Kossuth Square

by Adam LeBor

  Klauzal Square, and his apartment building on the corner of Dob Street, suddenly felt very welcoming. Here his only task was to close his eyes, stretch out his legs, breathe in the smell of the park, feel the warmth of the sun and the late-summer breeze on his face and enjoy a few moments of peace. A dreadlocked hipster in a pink T-shirt and ripped jean shorts swished by on an extra-long skateboard. Two teenage boys on BMX bicycles spun wheelies up and down the path. Vera, Eva neni’s niece who lived nearby, stood gossiping with two other young mothers while their toddlers played in the sandpit. A male tourist in his early twenties, tall and blonde, walked slowly down the side of the square, staring at the map on his telephone until he saw the entrance to the Kadar restaurant and stepped inside. The sound of children’s laughter drifted over from the park. For a moment Balthazar was back in the playground on Szabadsag Square the previous Sunday evening, watching Alex and Jozsi clamber over the wooden locomotives. The high point of the evening was taking the two boys for a burger at a nearby restaurant on Oktober 6 Street and the look of sheer wonder on Jozsi’s face as he bit into the food.

  Balthazar looked at the balcony of his fourth-floor home. The sight of his building always gave him a small surge of pleasure. Budapest was a city that well rewarded its residents and visitors, if they raised their eyes. Many of its apartment houses were urban works of art, decorated with carved figures, friezes and glistening tiles. His six-storey flat-fronted apartment building was an art deco period piece, recently declared a protected national monument. The central facade was decorated with modernist reliefs of workers and families, a different scene on each floor. Curved balconies stood on either side. Rezso Seress, the composer of ‘Gloomy Sunday’, the 1930s song immortalised by Billie Holiday, who had once lived here, was commemorated with a plaque by the front door.

  Klauzal Square and Dob Street were the very heart of the old Jewish quarter. During the Second World War the area and its surrounds had been walled off. Tens of thousands of people had been crammed into the ghetto’s narrow streets in the freezing winter of 1944–45. Eva neni had told him chilling stories of those weeks, when the Russians were advancing block by block and the frozen ground of the square was filled with bodies stacked like logs. Feral Arrow Cross militiamen had roamed wild, killing on a whim, rounding up the frightened, starving Jews before marching them away to be deported to forced labour, digging fortifications on the Austrian border, or to be shot into the Danube. Nowadays this part of Budapest was the liveliest part of town, known as the buli-negyed, or party quarter. The surrounding streets were crowded with rom-kerts, ruin pubs, in the courtyards of dilapidated apartment buildings, hipster eateries and artisan coffee shops. It was all a world away from the city in which he had grown up, where most restaurants were state-owned with a centrally planned menu serving dreary high-calorie fried food – if even that was available – and the most common refrain of the bored, surly wait staff was ‘Sajnos, nincs’ – sorry, there isn’t any – because they and the cook had sold off the ingredients on the sly to their friends and relatives.

  But even with dreadlocked skateboarders, Klauzal Square was still holding out against gentrification. The buildings around the square were an architectural jumble, mostly of three- or four-storey apartment houses, with the kind of old-fashioned shops that were rapidly vanishing in the more upmarket parts of the city: a proper butcher, where manual and office workers gathered at stand-up aluminium tables for a lunch of home-made sausages and bread, an electrician’s, a watch repairer’s, a covered market. The park was encircled by a tidy grey metal fence, and each side was lined with trees. Inside there was a playground, a basketball court and manicured gardens. A bank of Bubi-bikes, green municipal bicycles, stood on the corner, complete with a solar panel pointing skywards to charge the electronic booking system.

