“Had to wait forever. But Daniela came along. Wasn’t so bad. Where were you? I thought you were sick too.”
“I had to work.” My cigarette was burned down, so I carried it to the kitchen, dropping ash along the way. Agnes changed the radio station.
“Daniela told me about this,” she said by way of explanation.
So we sat together on the sofa and listened to the Americans. It was a day of injustice, they said. Although sporadic fighting continued in some areas of the city, Budapest was now clearly lost. Imre Nagy was hiding in the Yugoslav embassy. I put my arm around Agnes, and she leaned into me. Pavel was quiet in her lap. When the news began to repeat itself, I turned it off.
Around six, as I was cooking eggs for dinner, Magda showed up. She seemed disheveled somehow, as if she’d put her clothes on backward. But they looked fine. She sat at the kitchen table and watched me with surprise. I didn’t think it was because I was cooking.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked finally.
“What?”
“Yesterday. The demonstration. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
I stared back at her. “How did you know?”
“Word gets around.”
I wondered if Stefan had shed tears when he’d told her the story. I set a plate in front of her. “You weren’t in a listening mood.”
After dinner, we put on the Americans again, sitting together like a proper family, until the screech of jamming overcame it. As I turned it back to music, I told Agnes that, whether or not everyone else listened to this station, it was still against the law. It should not be discussed outside the family. “The volume should remain low,” I said. “And afterward, always change the station. You understand?”
“I knew all this before, Daddy.”
“Now it’s more important than before.”
She nodded, and so did Magda.
We put Agnes to bed, then drank wine in the living room. We didn’t talk, but for the first time in weeks the silence wasn’t strained. I didn’t know why. I was too exhausted to dwell on her and Stefan or even the mistakes I’d made these last two days. I was blank. I was disconnected from everything around me, even all that we had learned from the radio. It was disturbingly like the blankness I acquired on the battlefield, where all tender emotions are kept at arm’s length, so they will not harm you.
But then she smiled and nodded at the bedroom door. “You want to sleep in a real bed tonight?”
I did.
We undressed and got beneath the sheets in the dark. At first we did not touch, then she slid against me, and I could feel that she had not worn her nightdress. She buried her face in my chest in a way that made the blood rush into my head. It had been so long since she’d held me like that, and I stroked her bare, warm ribs with the tips of my fingers. But it was no use. After the initial flush of excitement, my body wouldn’t stay up for it. Everything receded to arm’s length. I kissed her ear and let her go. She rolled away from me, her cold heels just touching my shins, and began to cry.
15
The students had been right. A general strike can arise spontaneously out of the malaise of discontent triggered by a single act, and when this happens it seems that the entire population has found its voice at last, one that rises above all the little voices in The Spark. But the students were wrong to think a strike can last without organization. No leaders came from the Sixth of November Strike. No Imre Nagy. Even Kozak the Engineer stayed quiet. So over the days that followed, the streets became fuller, the shop counters staffed, the shutters open. Because despite our proud talk at parties and clandestine meetings, all any of us wanted was some food on the table and a little security. When on the twelfth The Spark proclaimed that the imperialist-financed counterrevolutionaries in Budapest had finally been crushed completely, we were all already back to work.
Emil came back first, on Thursday the eighth. We took his Russian Zorki camera over the Georgian Bridge and parked in the lot on the edge of the canals and walked the rest of the way.
The lumpenproletariat of the Canal District was still on strike. We crossed arched stone bridges over stagnant water and heard our footsteps through the ancient alleys. A few old women in black scurried behind their doors.
Augustus II Square was in the flooded Deeps, the center of the canals. It had always been the most crumbling, waterlogged area of the district, and recent fires had turned a lot of upper floors into charred shells. We paused at the summit of a bridge and tried to figure out how to reach the dry curb. My leap was just short, and I landed shin deep in icy water. Emil, lighter and more agile, arrived unscathed. One more long alley, my shoes squeaking, and we were finally there.
Two centuries back, it had been a tanners’ square, and there was still an eroded wooden sign depicting the shape of a cow’s flesh, removed and flattened. Below it, a man’s black shoe floated in the water. But number three was an old, aristocratic residence. Its front door was missing, and beside its frame, the anonymous caller had been kind enough to mark it with a white chalk x.
In the entryway, the temperature dropped and a decomposed rug slopped under my feet. Emil cursed as he slipped and almost dropped the camera. I lit a match to see better. The cracked walls were blackened by moss. Light came from a doorway up ahead. I blew out the flame.
The smell hit us first. I’d smelled charred flesh during the war inside burned farmhouses. Its pungency is different than any other burned substance, but in a way I still can’t describe with words. The room was vast and circular, its edge raised like a walkway, everything lit by the shattered glass roof above. In the corner was the stone lip of a well, probably dug so the servants could avoid mixing with the tanners in the street. The lower level of the room was now a circular pool coated with pieces of shattered glass and fragments of colored stone that had once been part of a mosaic. A bacchanal scene of nymphs and satyrs with chalices of wine and grapes. All that was left was a hoof here, a breast there, and pieces of purple grapes scattered through the water. A Roman scene-here, in the middle of the Carpathian basin.
Emil pointed to a black mound curled up on the dry edge, facing the wall. The stone floor beneath it had been discolored by heat. That indescribable smell filled me as we approached, and I had to focus to quell my stomach.
Emil snapped a picture.
I crouched and examined as best I could without touching it. Gender unknown. Folded up fetally, arms together, black hands pressed tight as if praying. That, at least, made some kind of sense. A final prayer. Then I noticed the lump around the wrists. “Tied up,” I said, and Emil took another photo. There was more charred rope around the ankles.
I didn’t know if the body had been alive or dead when it was burned, but it seemed to mean something that the body was only two feet from the ledge that dropped off into water, and salvation.
Emil circled the room, shooting and looking for clues. I started to do the same, but I wasn’t seeing anything clearly. “Emil.”
He heard the tone in my voice. “Go on. I’ll be out in a minute.”
I squatted on the steps outside. The chill froze my wet feet, but I was more worried about my stomach. I stared at that lone shoe beneath the tanner’s sign and tried to steady myself, the fall light making everything too crisp and too gray. The nausea was more than it should have been; it was proving how weak I really was.
A flaming body, bound and twisting, so close to the water. One roll, that’s all it would have taken. The tragedy was magnified. Then, inexplicably, I remembered earlier that morning, waking up next to Magda for the first time in months. That first rush of joy was tempered as she rolled over, smiling, and said, I’m going to call in sick again. She didn’t remember at the moment of waking that she’d told me she had worked her full shift.
I walked through the water and retrieved the shoe. Black, unadorned leather, not very worn, right foot. If I needed it in the future, I wouldn’t want to come back to search for it.
