by Ailsa Kay
The cake is sweeter, eggier than any she remembers from her childhood. The bitter coffee is done in a swallow. Waitresses offer minimal smiles, giving nothing away for free. This is the same. As are the low, private voices. She’s forgotten how loud Canadians had seemed when she first landed. Here, all conversation, including her own, is traded intimately, conscious of listeners. Maybe this is generational. Maybe the children born after 1989 are as loud as tourists.
He’s explaining something about the restoration of the café, the attention to period detail. His fingernails are chipped, dirty. Odd, for a man who surely pays others to do his labour. Under the table, his knee jitters. She remembers the jittering—always too much energy to sit still for long. Surprising, in an old man. Around them, the staff hustles, discreetly silent.
“You’ve done well for yourself, Gyula.”
“I’ve done all right.” Gives her a prepared smile. “Construction’s a lucrative business.”
Enough already. She doesn’t need the tour guide, the businessman. They’re not on a date, and she’s not a girl to impress and there are things they need to say. She looks straight at him. “I’m sorry I never replied to your letter.”
This businessman Gyula shrugs it off, as if it was nothing more than a slight inconvenience, as if she was being sentimental. “It was a long time ago.”
“I was married, pregnant with Tibor.”
“It doesn’t matter. Please. How’s the coffee? Like you remember?”
That letter, in 1963, nearly made her vomit. It was the shock. He’d asked nothing except, “How are you?” In the fewest words, as if he had to pay for each one, the letter described where he’d been: After November 4, the day the Russian tanks shot the hell out of their revolution, he’d been caught, arrested, and imprisoned first with others and then by himself in a windowless solitary cell for what he estimates was a period of three years. He was released along with dozens of other revolutionaries in a sudden amnesty. She sat there at her kitchen table, aware of the nail polish on her fingers, the Formica under her hands, the refrigerator humming behind her, the very ease of all her surfaces. After she’d read it through, this letter on rough, unbleached paper, in clotting blue ink, she put it back in its envelope, and for a while she kept it on top of her dresser, believing one day she’d answer it.
After leaving Hungary, she’d first made a living sewing and cleaning. She learned English. She started working at a preschool, not quite teaching but almost. Then she’d married a Canadian, James, who taught math at a high school, and they bought this house, and now they were having this baby. Budapest was a different world, and the Hungarian Agi a different person than this new Canadian Agnes, who spoke English with only the slightest Hungarian accent and who never, ever turned a w into a v. In his letter, Gyula had said very little of Zsofi. He’d seen her at the student housing that day the Russians stormed back into the city, and he hadn’t heard from her since his release. He’d stopped in to visit Agi’s parents. They were fine. They’d had no news of Zsofi either, and they complained that Agi never wrote. Your mother is angry with you, he’d written. And then, Some things never change. She read it through once and then propped it against the mirror on her dresser and never opened it again. Eventually, she tidied it into a drawer and let herself forget.
Gyula has finished his coffee. His cake is virtually untouched. He shifts in his chair. He folds and refolds his napkin. Used to be she was the nervous one and he was never nervous enough.
“It was hard for me to face it. So. That’s it. I’m sorry.”
“Your bad luck. Until ten years ago, I still had my looks.”
She laughs more from relief than the joke—finally, the old Gyula. The laughter feels good. Yes. This was the feeling. This is it exactly.
“Isn’t this strange,” she says. “Being old.”
“It’s certainly a surprise.”
Yes, that’s her Gyula. Look at him. She puts her hand on his because it feels right. Because they are still the kids they were, and here they are. “Gyula, Zsofi escaped.”
The look on his face.
“Escaped? That’s why you didn’t write?” He seems almost defensive, as if she’s accused him of something.
Next to them, a family of tourists marvels in English at the ceiling, the cakes, the everything. They’re too loud, and they don’t know it.
“No. Why would I not tell you that? I only found out two months ago.”
As he pulls his focus back to Agnes, in front of him, she thinks madly, momentarily, that he is going to hit her.
“What did you find out?”
