BIRDS OF PASSAGE. CHAPTER 3. There’s a Bird in There, Singing
A baby.
Nothing. It doesn’t register. Or, rather, what registers is a confusion of weak signals.
There’s a little flutter of pleasure. But how genuine is it? Maybe that’s just the automatic response a man has to such news.
There’s a sense of alarm too, bells jangling faintly somewhere in the corners of his consciousness. Alarm at what? For whom? For the unsuspecting baby, perhaps. For Veronika too, probably. But mostly for himself.
His cigarette gripped between his teeth, Gábor is intent on unraveling the edge of the worn red blanket. With both hands thus occupied, he has to tilt his head to the side and squint to keep the smoke out of his eyes. Veronika has started running a bath for herself.
Gábor feels like a refugee catapulted into some alien place where nothing is the way he expects, or wants, or needs. For months, now, bombarded with strangeness on all sides, he has been struggling to build a vision of perfection, a little utopia, in a corner of his past. Reassurance is what he needs, a fixed point, a beacon.
All those fixed points are in the past. The present is intolerable and the future a blur of unnameable anxieties. And now a baby!
He is annoyed, angry with Veronika. They have never talked about having a baby. Babies have nothing to do with him, nothing at all. Domesticity bores him. Children bore him.
Maybe when he was younger, if things had been different, he’d have enjoyed a child, but now? Gábor is a self-absorbed man. Veronika must know that. His world is inside his head, where there is room only for his imaginings. But a child is not a figment of his imagination, to be moulded and manipulated at Gábor’s whim. A child will need patience, attention, love. And by the time the child begins to be interesting, Gábor will be sixty years old, an old man already.
In the most practical terms of all, there is no room for a child in this apartment. There is only the bedroom and this living room scattered with all Gábor’s little papier-maché people and cardboard sets.
This is where he works. This is not a playroom.
And the birds!
It is impossible. Impossible. He cannot cross this hurdle.
Cecília lands on the pelmet over the bedroom window and stares fixedly at Gábor. He lets the frayed blanket fall and lets her hop onto his finger. She flies away again as soon as he takes the cigarette out of his mouth. It’s too late, and the ash falls onto the floor. For a long, blank moment Gábor allows the roar of the bathwater to drown his thoughts.
Then, with a massive refusal to face his own predicament, he goes back to the living room and looks out the balcony window to the villa.
Alice is in the kitchen, scrubbing potatoes. She is running water too, and Gábor can imagine the clanking of the old pipes as she turns off the tap.
A mother cleaning vegetables for dinner: the very picture of domesticity. Alice plays the part quite well, on the whole, if unevenly and unpredictably. With the boy she seems to be quite natural; less so with Daniel. There’s something wrong there, Gábor doesn’t know what. Some women are crushed by a life on the fringes of the theatre. Gábor has seen it happen more than once. But the uncertainties of the life seem not to have been a problem for Alice. She has the air of a woman who would feel herself fortunate to have dry bread and water. Something certainly has been a problem, though. Alice and Daniel act as though their marriage is on hold.
Alice’s really odd behaviour, though, seems to be reserved for other people — guests, visitors, strangers on the street. How easy it is, seeing a woman in her kitchen, to imagine her defined once and forever by that single image — an image of home and stability and food and reassuring warmth. It is an appealing image. Gábor can recognize that. But domesticity alone is of limited interest to him.
In the guise of improving her own French and of letting Alice practise her Hungarian, Eszter has made it her business to learn Alice’s story. And it is a remarkable story. Gábor has perfected the art of interrupting his sister, but he has taken to hearing her out when she talks about Alice. He shrugged when he learned that Alice is originally from the North of Ireland. Ireland means nothing to him.
Canada is populated by immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants from all over the world. But a police photographer in Belfast? That little woman? It was her very first job, twenty years ago or more. Alice can’t have been out of her teens. But still. That must have been a life of controversy. And of danger, too. There is nothing that impresses Gábor more.
