by Ailsa Kay
He shakes his head.
Good. She can’t bear to know.
Miklos had not been held under Koztarsasag Ter after all, but at Gyujtofoghaz prison. Yesterday, while Margit shouted into a hole, its doors had been flung open and hundreds of political prisoners poured out. A couple of strong young revolutionaries had brought Miklos home. She found him there, when she returned, in front of her door like a parcel.
She had bathed him first. Run the cloth over the burn marks on his arms, the smashed and twisted bones of his engineer’s hands. He’d lain back in the tub as she raised one leg to wash, then the other. Legs so thin, they weighed almost nothing. Pulling the cloth between his legs, moving his slack penis from one side to the next, she’d bit the tears back. What right had she to cry? She helped him out of the deep tub and into a clean, warm set of clothes, too big. He lay in bed as she scrubbed the grey scum off the tub. He slept for six hours. When he wakes in the dark, he finds Margit in the bathtub crying silently in inches of water, and he takes the cloth from her hand.
Now the man who sits at the kitchen table fills the small room. Quietly, he thanks his wife for the bowl she puts in front of him. He barely meets his daughter’s eyes, abashed before her sudden adulthood. He’s skinny. He’s lost teeth. The spoon trembles in his hand.
“Jo etvagyat,” her mother says, her voice like the spoon.
That morning, when Agi woke up, both her parents were still asleep, arms around each other. She had to find her clothes in the near dark of the shuttered room and dress in the bathroom, jumping on the freezing cold tile, trying not to look at the stinking heap of rags he’d dropped there last night.
Now he turns to her. “Agi, your mother tells me you’re a teacher?”
“Yes. Mathematics.”
“Good. That’s very good.”
They hear gunfire and shouting, boots pounding on cracked stone. How can he ask such questions when the world is falling apart?
“Mathematics.” He nods. He’s run out of things to say, looks to his wife with a helplessness she’s never seen before. At the sharp sadness in her eyes, he pulls it in. “Margit, how on earth did you make such a responsible, intelligent woman out of the hooligan I used to know?”
“I had nothing to do with it,” says her mother. Her tone ends the conversation. They finish their bread in silence. If anyone’s still hungry, no one says so.
Agi dries and stacks the plates. From the other room, the low mumble of her parents’ voices. Her mother seems no happier now than when he was gone. There was no rejoicing last night at his return, no signs of joy on her mother’s face this morning, only the same tight knot of a forehead. And Agi thinks, Why am I still here? Who am I waiting for?
Thursday, November 1
At 10:00 a.m., Gyula appears at her door. Gyula! For a moment she forgets. And then she remembers. He pulls her out of the apartment, away from her mother, but there’s nowhere else to go so he shuts the door behind them and they stand there under the shadow of the balcony above. He holds her hands. Into her ear, he says, “The word from Vecses is that the tanks have turned around. They’re pointed back toward Budapest. They’ve been playing with us, Agi. They’re preparing to invade. Almost certainly, and probably very soon.”
He’s afraid but trying not to show it, acting strong, for her. “The Revolutionary Council is meeting tonight. Everyone needs to make his own decision, whether to stay or get out. You need to go, Agi. Just like you planned. If you go now, you can likely make it through. The borders are still open, you can get to Austria.”
She looks at him, her Gyula. He’s still her Gyula, isn’t he? For one instant, she imagines Zsofi has never said what she said. Imagines stepping into his arms, the relief of that letting go because he would hold her just as he used to and everything would be fine. “Did you tell Zsofi that you love her?”
The question takes him by surprise. “What are you talking about?”
“She believes that you love her.”
“But that’s crazy. She’s crazy. Are you listening to me, Agi? There’s no time for this. You need to get your things together and go. Today.”
“You didn’t kiss her? Make love to her?”
“For God’s sake, Agi.” His hair needs a wash. At least six grenades hang from his belt. His hands are black from shooting the gun that hangs from his shoulder.
“Zsofi’s dramatic, but she doesn’t lie. It’s one of her weaknesses.”