“She was arrested. And she escaped.”
“When.” He doesn’t question but demands.
“I met someone who says she was with Zsofi in prison and they escaped. In the winter of 1957.”
He takes a moment to absorb this information. Then he leans back as if released. “What? Through the underground tunnels? Secret passages from jail to freedom? Is that what you heard?”
Yes.
“Christ. Agi.”
She refuses to feel stupid.
But the pantyhose she’d pulled on underneath her trousers squeezes her stomach and her sweater is too heavy for this warm café. She’d remembered every place as cold. How much warmer the city is now, how much brighter.
“You didn’t hear anything from her after 1956? Nothing?” she asks.
“You think Zsofi escaped, and then what? Came back to liberate me?” He’s both superior and irritated.
“I just want to know, Gyula. I’m just trying to understand.”
“You haven’t heard from her since you left. You think she’s alive? She’s not.”
The waiter picks up their coffee cups and Agnes’s plate. She focuses on this, this meticulous tidying, careful brushing of crumbs. She will not cry.
The sun is sinking as they leave the café. He parked the car just around the corner. An expensive car. Leather interior. Better than any she’s ever owned. Gyula drives her back to the hotel. All the storefronts along Jozsef Korut are lit up like little stages, a train of stages, flashing by.
“She stayed because of you. Because she was in love with you,” Agnes says.
They stop at the lights. He stares straight ahead, angry and hard. That’s what she thinks. He wants to be rid of her. The lights turn. The car surges, pinning her to her seat.
Election posters banner the lampposts. A streetcar clatters past, and she’d like to be in it, inside the bright, swaying, clattering noise of it, hanging to a strap the way she used to, unperturbed and agile.
“Detective Tamas Sarkady.” The detective extends his right hand.
“Detective Number Two,” says the other. Not really, but Tibor forgets his name immediately.
Tamas Sarkady takes Ferenc’s seat. Number Two pulls up a second chair. Neither is uniformed. They wear their badges clipped to their belts. And they don’t look like murderers but like ordinary, constipated guys who fight with their plain wives and eat supper in front of the TV knowing life should have treated them better. They’re good guys. Normal guys, understanding of other, normal guys.
Tibor looks Tamas Sarkady in the eye. He sees that Tamas Sarkady knows that he knows that this is not interrogation but intimidation. Tamas Sarkady is not bothered by the fact that Tibor sees this. Because he’s a good guy, a normal guy. Just play along, his look says. Be cool.
“So you were going for a jog,” Tamas Sarkady prompts.
“I was, yes. You know, I should probably leave a message at the hotel. I’m travelling with my mother. She’ll worry if I’m late for dinner.”
“Mothers,” says Number Two.
But neither offers a telephone.
“This won’t take long. You were jogging on Gellert Hegy in the middle of the night.”
As he repeats his story, they take some notes. They ask a few questions. When he gets to the part of the story where the one guy names Gombas, Sarkady interrupts.
“Are y
ou sure that’s the name you heard?”
That’s what he says, but his look says I’d really like to help you out here. It says, We can help each other.
“I think so,” says Tibor. “I mean, I suppose I could be wrong.”
“So you’re not absolutely sure?”
“Not absolutely, no.”
“Would you be able to testify that you heard Gombas?”
“Well, now that you put it that way, no. I suppose not. I mean, there was a lot going on. Their voices were muffled.”
Number Two looks like he’s just been slapped with a month of unpaid overtime. And he’s thinking about his dog shitting on the carpet. And his wife sitting there, watching it shit on the carpet. And him sitting here as a whole world of shitters just slips through his fingers.
“What did they do with the body?”
“The body? Well, I didn’t…How would I know? Maybe they buried it?”
“They were above you, you say, on the cliff?”
“That’s right.”
“About how far above?”
“Hard to say. Maybe five metres. Maybe ten.” Tibor is sweating through his shirt. “I can go?”
“If we have any more questions,” says Sarkady, “where can we reach you?”
“The Gellert Hotel.” The lie comes fluently.
“Nice place.”
