February 9, 1965
Dear Uncle Lanci,
There’s more to tell you now and I’m so overwhelmed, even though I have rolls of paper ready to go for your letter! My hand endures shakes as I write this. If anyone should happen upon this letter, besides you—which is a great chance—I’m going to not survive. They’ll take me away instantaneously. I heard stories about people who underwent interrogations for letters to you, and I take one hundred percent culpability that by writing this letter now, I may become one of those people. But to keep this inward would be to live a different life, and I’m so bored at pretending.
I have just one wish—the wish that you would write me. Instruct me on what to do. Help me get out of Hungary. I am just as desperate as I was before. The more far I get from that basement, the more sound my mind will become. Until then, I am continuously beckoned back to Eszter and continuously launched into more danger. I am waiting for your reply so I can flee all of this.
My life has been plagued by mostly evil in the past weeks. Eszter appears in my dreams, then evaporates and appears in a repeated fashion. The sounds I recollect are one hundred percent burdensome. The grunts and slaps, the tangles and wails, the pleading and groaning are the sounds of Eszter losing. My nightmares of her become daymares, and I walk around living all that’s occurring to her.
Imagine having to tell my family of these events. It was awful, Uncle Lanci. It was mere hours after I returned home from jail and all were asleep in the apartment. Neither Adrienne nor my father harbored awareness of my return. I went to sleep with Adrienne so that I could heed her breathing and I could witness her dance with her dreams. I always do that so I can take dreams, but not for my own. I take them from her so that I can give them backward to her. Not when she is sleeping, but when she is awake.
When we awoke, we rambled into the kitchen where our father sat and I explained in vague terms the actual events that transposed. I informed Adrienne and my father of my imprisonment. My father’s reaction proved more vague than I would have ever guessed. Adrienne uttered not much. She just stood in place, staring at Father, who munched his beans that dripped secretly out the side of his mouth. I mentally side-noted to approach him later concerning this particular topic rather than detail it in Adrienne’s presence.
Of course, Adrienne did the honor of offensing Father wholeheartedly. “Father, why does it make no impact on you if Mike enters jail? Should I enter jail and you will not care?” she asked.
I had a proud moment as Adrienne spoke. She assembled an utter perseverance to determine how events work and the consequences that follow them. Our father swallowed the entire mouthful of beans he had been nurturing and scratched his napkin atop his face. We could hear his little hairs jarring the napkin like sandsheets. His lips lunged for another bite. And another bite. He failed to glance me in the eye, but he knew Adrienne would bore into him without relenting.
“Inhabiting jail for a single night could be beneficiary to Mike,” he said. “A grown man should get slaps on the hand a few times just to remember who is hitting him. He should know he needs to abide to the rules. And, Adrienne, if the plays you run at these KISZ meetings barrel on in full force, you may be exposed to what it feels like to disobey, too.”
In that instance, I wanted to slap, stab, I don’t even know what, to my father. Inspiring fear in Adrienne inspired vomit in me. I wanted to open my mouth far greater than anyone could see and release the context of my stomach all over my father.
Adrienne dissolved, and I could perceive what transpired within her. She is just learning how words can stop up tears or, to the worse, make them rage.
“Adrienne.” I stepped in front of my father to obstruct his plans to deconstruct Adrienne. “Soon, I will be going to Munich and avoiding all the rules that people like our father strive to live beneath. It is no use in fighting him. Even if he is just requiting these rules for our own safety, it’s not who I am or who you are to just accept and commence forward.”
You see, Uncle Lanci, that’s why you’re so important to my efforts. I have my sister to impress upon and doing that will mean so much to her life, as you can tell. I want Adrienne to learn that what she desires does not constitute disobedience. It’s okay. It’s for humans. Adrienne quelled, swiveled, and then stared at me in an endearing but honestly confounded manner. It always flees my mind that she is nearing the age of achieving full adulthood.
“Mike,” she said to me, looking me straight in the barrel of my arteries, “I know you are striving to accomplish a nearly impossible task. I am capable of comprehending how near insanity it is to flee this country and then to enter the West.”
Father huffed a big chunk of beans that flew out of his mouth and rested directly on my sleeve.
“You are imagining pure illusion!” Father grumbled through the mashed up beans in his mouth. “Stop convincing Adrienne to accept a part in it. The moment I believe that you will succeed is the moment when your mom is standing here before me.”
I had a storage unit full of words to launch forth toward my father, but I am grown now to recognize the anger within me needs a home, not an outlet. It resides inside me and propels me forward toward the promises I make to myself and to Adrienne. I will make sure she is aware that I will make things one hundred percent for her. She will not have to persist in a world that is only seventy or sixty percent, like I did my entire existence. She will feel everything good and complete. I do not mind I am barred from that if I can accomplish this for my petite sister.
I reaffirmed Adrienne when I said, “There is no necessity to discuss this matter any further. I decided my mind, and I will be glued to what I believe. I will find our mom.”
Munich is where you reside, Uncle Lanci, and I know that your connections can provide aid to me in this venture of mine to discover my mom. And, Uncle Lanci, please enlighten me how you know this Eszter. Is she correct that you announce pinpoints to flee Hungary on the radio? I implore you to tell me all you know on these topics. Will you aid me escaping Hungary?
I’ll permit you some time to ponder my request. It’s something that stalls my happiness every day, to know that your eyes may never read this. In fact, almost every second I can’t pardon the unhappy anxiety cresting on my mind.
I think I can manage to find her too, with all the intelligence I have collected on my mom. I read about her on a daily basis. My father is unaware of the espionage that has been transpiring underneath his own roof. In the back corner of his closet resides my mom’s diary. She left it, along with everything else, when she fleed from here. My favorite part is when she talks in reference to how she had to rescue me from the backyard where I engaged in football with my friends, because I had lost and was leveled to sorrow. She picked me up from the yard and carried me inside. She had donned her favorite shirt that night and my secretions had destroyed it one hundred percent. She said it didn’t matter to her, though, because she would continue to don it as a testament to the necessity of her presence in my life. (I do not know what is sadder, Uncle Lanci—a mom who needs a reminder of her loyalty to her son, or a mom who would disregard the shirt in the trash.)
My mom suffered from love amnesia. Things that would be loved, or memories that the mind should crave, she would forget with no hesitating unless she remembered to install evidence of its existence (the shirt). That’s why Mom would trot around town in clothes that bore copious gobs of tears or snot exertions. No one knew why she would wear such abhorrable shirts. In that way, my mom kept us to herself. She became the solitary landlord of her love for us. But it couldn’t stop her from searching for more trinkets of love, anywhere she could.