by Andrew Ervin
Her eyes brightened angelically. She appeared genuinely cheerful and merry, despite her degraded condition. Her cheeks revealed the frigidity of the atmosphere, only slightly warmer down here. “Jó estét kivánok.”
As a boy, he would with some anxiety await the first hóvirág of the spring, which, in a private ritual, he would wrap in similar bundles and present to his mother. They stayed on the windowsill of the kitchen, in cups of chipped and brightly glazed ceramic, some until the August heat descended from the Mátras, from Slovakia and farther.
“Menny?”
“Tessék?”
He spoke slower, “Menny?”
“Mennyi?”
“Yes—igen. Mennyi?”
“Száz forint.”
He didn’t have any coins, or even a hundred-forint bill. The automated teller machine at the airport dispensed only five- and ten-thousand forint notes. He offered her five thousand and she shook her head, dismayed. She pointed to the Tour Inform office, where he could get change, were they open. “No,” he said. “All of them. Minden.” He waved his gloved hand over the flowers like a benediction and she finally understood. From the bag at her feet she took out a sheet of newspaper from yesterday’s Magyar Hírlap, and laid it on the filthy concrete floor of the underpass. Harkályi expected to see his own picture looking up at himself again, but it did not appear. The old woman spread out the bundles of flowers on the paper, which soaked up water from the bottom of her baking pan. Lifting it from the corners, she placed the entire bundle in a flimsy plastic bag with vertical yellow stripes, loosely tied the handles together, and held it out for him. “Tessék,” she said, and quickly, with a furtive look around, slipped the five thousand forints into a pocket of her peasant skirt. “Nagyon szépen köszönöm,” she told him, collected her belongings, and walked quickly to the metro. He was left standing there with a bagful of soggy newspaper—yesterday’s news no less—and a garden’s worth of quickly dehydrating flowers. He could not help but laugh, and as he did a man of dark complexion, Gypsy maybe, or Turkish, slouched past and whispered, “Change money?” without looking at him.
3.
His glove gripped the conveyor belt, a dirty loop of black rubber leading endlessly into the abyss of the metro station below, circling beneath the iron teeth of the escalator at a greater rate of speed than that of the steps themselves. It moved too rapidly for his comfort, pulling his arm gently down ahead of him. But he did not want to let go; it was an extremely long descent, deep into the core of the city. Of the four long escalators only the outer two were in operation, one moving quickly upward and one downward. Vinyl siding the color of dark wood covered the walls and ceiling of the rounded tunnel and was plastered with stickers and crude illustrations upon which he refused to allow his gaze to linger. A series of plastic-framed advertisements whirred past him faster than he could discern them; a colorful fast-food cup slid down the metal barrier between his and the next escalator over. He watched it descend ahead of him and crash to the station floor. There was laughter at his back.
At the bottom, thrown from the machine, Harkályi was forced to step over the pile of ice cubes and in the process very nearly stumbled, regaining his balance only at the last instant. The bag of flowers fell from his hands and spilled to the ground, mixing with the ice cubes and cola. Four teenagers exited the escalator behind him and stepped on the hóvirág as they passed, smashing them with their boots. They continued past into the darkened corners of the station. Harkályi tried to collect the flowers again but nearly all were crushed. No one stopped to help him gather them from the ground. The old néni who had sold them to him was still waiting for her subway; she turned quickly away out of what appeared to be either embarrassment or disgust. He had no idea what to do with them now. To throw them away would be unthinkable. He left the most flattened of the bunch but returned the remainder to their newspaper-lined bag. They were a delightful burden. Magda would appreciate them.
