“Where?”
“To Munich.”
Dora’s mouth went dry. Her tongue tried to formulate a response, but it felt like a beached whale flopping around on dry sand.
“Please, Anika.”
Dora knew she wouldn’t be able to go with Ferenc to Munich, but she didn’t want to say anything that would dissuade him from leaving either. “I will have to think about it.”
“That’s all I can ask for.” He leaned across the table and kissed her, leaving a slight dampness on her cheek. He had cried, but only a little.
For the first time, they made love that night. She kissed every part of him, savoring his skin, which tasted vaguely like nutmeg. He ran his fingers up and down her body, gently and methodically, as if he had never touched Dora before. He moved slowly into her, anticipating somehow that Dora hadn’t been with anyone for a while. She relaxed into the sensation until she wanted more.
She felt so safe with him and she saw, in his eyes, that same feeling of security, the letting go of his silliness and his toughness, all at once. It stung her to know that this was, in some way, a sham. She wished she could have made love to him as Dora and not Anika. She wondered if he would ever forgive her for the betrayal, especially now that they had been so intimate. She would tell him when the time was right, and with the right words, but the closer she got to him, the more she dreaded it.
Afterward, he walked Dora home, saying very little. As they bid each other goodnight, he asked again if she would consider going to Munich with him. Dora kissed him, cherishing the transitory mark of their love, and his devotion to her. She never responded directly to his question. She hoped he would understand.
Sauntering through the door of her apartment, her body made lackadaisical by pleasure, Dora saw Ivan in the kitchen. He sat at the table, staring at the opposite wall, his fingers tracing the mouth of an empty glass. Dora edged back toward the door, but he saw her in time.
“Come over here,” Ivan said, his voice so low that Dora would need to get closer to him.
“Is everything okay?”
“They’ve done it.”
“Done what?”
“Your mom.” Ivan buried his face in his hands. “They decided that…,” he gasped, “that she is to hang.”
Dora tried to say something, but she couldn’t. Her legs started cramping, her head spun, and she felt like she would never get up again. She fell back against the wall, slumping to the floor and taking with her some of the peeling, gray-checkered wallpaper.
“It’s going to happen in a week, but it could be sooner. That’s all I know. They make sure it’s a surprise on purpose,” Ivan sobbed, nose-diving into the table.
“I thought we had time,” Dora whispered. She assumed it would be weeks, maybe even months, before they carried forward her mom’s sentence. How foolish she had been for thinking that they would act reliably slow when history showed a quickness to execute, to swiftly erase those who stood in the way. Her mom only had seven more days to live, at most, and Dora couldn’t even get up. She didn’t have a plan in place. Radio Free Europe faced a future of eternal jamming, and this elusive code remained trapped in the brain of a woman succumbing to madness. Her mom was going to die, and there was nothing Dora could do to stop it.
Dora wanted to melt into the kitchen tile and disappear. She just wanted to take leave of her family and this situation, all at once, and in feeling that urge, she realized that was just what her mom would have done. Dora had promised she would do better. She always thought that not being Eszter meant following the rules of the government, staying under the radar, and keeping herself—and her dad—safe. Now, she realized, it was quite the opposite. It was standing up to the repression, doing exactly what her mom did, but with one difference: her family would come before anyone, and anything, else. She collected herself and went to her dad. Hugging him, she felt his tears on her arms. They were wet and cold.
“Well, what will we do?” Ivan clutched Dora’s arm.
Backing away from Ivan, Dora straightened her back, lifted her chin, and prepared to address him. “We’ll help her.”
Ivan grunted. He shook his head. “So little we know of her and why she did it,” he said, as if he was already giving Eszter’s eulogy. “Maybe she deserves to die.”
“We don’t deserve for her to die,” Dora said.
“It’s not up to us.”
In that moment, Dora knew Ivan had given up. She readied herself to make her plea to stop the jamming of Radio Free Europe. But as she saw her dad launch into another fit of sobbing, she realized that would just give him a reason to snap out of his grief. He’d take up the cause of stopping Dora from doing anything that would put her in danger, just as he had done for the past nine years. It would be his excuse to, once again, forsake Eszter.
So Dora sat by Ivan’s side until she heard his crying stop, replaced by a heavy silence as, in his sleep, he breathed through the remains of his tears. She wondered if that was what it would sound like when her mom hanged—a terrible cry, extinguished.
MIKE A KORVINKÖZBŐL
February 25, 1965
Dear Uncle Lanci,
You already know that things have changed. How could you neglect to know? The presently familiar screeching of the jammed radio has overtaken it. Every minute or so, I leap up and start pacing, cursing, making shits. With the jamming happening so often, I am perplexed into personal fear constantly.
I’m doing all that you instructed, with regards to our plan. I visit Eszter all the time, going almost every night. The final night that made a difference, Uncle Lanci, was last night. When I sulked into Eszter’s capsule she was living with fever. Her body eliminated cold and was composed entirely of heat. I was certain that my hand would completely fall off its chain the second I placed it on her forehead.
So I sat by the side of her and pet her hair. I gave her water to drink through a petite straw. She began to drift toward sleep, but she snapped from it to say, “Thank you, Laszlo,” very softly into my elbow.
“You are welcome,” I told her. I had the compassion to be kind to her because then maybe she would tell me the code.
“I am going in two days,” I told her as I matched my eyes up against her.
“I am going to miss this.”
“I will too,” I said, though I was still making to be you.
“How are you going to get in touch with your mom?” she asked, now seeing me for me.
“Well, my father finally broke down and told me all he knew about her,” I lied. “She’s a teacher at a school in Munich. She is the most one hundred percent teacher and she has discovered her life’s passionate work. Why my father kept this from me, I do not know,” I imagined on.
“Moms are moms, are moms, are moms. Their happiness is theirs, not yours,” she said.
“I’ve been practicing your code,” I made more lies, but I could see that Eszter accepted what I said as one hundred percent truth, the battle in her majorly exhausted. “I have also been witnessing people getting on the envoys. I go every day to see them.”
“Oh, yes? And who are they? What do they look like?” She began picking at her fingers like I had made nerves in her. Her hand is full with scabs and blood. It brings worry to me as I think about the rat too, whose diseases could merge into Eszter.
“They made appearances like everyday people. There was an older man, with gray hair, and a younger one that was my age, and she carried a folder with her,” I said.
“I wish I could go with you,” Eszter said in petite voice, more petite than I had ever heard her use. I wondered if Eszter even had a true desire to flee her capsule or if maybe she was with major fear of being in the real world.