And how did she get from that point to this? Gábor feels an overwhelming desire to know Alice better. There is something there he needs to understand.
When she’s in motion, running like the wind, Alice looks as though she’s afraid of nothing. But Gábor knows that’s an illusion. He saw her staring at the sky earlier on. It isn’t only that she’s out of her element, although she is. Her feet aren’t really on the ground at all, and she doesn’t even know it. What is Budapest to her, or she to Budapest? She might as well be on Mars.
But there’s more. Watching her at the kitchen window, Gábor sees now that there’s a sureness about Alice too, well-camouflaged, but not entirely hidden. No matter how hard it gets, some small part of her is safe in the knowledge that she has survived worse. In some ways she may be at a loss, but she has it in her to stand there, at a kitchen window that might as well be on Mars, conjuring up an appealing vision of hearth and home.
How does she make sense of her life? What is it like for her, being in Budapest? In Gábor’s experience, foreigners tend to overreact to Hungary one way or another, and Gábor would bet that Alice is prone to overreacting. Is she the kind of foreigner who feels contempt for Hungarians? What does she make of this strike? Does it alarm her that Hungary is in crisis? Does it amuse her? No. None of these seems likely. Or — is it possible? — is Alice in the throes of creating a little utopia in the here and now? That takes some doing, imagining Hungary in 1990 as paradise. But yes, that’s it. That must be it.
And so the women and children began their vigil. Police sirens wailed along the little streets of the Second District in the unnerving quiet of a morning without any other traffic, while the radio provided breathless eyewitness accounts of scuffles between taxi drivers and police on the bridges, and reported inflammatory speeches clamouring for the resignation of the government.
Eszter was all yelps and sighs, kindness and folly, interested as always in everyone else’s business, but for once Alice found Eszter’s overpowering helpfulness welcome.
Widowed a year ago, when her husband died of coronary thrombosis, Eszter had been left at the age of forty-five with three children, a ramshackle villa, an ill-paid part-time job in the pharmacology department of the Medical Research Institute, and a vizsla puppy named Vill.
“People think I just sit and cry all the time,” she told Alice, smoke from her cigarette billowing out of her nose and mouth, and her calamitous tangle of brown curls quivering with indignation, “but it isn’t like that.”
Her body is beyond redemption, and her face is ravaged by the grief that she clings to as to a lover.
By lunchtime, the overloaded telephone lines were all down. When Zoltán, Eszter’s eldest, finally got home from the Academy of Music in mid-afternoon after walking across the city with his oboe, they greeted him as a conquering hero. The metro was closed for several hours; the authorities had decided that the extra crowds on the platforms and on the escalators made it too dangerous to keep it in operation.
Simon, the fifteen-year-old, didn’t make it back from his Gymnazium in Pest till nearly five o’clock. One by one the children were plied with spiced cabbage soup, sour cream, and questions.
The barricades had started to go up in some parts of Budapest on Thursday night, but the blockade became widespread only on Friday morning. Alice got home from teaching her morning low-impact aerobic class just moments before Peter came in from school with Eszter’s daughter, Juli. The school had sent all the children home early because of the emergency. Peter and Jul’s teacher, Rózanéni — not the most stable of individuals at the best of times — announced to a class full of ten-year-olds that this was a revolution, that the poor were rising up against the rich, and that the shooting would begin at 2 o’clock that Friday afternoon.
Generally, Peter finds school more exciting here than it ever was in Montreal. Rózanéni, who lives just down the road with her ill-tempered schnauzer, keeps a bottle of plum palinka in her desk at school, and has been falling-down drunk in class more than once.
Most of the teachers smoke in front of the children, some of them call the children names, and there are daily shouting matches and other spectacles that Peter describes to Alice in pure amazement.
