BIRDS OF PASSAGE, CHAPTER 12: Hard Currency Street
When Kalliopé leaves the café, she walks back up past the market, which is closing now, and climbs onto the packed 49 bus just in time. The bell rings, and the driver rattles the engine to life as the next bus pulls up behind.
A substantial woman with a wen the size of a quail’s egg sniffs and tries to edge away from Kalliopé. Too bad. There’s nowhere to go, they’re in this together, and that couple carrying a huge string-tied parcel between them will make sure neither woman will be able to budge even after the crowd thins a little. But Kalliopé, who is short of pity these days, just opens her mouth and yawns a great big onion-flavoured yawn at her.
The light changes, and the bus wheezes on its way along the edge of Moscow Square. Are they going to change the name of this square, too? Half the streets in Budapest have had their names changed in the past few months. Almost all the communist names are gone, and the streets have been given back the pre-war Hungarian names, or at least Habsburg names.
People’s Republic Street is now Andrássy Street again, Lenin Boulevard is now Teréz Boulevard, and the road named Érzsébet Boulevard and László Rajk Street is now back to being called Pannonia Street. Is it any wonder this country has lost its way, when half the time people are being directed to places that no longer exist?
They’re talking now of taking down the Liberty monument in the Citadel, which commemorates the Russians killed liberating Hungary in 1944, and replacing it with some memorial to all the war dead.
The bus squeezes past a big work site like a giant sandbox full of overgrown little boys playing with bricks and dump trucks and electric shovels. As it turns the next corner onto Fillér Street, Kalliopé thinks to herself, well, if you’re going to just start changing street names, I’d have a suggestion to make. Fillér Street — Penny Street — for a street of riches? Naah. Forint Street would be a slight improvement. Better yet, call it Hard Currency Street. That’s what everyone’s after these days.
They should put Kalliopé in charge of street names. For a start, she’d do something about the number of Habsburgs.
Then what? How about a Charter 77 Street? And an Imre Nagy Street. The must surely be planning to name something after the martyrs of 1956.
And a Sophie Török Street. and a Miklós Erdély Street, a Júlia Szendrei Street, and a Karl Polányi Street and — ha! — a Ilona Ducsinszka Boulevard! Likely story!
Catching a glimpse of a little side street called Pengő Street, Kalliopé laughs out loud. Now that’s a good one. The pengő was the prewar Hungarian currency. Old Money Street, in other words. The pengő was replaced by the forint when Hungary was hit with the worst inflation in human history. They’d minted billion pengő notes, and you had to spend your whole pay as soon you got it — or you’d be sorry, for it would be worth nothing in a matter of hours.
The bus heaves up the hill, and when Fillér Street finally levels out and joins Vadrózsa Street seven stops further on, Kalliopé gets down behind a half dozen other passengers, who all seem far too relieved to get away from her to bother watching where she is headed.
She sits down on the bench at the bus stop to wait till they’re all well on their way. Across the road is a big new school, all lit up in anticipation of the gathering darkness. Some of the people of the bus are walking over to it, picking up their children probably, and some of them may come back to the bus-stop before long. Kalliopé had better be well out of sight by then.
Humming to herself — what would happen if she were to start singing here? — she walks back down the hill and turns right, down the steep little lane called Gólya Steps, so steep that you wonder why they ever paved over the steps. A thin man with one arm held against his chest is resting on his walking stick beside a pothole, breathing painfully. The gate to the first apartment building is locked, and the entrance is too well lit anyway, not promising at all. The first house down the hill, one of the glitzy new Spanish-style houses, has a low fence. Interesting, especially as the streetlight here has burned out. With a quick glance round — the thin man has his back to her, and he’s getting close to the corner — Kalliopé moves right up to the gate to see if there’s any sign of a dog. The gate is locked of course, but there is no dog, at least not outside. Evening is closing in, and the lights of the cars and houses on Szabadság Hill are winking at Kalliopé from across the valley.
A little further downhill, on the other side of the street, the second house, a villa, is old and modest, perched on the hillside like a cottage out of a fairy tale. A red-tiled roof, grapevines hanging from the stucco porch, flower boxes leading up towards the front door, the glow of lights from several windows. From where Kalliopé is standing now, her back to the Spanish-style monstrosity, this little house seems alone on the hillside, as lovely and inevitable as a house long forgotten, with its garden full of fruit trees, two ancient towering poplars at the gate, and the gate unlocked.
Kalliopé is now in almost complete darkness. The entrance to the villa is set far back from the street, and the porch light would blind anyone trying to see out from the front door. Two doorbells. That means two different families. Kalliopé closes the gate quietly, stands listening for a moment, and hear’s a child’s voice from the other side of the house. A child, of course a child, every child should live in such a house. Then the front door opens, and Kalliopé moves down the road, out of sight.
“Peter?” A woman’s voice calls out in a foreign sing-song. “Peter! I’m ready. You’d better put your sweater on. Come on.”
English.
A gangling vizsla comes loping up from the garden, followed by a boy of about ten. The dog veers over towards the fence and barks excitedly at Kalliopé.
A dog complicates matters. But it’s not the end of the world. She and Tivadar would just have to be more careful, and find out which of the two families the dog belongs to.
“Come on, Vili!” calls the child in a high, sweet voice.
Moving away from the fence, not too quickly, but purposefully, as if she were on her way home, Kalliopé sees the agile figure of the child in the light cast by the lamp at the door. His black hair is long and straight. He is beautiful, this fortunate child, just like a child in a storybook illustrated with more wistfulness than realism. Satisfied that Kalliopé is going on her way, the vizsla bounds after the boy happily, and the mother’s sing-song is cut off as the door closes on them all.
