But before I could figure out how to phrase it, or even if it was worth phrasing, Mihály remembered something. “Did you ever hear about the sailor who tried to come back?”
“She never mentioned him,” I said.
“Her,” he said, guiding me to a glass case mounted on the wall behind which were large pieces of paper that appeared blank. Mihály told me to look closely at them, and I did, noticing how worn the paper was, as if it had been rubbed over and over with a wetted fingertip until there were only the faintest of lines, traces of red, blue, green. “She thought it was just a question of erasing the maps,” he said, “and she’d find herself once more in that place from which she’d started out. I mean when she’d started,” he corrected himself, “before she’d discovered anything of the world.” He came close to the glass to look at it with me. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
“It is,” I replied. And it was, like some transcript of dreams, written days later, when all you remember is the faintest of traces, a world already gone before it registered. But there was no surprise there, looking at it, only gratitude for what Judit had given me and what a woman like her, trapped in that life, would never be allowed—that hopefulness her sailors felt in their moment of escape, when home was still everywhere, glimmering out there, and where every mistake, every wayward decision, was for a moment erased.
The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived
ÍBOR KÁLMÁN. Tíbor Kálmán’s villa.” That’s what Györgyi told Zoltán the night they went AWOL from the camp, the two of them huddled in the barracks amidst the other conscripts, boys like them, but asleep, some as young as sixteen, called on in the last hours of the war in a futile effort to salvage a regime already fallen, a country and people already defeated. “We need to get to Mátyásföld,” Györgyi said, “that’s where the villa is. Tíbor Kálmán will give us papers.” But Györgyi didn’t make it far, only to the end of the barracks, to the loose board and through the fence, frantically trying to keep up with Zoltán, who always seemed to run faster, to climb better, to see in the dark. Zoltán was already waiting on the other side of the ditch, hidden in the thicket, when the guard shouted, when they heard the first crack of bullets being fired, Györgyi screaming where he’d fallen, “My leg! I’ve been shot! Zoli, help me,” and Zoltán looked back at his friend for a second, calculating the odds of getting to him in time, the two of them managing to elude the guards, limping along at whatever speed Györgyi’s leg would allow. They’d be caught, charged with desertion, executed—both of them. Then Zoltán turned in the direction he was headed, Györgyi’s cries fading in the distance.
It was the end of December 1944, and that night, running from the makeshift encampment and its marshalling yard, running and running long after the military police had given up, not wanting to risk their own lives by following him east, Zoltán realized it was hopeless, there was a wall of refugees coming at him, and behind it, the Russian guns, already so loud he felt as if they were sounding beside his ears. Budapest was streaming with people fleeing from the suburbs—Rákospalota, Pestszentlőrinc, Soroksár, Mátyásföld—because the Red Army had not only arrived at these places already and taken control, but was advancing on Budapest itself.
So Zoltán became part of the human tide flowing from one death trap to another during the siege, and the things he’d seen would live on, unspoken, beneath everything he was to think and say from that point forward. Civilians used as human shields by the Red Army. Nazis exploding bridges over the Danube while there were still families and soldiers streaming across. Men and women forced to carry ammunition across the frozen river to German soldiers stationed on Margit Island while Soviet bullets and shells and bombs rained around them. He saw child soldiers holding off two dozen Russians by running up and down the stairs of a devastated building, shooting from every window, making them think there were a dozen soldiers trapped inside. Young boys crashing in gliders while attempting to fly in supplies for the fascist armies of Hitler and Szálasi, the fields littered with broken fuselages and wings and pilots contorted in positions that seemed to Zoltán the war’s alphabet—untranslatable into human terms. There was a broken gas main near Vérmező that for days shot flame through every crack and hole in the asphalt—blue, orange, yellow—dancing along the road as if fire alone were capable of celebrating what had become of Budapest.
He’d seen exhausted doctors trying to save patients from a burning hospital, carrying them into the snow only to realize they had nothing—not a blanket, a sheet, even a shirt—to keep them from freezing. He’d come across the most beautiful girl, eighteen or nineteen, in one of the ruined homes filled with those too wounded to go on, staring up, whispering from the mass of bodies, injured, starving, gripped by typhus, and as he leaned in to hear what she wanted to say—“Shoot me, please shoot me”—he noticed that both her legs had been torn away.
All that time Zoltán had been tormented by the idea of Tíbor Kálmán’s villa—it was like the place was imagining him rather than the other way around—it sometimes appeared in place of what he was running from, and Zoltán had to stop himself from leaping into a burning apartment, a metro tunnel, or a garden under shelling, thinking, this is it, finally, I’ve made it.
After a while, Zoltán began to feel protected by the villa, as if the new life it promised was his true life, and the one he was living now only an alias, false, no one real inside it, and therefore anything that happened was not really happening to him. This is what helped Zoltán survive when he was press-ganged, along with a number of other boys and young men fleeing west, into the Vannay Battalion, and ended up doing the very thing he’d hoped to avoid: fighting for the Nazis. He would have liked to remember when it happened, but there were no dates then, the end of December, the beginning of January, sometime during those hundred days of a siege that never did end for him, hauled out of the cellar where he was hiding by Vannay’s men, him and the rest, given a gun and told what the Russians looked like, and from there the black minutes, schoolboy comrades falling around him, Vannay making radio announcements to the Soviets that they would take no prisoners, and the Soviets responding to this as Vannay had hoped, likewise killing every one of them they captured, which Vannay was only too pleased to tell Zoltán and the others, knowing it would make them fight with that much more desperation. Then the breakout attempt of February through Russian lines, German and Hungarian soldiers cut down in the streets as they tried to escape the gutted capital to make it to the forests and then west to where the rest of Hitler’s armies were stationed, running headlong into rockets, tank fire, snipers stationed in buildings along the routes the Soviets knew they would take, drowning in sewers where the water level rose with each body that climbed down the ladder until it was up to their noses, pitch-black, screaming panic. So few of them made it. Three percent, the historians would say. The rest of the soldiers, the thousands, were killed along Széna Square and Lövőház Street and Széll Kálmán Square, piled into doorways, ground up by tanks, swearing, pleading, sobbing, unable to fire off even the last bullet they’d saved for themselves.
But Zoltán was not there. He’d gone over to the other side by then, turning on the boys he was fighting with, aged sixteen and seventeen, shooting them dead as they stared at him dumbstruck, and then saw, over his shoulder, the approaching Russians. He thought he saw a last glimmer of envy in the boys’ eyes, regret at not having thought of it first, before