Free Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy

Judit said to me one day. She was drinking even more heavily then, our hours together more and more quiet as if her interest in me was steadily draining away, the two of us leaning into the pillows, uncorking another bottle. Even her stories of sailors grew shorter and shorter, reduced to single sentences spoken at the very end of the night, when I was almost asleep, not sure if she was speaking or it was a dream. “You could take her, and I could write a letter that would let the two of you travel, and then I could work out the legal things afterwards.” Judit tilted her head to one side. “But I would need the money.”
    â€œHow much?” I asked. She shrugged as if she didn’t know. “Twenty-five thousand dollars? That would be enough, wouldn’t it?” I waited. “Thirty thousand?” Judit nodded, and I wrote her a cheque right there, the paper curling on itself like a wave. She cashed it the next morning while I went back to my hotel and, after sitting in front of the phone for what seemed hours, left a message for Anna and Míklós, telling them I was coming home, that Janka was her name.
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    But that’s not how it worked out. Janka was standing beside her mother at the airport, crying, holding Judit’s hand, the tiny flower-printed suitcase I’d bought for her sitting on the ground beside them. We were ten or fifteen minutes from boarding, and I nodded at Judit over Janka’s head, saying I’d leave them alone for a moment to say goodbye. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, leaning down to stroke Janka’s hair,pointing at the sign for the men’s room, and then, once I was out of sight, I stood there, back against the tiled wall trying to regulate my breathing, glancing out into the crowd to see if they’d followed. Then I was gone, keeping the passengers between me and Judit, moving fast through security, down along ramps and onto the plane, looking over my shoulder every few steps to make sure Janka wasn’t there, still crying, the little suitcase banging against her legs as she tried to catch up to me. Looking out the airplane window I thought I could see Janka in the terminal, back at the boarding gate, pressed against the glass wondering where I was, what happened to our plane, how long it would take before I came back, or whether her mother was still there on the other side of security or gone home, goodbye forever, the airport suddenly large and exitless and all around her.
    I watched and watched for that little girl standing by the window, craning my neck as the plane reversed, moved onto the runway, took off. I sat there wishing I could go back until we were well over the Arctic, halfway to Canada, and I opened the letter Judit had written—permitting me to take Janka—and turned it this way and that. It was completely blank.
    She’d known I would never take her. She’d known I’d waffle in the last minute, known it from that first night standing over the Danube, stringing me along until she got every last cent. She knew, too, that what I was really paying for was not Janka but my freedom, not just from her and Janka, but from everything that had brought me there, to Budapest, in the first place. That blank letter, which would have stopped me dead at the border, which would have gotten me arrestedif I’d tried to take Janka with me, was what I’d really been after all along.
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    It turns out there is a Museum of Failed Escapes, and that it is, as Judit said, in the ninth district. I went there once, many years after that day on the plane with the blank letter. It had been a private collection during the eighties, nineties, and early oughts, opening to the public in 2007, after its owner, András Fabiani, died and bequeathed the property to the city. During the time it was private, entry had been limited to a tiny circle of collectors, politicians, VIPs (and, I supposed, certain exotic