by Ailsa Kay
The man is willowy, a weed. His shoulders slope with the weight of the bags. He puts them down to find his key to the gate. “Who were you looking for?”
“No one. Just looking.”
He’s still searching for his keys.
“I lived here, once.” The old skill returns so fluently; she lies as smoothly as a teenager.
“Ah.” Still searching through his pockets. Clearly, he would prefer that she leave him be. He’s too polite to push through and leave her standing there. This is the quandary she’s put him in.
He’s kind, but he’s a busy man with things to do other than talk to her. He wants to go inside, read his newspaper, eat his bread and salami. She’s holding him hostage. He finds his key.
“Which apartment are you in?”
He points up. “Second floor, back.”
“Oh. We were in the back, fourth floor.”
On Visegradi, they’d lived crammed all together in one room plus kitchen and bath. First the four of them, and then after her father’s arrest, just the three.
He’d probably heard similar stories from his parents and grandparents. Probably hated them. Now, glossy shops lined Andrassy. Millionaire mile, it had become. Suits worth more than a Hungarian doctor’s yearly salary. Gold necklaces for their millionaire wives. No shame in money, any longer.
“I never thought I’d be so nostalgic.” She smiles sentimentally, the attack dog now curled happily around his own tail. “I won’t keep you. I just wanted to see if it was still here.” She grips the gate and peers.
“Did you want to see inside?” Through his kind-to-old-ladies voice, she hears his reluctance.
“Really? I would love to.” The gate opens. “This is my first trip home since fifty-six—you can’t imagine how old I am. Isn’t this amazing? An AVO secret policeman was killed at the foot of these very stairs. Did you know that?” She forges ahead, lie after breathtaking lie, defying gravity. The balustrade overlooking the courtyard has fallen away in parts, held together with bits of salvaged wood. “It used to be so well kept. Who lives up there now, in our old apartment?”
The man shrugs. He’s trying to get away from her.
“Maybe I’ll just go and see if anyone’s home.” She follows him up the stairs. “I would love to see what’s left of the place. I wonder if my grandmother’s kitchen table is still there?”
As soon as he gets to the second floor, he flees. “Hallo,” he says. “Csokolom,” as he pushes open his door.
Agnes waits until he’s well inside, counts to thirty, then quietly, on kitten feet as her mother would once have said, creeps back down the stairs. Rugs hang over balcony rails on the third and second floors, awaiting their weekly thrashing. There’s the sound of a vacuum from somewhere. Jangling keys, locking a door, then the gate in front of the door. Clip-clop of a housewife’s brisk step. The door to the cellar is at the back of the courtyard, as it is in every old-style Pest apartment block. She edges around, under the balcony, just in case her young friend looks out his window. This door’s unlocked. She slips in. Closes the door behind her. She’s come equipped. She pulls a flashlight from her purse.
The steep stairs are exactly the same as the ones she remembers from the place on Visegradi. In that cellar, each family had their own storage space—for coal, extra or old pieces of furniture. The family next door had once been aristocrats, though they never talked about that. Their storage corner held heirlooms: oil paintings they had no room for in their apartment, a huge Herendi vase, a disassembled mahogany table. Her family’s space was only for coal. They’d lost their house and everything in it after the war, when the Russians “liberated” Hungary. Most of this cellar is stacked to the hilt with old furniture. This might be a challenge. She puts the flashlight on a dusty record cabinet, reaches again into her purse. Tibor was always teasing her about her large bag. “An old woman’s prerogative,” she would answer. Now, she pulls from it the metal detector she purchased before leaving Toronto. Thank goodness she’d had the foresight to practise in her backyard before leaving. It wasn’t complicated, but today there’s no time to waste. She extends the collapsible rod, screws it tight, puts the earphones on her head, takes the flashlight in her other hand.
