by Ailsa Kay
When the revolutionaries stormed Communist Party Headquarters in Koztarsasag Ter on October 30, they found half-cooked palacsinta—far more than would be required to feed the number of prisoners found in the building’s cellar prisons. Frantic, searchers fanned out into every dank hallway, looking for secret doors, knocking index knuckles on walls that looked solid, testing for hollow. There were so few prisoners in the building. Where were the hundreds who’d vanished? Someone had heard shouting from below. Someone else had heard a number: one hundred and forty prisoners. Where were they? They had no food, no water. Time was running out. General Bela Kiraly, the commander of the Revolutionary National Guard, gave the order to drill.
Three boring masters were ordered to the city from the Oroszlany coalmines. Drill! From the National Geophysics Institute came one cathode-ray oscilloscope, four Soviet-made geophones, one anode-battery with necessary cables. Drill! Twenty metres down and not far enough. Drill! Heavy machines, the same used to excavate the city’s extraordinarily deep subway tunnels, were put to revolutionary service, much of Budapest’s Sewage Company too, with their ropes, their pickaxes, their Soviet labourer muscle. Drill! Searchers spread into the sewers. They dug out the cellars in the houses surrounding the square. Hundreds of people gathered with shovels and pickaxes. They dug and they scraped and they listened, desperately, for the voices of the interred. The search ended early morning November 4 when Soviet tanks thundered into the city. The revolution was suppressed. The prisoners in the tunnels remained buried.
In 1993, the search began again. This time, a film crew hired the National Geophysical Institute to find the tunnels. Anomalies in the soil structure were found. An oil drill with a diamond bit was ordered. The drill hit something four metres below the surface, a hard substance that ate up the diamond. And another, and another. Three diamond bits were wasted on that impenetrable substance below the square.
It doesn’t matter that the tunnels were never proven. Everyone knows they exist. They must. It’s the only possible explanation.
1.
Tibor wakes to the battering rat-a-tat of a cement drill to realize he’s hot and unbearably itchy under a hotel comforter of prickling fibreglass. It’s 11:13 a.m. He throws off the comforter to find the crinkly burst plastic of the airplane snack that somehow landed in his bed when he did. Cracker crumbs in his chest hair. Hauling himself upright, he teeters to the window and yanks the curtain cord. Light pours in. Ah.
Across the Duna, the parliament gleams, white spiring the complete blue of sky. Budapest, finally: the salve his poor, love-damaged soul needs. Salvation. He’d been dreaming of this moment for months. Granted, they had been some of the worst months of his life. After the devastation of losing Rafaela, he retracted. The way he described it—to himself, that is; he’d never say so out loud—was that his soul had beat a retreat, had shrunk up and back inside itself like a penis, coldly plunged.
The reason he can’t stop thinking about what happened, he thinks, is that they didn’t have final words. He didn’t get to tell her that he loved her, that he’s sorry he never told her that he knew Daniel, that he didn’t intend to make life difficult for her, that he wishes things could have been different—that she’d had a normal child, that he hadn’t fallen for her, that they’d both been truthful from the beginning, that he’d never bumped into them like that in the liquor store. He’d never forget her face as, foundering, she put things together.
“Rafa, this is my old friend Rolly. Back in undergrad, we were inseparable.”
Rafaela extends her hand. “Hi. Nice to meet you.”
“And this is our daughter, Evie. Evie, say hi.”
Slobbering child opens her mouth and caws.
How did Daniel not see what was happening? His wife every shade of crimson and fury and his friend stiffly grinning.
He’d half expected her to call to yell at him, call him names, accuse him. And he’d considered calling her—to apologize, to explain, to confess his love. He is still every day in his mind composing the words that would salvage something from the disaster, but sometimes, there’s just no salvage. He lost her. It feels impossibly bad.
A bit self-consciously at first, he named this bad feeling grief. “Grief,” he said out loud. But even that potent word could do nothing to tame the writhing vermicular mass of loss and abandonment or fortify the queasy state of “being loser” that having lost implies.
