All at once, the police slapped their clubs against their hands. Ferenc turned around. The radio slid from his hands and crashed to the ground. One of the police officers went up next to Ferenc, who still hadn’t moved, and kicked his radio into the river.
Dora felt her head swing back violently as a surge of pain jolted up her neck. Her scalp was burning. Someone was pulling her hair. They yanked her to the ground. Another surge of pain erupted. Something was hitting her. It was hitting her hard. The pain burst on her back and then sprung onto her shoulder. It clawed into the back of her thighs. Then there was nothing.
Dora saw a dark orb hang above her. It looked peaceful, like she could curl up in its silky body. She reached out to touch it, only to feel the course fibers of something thick and unruly.
“Why are you touching my hair, Dora?” Marta breathed. “It doesn’t matter, just get up! Get up!”
Marta yanked at the bottom of Dora’s shirt, trying to lift her up however possible. The stitches on Dora’s shirt ripped open, but Marta refused to let go. Before she could understand anything more, Dora heard a violent pitter-patter, a panicked thumping, that grew quicker and louder until it sounded like thunder claps in her ears. She realized it was the sound of her boots smacking against the cobblestone. They were running. Dora heard an inconsistent series of screams in the distance. The lights beaming from the apartments above them flickered off.
“Dora!” Marta whispered. “Dora, you need to run faster. I’m serious.”
Dora considered the strangeness of Marta’s right eye. It was smaller than her left and seemed to do all the communicating for Marta. Dora’s concerted effort to export her consciousness from the situation was interrupted by the sound of boots clanking. Two policemen ran past them with clubs drawn.
“Okay,” Dora rapidly nodded. “Okay. Okay, let’s move.”
Despite her injured back and legs, now exposed and bleeding, Dora ran. She couldn’t string together logical thoughts, but her body somehow matched Marta’s pace, locking into the rhythm of their escape.
ESZTER TURJÁN
October 23, 1956—Late Afternoon
I WOKE UP to a subtle draft gliding over my nose. I opened my eyes to Laszlo leaning over me, scanning my face. Before I could say anything, he pressed his ink-stained finger against my lips. I could almost taste the sultry sweat on his hands through my closed mouth. He picked me up off the ground and shuttled me to the other side of the office. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Antal, stretched out on the couch and asleep, despite his agony.
Speaking so affectedly that I could see him wrench every syllable from his mouth, Laszlo said, “Look at him, Eszter. He is all beat up. How do we know that he has not betrayed us? Or someone else? Did someone find out about us?”
I looked at Antal’s disfigured face, and I couldn’t imagine him ever saying anything about Realitás to the wrong people.
“We need to just take care of him for now,” I urged.
Laszlo listed, slightly, and let out a sigh. “We will watch Antal. Just you and I, and we won’t let him out of our sight.”
Laszlo fingered the flimsy steno pad in his hand as his eyelashes brimmed with perspiration.
“What’s wrong?” I wiped away a bead of sweat, which, upon examining, realized could be a tear.
“I don’t know how to write about this,” he said.
“Write about what?”
“What I saw, everyone tearing down the Stalin Monument, like they don’t even know what that’s going to mean for them.”
Laszlo and I had split up for the day to gather notes—he followed the protest to the city park, where thousands of people demolished a massive statue of Stalin, leaving only his boots. In them, they placed flowers.
“Just try.” I ushered Laszlo to his chair at the typewriter.
“How could you not get it, Eszter? Especially after everything you saw at the radio building. This is real. The protest went right by your house, you know.”
“It did?” I hadn’t checked in at home, but I knew Ivan would protect Dora. I was certain he had thoroughly demeaned the students’ efforts by now, calling them out as ignorant and idealistic. He would make sure to stifle any desire in Dora to even step outside that apartment.
“You should call them.” Laszlo turned away from me. He loaded a piece of paper in the typewriter and, as I heard the click of the first keys, I picked up the phone. He was right this time. Miraculously, the phone lines had been sustained.
“Eszter,” Ivan breathed. “It’s you. Thank God, it’s you.”
I pretended to cry. If Ivan imagined me cowering in fear somewhere, unable to get home, I could uphold the lie a little longer. My family would get through this without me, and I needed to focus on my duties at the paper.
“Ivan,” I sobbed, “Are you okay?”
“What do you mean, Eszter? Can you make it home? We’re fine. We’re here and we’re both reading in the room, but we want you to come home.”
“I’m okay, just stuck in this shelter at the factory. I’ll be here for the night, I think,” I told him.
“Where?”
“I have to go. I have to go now.” If I still loved Ivan, maybe I would have gone home. I used to love him for how he could be so strong and sensitive at the same time. Yet over the years, and as Ivan climbed the ranks in the regime, that strength grew so hard it calcified. Beneath it, trapped, was his gentleness—his habit of telling me I was beautiful in his sleep, his affinity for music and making us chocolate chip pancakes at midnight. I wondered if this movement would take a match to his strength, and in melting it, set free some of that softness. I also wondered if it was still there at all.
I could hear Ivan breathing on the other line of the phone, waiting for me to say something else. He was always waiting for me to say something more, as if I could simply forgive him. I think he fantasized that I would come home one day with a smile on my face and chirp, “You’re forgiven.”
“For what?” he’d ask.
“Everything. My parents. You working for this government. You not looking at me or touching me for ten years,” I’d say.
It would never happen, though. In reaction to our isolation from one another, we’d built up separate lives that were highly involved. There were structures, incentives, and people that kept us moving away from one another.
I said goodbye to Ivan and hung up.
When I turned around, Laszlo, who clearly had been eavesdropping, resumed typing. I looked over his writing and noticed it seemed erratic. Sentences drifted on the page, untied from one another and unanchored to a central thesis. Laszlo’s hands shook, only slightly, but enough. He needed to relax. I edged my palms onto his working hands, feeling his muscles give with my touch.
“We need to get this out soon,” Laszlo sighed.
I wanted nothing more than for him to turn around and kiss me. I would wait, however.
“We tell them what I saw. What you saw,” I offered.
“But we have no intelligence beyond that,” Laszlo groaned as he leaned back in his chair, and into me.
“They have already started fighting. We need to give them more than what we gave them last time. Let’s give them something to keep them going. Let them know that there is hope,” I urged.
“You are saying we tell them to fight, without any resources, and without knowing any of the potential consequences?” Laszlo snarled.
By proposing we go at it blind, without a staple of intelligence, I challenged Laszlo’s journalistic integrity. But, certain hardships trumped that. We suffered under our government. I waited hours just to buy bread for my family. When I walked anywhere, even in my own home, I always looked behind me at least three times to check if anyone was following me. My friends, like my family, disappeared too. I would arrive at their apartments, ready to simply visit with them, and no one would answer the door. I would knock and knock, until I gave up and looked through the windows, only to notice all of their things gone. The discovery of their absence was nothing compared to the realization of what that meant. They were almost certainly killed, executed in the secret police’s dark chambers, or they had been sent to a work camp where they would die under the backbreaking labor. I always said a small prayer for them, right there, in the middle of the sidewalk. Then the anxiety would set in. I would wonder whether Ivan’s position really did shelter us from the all-powerful and paranoid government.