The thing is to be systematic. Start at one end, work progressively to the other. Any door to a tunnel would have to have some metal part, even if it was only the hinge. She begins at the corner closest to the stairwell. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do about the area covered in furniture, but maybe she won’t have to figure it out. Already, the thing is beeping like crazy. She drops to her knees. Pulls the trowel from her bag and digs. A button. Start again. Two hours she works and the thing almost never stops beeping. Each time, she takes out her trowel and digs down. She retrieves: a button, several coins of different denominations, the handle to a cabinet, a chain link, many nails. She’s working at the rate of approximately two square metres per hour. She’s covered about a third of the space. She pauses for some water and the buttered roll she’d brought. If her husband, James, were here, he’d be laughing, but in a nice way, the way that reminded her she was loved. He might even take a turn with the trowel, just to humour her. But James isn’t here. He’s been gone for nearly five years now. Nearly five years she has managed to go on living without him, and there’s no point leaving a job only half done. She’s sitting on the arm of a couch. As she pushes herself to standing, she looks down, between her feet. That’s definitely a glint. She takes the trowel. She digs. Not a coin or a button, not a nail. Heavier. Sturdier. Circular. About the size of her hand. The floor is hard-packed earth. She needs a pickaxe for something this deep, not a trowel. Sweat beads and her breath comes heavier, clouding the freezing air.
Creak and rattle of the door. A heavy tread. Then faster. Someone coming down the stairs at a gallop. A snarling growl.
Cica.
The dog lands on her.
“Cica.” The dog backs away. A flashlight shines in her face.
“What the hell?”
She puts her hands up, to cover her eyes.
“What the hell are you doing down here?”
It’s the kind young man. Is he really so kind, or was he pretending? There’s no way to know, really. There’s never any way to know for sure.
“My mother buried her jewellery box,” Agnes stutters. Realizing she’s holding her hands as though under arrest, she drops them into her lap. “From the communists.”
He’s trying to decide how to be, with her. Should he scare her away? Let her do her crazy, old-lady digging?
“You got the wrong building, lady. Mrs. Zena says her family’s been in that apartment you said was yours since the end of the war.”
“The wrong building? But that’s impossible. I remember it so clearly. Maybe it was the third floor.”
The man seizes her elbow, surprisingly strong for someone so skinny. Would anyone hear her if she screamed. If he killed her, how long would it be until her body was found? Would the dog eat her? “Lady, calm down. I’m just trying to help you up.”
“I can get up by myself, if you will stop breaking my arm.”
Once standing, she removes her gloves, dusts off her skirt. “Help me dig,” she says. “If you help me for one hour I will pay you twenty Canadian dollars.” He seems to be thinking about it.
“Forty.”
He goes to the far end of the cellar. Scrabbles about there for a few minutes and emerges with a flat shovel.
“One hour,” he says. “Show me the money.”
He unearths the ring she’d thought was the handle to a trap door. It’s a handle but to a large metal box, the size of a safe. She has to pretend that maybe her mother’s jewellery is inside it, but when they get it open, it’s full of paper—someone’s banking receipts, envelopes, inventories, account books. When he lifts one out, it falls apart in his fingers. That was an hour. Forty is all the Canadian money she has.
He pockets it. “You gonna keep looking?”<
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The cellar now seems enormous, and her plan absurd, if not stark raving mad (as James might say). “Did you ever find a door down here? To a tunnel?”
“To one of those Soviet tunnels, you mean?”
Yes. The eagerness in her face.
“The ones that supposedly hid a thousand prisoners, a hospital, and a spa for the higher-ups, you mean?”
She feels foolish. She hates him for taking her money. Herself for giving it to him.
He leaves, chuckling, Cica at his heel.