Eszter was out at the ABC grocery at the bottom of the hill when Peter and Juli arrived home. By the time she came clicking upstairs on her overburdened high-heeled shoes to tell Alice there was no bread or milk in any of the shops, delivery trucks couldn’t get through the barricades — Alice had cancelled a meeting with Magda at the Ministry of Education and was listening intently ot the news on Radio Bridge.
Pierrette, Alice’s friend from Montreal, was still not back by dinner time. That, it turned out, was because she had been wandering from room to dark endless room of the National Gallery in the Buda Castle searching, in vain, for a work by a Hungarian woman artist. She emerged into the deserted streets outside, stood under the outstretched bronze wing of the great Turul — the mythical eagle of the ancient Magyars that watches over the capital from its perch on the lip of the Castle Hill escarpment — and was astonished to find the city at a standstill beheath her.
So, the three long days passed. Saturday being Simon’s name day, and no one having been able to buy him a present, Eszter and Alice pooled their resources for an enormous quantity of batter, fried and tossed some forty palacsinta, layered them with the jams that Eszter had made last month when the peaches and apricots were ripe in the garden, and ate every one.
Now it is Sunday afternoon, and how is Daniel going to pick his way back across the blockaded city? He’ll be disgusted with the place before he can give it a chance. Alice knows all too well that the confusion will just provide him with another reason for regretting they moved to Hungary. The place is a disaster, he’ll say. Who knows what will happen next? Apart from anything else, don’t you think it’s all going to have a bad effect on Peter?
But these aren’t real questions. They’re excuses, excuses. It’s just not the right time for Daniel to be away from Montreal, and he’s looking for ways of justifying going back. The fact that Alice is happy to be here, well, that’s a problem, one of many problems. They have been together for seventeen years and are still close in some ways.
Alice wishes he were here, wishes they could start all over again, fresh and new. She misses him. She’s lonely when he’s here, but she’s infinitely lonelier without him.
And now, scrubbing potatoes for dinner under the kitchen lamp, greedy, as always, for news, AlicE has the radio on. She scrubs thoroughly, out of deference to her Hungarian guests. They remain deeply suspicious of unpeeled potatoes, though she has explained the nutritional value of potato peel more than once.
She is listening to Radio Bridge, the English-language station set up last summer in Budapest, where she can hear the Voice of America news. She has taken off her pink headband but has not changed her clothes since she came in from her run. In the glare of the yellow kitchen light, which catches the bend in her nose at an unflattering angle, she looks older than her thirty-eight years. On and off all day she has listened to endlessly repeated bulletins about some Japanese who died atter eating the flesh of a rare fish that was known to be poisonous. As far as the taxi strike is concerned, the international wire services have been slow off the mark. There is nothing on the Voice of America news, and neither The Independent nor The Herald Tribune has said a word about Hungary. The only mention of the blockade that Alice has heard on the international news is a glancing reference on the BBC World Service. When he steps off the plane at the airport, she realizes, Daniel will have no way of knowing about the crisis in Hungary.
The strike could turn into a revolution, and no one would know until it was all over. This remoteness is alarming, Alice has to admit. The whole country is alarming, really — Alice has visions of having to take Peter by the hand and escape to Austria on foot. But it’s exhilarating too. She loves it here.
As the daylight begins to fade, Gábor turns on the television to hear the latest developments. Negotiations continue. Nothing more dramatic than that. He turns the sound down and stares at the silent screen. The footage is of the crowd down at the roundabout at the mouth of the tunnel under Castle Hill. Dusty cars are parked bumper to bumper across the streets, trucks too here and there, and serious clusters of men are slouching around smoking rough cigarettes. The ornate office building on the corner is deserted, a frivolous backdrop for alarm and boredom. Across the way, on the far side of the roundabout, stands an undistinguished six-storey apartment building. Its inhabitants lean out over wrought iron railings or peek through sheer curtains greyed by metallic air.
It’s just like 1956, mutter the two stout women in black aprons as they carry a steaming cauldron of gulyás from the apartment building onto the grass in the centre of the roundabout. The drivers and all the unemployed and homeless men who have come out to swell their numbers are hungry and must be fed. Please God the police not try to clear the streets by force. And if the army is brought in? Then what?