  For a second Balthazar’s nostrils twitched as he realised that the breeze was carrying the acrid smell of burned hemp. He looked across the playground to see two teenage boys passing a long joint back and forth between them. One of them caught his eye and quickly nudged his friend, who looked at Balthazar. The friend, Balthazar saw, was called Denes and was the son of a local politician. Balthazar and the boy watched each other for a few seconds. Balthazar could go over and arrest them both. In fact he was duty-bound to do so. And they both knew what would happen next. Denes’s father would be on the telephone to Sandor Takacs, asking for the case to be cancelled. The request would likely be granted, as Sandor banked a useful favour to an up-and-coming politician. And Balthazar would have wasted several hours on pointless paperwork. He smiled to himself for a moment. Except he now was a man on a special prime ministerial mission, which did not include dope-smoking teenagers. Still, he was a cop and had to take some kind of stand. He caught the boys’ eyes, shook his head slowly and mimed taking the joint and flicking it away with his thumb. The two boys conferred rapidly. Denes dropped the joint on the ground and squashed it with his foot. He raised a hand in greeting, which Balthazar acknowledged with a nod, and the boys quickly left. Balthazar looked across the street to see Csaba, the pot-bellied owner of the ABC grocery store, laughing about the brief episode.

  *

  A few minutes later Balthazar walked into Eva neni’s kitchen to see his neighbour deep in conversation with his mother, Marta. The two women rose to greet Balthazar as he entered. He bent down and kissed Eva neni on each cheek, then embraced his mother, breathing in her familiar smell of home cooking and lavender perfume.

  ‘Does he know you are here?’ asked Balthazar, his hand still entwined in his mother’s.

  Marta laughed, a deep, throaty sound. ‘Your father knows what’s best for him. And that’s enough.’

  Eva asked, ‘How was breakfast?’

  Balthazar frowned, puzzled for a moment. ‘Fine, thanks. Why are you asking?’

  Eva gave him a knowing look. ‘She’s got class, that girl. I always thought so. Dinner soon, I hope. Then who knows?’

  Balthazar laughed. ‘Who does?’ The neni-networks reached across the city, none more than Eva’s. And it was not very far from Klauzal Square to Mikszath Kalman Square. Eva was the sentinel of their corner of Klauzal Square and Dob Street and ferociously guarded her territory. She was barely five feet tall, but her survival instinct had got her through the Nazi invasion, liberation by the Soviets and decades of dictatorship. Nothing of import happened without her knowing and she had played a minor supporting role in the previous weekend’s events. On Friday Eva had accepted a delivery from Anastasia, an envelope containing a burner telephone that she used to contact Balthazar. Two days later Eva had brought up a plate piled high with her famous turos palacsintas – sweet-cheese pancakes with lemon zest – for Balthazar, Anastasia and Eniko, when Eniko had taken refuge in Balthazar’s flat.

  Entering Eva’s kitchen was like time travel back to the 1970s, when it had last been furnished. The cupboards were dark orange with circular brown handles. A wall-mounted electric boiler delivered hot water into a white enamel sink. The two women sat at a small, brown Formica-topped table that overlooked the corner of Klauzal Square, drinking coffee from white cups with red bands around them and a red star on each side. The room smelled of the freshly baked chocolate biscuits that sat on a plate between the two women. A Liszt piano concerto played softly from a transistor radio on a shelf next to framed pictures of Eva’s family – faded black-and-white shots of childhood siblings, parents and grandparents, and modern colour photographs of her only daughter and granddaughter, who lived in London.

  Marta looked her son up and down, her maternal instinct instantly awakened. Balthazar could see her thoughts playing across her face: What friend? Marta was in her mid-fifties – she had given birth to Balthazar, her eldest son, at the age of eighteen, an age considered late for her generation of Roma women. Notably pretty in her youth, with thick, dark-brown hair, a wide, full mouth and big, bright grey eyes, she was now heavyset; her hair, still long, was shot through with grey streaks, but she remained a han
dsome woman. She wore a long black skirt and a grey silk blouse with a silver pendant. Like Eva, Marta had no qualms about making it clear that it was more than time for Balthazar to settle down, marry again and produce more grandchildren. ‘Mondd, fiam. Egy chaisi? Ki az? Tell me, my son. A girl? Who is she?’ Marta walked over to the kitchen window, pulled the curtain aside, and peered out at Klauzal Square as though a potential bride was waiting to be noticed. ‘And where is she?’