Horrible, horrible country. She should never have come back. She’s an old lady and it’s not worth it. An old lady, driven by guilt (how original), pretending to be Indiana Ancient-Jones. She should go back to the hotel and sit in her room and not leave again until Tibor returns and then she should tell Tibor what she is really doing here. She should confess all the things she’s kept locked in that black box in her brain all this time, not just this trip, but his whole life. Because what if she has a heart attack and dies? She doesn’t want to die with that box of secrets unopened inside her. Even if you don’t want to believe in a soul, as you get closer to dying, you find you do have one. And souls have to speak their secrets, release them into the world to be free of them. But she is not going to die today on Csengery Utca. She will turn back onto Andrassy Ut. Take the nearest subway back to the hotel room, blocking out the fact that for the minutes she’s on the train she’s under the Duna, under that wide, weighty flow that banks can hardly hold when it floods. Yes, she’ll go back to the fancy hotel that makes Tibor hold his head like the world watches, and she’ll order an overpriced lunch and charge it to her son. She’s starving, suddenly. She’s dizzy with hunger. She’ll order the biggest dish on the menu, and she’ll look out the massive window at the white parliament and will sort through the items in that unopened box and consider which ones to share with her son.
She turns onto Andrassy with these thoughts and this purpose clear in her mind, and as she does, looking neither right nor left, nor even seeing straight ahead of her, really, she steps into a living Duna of moving people. Flags snap. “Hungary for Hungarians.” “Slaves no longer!” The last words are from a poem that she hasn’t heard since 1956, the poem of the revolution. “Now or never,” they’d shouted in those few heady days before tanks came in. “Slaves no longer!” But Hungarians have always been pushed around, pushovers, and that’s why they shout it so stolidly. In orderly columns, the people push forward.
Marchers fill the street and she’s pulled into its centre, borne forward, purse banging against her knees. Everyone but her wears the kokarda, that tricolour Hungarian rosette on their lapel, even though it’s not a national holiday. When she looks behind, she sees the soldiers. Are they soldiers? Black boots stomp. A tall blonde girl locks arms with her. She can hardly see the sky for the shoulders and the banners. The marchers’ pride is hard and shiny and happy. It snaps like flags. But an old lady like her, her bag so heavy, her heart so out of tune—she will trip. She will and they will walk over top of her because she is not a revolutionary. She never was. She left, you see. She left them all behind.
A group from the conference decides to get lunch at a little csarda up the street: good soup and huge plates of schnitzel. They file in, gather around two small tables, barely enough room for shoulders, but there aren’t enough coat hooks. Tibor folds his and sits on it. He thinks of his camera. He had searched his hotel room, his suitcase, the pockets of all his clothes, even (irrationally) the ones he hadn’t unpacked. What if the police were right now huddled around his camera, ogling, making lewd jokes about her breasts or his technique? What if they put it on YouTube? He shouldn’t have shot the video in the first place, but it was almost an accident, really. Spur of one hot, unzippered moment. He’d been showing her photos from his trip to New York, so the camera was just there, on his side table within easy reach. It hadn’t taken more than one arm slipping over her hip to push a button and he was in permanent possession of Rafaela’s orgasm all the way from ah to oh god. It was mostly blurry. No picture of her face. Just her breasts, hips, the top of his head. Her moans. His moans. She might have guessed it was on, but she didn’t say anything. Maybe she liked the thought of performing. He’d had the stupid camera with him on Gellert, right until that moment. Maybe he’d dropped it on the path, before he’d ducked under the overhang. Maybe he should go look for it.
Peter elbows him, points at the small TV above the bar. The news anchor is talking. It takes a moment or two for Tibor to focus. Then the photograph flashes on screen—a young man in a black peaked cap, raising a beer stein to the camera and grinning his face off, scarcely recognizable.
“The head found on Gellert Hegy has been identified as that of Janos Hagy, a Canadian citizen. Hagy’s father arrived in Budapest today to identify the body. He has appealed to the Canadian government to work closely with the Hungarian police. He says he received no threats, and no request for ransom. He spoke to his son just hours before the murder is believed to have happened. His son was on his way to a party with a friend. He sounded happy and gave his father no indication that he was in any way in danger.”
“A Canadian,” someone says.
“Weird. I thought they said it was organized crime.”
“Weird.”
Everyone’s looking at him.
“Tibor, you have to go to the consulate,” Ilona presses.