This is on the Buda side of the Szécheny Chain Bridge. Soon the only sounds are the sounds of the waters of the Danube lapping against the embankment, the clink of a spoon against a bowl, the song of a small, disoriented bird. The glint of an October afternoon has faded, now, into the pewter chill of a late October evening. A thousand lights stud the Chain Bridge. The city is in silence as the men, sitting on their cars, leaning against their trucks, clean their bowls with crusts of bread. In front of them is the dark entrance to the tunnel, looking more sinister with every passing moment. A sign is posted at each end to warn pedestrians of the dangerous levels of pollutants emitted by the vehicles that pass through. A crumpled, curly-haired man in his late forties looks up from his soup bowl and stares into the tunnel.
“Did you hear that?” Tivadar Varga’s sharp blue eyes settle on those of the taxi driver beside him. At the end of a day spent detying the authorities, they feel as if they are old friends. For all his charm, Tivadar is short enough of friends nowadays to welcome this. He’s coming to the end of a long bad spell, or so he hopes, and his thin, wide mouth is anxious.
“What?” The driver’s moustache is glistening from the gulyás. He is storing the scene away in his memory, so as to be able to recount in detail the day he spent with the Tivadar Varga. He presses his thick lips together, puts his empty bowl down beside him on the front of his car, and then, when the black-aproned woman comes over with a stack of dirty dishes, hands it back to her. Nodding his thanks, he assures her he would indeed kiss her hand it only the times permitted, it their lives were gentler somehow, or at least different: “Kezi csókolom.”
The bowl has left a ring of grease on his car, and when he wipes this with his forearm you can see his car is flamingo pink. The colours of other cars are shining through the gathering dusk, here and there, wherever the men have wiped away the grime with their jackets or with the seats of their pants.
“A bird. There’s a bird in there, singing. I know. I saw it when I walked through the tunnel.” Tivadar spent the morning up on the Hill of Roses, where he discovered an abandoned house. He needs a place to live, somewhere for him and Kalliope, and the house is a squatters’ paradise. And now this bird has given him an idea. No money in it, of course, but a good idea, and an even better way to wreak havoc. He almost smiles, and a lock of grey hair falls across his forehead.
“You’re a crazy man, Tivadar. It’s no wonder no one’s giving you a job.” In this one regard, the driver feels sure of his superiority to Tivadar. In addition to driving a taxi, he sells newspapers and magazines in the underground passage at the Astoria Metro station. On top of that, he runs his own business as a car mechanic out of the minuscule garage where he locks up his own Zsiguli behind a corrugated tin door at night. Not that he can imagine Tivadar sticking to any one of those jobs. And no more should he: Tivadar’s are uncommon gifts, and the driver knows it.
Six years ago Tivadar was an economic historian. On the atternoon when the secret police relieved him of his duties at the Karl Marx University of Economics because of his dissident political activities, he bought a shot of apricot pálinka for the five men who happened to be in the Vén Diák bar, finished the bottle himself, and then broke his jaw when he tripped over a concrete planter full of chrysanthemums on his way home across People’s Republic Street.
When he recovered sufficiently to speak — and he was always a good talker, a great dreamer — he moved into high gear politically. When the gays hanging around the public toilets on the Pest embankment were rounded up, Tivadar went on television to protest. In the corridor next day, Gábor Marton gave a doubtful shrug and said, “I agree with you, of course, my dear Tivadar. You are right. But this is a conservative country, and what you have done is politically stupid. This is not an issue that will win us the election. On the contrary.”
