When news surfaced that you were alive and still imprisoned, I wasn’t shocked. I was infuriated with myself for ignoring the possibility that you never escaped the wrath of the regime. I got in touch with the necessary people to get this letter to you. I hope you get it. Also, I’m sure you haven’t heard yet, but Antal has died. He killed himself. It still makes me mad that I let him deceive us. I should have been more vigilant and acted more on my suspicions. It’s a mystery to me how he managed to enroll Anya in his scheme. An internal committee here ruled her as negligent and she resigned immediately. I guess that makes three of us who fell victim to Antal’s lies. The important thing is he’s gone now, though, and it’s time to be free.
So listen to me now, Eszter. Everything is the same, in terms of the code. You can go. It’s the same from when I left. Listen to the radio and you will be safe. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to get out of there.
The guards read this before me. I know, because it smells like grease and cigarettes. I realize they think I will die. It has to be, or else the guards would not have delivered this letter to me. So they are taunting me. They could have written this letter themselves. Except, I know this is from Laszlo. I know his handwriting, the messy cursive where every letter bleeds into the next, except for the letter “A,” which he capitalizes for some absurd, endearing reason.
I smile. He wants to save me, so I’ll let him. I smile too because Antal is dead. His children, in their fancy Buda apartment, are wiping down his ashen skin right now. They’re shrouding him in white. They’re preparing his body to burn, burn, and I hope he is still a little alive to feel it. I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at Laszlo. He could have helped me. “I’ll always hate you,” I scream to the letter loud enough for myself and my rat. He is bound by my hatred at all times, even if he doesn’t know it. He broadcasts to us in his singsong voice, but the thing at the bottom of him constantly holds him back. It’s the thing he sometimes feels when he gets bored or when he wakes up in the middle of the night. That thing is me who he walked away from. I gave him the code so that he could help me too, but he failed.
Laszlo saw them taking me away from my home. I was not right then. That was the beginning of my not-rightness. I shouldn’t have gone home, where I could have been ambushed. And, Laszlo, he must have been hiding in the alley. When our eyes met, he looked right back at the soldiers and nodded to them, as if they were doing the right thing. He could have tried to deter them, to wrestle me down, except he cowered. I am going to be free soon, and he never will.
Finally, Ferenc is here, upstairs. Happily, I listen to him and his friend. I savor their conversation and its lovely, bouncy youthfulness. Otherwise, I only hear the hushed conversations of the prisoners to themselves. Those wicked conversations make it more of a hell here than these cell walls, the mold, or the guards eyeing me up and down with the threat in their eyes apparent as if they wanted to say, “If I choose, you would be mine. If I choose.”
As the boys work, I lie down on the cot and listen to their radio. Soon I’ll have my own if the boy listens. He’ll listen. Oh, how their radio changes everything right now. All this time, the radio has been the one conversation I was openly invited to, where no one whispers or says things that confuse me. It’s the one conversation they haven’t stifled, because they don’t know I’m having it.
Putting me to sleep, with their melodic voices and music, I’m absorbed in the boys’ youth-hope. I bet all his life, Ferenc had been told being content is the greatest prize of all. But he figured it out. It’s no prize if you are lying. It’s no prize if fitting in means not being you. Ferenc tries to defy it all, but he won’t succeed. Not if the government has its way. Those bureaucrats, like my Ivan, sow doubt into your conscience. You spend your days living, breathing, and utterly denying all that they say. But at the end of the day, no one says much unless it’s steeped in sarcasm. You don’t work out any epiphanies about the system because beneath it all, you are too scared to trust yourself.
I wish I could be a cat, climb up there, nudge myself in their arms, purr, and suddenly look up at them and say, “But it’s not that way at all, you see. You can leave here if you need.” Except that’s not reality. It’s not reality at all.
Someone is coming for me, but I am half asleep. He sits beside me now and I endure the urge to reach out and squeeze him so tight. I want to squeeze his hope out of him and lap it up with my short, squatty tongue. He’s a scared kitten, and the more he acts like it, the more I become the alpha cat, the lion. The rush invades me as it always does, and did. Filling me up with power, his presence is dizzying and exciting. He’s listing slowly and he’s tired. He knows that I have a way to get out, that I have it locked up inside of me. But to reveal the code right now would only make him abandon me here. I roll over and go back to sleep, pretending he is not there. He needs to want this so badly, he’ll go to any length to help me.
For three straight days, I feel Ferenc hovering over me. Sometimes he strokes my hair or sings to me. His innocence is arrogance to me. He thinks I am interested in his fate, but I am old, and I am sick. He doesn’t see that, because he thinks he deserves my help. Being good and being sweet doesn’t make you deserving, I want to tell him.
He starts shaking me, and I cower in the hole that created me, in this prison that created me. He tries to straighten me out, but I explain to him it’s beyond his control. On the third day, he leaves the radio. I am thrilled he relented. It’s a rush going through me.
I know my mind has a short window of time until it begins contorting and twisting again. I sit up to face him. Looking away, he acts like he barely cares. Doesn’t he know that my attention is special?
“Ferenc!” I scream, because his arrogance blows angry breath into my lungs. I don’t even care if the guards come. He tells me the radio has been disrupted. While listening to his favorite program, it suddenly went blank. Off. Just like that. The story almost makes me nostalgic for when jamming hit our little radios with regularity. I know this is a sign. They’re cracking down.
“Please,” he pleads. “I need to know how to solve this. This can’t be the end. The radio cannot be jammed or else we cannot get the code.”
He wants to know my diagnosis of the situation, but I am busy calculating. He nudges me with his palm. How many times has it happened? What does it sound like? I can tell he trusts me when he hears these questions of mine. I am his answer. He is mine, my portal to escaping this jail cell before I’m hanged. If I can wrest myself free from jail, I can see Dora. I can touch her, smell her, and hold her. She will be my daughter again. But I am not going to give Ferenc the code without being sure he will take me right away. Until he is desperate. I need a way to guarantee he will climb down here and get me. I have a couple of weeks, that I know, because the rat told me and I told the rat. So I hold on tight.
“Well, it is complicated,” I say to Ferenc as my tongue tastes my teeth. The familiarity of plotting invigorates me like it had the night of Boldiszar’s death. There’s a chance, and I must find a way to get on that envoy. Would they recognize me? I’m not the same. But they would be able to tell who I am by my eyes and voice. They would kneel before me and kiss my head and revere the woman they had forsaken. “First, you must find a way to unjam the radio.”