“Gorgeous.” Tibor has one sleeve in his coat. He’s standing up. He’s so close to gone.
“So you like a downhill home stretch.”
“Pardon?”
“You said you started your jog at the steps of Szent Gellert. So you ran all the way along the rakpart, to the other side of the hill to begin.”
Right. “I always like to start on the flat. Build up a little steam.” Tibor does a weird, fake little show of running. Why did he do that?
“Ah.”
“Anything you need, just call. I’m really very glad to help.” Tibor gives Sarkady a meaningful look, to let him know that Tibor is more than happy to mind his own goddamn business. Sarkady nods. Sarkady knows.
Tibor steps out of the station into the Budapest evening. The snow falls reasonless and unreasonable, and Tibor walks as quickly as he can without slipping. He is afraid. So afraid he can’t even care that he’s afraid.
The street throngs with fatigued workers. Tomorrow, first thing, he will go to the Canadian Consulate to file a report and, if necessary, ask for protection. That’s where he should have started in the first place. He hadn’t asked Ferenc if they’d found his camera. Fuck the camera. He scans the faces on the sidewalk. He glances back over his left shoulder, then over his right. As far as he can tell, he’s not being followed, but to be safe he takes the well-lit sidewalk, on the side close to the rakpart and the river, to the hotel. He nearly laughs with relief when the ever-attentive Gabor raises his head from his computer with a calm, “Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening, Gabor.”
“Your mother is waiting in the restaurant, sir. Sir, are you all right?”
“Fine. Thank you. Just getting some exercise. Beautiful night.”
“Yes. Budapest is beautiful in the snow.”
Tibor turns toward the restaurant. He sees his mother at the far end. He raises his hand to wave hello. She looks at her watch. He’s late. He leans forward to kiss her cheeks. The other side of the window, a car flashes by. When Tibor looks up, he sees under the halo of streetlight across the street, tipped against the slender trunk of a tree, a young man. He’s watching them. He nods. He strolls away.
Ferenc.
Was it?
“Tibor? Tibor, what’s wrong?”
It was Ferenc. The officer had followed him.
“Nothing. I thought I saw someone I recognized, that’s all. No, not a friend. It’s just been a really long day.” Had he told Ferenc where he was staying? What had he told him? He couldn’t remember. “At the police station? Oh, it was like your friend said—sorry, I’ve forgotten his name—Gyula, right? It was like Gyula said—no one cares about a mugging. Took a bit longer than I expected. Typical bureaucracy, that’s all.” He hadn’t given him the name of this hotel. “No, really, I’m fine. Just tired. You’re right, a bowl of soup.” But the police would have ways of finding out. Was Ferenc here just to warn him? Or were they following him? Stalking him. “Do you mind if we eat in your room tonight? A quiet evening in front of the TV. How’s that?”
3.
“Tibor. What happened to you yesterday?”
Peter. Finally. Thank hell. They squeeze together into the lecture hall. “You didn’t get my message?”
“Sorry. Fucking pickpocket got my phone. Why?” Peter waves to someone at the front of the room. Imre. God, he’s gained some weight. Tibor almost didn’t recognize him.
“You heard about the head they found on Gellert?”
Peter shrugs. “Of course.”
They settle into seats close to the aisle. Tibor leans in to Peter: “I was there.”
“You what?”
“I witnessed the murder.”
“Oh my God, Tibor.”
“I went for a jog, early. I overheard the whole thing. The guys talking. The murder, the…Fuck. Everything.”
“Christ, I saw it on the news last night. Organized crime, they think.”
“Dr. Roland, are you feeling better?” The moderately attractive conference organizer. Ilona. Today, without the ponytail.
“Much, thanks.”
She takes a seat in front of them and turns to keep talking. “That’s a relief. Must have been a mild case. I had salmonella once, wiped me out for five days.”
“Ilona, Tibor witnessed the murder on Gellert. He was just telling me.”
“You’re kidding. The head?” Ilona’s hand flutters to her neck, as if worried for her own.