Tibor wrestles his attention back to the spires, the Carpathian blue sky. He’s here now. At home, it’s reading week. Here, it’s the day before the conference begins. He’s made it. He’d made the decision in January. A bit last minute. Peter, a friend of his, was putting together this conference and had first contacted him back in October, at the very centre of the maelstrom called Rafaela. When one of the participants dropped out, he emailed Tibor again, and for some reason, the proposition struck Tibor as exactly the right cure. A conference. He’d always excelled at conferences. He likes the showmanship of it—the off-the-cuff opening, the studied pause, the sly aside—and his research, he likes to think, lends itself to performance. He would have his argument sewn up, solid, and he would dismantle any attempt at critique. A conference was exactly what he needed. And in Budapest. He hasn’t been here since his post-doc days eight years ago.
And now, the city awaits. He turns. The bedside clock radio glares: 11:15.
Which means his mother has been waiting for him in the lobby—showered and dressed—since ten.
His mother.
She’d ambushed him over a plate of turkey fillet in paprikas cream sauce.
“You what?” he gabbled, mouth full, fork hovering. “I mean, have you booked a hotel? A flight? You can’t just do these things last minute, you know.”
She spooned more sauce on his plate, beaming pinkly. “You’d be proud of your old mother; I even did a web booking.” She said web booking, not veb booking. Her w was perfectly Canadian and now, now of all times, she’d decided to go home. Tibor cursed the Internet and the amiable North York travel agent who apparently had no problem sending a seventy-eight-year-old woman on an arduous journey across the world to a potentially volatile post-communist state. “I never would have done it on my own, but since you were going. Well, I thought it might be my last chance.” She didn’t say, Before I die. She didn’t say, I am old and alone. But he heard it. He heard it and he wanted to cry.
Sure enough, in the hotel’s ground-floor, near-empty restaurant his mother sits by herself at a window seat, a ringed espresso cup in front of her, a heavy paperback balanced against the table’s edge. The awkward, upward tilt of the head keeps her glasses from sliding off her nose. It also makes her thin neck as vulnerable as a downy gosling’s. Pecking her on the cheek, he slides into the chair opposite. “You should have called. I was fast asleep.”
She closes her book. “I didn’t want to wake you. But the menu is so expensive here, Tibor, so I didn’t order lunch.”
“No problem. The Angelika’s just around the corner. Not cheap, by Hungarian standards, but good food, great atmosphere.”
“The young lady at the desk tells me there’s a palacsinta house just five minutes away. I would love a mazsolas-turos palacsinta.”
“I’m sure they have palacsinta at the Angelika.”
“She says this place is very good. And inexpensive. When I was a girl, I thought I could live only on palacsinta. Hortobagyi husos and mazsolas-turos palacsinta was all I wanted to eat.”
“Mom. I’m sure we can afford lunch at a decent restaurant.”
“Persze, Tibor, persze.” Persze. Such a harmless, conciliatory word, with multiple, micro-sonar nuances as yet untabulated. Of course, Tibor, of course. As she tucks her book into her bottomless handbag.
“It’s a great restaurant, Mom. You’ll love it.”
“Good. You know it’s been hours since that airplane snack.”
The Angelika doesn’t serve palacsinta and it doesn’t suit her. A renovated old convent, its flo
or is at least four feet below street level, and stained-glass windows look out onto pedestrian feet. High-ceilinged, white-walled, and pristine, with his mother here in front of him, it suddenly seems pretentious.
She orders a soup, the cheapest item on the menu. “Salty,” she concludes but finishes it. She’s so hungry, she’d eat grass right now. She asks for a chamomile tea. They’re sold out. She orders a cup of hot water instead, which earns her a stiffly polite nod.
“My aunt and uncle lived not far from here. After the war.”
“Is that right.” Eager to recover from his error, he tilts too far toward enthusiasm. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“It was only one small room. My uncle put their bed up on stilts to make room for a table.”
He says, “My friend Peter and his wife had exactly the same arrangement in their flat. It works surprisingly well. Like a loft.”