Thinking for himself had always got Tivadar into trouble under the Communist regime; now it would get him into deeper trouble. He was too far on the fringes of the Hungarian Civic Party to have been informed about how to handle controversial issues. So, following his own instincts, he championed the Gypsy cause. When the gypsies — the Roma people, as they would like to be called — staged a demonstration outside Parliament, Tivadar was there. The next morning a photograph of him making an obscene gesture — with his right hand jammed angrily into his bent left elbow — shocked newspaper readers all over Hungary. “A special gesture for us all, read the caption in Népszabadság beside the headline “The Roma people are Magyar too — Tivadar Varga.”
He met Gábor in the corridor just after lunch. “My dear Tivadar,” Gábor said, lighting a Marlboro, “the Gypsy cause is important to all of us in the party, but that photograph. This is not the way to win support. we have enough trouble in the countryside without this! You should have known better.” The note of exasperation was unmistakable.
Tivadar was stung. Gábor was the last man he’d expected to berate him. The plays that had made Gábor famous were full of insolent gestures, obscene ones, too. So what if Tivadar’s fame had metamorphosed into notoriety? Tivadar could feel him upper lip twitch. “Why don’t you stick to writing plays, Gábor. Pragmatism doesn’t suit you. As a politician you make a lousy playwright!”
Gábor turned and faced Tivadar. “This isn’t a play, you fool. We have to live with what happens in this election, all of us, and you’re making it harder for us. This has nothing to do with rights and wrongs. It has everything to do with the way people see the Civic Party. If people see photographs like that they aren’t going to vote for us. We’ve all been working around the clock. We don’t have the time to control the damage on this kind of publicity.” The cigarette snapped in two between his fingers. He stared at it in disgust and threw it away. “We have enough liabilities.”
There was no round of drinks at the Vén Diák that afternoon.
Tivadar had many reasons, after that, to be glad he’d married a sensible woman while the going was good. His wife, Magda, who worked in the Ministry of Education, was a strong woman of nearly fifty. She had been a championship volleyball player until she was twenty-five, had grown sturdy within months of stopping her training, and was now national director of the schools athletic curriculum. Not that either her athletic or her administrative skills had done her much good with Tivadar, whose contempt for the bureaucracy was equalled only by his contempt tor physical education. Misery had etched a deep line across her eyebrow at an angle that gave her an air of surprise. It was a wet April morning when she put Tivadar’s clothes in a plastic shopping bag outside the door of their apartment, changed the lock, and went down to the Ministry’s holiday resort at Lake Balaton for two weeks. All this was six months ago, and they have not seen each other since.
“They used to take songbirds down the mines to test the air,” Tivadar tells the taxi driver, jabbing his bony thumb in the direction of the tunnel. “If the birds died in the cage, the air was dangerous, and it they survived, the aur was saFe enough to let the miners start work.”
“No kidding.” The driver is sucking gulyás off his moustache.
“Most days you’d take your life in your hands walking through this tunnel. I’ve seen pedestrians with their scarves over their faces to block out the fumes. Once, I saw a guy with a gas mask.”
Is this an attack? The driver isn’t sure, but he leaps into the fray anyway. Life has taught him that you can never be too quick off the mark. “Don’t take offence, but believe me, it isn’t just the taxis,” he says, with a belligerence that belies the polite phrasing. Don’t take offence is reserved for offensive occasions. It’s a kind of insurance that the aggressor takes out in case he ends up in a brawl. “Don’t pin it all on us. We aren’t responsible for all the pollution.”
“That’s not my point at all.” Tivadar flicks the man’s fierceness away as if it were a wasp. “You guys are the least of it. It’d be far better if it were just taxis — and streetcars, of course. You have to have public transport too.”
The driver is prepared to concede this. There’s a hiss of pressure released as he breathes again. Turning down the edges of his fleshy pink mouth, he reaches into the pocket of his jacket. “Pálinka?” The medicinal bottle of clear liquid he proffers to Tivadar has no label on It.
Tivadar throws back his head and swallows a long, searing mouthtul of the home-made apricot brandy.
“Aaaa!” He makes the long vowel sound like a satisfyingly guttural consonant. “Poison!”