“That guy, Gombas, he was up on major corruption last year—a scam that took millions out of the public purse—and he got away with it. On the news after the trial, he was calm, so ordinary-looking, forgiving everyone for judging him wrongly and all we could do was laugh at the farce. Not a single witness would testify against him.”
The photograph is gone, replaced with the next news item. A reporter now stands in front of marchers wearing kokardas and waving red flags and shouting something about true Magyar.
Lucia looks as if she’s waiting for something from him.
“No, you’re right. Thugs like that, they can’t get away with it.”
She nods. Exactly.
He knows he’s on perilous footing here, taking such a definitive stance when really what he’d like most is to have a beer, talk about politics, and forget about young Janos Hagy and his gruesome end. But the way she’s looking at him. And not just Lucia, everyone else too. They want him to step up. Their respect—no, their admiration—dangles like a fat, graspable peach just within reach. “And I’m the only witness.”
He stares wretchedly into his beer.
Peter doesn’t believe him for a second. He laughs. “Really? Look, if these guys are really with Gombas, you don’t want to be anywhere near it, and if you’re wrong about this detective, you’ll only be making a fool of yourself. Possibly sinking some poor harmless guy’s career.”
“I’m not wrong about the detective.”
“Fine, so you met a corrupt detective.”
“A murderer,” Imre corrects.
“But if you go to the National Police, or to your consulate, what’s that going to solve? You think they’ll ride in and arrest your guy? Just like that?”
Tibor feels the upswell of something, some feeling in his chest. Pride? Anger? It feels warm. It feels good. “I don’t think I have a choice, Peter. It’s the responsibility of the witness.”
“Holy shit.” Lucia’s focused on the TV. A platoon of black uniforms stomp, but they’re not police and they don’t look like soldiers. It’s the Magyar Garda, the quasi-militant front of Jobbik. They were supposed to have been disbanded last year.
“My sister’s husband joined them,” says Ilona. “It’s unbelievable. Listening to him, you’d think it was 1938.”
Everyone stares as the march pushes forward. The marchers look calm, unworried, definitive.
“Fucking fascists,” says someone.
“It’s frightening.”
“They’re as frightening as we let them become. They’re a fringe element.”
“It’
s true,” says Imre. “Why are we taking them seriously? We should be laughing at them.”
“Well, you’re not Jewish, Imre.”
The black-vested men and women look straight ahead, soldierly and undistractible, following orders they invented themselves.
Tibor feels the warmth dissipate as attention swirls away from him, consumed now with the upsurge in anti-Semitism. Will the ultra right-wing Jobbik win the next election? He tries not to feel deflated. Only Lucia says, one more time, pressing her hand into his arm, “If you need a lawyer.”
After more conference and more beer, Tibor gets back to the hotel late and alone, despite what he thought was a pretty convincing effort with Lucia. He’d left a message at the front desk for his mother that he wouldn’t be joining her for dinner. Easier that way. She was a grown-up after all, not a child. She could order her own dinner, entertain herself. When he gets to his hotel room, he turns on the TV. A pretty reporter is talking to the camera.
“Police have found evidence suggesting that the young man was being stalked. Warning that it’s too early yet to say for certain, they suggest that it may be the work of a sexual predator. A friend of the murdered Canadian, Csaba Bekes, has come forward with information. The night of the murder, Bekes says, Hagy and Bekes attended a party together at this tear-down in Pest.”
As Tibor watches, the camera slides to reveal the squat, the last party house he and Peter had visited on his first night here. It looks different through a news lens—more like the wreck it was, amateur, adolescent, not at all cool. The pretty reporter continues.
“By night, this place is a bar, its rooms filled with young partygoers. The beer is cheap and its guests, like Bekes and Hagy, are just here to have a good time. But one witness says Hagy left the party at 2:30 a.m. shortly after he spoke with a middle-aged man, likely a tourist as the two were speaking English. And Bekes reports seeing Hagy getting into a black Mercedes-Benz.”