She blows to cool her water and tentatively sips.
Tibor settles his coffee cup in his saucer. “So, it’s men’s day at the Kiraly today and I thought I’d take advantage, go to the baths this afternoon, Mom, if you think you can manage by yourself for a while.”
“Persze, Tibor. You go ahead. Relax. You have a big day tomorrow.” A pause, and Tibor braces himself for the but. “I think I’ll go to the cemetery. I asked the girl at the desk and she tells me it’s quite easy to get there by subway, just a ten-minute walk from the Keleti train station. I’m sure it’s not too complicated. She gave me a map.”
“You’re okay on your own?”
“Persze.”
She gazes out the window that offers no view. She seems all right. Or is she pretending? She rides the subway all the time in Toronto, but that’s Toronto. It’s different here, as she’d discover. Some underground stations house whole villages of homeless, aggressive panhandlers, pickpockets, beggars, particularly near the train stations. People selling puppies and stolen cameras and cigarettes. In her tidy American boots and all-weather coat, she’d be a walking target.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, thank you, Tibor. They’ve been dead a long time. Almost twenty years now, hard to believe. I just want to pay my respects. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
At dinner, she’d tell him how hard it was to get there, how rude were the gypsies. She’d call them gypsies. She’d say nothing about sadness or grief or the funerals she’d missed. She’d detail the unkemptness of the paths, the graffiti. How nothing was the same, nothing respected.
“You don’t want some company?”
“No, no. Really. You don’t have time. I know your presentation is tomorrow. You should prepare, practise.”
She probably assumes he’s the main event at this international conference—her son, the star. And Tibor feels suddenly both abashed and fond, and under the tidal insistence of such fondness, his plans erode.
At Batthyany Ter, the escalator descends about a hundred metres at warp speed at a nearly vertical angle through a tight red-and-white metal tunnel. Tibor supports his mother’s elbow as they take the step together and are borne vertiginously down, handrail jiggering.
“So this wouldn’t have been nearly complete by the time you left,” he says. “Work on the metro halted in…1953, I think. It was this massive, hubristic exercise in Soviet symbolism. The deepest metro in the world, vertically superior to any other subway. I wish I knew who thought of the idea first. What chaos. Thousands of workers shipped in from the country to dig with shovels and pickaxes at fourteen different locations.”
“It’s true, I—”
“The dig under Rakoczi Ut was apparently the deepest. That’s the remarkable thing: there was absolutely no structural or engineering reason to tunnel so deep. Of course, in the absence of reason, one Soviet science journal claimed that tunnelling would expose the buried secrets of Budapest’s prehistoric past, bringing them to the surface for the enlightenment of all workers.”
His mother seems surprisingly unworried by the dizzying, speedy descent, the look on her face almost seraphic. When they get to the bottom, she steps unhesitatingly as harried people push past.
They sit side by side on the cold vinyl bench, and the train carries them under the Duna. His mother grips a bouquet of flowers—calla lilies, ferns, three yellow roses, some pink carnations—wrapped in stiff, crinkly green paper. With one gloved hand, she fiddles with the paper.
“The Soviet propaganda said that commuting via subway would save workers nine million working hours annually. Can you imagine? One newspaper declared that meant millions of Hungarian people could watch more than four and a half million movies. Right, Soviet movies, exactly. But then after Imre Nagy came in as prime minister—the first time, I mean, not for those few revolutionary days—the Soviet leadership ordered it all to stop. All the workers went home. They’d decided the workers needed apartments more than they needed transit. So they started building up instead of down.”
The subway grinds to a halt. An electronic voice announces that the doors are opening. People pour in. The voice warns, “Careful. The doors are closing.”
“They built it so deep so the top party officials and their families could be kept safe in case of a nuclear attack,” she said. “That’s why they went so far down.”
“Well, that was the rumour circulating, yes.”
“There were stores of food down there when the rest of us had nothing. ”
“It must have seemed that way.”
“They were preparing for war. Many people died building those tunnels. Country people. We learned that later.”