But Gyula lies. He lies all the time. He lied to his father about her; he lied to the school about his ideology; he lied to the police who stopped him coming out of the British Legation; he loves to lie. Did he lie to her? All that time, promising to come with her, pretending that escape was his dream too—was it just another lie? No, looking at him now, here in front of her, she knows that much, at least. He is a sincere man, a true man who feels deeply. Maybe he hadn’t lied to her but hadn’t chosen her either. When it came down to it, he chose this revolution. That didn’t stop her from wanting him. It only made it impossible, and the one thing she will never do is love like that, love grievingly, love for what is not. She knows what that love looks like: it leaves holes inside a person deeper than life, so deep if you fell in you’d never crawl out.
“I love you, Agi. You.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she says, taking a step back.
“Come on, Agi, it was one kiss. In the heat of battle. A moment. That’s all. ”
One kiss, that’s all. Of course it didn’t matter, not to him. And it should never have mattered to Zsofi.
“Where’s Zsofi now?”
“What did I just say?”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, I can’t leave without her, Gyula. I have to find her.”
“Oh. I don’t know for sure. Likely the student housing near the Vermezo.”
“Thank you,” she says.
He leans in, touches his lips to hers. “My love,” he says, and his voice drops right through her. As if nothing has changed. She bristles, he brushes. How can love possibly end? How can it? She wants to hold him so tight. Wants to hold him and never let him go. Wants his arms around her, and his heart, wants his soul, his touch, his breath.
“Agi, I’ll come find you. I promise. When all this is over, I’ll find you.”
Moments later, from behind the closed door, she hears him go.
She makes it across the city in good time, without having to run to avoid shooters or explosions or armed or fleeing crowds. If it’s true the tanks have turned, that this is, in fact, the eve of a new invasion, there’s no sign of it. Budapest is calm, the air strangely quiet in the aftershock. People rest, bury bodies in parks and empty lots, line up patiently for food, walk at an ordinary pace, greet with an ordinary voice. In the housing by the meadow named Field of Blood for a different battle, she finds students massed, lounging, crowded in, dozing five or six to a room. She walks the hallways, takes it all in. The feeling of it. The youth and the camaraderie. They share cigarettes, food, clothes, ammo, and hope. They huddle for warmth. They dream of a future that will thank them. Of course they shared love. How could they not? They are joined together in this making of new epic stories where love runs ready and hot as blood. But Zsofi is her sister and that is love too.
“Zsofi Teglas?” Agi asks the first group she sees.
Shrugs.
“Zsofi Teglas?” she asks a woman in men’s pants, coming out the door of a crowded room.
“Sorry.”
Down one hall and up the next, Agi wanders. She has all her forints. She carries food and water in a bag. She wears the only shoes she owns; they’ll have to do. On her head, a hat, and under the jacket she’s borrowed from her mother a shirt, two sweaters, two skirts. She’d made all her preparations as her parents watched. Her mother’s anger was ebbing, finally, running out and drifting around her ankles with the pages and pages of ink-etched paper that she kept letting go. Her father held one hand in the other, listening to the voices of his daug
hter and his wife and hardly hearing them. “Are you leaving for good, then?” he finally asked, after she had twice explained to her mother the plan, the route, how she would evade the guards at the border, how she would write as soon as she was safe. In Vienna.
“For good,” she answered. And she kissed her father’s cheek, the cheek of the man who’d once towered over her, but who had never been able to protect either his daughters or his wife.
“Zsofi,” she calls.
Her sister lies curled into the arm of another girl the same age. They’re dozing fully dressed on a bed, with their shoes still on their feet. She calls again, “Zsofi. Wake up.”
Zsofi pulls herself out of sleep, blinking to make sense of the world. “It’s me. Come on. Get up.”
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s time to go.”
“Says who?”
“I don’t want to fight with you, Zsofi. Please. Just come.”
The other girl has woken now too, and three others in the room watch them.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Agi knows that tone: stubborn Zsofi, digging her heels in, especially in front of an audience.
“Gyula came to warn me. The tanks have turned around. He thinks the Russians will invade.”
Around them, a scuffle, a flurry of questions—“What? Turned around where? Where are they? When?” Zsofi, though, has heard only the first part of what she’s said.
“Gyula came to you?”
