Under Budapest

Ailsa Kay

• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780864926814
• eBook ISBN: 9780864927507
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Ailsa Kay lays out the literary equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle in Under Budapest, bringing into stark relief the triumphs, calamities, and desperation of two North American Hungarian families and those whose lives they've touched. There's Agnes and Tibor, mother and son, travelling to Hungary for reasons they keep to themselves, he to recover from a disastrous love affair, she to search for a sister gone missing during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. There's Janos, a self-styled player and petty thug, who schemes to make it rich in post-communist Hungary. And there's Gyula and Zsofi, caught up in a revolution that will change the face of Hungary forever. Their lives are all connected by a conflagration of events: The legacy of wartime violence, past allegiances, long-buried rivalries, and secrets from the past. Through riveting narratives that spring back and forth through time, Under Budapest captures the drama and ravages of the Hungarian Revolution and the eras that followed. A dark ode to memory, Kay's intimate spectacle demonstrates that actions have consequences, that the past cannot be shaken, that all events can carry the possibility of repercussion.

Gellert Hegy

Long before the revolution of October 1956, the rumours were that the Soviets were tunnelling. Their tunnels spread with the speed of rhizomes, under the surface of Budapest. The rumours spread the same way, sprouting and multiplying, their source untraceable.

When the revolutionaries stormed Communist Party Head­quarters in Koztarsasag Ter on October 30, they found half-cooked palacsinta—far more than would be required to feed the number of prisoners found in the building’s cellar prisons. Frantic, searchers fanned out into every dank hallway, looking for secret doors, knocking index knuckles on walls that looked solid, testing for hollow. There were so few prisoners in the building. Where were the hundreds who’d vanished? Someone had heard shouting from below. Someone else had heard a number: one hundred and forty prisoners. Where were they? They had no food, no water. Time was running out. General Bela Kiraly, the commander of the Revolutionary National Guard, gave the order to drill.

Three boring masters were ordered to the city from the Oroszlany coalmines. Drill! From the National Geophysics Institute came one cathode-ray oscilloscope, four Soviet-made geophones, one anode-battery with necessary cables. Drill! Twenty metres down and not far enough. Drill! Heavy machines, the same used to excavate the city’s extraordinarily deep subway tunnels, were put to revolutionary service, much of Budapest’s Sewage Company too, with their ropes, their pickaxes, their Soviet labourer muscle. Drill! Searchers spread into the sewers. They dug out the cellars in the houses surrounding the square. Hundreds of people gathered with shovels and pickaxes. They dug and they scraped and they listened, desperately, for the voices of the interred. The search ended early morning November 4 when Soviet tanks thundered into the city. The revolution was suppressed. The prisoners in the tunnels remained buried.

In 1993, the search began again. This time, a film crew hired the National Geophysical Institute to find the tunnels. Anomalies in the soil structure were found. An oil drill with a diamond bit was ordered. The drill hit something four metres below the surface, a hard substance that ate up the diamond. And another, and another. Three diamond bits were wasted on that impenetrable substance below the square.

It doesn’t matter that the tunnels were never proven. Everyone knows they exist. They must. It’s the only possible explanation.

1.

Tibor wakes to the battering rat-a-tat of a cement drill to realize he’s hot and unbearably itchy under a hotel comforter of prickling fibreglass. It’s 11:13 a.m. He throws off the comforter to find the crinkly burst plastic of the airplane snack that somehow landed in his bed when he did. Cracker crumbs in his chest hair. Hauling himself upright, he teeters to the window and yanks the curtain cord. Light pours in. Ah.

Across the Duna, the parliament gleams, white spiring the complete blue of sky. Budapest, finally: the salve his poor, love-damaged soul needs. Salvation. He’d been dreaming of this moment for months. Granted, they had been some of the worst months of his life. After the devastation of losing Rafaela, he retracted. The way he described it—to himself, that is; he’d never say so out loud—was that his soul had beat a retreat, had shrunk up and back inside itself like a penis, coldly plunged.

The reason he can’t stop thinking about what happened, he thinks, is that they didn’t have final words. He didn’t get to tell her that he loved her, that he’s sorry he never told her that he knew Daniel, that he didn’t intend to make life difficult for her, that he wishes things could have been different—that she’d had a normal child, that he hadn’t fallen for her, that they’d both been truthful from the beginning, that he’d never bumped into them like that in the liquor store. He’d never forget her face as, foundering, she put things together.

“Rafa, this is my old friend Rolly. Back in undergrad, we were inseparable.”

Rafaela extends her hand. “Hi. Nice to meet you.”

“And this is our daughter, Evie. Evie, say hi.”

Slobbering child opens her mouth and caws.

