheek. Couldn’t she see he was trying to protect her? He stormed to the door, swung it open and summoned a guard.
As the guard took her away, he pleaded one last time. ‘I’d ask you to think very carefully about what I said.’
She ignored him.
*
The morning was cold; a fresh breeze blew into their faces. The park was deserted, a sheet of newspaper floated round their feet. Roza paced ahead of them, her slight frame wrapped in a pink coat with matching woolly hat, stamping her boots into puddles and squealing at the splashes. Petra slipped her arm through Zoltan’s. ‘How’s it going at work?’
‘Hideous,’ he said.
‘We hardly see you.’
‘I know.’
She had cut her hair, her curls hacked away; she looked younger for it, more boy-like. He saw Elizabeth Vas in her, the confident smile, her still-fresh skin disguising the vigorous determination within.
‘How’s Roza been?’ he asked. On hearing her name, Roza skipped back to them.
‘Roza’s a little upset today, aren’t you, love?’
‘Why, what’s the matter?’
Roza shook her head and grabbed her mother’s hand.
‘Are you cold, sweetheart?’ she asked, rubbing her gloved hand. ‘Her friend Marika won’t be coming back to school.’
‘Oh.’
‘And we’re
a bit sad about it.’
‘Maybe she’ll come back,’ said Zoltan, realising that for a policeman it was an incredibly naïve comment to make.
Petra pulled a face and withdrew her arm from Zoltan’s. ‘Do you want me to tell Papa?’
‘Her Mama and Papa have to leave,’ said Roza.
‘Twenty-four hours notice,’ added Petra.
‘Why do they have to leave, Papa?’
Zoltan sighed. He knew his daughter held him personally responsible for every piece of bad news that happened at her school. The other children knew what he did for a living and tended to avoid Roza as a result. ‘Sometimes, love, it’s for people’s own good.’
‘But they were nice people.’
‘Yes, but sometimes even the nicest of people have secrets that aren’t so nice...’
‘It’s unfair,’ she said, stamping her feet on the gravelled path. ‘Marika was my friend.’
They’d come to the artificial lake and stopped at the low wall to gaze across the water rippling in the wind. ‘No boats today,’ said Petra.
‘Pity,’ said Zoltan. ‘It’d be a good with this breeze.’
Someone called out Petra’s name. She turned and waved at a friend who was on the path, twenty yards away, a woman Zoltan didn’t recognise under her layers of coats and scarves. ‘It’s not that cold,’ he muttered.
‘I’d better go say hello. Back in a minute.’
Roza had climbed onto the wall and was tiptoeing across, her arms outstretched. ‘Roza, get down from there,’ said Zoltan.
She did as she was told, picked up a stone and threw it into the water. ‘No ducks today,’ she said.
‘No. No boats, no ducks.’
While Roza found bigger stones to throw, he turned and looked at the two huddled women. He wondered who Petra’s friend was but, when he thought about, he realised he knew hardly any of his wife’s acquaintances. They preferred to socialise while he was at work. He knew why – they all thought it wise not to mingle with someone who had the power of arrest over them. He couldn’t blame them. He drew out his packet of Red Stars and lit one.
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