Free Tiger Lillie by Lisa Samson

line of faith-filled womanhood and I am thankful. Thankful for my faith. Thankful to be a woman.
    I mean, who wants to eventually grow ear hair? Not exactly something to look forward to.
    “We lived this way for years. Educated by the state. Taught to be good little communists. Doled out hard little hunks of black bread for sustenance. Always feeling cold or hot, never in between. Wearing clothes in conditions we almost never see here in America.” She raises her index finger. “But we could not complain about the government or even our living conditions.”
    “Why, Aunt Kathy?” one of my cousin’s children, a boy named Brandon, asks. I think, at five, Brandon is actually listening for the first time. Her words begin to color him in.
    “Again, my loves, one never knew who was an ÁVH informant. One never knew who would go running to the secret police, very powerful by this time, in search of gathering some brownie points.”
    I doubt if they called them brownie points in Hungary. But she’s employed that phrase every year, and I always forget to ask her where she learned it.
    “Mama took care of Babi and Luca during the day and worked all night. I was with them while we slept. Finally, in 1956, news of a revolution against the Soviets erupted! I was twelve by this time and Babi and Luca were six. The tale of the uprising in Budapest flooded the country like a sweeping wave, as though the stagnant ocean suddenly filled with spring water and washed away the suffocating despair that had encrusted our lives for years.”
    No wonder Daddy loves this woman. I mean, she’s so naturally lyrical.
    “Do you remember, Babi?” Luca turns to her twin, who nods in reply, her eyes slick with tears.
    Mom nods at them. “We heard our national anthem ‘ Himnusz ’ afresh that October. ‘God bless Hungarians with good will and plenty.’ It meant more than ever before, even the times I watched those tight-lipped atheist communists endure it during the dark years.”
    Go, Mom. I like it when she editorializes. And she editorializes because she can now.
    “We heard about the way our countrymen had seized the Russian tanks and had fired at the ÁVH. We heard about the horror in the square in Budapest, how the ÁVH had mowed down people like they were nothing more than a flock of lambs.”
    My mother tells of the first shot fired into the square. How an ÁVH guard had triggered one stray bullet into the crowd. How that stray bullet, that single, deadly shot had pierced the body of an infant in her mother’s arms. How the force had thrown the mother backward. How she had walked up to a Russian tank, held aloft her lifeless baby, and screamed. “You’ve killed my child! Kill me, too!”
    “And then bullets rained in a brutal mist upon the masses gathered upon a pavement going crimson. And we fought.
    “It was very far away from our little Sopron, but we heard about it in time to feel our hearts swell, to remember, even though I had been but a small child when the Soviets came, what our beloved Hungary had been. We had enough time to relight our lamps of hope, to dream again of a place where we would live in dignity and pride and freedom as true Hungarians.”
    Luca squelches a sob. Babi lays a hand between her shoulders.
    “And”—my mother focuses on each one gathered there amid the bamboo torches, looking each one in the eyes—“we had enough time to feel as though our hearts would break beneath the crushing weight of a disappointment you cannot, here in freedom, imagine, when we heard the news at the beginning of November that the revolutionary forces were squelched. That great Russian tanks came rolling in. That aid was sought from the West. That no help came. That we had been left alone, David against an army of Goliaths.”
    The Red Army was endless. For every man killed, another one was shoved in line. And another and another. When the Berlin Wall fell, I must say, I was more relieved than anybody I knew outside of