The Nyugati M3 stop consisted of one long hallway interrupted by a series of metallic pillars. The silver letters above one of the tracks spelled ÚJPEST-KÖZPONT and, above the other, KÖBÁNYA-KISPEST. He was not sure which direction to take, as he did not yet have in mind a specific destination, so he moved toward the sound of the first oncoming train. When it stopped, dozens of people rushed from it, hollering and laughing and passing around bottles of wine and beer. A young woman wearing large headphones stumbled to a stop in front of him. He could not see her eyes through her sunglasses, but the volume of the so-called music emanating from her head was staggering. She looked up at him smilingly, reached into a pocket of her shabby coat, and produced a small safety pin, which, with some difficulty, she attached to the lapel of his overcoat. He made no move to stop her. When she finished he saw that affixed to the pin was a small ribbon of red, white, and green. She smiled and Harkályi watched her walk unsteadily away. She halted at the foot of the upward escalator, went over to the other, downward one, and picked up the remainder of his broken flowers. She gently dusted them off, tried to mend the damaged stems, and carried them in front of her like a bridal bouquet, back up to the city.
The subway left without him, a state of affairs he accepted as an omen to go in the other direction, south, toward Deák Ferenc Square. With the exception of several bums, Harkályi stood alone on the platform. Someone had spray-painted a swastika, of all possible profanities, on the wall map of Budapest, dividing the city into quarters, like Vienna after the war. He could feel the weight of the emptiness in his stomach. It was a Strange sensation to be underground here, again, yet not an entirely unwelcome one.
A rush of hot, stale air preceded the sound of the train’s arrival. Newspapers and paper bags took flight like so many sickly birds. Pulling to a moderately slow, metallic halt, the sky-blue cars appeared old and not very well tended-to at all. Dirt and colorless geometric graffiti covered the entire side of the train, which cracked open in two places and birthed another mass of red-faced young people into his midst. They jostled past him, taking with them their laughter, which ascended the escalator. As he stepped on board he could see, in the gap between the platform and the floor of the train, something shining amid the oily rocks lining the track bed; he couldn’t make out the precise shape before the orange light above his head buzzed and the doors slammed shut, sealed tight and airless by wide, vertical strips of black rubber.
The only other occupants were two teens pressed romantically against the doors at the other end of the car. The train slowed to a stop at, according to the sign posted above the door, ARANY JÁNOS UTCA, named for the father of Hungarian nationalist poetry—some said of Hungarian nationalism itself. There, two Gypsies, one skinny and one preposterously fat, entered through the rear doors. It occurred to him that he had not purchased a ticket. The larger of them looked at Harkályi, but avoided making eye contact. The train started to move. He placed the wet plastic bag on the seat beside him and discretely patted the left side of his breast, as if his billfold may have already disappeared, and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets in order to keep his arms fast against his body for protection. The skinnier of the two men stood at the far door, looking out into the nothingness of subterranean Budapest, while the other planted his sizeable frame strangely close to the groping couple. Harkályi stared at him, watched him slide his right elbow forcefully against the small of the young man’s back. The boy did not respond. With his left hand— Harkályi saw all of this quite clearly—the Gypsy easily removed the boy’s wallet from the back pocket of his dungarees, then discretely handed it to the skinny man. The skinny man walked to the front of the train, toward Harkályi, and flashed a defiant smile that convinced him to remain silent. The Gypsies stood in their respective doorways and remained there even as the train stopped at Deák Square, the hub of the entire metro system, where all three of the city’s underground lines met. Would-be riders approached the doors of his car from the platform, but seeing the dark-skinned men blocking their paths, moved on qu
ickly to the adjoining cars. When the orange lights buzzed again, signaling that the doors would now close, both men darted out, leaving Harkályi alone once more with the young lovers. He felt for his billfold one more time and found it safely in place. He had trouble controlling his breathing. When he got off at Ferenciek Square he looked back to see that the victimized lovers remained oblivious, ignorant, for the time being, of what had occurred. The hóvirág, which Harkályi had forgotten, traveled with them.
4.
