When I took the turnoff for Eger, a dark green Toyota Camry pulled off at the same time, and pretty much stayed with me right into the city. It made me nervous, thinking as I was of Mihaly Kovacs standing at the hotel, but the car stayed far enough back that I had no chance to see the driver. I decided I was imagining things, and kept going.
I was in Eger by midafternoon. It was autumn, and already the sun was fairly low in the sky. I wasn't too keen on wandering around caves in the dark, and it was pretty clear to me that I wasn't going to get all my exploring done and get back to Budapest in one day, so I found myself a room at the Flora, a hotel that boasted a spa and hot springs, and spent what was left of the day exploring Eger. It's an attractive town, baroque in style, all pinks, peaches, and yellows, topped by red tile roofs, particularly pretty in the late afternoon sun. There's a handsome brilliant yellow cathedral, Italian in style, a castle, or what's left of one, and even a Turkish minaret. And there was wine to be drunk in the many cafes, grown in the vineyards in the rather charmingly named Szepasszony-volgy, the Valley of Beautiful Women.
While being there alone without the Divas, and doing all the tourist kinds of activities, gave my afternoon the air of holiday, it wasn't. All the while I kept checking over m shoulder, but neither Kovacs nor the green Camry were t be seen.
I THOUGHT THAT after all that driving, a couple hours sightseeing on foot, and some really lovely wine, I'd sleep that night. For days, if not weeks, I'd been telling myself I'd sleep if I got tired enough, but I had long since passed that point, and still I was wandering around most nights like some restless wraith. On this particular occasion, every time I dozed off I dreamed of Anna, holding the Magyar Venus, crying and pointing. This time she was pointing toward a rather dark and menacing cave.
IT WAS EARLY morning when I packed up and left the hotel. Steam was rising from the warm pools outside, where already people of various shapes and sizes were taking the waters. Two men were playing chess at a table in the pool. I supposed I might benefit from a spa treatment or two, but I didn't have time.
With the help of directions from the concierge, who spoke excellent English, I headed into the Biikks to find a barlang, a cave. I knew I wasn't going to find Piper's cave. As guidebooks to the area made clear, there were hundreds of these barlangs in Northern Hungary stretching right into Slovakia, and it was ridiculous to think that I'd just strap on my walking shoes, head into the Biikks, and happen upon the right cave.
What I wanted to do was essentially what I'd been doing all along, which was to test Piper's narrative to see if the descriptions of the surroundings remained credible once outside Budapest. I was still looking for something, the whatever it was that was bothering me, but so far, no go. On the other hand, if the diaries were consistent that would lend some weight, if not assurance, to the story of the discovery of the Venus.
And indeed, the description of the countryside rang true. I took a road that wound first through many vineyards, this being the part of the country from which the famous Egri bikaver wines come, but which then started to climb higher through steep turns right into the hills. The beech forests interspersed with dark evergreens matched the diaries' description perfectly, as did the alpine meadows, grass gleaming with the previous night's rain, and the tiny, brilliant green lakes. The leaves of the trees were a gorgeous yellow in the autumn sun. As the road climbed higher, I began to see the limestone outcroppings, and then the cliffs that Piper had written about, where the caves of the region were to be found.
I'd put about thirty kilometers on the odometer, when I saw what I was looking for, a cave entrance, high up over the road, but quite visible from it. I trained the binoculars on it, and on the ground leading up to it, and decided I'd give it a go. The Hungarians might call these mountains. Where I come from they'd be called hills, and climbing them didn't seem insurmountable by any means, a hike up a reasonably gentle slope.
I found a place to pull off and park as close to where I knew the cave to be as I could, although from directly below it couldn't be seen. There were trail markers, however, and a rather overgrown but still distinguishable path heading upwards. I decided to follow the trail as long as it kept going up, on the assumption it would probably lead to the bottom of the rocky ridge in which the cave was situated. I hauled out my walking shoes, and sitting sideways in the driver's seat, with the door open, put them on. As I did so, a dark green Camry passed me. I didn't look up in time to see who was in it, but it sent an unpleasant shiver up my spine. I watched as it took the turn ahead, lost sight of it in the trees, but caught a glimpse of it again farther along the road at the next turn. There too it kept going. In fact, it didn't even slow down. I told myself that there was more than one green Camry on the road, and even at that I couldn't say the driver of any one of them was looking out for me.
As I'd predicted, the climbing was not particularly difficult, none of it of the fingernail-gripping-stone variety, simply a walk up a reasonably steep hillside through a forest of beech. I stopped to catch my breath after climbing over a large fallen tree that blocked the path, enjoying the exercise and fresh air—until I heard what I thought was the crack of a branch behind me. I turned and looked back down the trail, saw nothing, but realized just how silent the woods suddenly were. There wasn't a chirp from any bird, nor the sound of any cars on the road.
Stuffing down incipient panic, I kept climbing until I reached what I thought was the bottom of the rocky ridge high over the road, only to find it wasn't. I stopped and again heard what I thought could be an animal in the woods below me and to the right. The other sound had been below and to the left, which either meant that I was imagining things or there were small animals about, or, and this was my least-favorite option, there were three of us in the woods. The cave, which from the road had been quite visible, was from my current position, nowhere to be seen. I kept climbing steadily upward—it was higher than I'd thought—until at last I saw the rock face, at which point I left the path, now almost extinct anyway, and took the last few steep steps to the rock. It was relatively smooth, and there was no way I was going to go straight up from there. Again I heard a sound in the woods behind me and lower down. Perhaps I should have made a dash for the road, but I would have run into whoever it was down there, and it just didn't seem like the best idea in the world. I couldn't go up, and I didn't want to go down, so there was only one other option, which was to edge along the rock face—there was only one direction where this was possible—and hope to find a hiding place. The rock was damp and clammy, the smell of mold in my nose as I edged my way along. The footing was slippery, precariously so, but I hung on.