After all of these years, Dora remains completely intact. She grew up fine, but love can’t be seen, especially when it’s loss of love. That’s harder to see. I raise my left arm, the one allowed to be in public, just slight enough to wave at her. She lifts her eyes, but only for a second before she stares again at the judge. Suddenly, I realize I must look disgusting. Still, I refuse to look away from her. Coming from the side, a voice bends down toward me.
“Eszter, we are here today to discuss your prison term,” the voice says.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell the voice loud to myself.
I am looking at my daughter. I am so thankful I survived for this moment. Tears. That’s what it looks like. Down her cheek, her tears tumble, and she never moves her hands to wipe them. She’s alone, since Ivan is absent. But I’m here. “I’m here,” I want to tell her.
Bending again, the voice continues through Dora’s tears. “Eszter, we have determined that you are a threat to this country. We will soon deliberate on your sentence, but first, do you have anything to say?”
Dora cries, but in small whimpers, which is even sadder because she knows that it’s not allowed and it never was, and I hate that no one is there to tell her it’s okay. I’m wanting and breathing my story to her. Can she hear it? I have never uttered the truth to anyone, but now Dora is listening. Boldiszar died, Dora, and that’s when I took leave of you, forever. I abandoned you, daughter, who thrived under one identity and nothing more. I remember the knock on the door. I remember your face the most, because I saw it when the police arrived. Your mouth hung limp and to the side. You stood there dumbfounded by the quickness of it all. You reminded me of the neighborhood dog that got struck by a car, and as he lay dying, he seemed so confused, wanting nothing more than for me to lean down and explain to him what dying was. Instead, he felt it. He felt it without any power to stop or control it. It happened to him, and it happened to you.
I explain to Dora inside myself why I threw our family away. If she could just see my side, she would understand. I never meant to kill anyone. It just happened. Just like being placed in that cell, in the basement of a cold building, just happened. Just like her staring at me, me staring back at her, and the together-apartness is just happening.
Sometimes, a long time ago, when I was in it, in it all, I imagined meeting up with Dora at a coffee shop and telling her about what it felt like to write a real story. No, not one that the bureaucrats approved, but one that comes from deep within me, and within others, in our realities. My stories still amass inside me. They feel heavy, but the heaviness is a comfort that reminds me I am not in control. It just happened, to me, to my Dora. After Anya’s call came in to go to Boldiszar, I became someone else. That was the someone else who now spends hours picking dirt out from underneath her nails, whose insides have been rubbed raw, who has no need for history. I was never right. Does Dora know this, and does that mean she will never love me again?
Sometimes, when it’s not all the time, I fantasize Dora will wake up one morning, throw off her sheets, and come rescue me, no matter what Ivan said to her. I know Ivan handed Dora her reality after I left. In parcels, he divvied up the information she’d receive and not receive. I was on the not-receiving end, I knew when the jail cell stayed empty, unvisited. Dora sees me now. I’m embracing her with my eyes. I open them as wide as I can. I even raise my lips in a tiny smile, a gentle one. I wonder how scary it would be if I went all the way, if I smiled. I have holes there, in my mouth. She’d see, and in seeing, would she be happy or cry more?
“We therefore will make a determination,” the voice is still bending toward me, “on your sentence in the coming weeks. It does not look good for you, Eszter.”
In an instant, the proceedings finish. Dora’s blinking and now is silent with her tears, but I can hear them rushing into me and through me. These pigs want to kill me, but they already did, I want to tell Dora. Fleeing, the judge exits with everyone else except the guards and Dora. She’s looking, and I’m looking more. My hand is behind my back when the young guard curls his fingers around my arms and my scratchy uniform and leads me through the center of the pews past Dora.
“Mom,” she says, not loud enough to make a scene. Good girl, I think.
“Dora!” I whisper back, which really means “I love you,” and she knows it because her face swells and she gets so red. The last vision of her I see, will ever see, is her scarlet head staring, void of tears, at me.
I am thanking her in my mind for coming, and I hope she can feel that she has done enough. I do not need anything from Dora because she deserves it all to be given to her, but she never had unselfish parents, and she never will. I wish that I could go back and just give her a different mom, because I was too scared to be one.
There is one thing I know, and in knowing gives me hope, so I have to share it with the little rat I just found. I bend close to him. Dora’s in love now, I reassure him. There’s no greater explanation as to why she’d come see me if someone hadn’t softened her. She’s beautiful, I tell my little rat, and I know he likes it when I describe how Dora looks because he wiggles a little.
The dripping dribbles of the leaky pipe sync with my veins as they push the blood through me. As long as I have myself, then this cell will not control me. I decide the up, the down, and as the days labor on, so do I.
I am waiting and waiting, and I do not know what they will decide, but I know they aren’t going to kill me yet. Their proceedings are going to take them weeks because that makes them feel proud and good: to stamp things, submit paperwork, and be so bureaucratic. I think the guards are coming for me, like they always do. Instead, they push through, on the ground, a small letter.
Dear Eszter,
I can help, if you let me. I don’t expect you to forgive me. I can’t even forgive myself. I thought about you every day after my escape. I should have brought you with me, but I was scared.
When I first got to Munich after that terrifying day in 1956, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You were in my thoughts when I woke up, when I went to bed, and all the time in between. And my feelings toward your beloved Radio Free Europe had changed. I was grateful to them for helping me get out of Hungary, and I found out quickly it was really Antal who betrayed you, not the radio station. Radio Free Europe was all I knew, and they were looking for exiles like me. So I went to their headquarters and got a job. But I couldn’t report on the news anymore. I was terrified I would let the same thing happen again. I became the rock ‘n’ roll DJ. Can you believe that? Me? A rock ‘n’ roll DJ.
When I realized I would be relaying the codes that would help people escape Hungary, I couldn’t turn the job down. I think, in the back of my head, I thought one day you might hear one of my codes, and it would help you get out. Of course, I never consciously recognized these thoughts. Not for a long, long time.
You see, Eszter, I got used to my freedom. I didn’t want to let it go, and I feared if I helped you, the secret police would come find me, somehow, and bring me back to Hungary or just kill me here in Munich. After a few months, I consoled myself with the idea that Ivan must have rushed to your aid—I knew he would always be in love with you. I assumed he got you out and that you were living with your family again. We couldn’t find anything on you. I figured you probably heard me on the radio and that it had to be your decision not to speak with me. How wrong was I.