“You can do this,” Dora said to herself. “This is work.”
She closed her eyes and ran her fingers along the edges of the envelope, savoring what could very well be the last time she came into contact with one of Ferenc’s letters. If he wrote anything subversive, he’d be taken away again, she was certain. She scooted closer to where the streetlight hit the bench and pulled the letter out of her pocket.
Inch by inch, she slid her finger through the envelope’s adhesive, trying to keep it intact as much as possible. She unfolded the paper, so thin it hardly made any noise. As she read the beginning of the letter, Dora knew Ferenc confessed enough to send him back to prison. Not only did Ferenc bring up leaving Hungary again, but he found someone who would help him do it—he would probably attempt to communicate with the prisoner again.
As Dora read on, she grew more and more horrified by the strange and disturbed woman in the basement. Soon, she forgot about Ferenc’s plight, her mind imagining and re-imagining the poor woman’s rape. She knew Hungary had a long history of injustice. She heard once of a boy, Péter Mansfeld, who was taken into custody for his participation in the revolution at age seventeen. He was too young to be executed, so officials waited until he turned eighteen, then, in secret, hanged him. But Dora thought those days were over. She had made peace with the government’s past indiscretions, dismissing them as the growing pangs of a system attempting to establish order.
She wondered if the eyes she met that day were those of the forsaken inmate. They floated in front of her now, blinking back at her. Their blank and vacant expression was simply a defense mechanism—the numbness required to survive daily abuse. Dora couldn’t keep reading.
She felt both sick and weak. Her hands trembling, she started folding the letter from the bottom up. That’s when she saw it—her mom’s name. It was just sitting there, on its own, scribbled in the inky, sloppy handwriting of Ferenc.
Dora was certain Ferenc didn’t know anyone named Eszter. Maybe one of the prison guards had that name. Maybe Ferenc had found one of his mom’s old friends, and her name was Eszter. Either way, Dora felt the familiar, yet unwelcome, tug toward the name. She pried open the letter and read the remaining paragraphs until she came to her mom’s name again. “Eszter.”
Dora brought the letter close to her eyes and stared at the name, unbelieving, and yet, also knowing who was stuck in that basement.
It was her mom.
ESZTER TURJÁN
January 25, 1965
IT’S HAPPENING AND unhappening in a loop in my mind. Every night when I go to bed, it happens. When I dream, it unhappens. And when I wake up, it happens again, until I’m gone. Because reality is mine, not theirs. This grotesque horror is just a series of different events stacked up on top of one other, but none of them are real. Or some of them are real, but I say which ones.
Sometimes, when I look out the window, I see people. This window is actually not in my cell—it’s far away in the head officer’s cell. He spends his own time with me when he says it’s time. Time is time, but to me, time is nothing more than the reality of others. For me, time is in the past when I was Dora’s mom, even though I wasn’t really there. These stupid soldiers don’t realize that. They think I am suffering in here. They look at me like they can do anything to me because I am miserable anyway, but I am not in pain when I go back, which I do whenever I want.
Right now, I am putting Dora to bed after reading to her because she asked me to do it, and though she is a teenager, I’m so grateful that she still wants to spend time with her mom in this affectionate way, like she’s a kid. I wonder if she does it just for me—to let me think she will always be my baby because she knows how abandoned I would feel otherwise—and I love her for that. And I smell her hair, which smells delicious, because I infused her shampoo with cherries I picked from my friend’s garden. I’m just crafty like that. All of Dora’s friends come over to our apartment to hang out, so they can talk to me about their crushes and school and the fights they’re in with their friends. And I am totally fine with being that type of mom because I am so generous, and Dora’s friends distract me from the goals I never reached because who wants to pursue goals when you’re happy, anyway? And then I just look at Dora and think about who she has become because of me, and the time I devoted to her, and I get fulfillment from that. They say the greatest gift is being a mother, and in that moment, I know it is.
It’s that easy. It’s that easy to live in that time even though the time that most people know is different. Sometimes when they are hurting me, the way they do—the hurt that goes deep inside—I travel to distance centuries and realms. I imagine I’m Cleopatra or Aphrodite, and that makes me laugh. That makes them hurt me even more. Sometimes I am in a place where no time exists, only blackness, which is on the inside of my eyes, even though they force me to keep them open. I think they like my eyes, or they like to see the pain in them, because when I close them they yell and shout, and once an officer stooped over me and propped open my eyes with his fingers. That’s how I know eyes are important to them, so I go to other times with my eyes open.
I found a little rat, and I named him Antal. The rat is sick, like Antal is old, and he sits and stares like he is waiting for me to forgive him, but forgiveness isn’t something I can give out. You can’t forgive when you haven’t been forgiven yourself.
“I’m not scared,” I tell the rat, because I could get any of its diseases and it wouldn’t matter because I’ll never leave this cell and it will never leave me. Even if I crawl out of this hole, I will still be in it. “I know what you did,” I tell the rat, who is Antal. I hate Antal. I found out Gerő’s men almost killed him in the alley that day I found him bleeding. They told him if he didn’t turn Boldiszar in, they’d go after him and his family. I know Antal, and I know he didn’t think twice, even though he knew Boldiszar’s connection to my Dora. Then he used me. I was just a casualty along the way. I heard Antal had never been working for us in the first place. He had sided with the Soviets from day one.
I know it’s true. I’m going for his neck, and he bites me and claws me, but I don’t care. I’m piercing every single fingernail through him. The rat starts bleeding. As the holes open wider, my hands get slippery. The wounds become serrated as Antal groans from the pain. I don’t understand why, why he did this, because I never, ever believe in evil even though it is around me and within me. Laszlo believed in evil because Laszlo sees it like it’s a different dimension that I don’t live in. I miss Laszlo and I still love Laszlo, but I hate Laszlo too, maybe more than I hate Antal. He didn’t save me and he could have tried to use his connections. But what about Ivan? Well, not like I expected him to even try. He would have found out that I picked up that gun, and I shot that Soviet soldier, and I shot Boldiszar.
I can’t travel to the place where Boldiszar is still alive, because I believe in death, so I know that I will never be forgiven for Boldiszar’s murder. Dora will never forgive me, if she even knows that Boldiszar is dead—if she is still thinking and seeing and being, like she was when I was taken away.