“To warn me, Zsofi. If we can leave today, now, we can be to the border by tomorrow. It’s still open, he says.”
“But he’s not leaving.”
“No, Zsofi, he’s not. But we can.”
“If he’s not going, I’m not going.”
Zsofi flings her arms in front of her chest. Proud, fearless lover is what she means to project, but what she does project is stupid, foolish, lovesick girl with gritty crumbs of sleep in her eye. Agi steadies her voice, makes it warmer than she feels right now, tries to draw the better, smarter, realistic Zsofi out from behind this face. Like tsking for a kitten, offering plates of warm milk.
“He can join us, Zsofi. He said he’d join us. After. But he wants us to be safe.”
“Grow up, Agi. He wants you to be safe; he wants me by his side.”
Grow up? Since when…? She buttons the anger. “He doesn’t love you, Zsofi. Not the way you think.”
“Really? Then why did he make love to me?”
“He kissed you, Zsofi.”
“Yes, and since then, we’ve been lovers.”
The word sounds obscene, engorged in her sister’s mouth.
Zsofi turns to her bedmate: “Isn’t that right, Anna?”
“Gyula adores her,” says the witless child.
Okay, enough. Agi grabs Zsofi’s wrist. “You’re coming with me.”
“Am not.” She kicks.
“Yes, you are.” Agi drags her half off the bed, but Anna holds tight to Zsofi’s other arm.
“She said she’s staying!” Anna shouts.
“Zsofi, listen to me. This revolution is over. You have to stop pretending.”
“I’m pretending, Agi? You wanted him to run away with you, to be your husband. I just wanted him between my legs. Which do you think he chose?”
Her sister gloats, so in love with her posturing, sure of herself, and her murderous beauty, sure that she’ll win because she’s always been the lucky one, the untouched and protected one, the brave one. So Agi lets go.
The Safe Room
He hears it first, the crack of his own skull against the brick wall, the pain a moment late. Two uniformed men stand in front of him. Just two weeks ago, they would have been the ones in hiding or running for their lives and this shows in their faces—their satisfaction, happy to be on the winning side again. Revolution over, Gyula, too, is once again exactly what he’d always been: a skinny, bookish man with the hands of a pianist, not a fighter. One punch to the gut knocks the air out of him before he can straighten. He crumples forward. Don’t go down. The next one smashes into his cheek, and his shoulder lands on frozen ground. The toe of a boot meets his kidneys. The grunt of pain comes from outside him. Who else is being beaten in this stone-cold yard? Christ. He prays. No one to save him. There was never any other ending, and they all know it’s only what he deserves. Another kick, this time to the hand protecting his skull. Fingers splinter. He screams. A boot readies itself above his knee. Zsofi.
They caught him on Aldas Utca. He heard the rumbling truck behind him, heard it slowing down. His left hand tightened on the satchel he held, meaningless. An older man walking toward him looked decisively innocent, and Gyula restrained his pace, reminding himself that from the back he looked like any comrade on his way to the office. Before leaving the house, he’d shrugged into one of his father’s good coats—about three sizes too big, but it was warm and innocuous. At the last minute, he picked up the soft leather briefcase, its handle polished to a dark shine by years of his father’s grip. If he’d seen himself in the mirror, he’d have recognized how inept a disguise it was. His unshaven face hovered pale and hollow-eyed above the clownishly large coat. The briefcase dangled, obviously empty of papers, from an ungloved hand. But Gyula hadn’t checked the mirror, and now he just kept going because once the choice is made, it’s made. No turning back. Maybe they were slowing for someone else—those hurrying, slender women up ahead perhaps, who were also refusing to look over their shoulders. He kept his gaze straight ahead and put one flimsy-soled foot in front of the other. He’d found these shoes a week ago on a dead man, and they were better than the ones he’d worn right out, but not by much. If he had to run, he’d slip. So he wouldn’t run. In less than ten metres, he would take a left and let the truck continue on its way down the hill to the city. He counted every step. Perspiration streamed between his shoulder blades. He just had to get to a pharmacy. Or a hospital. Either would do. Zsofi wouldn’t even know he’d left. He’d bandage her up. In a few days, they’d be sharing a can of ham by candlelight, and he’d tell her how, seized by fear, he couldn’t turn around and all he could think about was his lousy shoes. She’d giggle like she used to.