How did Daniel not see what was happening? His wife every shade of crimson and fury and his friend stiffly grinning.

He’d half expected her to call to yell at him, call him names, accuse him. And he’d considered calling her—to apologize, to explain, to confess his love. He is still every day in his mind composing the words that would salvage something from the disaster, but sometimes, there’s just no salvage. He lost her. It feels impossibly bad.

A bit self-consciously at first, he named this bad feeling grief. “Grief,” he said out loud. But even that potent word could do nothing to tame the writhing vermicular mass of loss and abandonment or fortify the queasy state of “being loser” that having lost implies.

Tibor wrestles his attention back to the spires, the Car­pathian blue sky. He’s here now. At home, it’s reading week. Here, it’s the day before the conference begins. He’s made it. He’d made the decision in January. A bit last minute. Peter, a friend of his, was putting together this conference and had first contacted him back in October, at the very centre of the maelstrom called Rafaela. When one of the participants dropped out, he emailed Tibor again, and for some reason, the pro­position struck Tibor as exactly the right cure. A conference. He’d always excelled at conferences. He likes the showmanship of it—the off-the-cuff opening, the studied pause, the sly aside—and his research, he likes to think, lends itself to performance. He would have his argument sewn up, solid, and he would dismantle any attempt at critique. A conference was exactly what he needed. And in Budapest. He hasn’t been here since his post-doc days eight years ago.

And now, the city awaits. He turns. The bedside clock radio glares: 11:15.

Which means his mother has been waiting for him in the lobby—showered and dressed—since ten.

His mother.

She’d ambushed him over a plate of turkey fillet in paprikas cream sauce.

“You what?” he gabbled, mouth full, fork hovering. “I mean, have you booked a hotel? A flight? You can’t just do these things last minute, you know.”

She spooned more sauce on his plate, beaming pinkly. “You’d be proud of your old mother; I even did a web booking.” She said web booking, not veb booking. Her w was perfectly Canadian and now, now of all times, she’d decided to go home. Tibor cursed the Internet and the amiable North York travel agent who apparently had no problem sending a seventy-eight-year-old woman on an arduous journey across the world to a potentially volatile post-communist state. “I never would have done it on my own, but since you were going. Well, I thought it might be my last chance.” She didn’t say, Before I die. She didn’t say, I am old and alone. But he heard it. He heard it and he wanted to cry.

Sure enough, in the hotel’s ground-floor, near-empty restaurant his mother sits by herself at a window seat, a ringed espresso cup in front of her, a heavy paperback balanced against the table’s edge. The awkward, upward tilt of the head keeps her glasses from sliding off her nose. It also makes her thin neck as vulnerable as a downy gosling’s. Pecking her on the cheek, he slides into the chair opposite. “You should have called. I was fast asleep.”

She closes her book. “I didn’t want to wake you. But the menu is so expensive here, Tibor, so I didn’t order lunch.”

“No problem. The Angelika’s just around the corner. Not cheap, by Hungarian standards, but good food, great atmosphere.”

“The young lady at the desk tells me there’s a palacsinta house just five minutes away. I would love a mazsolas-turos palacsinta.”

“I’m sure they have palacsinta at the Angelika.”

“She says this place is very good. And inexpensive. When I was a girl, I thought I could live only on palacsinta. Hortobagyi husos and mazsolas-turos palacsinta was all I wanted to eat.”

“Mom. I’m sure we can afford lunch at a decent restaurant.”

“Persze, Tibor, persze.” Persze. Such a harmless, conciliatory word, with multiple, micro-sonar nuances as yet untabulated. Of course, Tibor, of course. As she tucks her book into her bottomless handbag.

“It’s a great restaurant, Mom. You’ll love it.”

“Good. You know it’s been hours since that airplane snack.”

The Angelika doesn’t serve palacsinta and it doesn’t suit her. A renovated old convent, its floor is at least four feet below street level, and stained-glass windows look out onto pedestrian feet. High-ceilinged, white-walled, and pristine, with his mother here in front of him, it suddenly seems pretentious.

She orders a soup, the cheapest item on the menu. “Salty,” she concludes but finishes it. She’s so hungry, she’d eat grass right now. She asks for a chamomile tea. They’re sold out. She orders a cup of hot water instead, which earns her a stiffly polite nod.

“My aunt and uncle lived not far from here. After the war.”

“Is that right.” Eager to recover from his error, he tilts too far toward enthusiasm. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“It was only one small room. My uncle put their bed up on stilts to make room for a table.”

He says, “My friend Peter and his wife had exactly the same arran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Budapest Night
• What We Deserve
• Gellert Hegy
• Now or Never
• The Safe Room
• Brothers
• After Budapest
• Under
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Back Cover