  ‘So many questions. You should be a cop, Mum. And she is a colleague, nothing more,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been hearing stories about your teenage years,’ said Eva neni. ‘All the fights you got into, protecting your brother.’

  Marta smiled proudly, ‘Jozsef Street was a rough neighbourhood then. Tazi was a tough guy.’ She gripped his arm. ‘Still is. Look at that muscle. We Roma are like Jews. Family, first and last.’ Marta looked at Balthazar, holding his arm even tighter, her voice heavy with meaning. ‘Right, fiam? Nothing comes between us.’

  Nothing except a dead man in your brother’s brothel, him dressing migrants as Gypsies then running them across the border, not to mention the Kris telling you that you cannot step foot inside the place where you grew up, he almost said. Still, nobody ever claimed that the Roma drom, the Roma way, was an easy one. So instead he looked at the table, where three white, round plastic pots for transporting food were held together by a red wrap-around handle. He walked over and lifted the edge of one lid. ‘Nothing, Mum. Not even your csirke-paprikas.’

  Marta said, ‘I hope you are hungry.’

  ‘I am now.’ Chicken paprikas, cooked in a creamy, spicy sauce, served with home-made noodles, was his favourite dish. It smelled delicious. For a moment he was transported back to his childhood, sitting at the kitchen table with his father and siblings while his mother brought a steaming tureen to the table. Those days of eating together at Jozsef Street were gone, probably forever. But at least his mother was here with him now.

  ‘Good.’ Marta picked up the food containers, then turned to Eva neni, thanking her for the coffee and biscuits. She and Balthazar kissed Eva goodbye, then walked into the foyer towards the lift. One of Balthazar’s neighbours, a stooped and elderly man who had formerly taught at the Liszt Ferenc music academy, was waiting for the lift. Balthazar and his mother greeted him and the three of them rose upwards in silence, until they reached the fourth floor.

  *

  Balthazar had bought his flat five years ago for the equivalent of £30,000 soon after he and Sarah split up. District VII’s rebirth as the party quarter, its central location and the renovation of the building meant his home was now worth almost three times that. The flat had two bedrooms, one decent-sized, which he used, a balcony overlooking Klauzal Square and a smaller space, originally the maid’s accommodation, where Alex slept on the rare occasions that Sarah let him stay over. With a wife at his side, and a growing son, Balthazar had coped with his rupture from his father. But the double whammy of losing both his father and Sarah, and only seeing Alex for a few hours a week, had sent Balthazar into a depression. Unable to face long evenings alone in a silent, empty flat, he returned to District VIII, started to drink and frequent the bars of his youth. These were not the trendy ruin pubs around Klauzal Square, but smoky dives for hard-core drinkers, where cheap beer and rough wine washed down industrially distilled spirits, where the wrong word or even look was enough to trigger violence. It was Gaspar who had helped to save him from himself, pulling Balthazar off his bruised and bloodied opponent in a bar fight, after he lined up a punch that would have broken the man’s cheekbones. Gaspar had then paid every bar owner within a square mile to ban Balthazar. The most he was allowed was a coffee in the morning. Gaspar’s medicine, and a stern warning from Sandor Takacs, had worked. Nowadays he rarely drank.

  Part of Balthazar thought that his career choice had helped to drive Sarah away. Once the passion and excitement had worn off their relationship and they tried to build an everyday life together and raise a child, he realised how her supposed liberal thinking was really just another ideological straightjacket, as rigid in its way as the Communist system under which he had grown up. Their dinner-party talking points demanded set responses. Any deviation from the party line brought bemusement at best, insults at worst. Sarah and her friends were horrified that he had joined the police, instead of taking up the path that had been set out for him, of an academic career. Balthazar had tried to brush it off, to put on a brave face when he and Sarah split up. But the truth was that the fact that Sarah had left him for a woman was somehow worse than if his rival had been another man, an emotional haymaker that struck at the very core of his masculinity. For all his time at Central European University, his travels abroad and worldly sophistication, Balthazar was self-aware enough to know that part of him was still a traditional Roma male. He knew how some in his community looked at him, the scandalised whispers about the Roma cop who could not keep his gadje wife, who now found her satisfaction with a woman.