She always did this, corrected him, as if to remind him that no matter how much history he studied, his knowledge could never match her real-life experience. She ambushed him with her past. In a grade six geography class, he learned about borders. Distraught, he confronted his mother after school: “Hungary is part of the Soviet Union?”
She looked at him, confused. She was peeling potatoes into the sink and when she turned, one pink-rubber-gloved hand held the peeler, the other the potato. “What are you talking about?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, where did you think it was?”
He was at a loss. He felt how hot his face was, how sweaty because he’d walked so quickly all the way home just to ask her this. “But people are poor there. And you can be arrested just for speaking your mind. It’s like a prison, and there’s an iron curtain all the way around it.”
“That’s true. Now aren’t you happy you are Canadian?” She went back to peeling potatoes. “Na. What did you learn in French class?”
Now she fiddles with the crinkly paper of the bouquet. “My mother was only sixty-three when she died. I’m more than a decade older than my own mother. Can you imagine?”
The subway jostles. “She was probably about forty when I left. She seemed so old. Old and angry. My God, always angry. We couldn’t do anything right. Zsofi and I, we used to go out at night just the two of us, sit in the courtyard, or wander up and down Szent Istvan Korut, just to be free of her.”
As his mother rambles, Tibor turns his mind to the coffee house near Ferenciek Ter—its elegant round tables and soaring ceilings—and the reading he’d brought with him. If they spent thirty minutes in the cemetery, an hour even, he could still salvage the late afternoon. She’d need a rest and he could get away, finish his paper, join his friend Peter later for a drink, as planned. Tibor wanted to talk to him about this paper he was working on, about the tunnels and the creation of fear, fear and far-right paranoia. He and his mother ride the rest of the way without talking.
“Here we are.” His mother pats his thigh. Grasping the rail, she stands while the train is still moving. It shudders to a stop and she sways, finding her balance.
Forty minutes later, Agnes picks her way along the rough stone paths of the old graveyard, map in hand. The map is drawn in blue ballpoint on a sheet of paper torn from the kind of little notepad only old ladies carry in their purses. It’s getting soggy
in the rain.
“Mom, can I just take a look at that?”
She hadn’t asked him to come. She hadn’t asked for a lecture on Soviet architecture or his solicitous hand at her elbow. She doesn’t need his help reading the map, though he’s already twice reached out his hand for it. “I am fully capable of reading a map, Tibor,” she’s said each time, but she doesn’t want to seem secretive or raise his suspicion. He’d never believe her, for a start. He has his own ideas about history. That’s fine. Historians tend to miss the point.
“I don’t think we’re going in the right direction, Mom. Could you just let me see the map?”
The rain had started almost as soon as they’d exited the subway. A cold, thick winter rain. She’d worn waterproof boots, in expectation of slush. Tibor had not, and his suede walking shoes were getting soaked through. She says nothing about his impractical shoes or the slush or the creeping cold. Neither does he, though they’ve been wandering in circles for more than an hour.
Agnes looks around. Nothing is quite as it should be. The paths veer left where they ought to be straight. Trees obscure what she’d been assured were obvious markers: the sculpture of a couple, dressed in 1950s workers’ garb. A tall angel, wings spread. The rain is creeping under the collar of her jacket, and her umbrella is next to useless. A fool’s errand, made worse by her son’s immaculately contained seething.
The map is from a Hungarian woman she’d met in Toronto at a funeral. It was funny, the way it happened. So coincidental, she couldn’t help but think it must mean something. The service was over and Agnes was downstairs in the church basement, eating a sandwich. The Hungarian accent was the first thing she noticed.
“We were four women to a cell. There was me, Klara Lengyel, Marta Horvath, and Zsofi…Zsofi Perec? No. Zsofi Teglas. You see, I tell you their names because—”
“Zsofi Teglas?” Agnes shouldered someone aside, grabbed the woman’s wrist. “Did you say Zsofi Teglas?”
There were crumbs on the woman’s black dress, a half-eaten egg sandwich in her left hand, a half-smile on her face.