Tivadar has spent the past two hours with Rudi in the plush surroundings of a downtown bar that the owner — a blowsy woman of forty who was in love with the theatre and with Rudi when they were both young — has decorated as a boudoir. Now, climbing breathlessly up the side of the hill from the streetcar stop in the valley, his mind is teeming with the excuses he will make to Kalliopé.
He’s not too worried. An old friend wanted to do him a favour and bought him the clothes. He needs them. He’d never get anywhere, looking as he did. Yeah, he bought the drinks too, the same friend. He’s been living in the west. He can afford it. He’s got lots of money. He doesn’t even notice when he spends 20,000 forints.
Get Linda Leith’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Kalliopé’s okay. It’ll be alright. Tivadar has brought a pack of cigarettes with him, still almost half full.
Besides, the abandoned building is the answer to everything. Tivadar is on the comeback trail.
Gábor walks over to his desk and gazes out over the little street. Cecília the sparrow is perched on Gábor’s forefinger, and a Marlboro dangles from the fingers of his other hand. A large caped figure is down near the bottom of the road, but she is of no interest to Gábor. The woman who interests Gábor at the moment is Alice.
Whenever he looks down from the window of his apartment, he sees her. Running, walking with Vili, washing potatoes, staring at her reflection in the mirror, peering out into the night. She was anxious last night, and it wasn’t because of the car.
Then there was her outburst this afternoon. She knows Daniel is going back to Canada. But does she know about the relationship between Daniel and Pierrette?
What would possess her to stay on here alone? Pride? Perhaps there is some element of pride in it, a refusal to be at Daniel’s beck and call, especially now. But there’s more to it than that.
She is anxious at this very moment, he can feel it. And there she is, he can see her now, inside the door of the villa with her arms wrapped around her own waist, small and unsure of herself. And, in a rush now, he sees himself standing in front of her as she leans into him, and he takes her in his arms and holds her. Just that. He sees no more than that.
The door opens, and there’s Alice now, with Peter and Vili. She pauses briefly. Is she looking for him? He can’t see from this distance, not in this light. Gábor sees more clearly with his mind’s eye.
At first, Kalliopé thinks there is only one more building on the street, down at the corner. “Come on” — that’s what the woman said, the child, too. As she makes her way towards this corner building, singing under her breath, “Come on, Come on, Come on, Come on, Come on,” come sounding like calm — the only English Kalliopé kons she learned from songs — she realizes there’s an apartment building on the other corner as well, submerged in darkness.
Kalliopé stops and stares. What a prize! And just then a car turns the corner on Fillér Street and comes charging towards her. Suddenly terrified — nothing must spoil this — she jumps into the bushes to hide at the side of the road. And stifles a yell of pain as brambles as thick as her finger gouge her face and hands.
The car slows down directly in front of her. Have they seen her?
The door opens and a middle-aged man steps out, the open-necked collar of his grey shirt folded over the lapels of his jacket. He glances over at the building beside her for a moment — has he seen her? — and then, moving wearily — surely not! — he unlocks the gate of the building on the other corner. He pushes the light button just inside the door and walks out of Kalliopé’s sight.
The timed light goes off after a minute, and Kalliopé picks her way painfully out of the nest of brambles, back on to the road. Her hands are scratched, badly in one or two places, and her face feels far worse, so she takes the corner of her cape and wipes the blood off. The pain is abating, and she is anxious to see more of the building.
It’s a half-finished, three-storey apartment building, a shell of brick and concrete with black, staring holes for windows and doors, no roof, no stairs, no plaster. She turns the corner to find the pathway to the front of the building, and to find the evidence of construction work, and sees no sign of either. The land on all sides is overgrown with weeds and brambles, and as she makes her way through it to the entrance, she knows for sure the building has been abandoned.
Rich people can get poor, too. Or they can get into trouble. Who knows? Who cares? Tivadar came through! He has found them a home.
She wades through the soggy leaves that have blown in at the top of the concrete steps leading to the second floor. There she finds the corner most sheltered from wind and rain and prying neighbours’ eyes. It won’t be warm, but it will be dry up here, and the houses nearby will handily provide whatever else they need.
And suddenly she knows. Someone has been here. Is it only Tivadar? In the dark she can’t see enough to tell, but human feet and human hands have been here, and recently.
Before she can go on to the next room, Tivadar is calling her name softly from the lower level. She feels her way back down the steps, following the sound of his voice until she makes out the darker figure against the dark ground.
“Isn’t this grand?” he whispers to her, and she can smell the pálinka on his breath, and something else, too, something she can’t quite identify. “Look, if we pile some material up over there, we’ll have shelter and a soft…”
“Have you been upstairs?” she interrupts.
He just looks at her. Something’s wrong. He knows it from her voice, and she knows it from his silence.
Before they can go up together to look, though, there are low voices on the steps, and there’s nowhere to hide. Two ragged men stop dead in their tracks when they see Kalliopé and Tivadar huddled together in the shadows on the far side of the main floor. Judging from the silhouettes Kalliopé can see through the door, against the lights of Szabadság Hill, the shorter and possibly the older of the two men is wearing a cloth cap. The other is a bruiser. In unison they move across the room towards Kalliopé and Tivadar.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” It’s cloth cap who speaks. “This is our turf. We’ve been here for weeks, and you’re trespassing.”
“No-ooo!” Tivadar wails, catapulting himself at them.
And in that instant the nervous beam of a flashlight through a side window catches his airborne figure.