  Marta shook her head when she looked around the lounge and the bedroom. The coffee table in the lounge was covered with newspapers, news magazines and an empty pizza box. Three half-finished mugs of coffee stood next to an empty bottle of beer and a crisp packet. She walked across to the French windows and opened them onto the small balcony, then bustled around, tidying up. ‘Tazikam, it’s not good for you to be alone. You need a woman. Forget these modern girls, journalists and professors. They are not for you. Gypsies and gadje,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘it never works. Leave it to me. I’ll find you someone. Someone to look after you.’

  Balthazar smiled, said nothing in reply, a part of him – surprisingly large – wondering if maybe his mother was right. What was he doing here, far from his family, eating alone every night? Perhaps it was time to shut down his one-man mission to straddle two worlds and return to the one where he could be himself. If and when he ever resigned from the police the Kris would immediately rescind its judgement. He could go home, for good. And who wanted more than that?

  He glanced around the room as his mother bustled back and forth. The flat looked the same as the day he moved in, albeit more run-down. The walls, once white, had faded further. The narrow parquet slats had long lost their shine. Some had worn loose over the years and clattered when walked over. The dark, heavy sofa and armchair pre-dated the Second World War. The 1980s kitchen was only slightly more modern than Eva neni’s. Once the raw pain of his split with Sarah wore off there had been a couple of brief flings, but it had taken him a long time to let another woman into his life. He had neither the drive nor interest to renovate the flat. Eventually his depression had lifted, and after Eniko had virtually moved in he began to think seriously about sharing his life with a woman again. They had talked about redecorating, even bought some home magazines to look at designs and colour schemes. But then Eniko too had left. Balthazar’s brief flurry of interest in interior design had vanished in her wake. The main addition was that one wall of the lounge now had fitted bookshelves, which were crowded with academic tomes on Roma life and society, and death in the Poraymus, classics of Hungarian literature, a handful of airport thrillers, and several reference works about forensics and modern police practice and procedure. A handful of photographs had been framed: Alex as a young boy, on a swing in a park in District VIII; Balthazar, his parents and siblings at his high school graduation; another with his mother when he graduated from university. In the centre was a silver-framed photograph of a pretty young Gypsy woman, with long, raven hair and a heart-shaped face. She wore a plain black blouse, a black-and-silver shawl and silver earrings with black gemstones.

  He glanced at the photograph then picked up the pizza boxes. ‘Thanks, Anyu but there’s no need. I’m taking a break for a moment. Then I’ll find someone myself.’

  Marta took a step towards him, her grey eyes locked on his. ‘Do that.’ Message delivered, she walked over to the bookshelf and picked up the silver-framed photograph. ‘I remember when th
is was taken.’ Her voice turned sombre. ‘The day of her concert. How beautiful she was. Is this new?’

  Balthazar nodded. ‘Yes. I had a small photograph, then I had it enlarged and framed. I don’t know why, but lately she’s been on my mind.’ Even in Marta’s hands, Virag’s eyes seemed to follow him around the room. Perhaps if he had trusted his instincts, had insisted on going with her that evening, she might still be alive.

  Marta put the picture back down. She wiped her eyes then was silent for several seconds, as though coming to a decision. ‘Mine too. Go,’ she said, pointing at the bathroom, ‘have a shower, I’ll tidy up, make your lunch.’

  Marta bustled around in the kitchen until ten minutes later when Balthazar emerged from his bedroom in a clean white T-shirt and loose summer trousers. The flat had filled with the smell of the chicken paprikas and he realised how hungry he was. He sat in the kitchen at the small table by the window with his mother, suddenly aware of how much he missed his parents and simply having company while he ate. The meal was delicious, the tender chicken falling off the bone in a thick, creamy sauce flecked with paprika, and his mother’s home-made noodles rich with egg.