A small cadre of waiters appeared from the kitchen, each burdened by a gigantic, round tray covered with flutes of pale, sparkling wine. They marched out in a solemn, single-file line, followed closely behind by an equal number of young waitresses in traditional, tightly bodiced servant attire. The conversations, the clink-clinking of silver against glass, even the drunken sing-along emanating from another, unseen room, all petered out until the entire coffee house arrived at a briefly sustained moment of silent incredulity. The processional soon splintered off into discrete pairs, who then distributed complimentary beverages to every table.
The building lacked the old-world charm that Harkályi had anticipated, but it was indeed warm and lively and appeared capable of providing an authentic Hungarian meal. He sat on a bench along the right-hand wall of the wide, main room, which also housed two long rows of round tables and a series of close-together, four-man tables, one of which he shared with three tweed-clad and spectacled men engaged in a rigorous debate he couldn’t comprehend. He took them for university professors, or some other variety of public intellectual. A balcony opposite his seat contained yet another seating area, and from the sound, there seemed to be even more dining rooms hidden from his current view. He watched the men at his table order coffee after coffee, which they interrupted with the occasional Unicum, an oil-black digestive that smelled uncomfortably like compost and left a green-blue coat inside the bulbs of their stemmed glasses. They didn’t acknowledge him. A raucous game of chess two tables over earned a small crowd of observers.
A mustachioed waiter appeared at their table holding over his right shoulder a heavy tray of glassware. The waitress with him carefully plucked four of them from different sections of the tray’s surface, helping the waiter maintain a safely balanced distribution of weight. “Tessék,” she said, setting one before each of them at the table. The intellectuals did not respond or even appear to notice. “Köszönöm szépen,” Harkályi told her, earning a lovely smile despite fumbling so egregiously over his pronunciation and, without question, his accent. The men at his table turned briefly toward the foreigner among them and then promptly resumed their strenuous argument and gesticulation. No one else acknowledged the sparkling wine, so Harkályi ignored his as well, busying himself by consulting his map yet again and watching the excitement around him. The bubbles in his flute soon stopped rising and conspired around the lip of the glass. In the time of his grandparents, and even of his parents, the coffee house had served as the firmament of Budapest’s social and intellectual spheres. It was an informal establishment, or less formal than in years past, yet it remained governed by a certain civility that he did appreciate. He had found nothing similar in America, and only distant approximations in Vienna and Paris.
The noise slowly swelled until, at midnight, the maître d’hôtel appeared near his station at the exit and, with a wireless microphone, begged for the attention of his patrons, who obediently complied. The massive team of waiters and waitresses then stood among the tables, each with his or her own glass of formerly sparkling wine. Even a few of the white-clad chefs stood in the kitchen doors for the duration of the five-minute speech, of which Harkályi clearly discerned just “Magyarország” and “szabadság,” which the maître d’ repeated frequently. Hungary and liberty. It was a toast in honor of Independence Day, the anniversary of the 1848 uprising against the Hapsburg Dynasty—and the outward excuse for Harkályi’s return. When he finished, finally, the maître d’ lifted his glass, looked around at his attentive audience, and said, “Egészségetekre.”
The others at Harkályi’s table lifted their glasses. “Egészségedre, egészségedre,” they said all at once, and touched their glasses to Harkályi’s. “Egészségedre.”
He was uncertain, at first, how to respond. “Cheers,” he said. “Cheers. Cheers.”
One of the intellectuals, the man next to him on the bench, asked him, “You are English?” His thick eyeglasses did not mask the circles beneath his eyes, which were as black as the peels of rotten bananas.
“No. I am … I am an American, I guess you could say.” He longed for the distraction of his meal, if only the chefs would stay in the kitchen long enough to prepare it.
“American,” another of the men said. He was fat and bald, with a face more sympathetic than those of the others. The buttons of his shirt barely contained the body and undershirt trying to escape from beneath them. “We will teach you to say ‘egészségedre.’ It means—”
‘“To your health,’” Harkályi said.
“You can speak Hungarian?”
“No, but I learned a small amount as a child. I was born here in Budapest.”
“What? Then you are a Hungarian, not an American!” the third interrogator said. He was only slightly less fat.