“You. Halt.”
Don’t look back. Never look back.
“You.” A shot. Gyula dropped his satchel.
He comes to in the back of a rattling canvas-covered army truck crammed full of men like him. His head is on another man’s legs. He’s not dead. The straining engine, the grind and clatter over broken roads fills his ears. His gaze finds its focus on the face of a boy opposite, no more than twelve years old. Blue eyes stare straight ahead, unseeing, from an unbruised face. He’s not dead either. As the truck swerves, bodies shift, a man’s elbow lands on Gyula’s knee. Again, he loses consciousness.
It didn’t occur to him to love her, at first. That seems impossible now, that he might have missed her.
The first time he kissed her, he hadn’t meant it like that. It really was a misunderstanding. He climbed out of the tank, his mind swarming with the unimaginable: men with their heads beaten in, men upside down with their hair on fire, men’s guts on the sidewalk in front of the store where he used to buy cigarettes, dead men and women and children too. A mind clustered with death. But he was a soldier, a champion. And he pushed himself up out of the tank’s belly not victorious but petrified and guilty, and wishing for grace. And there she was, waving both arms in the air like a kid, her hair unbrushed and her smile all joy. Victory. She shouted, like he was some hero. And she threw her arms around him and when he kissed her she tasted like onions.
He noticed her in the cafeteria, waiting in line for the boiled potatoes and cabbage.
“Zsofi.”
He meant to greet her casually, soldier to soldier, but when she turned, he felt a flutter in his belly and blushed.
“Thank God. Nobody’s seen you all day, Gyula.”
His tongue twisted. He had no answer. His heart hammering. Could she tell?
Yes. Yes, s
he could. She grinned now, sure of her power. “You look hungry. I’ll let you butt in line if you want.”
She came to him that night. The room was freezing cold, and under the covers he was fully dressed. Around them, the slumber, snores, sleep-mumbles of the other revolutionaries. She said nothing as she wrested him first from sleep and then from his clothes. No speaking, no naming, no imagining. No permission. No hesitation. Only a hurry of hands, the scrape of held breath, the fall of smooth hair in his face and her skin was cold, but her mouth so hot.
November 8, when it was clear the revolution was crashing, they hid in a burnt-out building along with six others. They had two nights together there. They found a shell of a room and called it their own. No roof to shelter them from the snow that had only just started falling so they burrowed under old rugs, made a cocoon, heated it with just body and breath. There was nothing more they needed. He fell asleep between her legs; he woke with his cock in her mouth. He licked her, bit her, screwed her. They fucked so hard they bruised. It was happiness so furious and so real it made everything else go away. Then someone warned them and they scrambled out of their perfect home and they ran, hand in hand, back ways that Gyula knew. To the safe room. They should have gone there first. Why hadn’t they?
She was hit. He couldn’t blame himself for that; it was so random. They were running, there was gunfire. It could have been anyone.
The truck stops. Outside the truck, men call out.
“Good haul?”
“Not bad for a day’s work.”
Tires screech and the truck’s back door clanks open. Cold rushes in. Those who can walk are hustled off. Those who can’t are dragged. He forces himself to sit up and, pushing against shoulders and grasping the cold metal of the truck’s ribs, cantilevers himself to standing. A hand yanks him from truck to ground. The pain in his knee nearly overtakes him—a dark, dizzying, nauseating wave. Don’t fall. And he’s following the man in front of him across a courtyard, through an ordinary open door that could be anywhere but isn’t. His bad leg is a stubborn old dog on a leash. Step, drag. Step, drag. Another door and a stairwell. He steadies himself against the wall to get down the stairs. He’s slowing down the line. The man behind him—who?—comes around front and puts Gyula’s two arms over his shoulders. One flight and another he descends, half carried on the back of this strong, two-legged soul. Thank you. At the turn of each flight, a grey-painted metal door bears a white number: -1, -2, -3. The paint is flaking. Some numbers are partial. But he’s not going to die today. He can’t die. -5. How deep is this prison? With every level they descend, panic mounts: panic -7, -8.
