Once Antal began snoring, Laszlo searched Antal’s pockets and beneath the layers of his sweaters and coats.
“I don’t trust him.”
“Don’t wake him up.”
“He’ll be lucky if he wakes up.”
“What, for God’s sake, did he ever do to you, Laszlo?”
“He reeks of the party.”
“Obviously, he is a spy. That’s what they do.”
“A spy whose children and grandchildren live in the party villas.”
“So? It would look suspicious if he moved them out.”
“He could find a reason.” Laszlo finished searching Antal, finding nothing more than a few cigarettes and some tissue.
“Can we just focus on what we’re going to do now?”
Laszlo moved closer to me and took my hand. He pressed his lips to my ears. “Are you ready for this?”
“Yes.” I felt my body bend toward Laszlo, craving what he kept withholding. We had been together before, but it had been years. I fantasized about him constantly. I equated his gruffness with an irresistible masculinity, and it triggered in me a longing both carnal and mindless.
He grabbed my arm and led me into the closet. In the darkness, I couldn’t see a thing. We were so close I could smell his scent, a combination of fresh coffee and rain. His warm breath crept along my cheeks.
“Then,” Laszlo whispered into my ear, “Nagy it is.”
Our lips slowly made their way toward each other. He kissed me, the warmth of his mouth barely detectible through his chapped and hardened lips. He pressed his body into mine and I capitulated, leading us to the floor.
“Please,” I whispered to him. “Let it happen this time.”
Laszlo ran his tongue across mine, delicately unlocking my trepidation. He tugged at the bottom of my lip with his teeth and pressed himself into me. He dove into my breasts, kissing and massaging them with the aggression of someone who hadn’t loved in far too long. As he peeled back my pants, I could feel, against my thigh, Laszlo growing harder and harder.
Wishing he could erase, in this single moment, every time Ivan ever touched me, I raised my hips, beckoning him in. We collided, the years of holding back released from his body into mine, and mine into his. At that moment, writing and sex combined in one aphrodisiacal wonder. Writing had elevated us—we were responsible for shaping the world around us. Sex leveled us—we were human again, pawns to forces we couldn’t control. And then, for a few glorious minutes, we were nothing. Free.
Afterward, Laszlo said nothing. I pressed my nose into the small of his back, allowing him to warm me up. His breathing slowed as he fell asleep. There would be no grand statements or confessions. There would be no talk of “us” or a next time. Laszlo’s love was driven by physical desire, and once that left his body, it disappeared into the past and, I hoped, the future. I tried to hide my disappointment, diving into my work and leaving Laszlo to his dreams.
I focused on Nagy, creating a spectacular narrative on his ascent to leadership. I wrote on where to collect arms and how to organize militias. When Laszlo woke up, he began writing too. Antal was still asleep, his snoring long abandoned in the thick entrails of sleep. We worked in complete silence, putting to words something far bigger than us, which seemed much simpler than putting to words the complexity of our lovemaking. We printed a small pamphlet with Nagy splayed across the cover and a headline that read “Nagy to Lead Opposition.”
We planned to deliver Realitás to the workers close to the arms factories. They would need to start stockpiling weapons as soon as possible. We would also give the paper to our courier service to distribute to the towns outside of Budapest. They promised to deliver Realitás to the Kilian Barracks, a major army post. I had no idea how our words would impact those soldiers, but we had to try every avenue.
Laszlo placed a stack of Realitás in my arms and quietly opened the front door. I would go straight to the factories in hopes that some workers had reported in today. If not, hopefully I could catch some of them on the streets nearby. I left a note for Antal and a copy of Realitás next to him, for when he woke up.
I had an hour before the march began.
DORA TURJÁN
January 17, 1965
DORA SAT ON a bench, surrounded by headstones that shot up from the ground like crooked teeth. Below them, weeds tormented the earth, uprooting the reluctant dirt, cracked and ugly. Webs of moss clung to the headstones, making it impossible to read the names of the deceased. It was in this graveyard that Dora allowed her mind a few seconds of freedom—to feel the pain she spent her days denying. She thought about Boldiszar and imagined him buried in the ground, beneath the jumbled mess of stone and green. As far as Dora knew, his body was still missing. He could be beneath the rubble of an abandoned building or in an unmarked grave in the countryside, in the tiny flecks of ash accumulating on a windowsill or in the crevices of the sidewalk.
At first, and for many weeks after, no one spoke of how it happened or where. Boldiszar died in the revolution, somewhere. Ivan told Dora the news with the mechanics of a trained bureaucrat. When she begged him for details, he said Boldiszar was a Freedom Fighter who had been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Dora yelled at Ivan, demanding answers, but he only shook his head and walked away. Dora couldn’t believe this was the same dad who treated Boldiszar like his son.
Dora had known Boldiszar her whole life. When she was five, Boldiszar’s mom came to Ivan and Eszter, begging them to help her with her son. Ever since his dad died, Boldiszar refused to eat dinner, play with his friends, or even leave the apartment, save for going to school. Ivan decided to give Boldiszar a distraction—he would be Dora’s babysitter. At ten, the boy was barely old enough for the job. Still, without fail, he collected Dora every day after school. Dora would be the first to line up to leave, just so she could have the first glimpse of Boldiszar. On their way home, Boldiszar always asked Dora for every minute detail of her day. Lifting her up on his shoulders, he took Dora to the park and pushed her so high on the swings she had to beg him to stop. On hot days, he bought Dora ice cream, getting her two scoops instead of one. And it was clear Boldiszar could sense Dora’s disappointment when, every day, Eszter failed to show up in time to see Dora before she went to bed. Many nights, Boldiszar stayed behind to play with Dora, trying to keep her up late enough to see her mom. Most of the time, Dora fell asleep, and Boldiszar did too.
A few years after his death, Dora tried to find Boldiszar’s body. She visited the Bureau of Missing Persons and anonymously filed a body location request. Ivan, with his expansive bureaucratic tendrils, found out immediately about Dora’s efforts. Waiting for her outside the office, he chided her for associating with a Freedom Fighter in such an obvious and public fashion. As if Ivan had planned it, he pulled from his pocket a tattered photo. Wincing as he lowered it to Dora, he showed her a picture of a bloodied heap of flesh. Dora could make out the black fluff of curly hair on the dead man’s forehead.
“This,” Ivan said, “was Boldiszar only a few hours after he died.”
Dora’s stomach disappeared. A weightlessness overtook her, like she was falling down and up at the same time.
“No,” she whispered.
“Yes, Dora. It’s hard for me too,” Ivan said.
“Where is he?”
“We really don’t know, Dora.”
The certainty of Ivan’s words suffocated the small, breathing creature of hope inside of her.