“Egészségedre,” the man next to him repeated, and they finally sipped their wine, which was cloying, almost unbearable, in its sweetness.
“Why is it that you say you are an American?”
“My family, we spoke German at home—before the war.”
Recognition, perhaps even some vague, uncomfortable understanding, passed over them. The first man, the one next to Harkályi, motioned for a passing waiter. “Négy Unicum,” he ordered. There was silence for a measure or two. “Where did they send you?”
These were things that Harkályi did not talk about, yet his personal background had become public knowledge, a cultural commodity to be sold and bought and consumed. Despite his reluctance, his embarrassment, and his guilt, his story existed independent of himself; it was as well-known, or known better, than even his music. Some words were not fit to be spoken aloud, yet he invoked them here: “To Terezín.”
“You were very young.”
“I was fifteen years old when the camps became liberated. My brother and I, we went to America.”
“And now you have returned,” the fat man said.
“To the scene of the crime,” the slightly less fat man said. He was extremely drunk.
“Tessék,” the waiter said, and deposited four glasses of Unicum on the table. He also carried with him a small kettle of goulash, which was hung suspended above a tea candle he placed in front of Harkályi. He ladled a portion of it into his bowl for him. The combined smell of paprika and beef rose. Pristine, white cubes of potato soaked in the glistening, red broth. He was ravenously hungry.
“Good appetite,” the fat man told him, and added something indecipherable to the waiter.
“Egészségedre,” the men around him said, lifting their glasses.
“Egészségedre,” Harkályi repeated. He held the Unicum under his nose, then watched the other men swallow their own portions whole. They smiled and urged him onward, and he obliged them. The liquid tasted like burned rubber, and then like rotten vegetation. The other men laughed. “That is awful,” he told them.
“Maybe,” the fat man said, “but it is Hungarian.”
The three of them stood from the table. They left a small pile of colorful bills, and exited with a few awkward salutations. The steam rose from his goulash, which he ate feverishly. From a straw basket he removed a slice of fresh bread, of házikenyér, the likes of which he had often believed he would never again taste. When the waiter passed, Harkályi caught his eye and asked for another serving of Unicum.
5.
The stew in his belly, he feared, would not keep him warm for any good duration, so he walked quickly. His true destination, the great Dohány synagogue, which stood in the opposite directi
on, would wait for him as it had done so patiently and without complaint for so many years; it was expecting him. He will deliver the stone he carried in his pocket, an offering that will signify, to him, the distance that existed between remembering and never forgetting. First, however, he must see the Danube or, more correctly, the Duna.
He wound his way along crowded streets made cavernous by tall residential buildings that emitted a singular blue light from a thousand windows. A whole nation lay asleep in a bath of commercial entertainment. In the absence of streetlamps, the glow filled the path before him for several paces, then plunged him again into a different kind of darkness. The hue of the entire street changed by degrees with every new televised scene, growing brighter and then darker again, and even darker and brighter yet. He carried himself, so he believed, directly toward the river.
The streets did not align themselves to a grid but rather to some circular logic of their own, and they certainly were not designed to accommodate this number of parked cars. The narrowness and curvature of the roads necessitated the haphazard distribution of automobiles, all of them small—Lada, Yugo, Fiat, Trabant—upon the sidewalks, and he was forced to either walk in the road, a dangerous proposition, surely, although the traffic appeared to have ceased for the night, or to maneuver his aging frame through an obstacle course of bumpers and side-view mirrors. The lawlessness was intolerable, yet he attempted to maintain a lively, brisk pace in an effort, amply rewarded thus far, to retain the warmth of the coffee house. It was a wonder that the entire city didn’t sink under its own vehicular weight. As a child he had spent considerable time underground, hiding from the Arrow Cross. He pictured the entire surface of the city giving way, crumbling and cascading down into the cellars and catacombs of Pest, where he once subsisted on the furtive scraps that friends of Kodály could, on occasion, deliver to him, often at the risk of their own well-being.
