Free Under Budapest by Ailsa Kay

Tibor always has something to say about monuments. The cab leaves the cemetery, swerving through hard, wet traffic. When she tires of her son’s monologue, she can listen to the taxi’s two-way, a woman’s voice crackling with addresses: “Visegradi utca huszonkilenc a tizenharmadikban, ötödik kerület Oktober 6 utca tizennégy, Liliom utca negyvenegy a kilencedik kerületben.” The guard who helped them said there were other exits. That’s what Dorottya told her. An exit somewhere in the city park, near the Szechenyi bath. And one on Gellert, a natural chasm in the rock, another somewhere up on Rozsadomb. Dorottya didn’t have maps for those.
    Windshield wipers shush. Tires kiss the pavement. Agnes listens to the scrolling addresses and the rain as her son patters on.
    2.
    â€œEgesegedre.” Peter raises his glass. “What took you so long?”
    â€œGood fucking question.”
    He’d left his mother in her hotel room with a blanket over her knees and a bowl of soup ordered from the restaurant on her table. She was fine. She’d be fine. This is his night. Eight years since Tibor had last been here, on a research grant. At the time, Peter was doing his Ph.D. at the Central European University and working part-time at the Open Society Archives associated with the university. Now, Peter’s still a teenager in a faded green concert T-shirt, jeans that seem rarely washed. And yet he’s married and he’s got a five-year-old boy. “You still in that one-room place near the university?”
    â€œNo. Moved to a panel apartment out in the Eleventh District.”
    Tibor winces.
    â€œIt’s not so bad. More space than downtown. But what about you? What happened to that woman you told me about, with the name?”
    â€œRafaela.”
    â€œRafaellaaaa.”
    â€œTragi-comedy. She found out I was her husband’s best friend. The end.”
    Peter slams the table with his beer and guffaws. It is kind of funny, when you think about it. Why doesn’t he have friends like Peter in Toronto?
    Peter is fun. He knows all the places to go. He leads Tibor down deserted black streets that Tibor will never remember, and doesn’t try to, into clubs that aren’t really clubs but condemned apartment houses turned into parties. Courtyards become tented lounges. Apartments are smashed open, graffitied, paint slopped on parquet floors. In one, a bathroom has been made up to be its own museum exhibit, glass-fronted, decorated with pages from communist-era textbooks. Tibor feels counterculture and cool. In another, the woman they call the veces neni (the washroom auntie) has a sign in twenty-six languages. She says hello, and here’s your toilet paper, and two hundred forints please, in twenty-six languages . Her Russian is sullen. Her English perfect. Her Japanese about as good as Tibor’s.
    â€œStop.” Peter puts his hand in front of Tibor’s camera. “You can’t do that.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause you look like a tourist.”
    â€œSo?”
    Tibor takes a picture of the veces neni and of Peter, frowning, of a girl leaning over a balcony, smoking. The smoke hangs so heavy in the air, it looks like someone’s barbecuing. Of a room full of laughing faces. Of feet on coffee tables. Of hands around steaming mugs of tea. A bartender’s haircut. A video screen showing a bikinied lady with a huge, bouncing balance ball.
    Peter is the best friend ever. He invited him to this con­ference that would save Tibor’s soul, and now he’s reminding him how great life can be in a decaying post-communist, economically bereft, precariously employed nation. “My soul is Hungarian,” Tibor declares over waves of reggae.
    â€œYour soul’s a stupid loser?”
    â€œPrecisely.”
    â€œAnd that’s why you chose to specialize in our irrelevant history?”
    â€œExactly. Because Hungary is