“Right. So obviously I went to the police and—”
“Why’d you go to the police?”
“To report it.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why? Because I witnessed a murder.”
Peter gives him a look like, “And?”
“Well, that’s the thing. The detective who interviewed me? He was one of the guys. One of the murderers.”
Ilona’s hand still hovers at her throat. Peter’s shaking his head.
“I know. It sounds ridiculous. But the voice was identical. I’m sure it’s him and I think he threatened me. I didn’t even tell them where I was staying, and I get back and I look out the window, and there’s Ferenc. That’s the first guy, the first police officer. He must have followed me.”
Lucia, another colleague, squeezes in beside Ilona, who says, “Dr. Roland witnessed the murder on Gellert, and it turns out the police are involved.” Last time Tibor saw Lucia, she was starting her Ph.D. in law—something to do with the Roma or refugees. He used to be a little in love with her.
“Well, there’s a surprise,” says Lucia.
“I think I should go to the Canadian Consulate. Report this guy or…I don’t know. Do something.”
Imre has joined them now. He hovers in the aisle beside Tibor. “I don’t know. That just sounds like more trouble.”
“But it’s the right thing to do.” That’s Ilona. “And they must offer some kind of protection.”
Imre shakes his head. “No. You’ve done your good duty and now you can happily go on seeing the sights and minding your own business. I mean, look, these guys, they kill each other. It happens. Nothing to do with you.”
“So what, exactly, did you hear?” Lucia asks.
“God. I heard the kid. I heard him die. And then after, they were arguing. The one guy didn’t think they should’ve killed him. The other guy said he just does what Gombas says.”
“Gombas?” Lucie interrupts. “Are you sure?”
The circle of listeners around Tibor grows, people linger in the aisle. Whispers carry the story out. At the front of the lecture hall, two of the three panellists chat while waiting for the third. The chair of th
e session looks pointedly toward Imre. “If we could get started, please. If we could get started.”
Chairs scrape and notebooks flutter. Imre regains his place at the front, with some apologies. The session begins, but the focus is shot. Tibor feels it. People look to the front, they listen, but their attention is still with him, Tibor Roland, witness.
Agnes feels like she remembers Andrassy Ut when the houses were brightly painted and wealth moved at a strolling pace in sunlight filtered through high green leaves. But she would have been so young. Maybe she was remembering her mother’s memories. Because all that was before the war, and after the war she was only nine, and houses were blasted shells that grew over with weeds and bush, full of broken treasures: pieces of teapots and palm-sized shards of crystal, and old thick glass bottles all mildew inside, rusting empty cans and stark white pieces of toilet bowl. She and Zsofi had raced along streets that had huge holes in the middle of them, past buildings without windows, black smoke stains up the walls like shocked hair.
Today, mottled limbs of plane trees scaffold the heavy sky. The air smells of diesel and cold, wet earth. Yesterday’s snow mashes into grey grass in the pedestrian alley that bisects the avenue. She turns onto Csengery Utca. Narrow. Cobbled.
She’s following the numbers: 75, 77, 79. There: 281. It looks exactly as Dorottya had described it: a corner building, with rounded corner windows on the second and third floors supported by a maenad with flowing hair. Dorottya said their instructions were to leave via the cemetery exit, but she and Zsofi had gotten turned around and had first emerged here, too close to the centre of the city, too risky. They’d immediately gone back down, taken the first left, and they’d got it right. Agnes peers through the locked gate into the building’s front hall. Past it, the courtyard.
Two rows of buzzers. Twelve apartments. She’s checking the names—Toth, Leeb, Kiraly—when a German shepherd fires out from somewhere, barking, teeth bared, and flings himself at the gate. She stumbles back. The thing growls, snapping its jaws between the metal bars.
“Bad dog,” she reprimands. “Down.”
“They trained him to do that.” A young man stands behind her, bags of groceries gripped in hands nearly purple with cold. “He’s a good dog. He thinks it’s a game. Isn’t that right, Cica?” At the man’s voice, the dog named pussycat wags his tail.
