Read Online Under Budapest by Ailsa Kay - Free Book Online

How nothing was the same, nothing respected.
    â€œYou don’t want some company?”
    â€œNo, no. Really. You don’t have time. I know your presen­tation is tomorrow. You should prepare, practise.”
    She probably assumes he’s the main event at this interna­tional conference—her son, the star. And Tibor feels suddenly both abashed and fond, and under the tidal insistence of such fondness, his plans erode.
    At Batthyany Ter, the escalator descends about a hundred metres at warp speed at a nearly vertical angle through a tight red-and-white metal tunnel. Tibor supports his mother’s elbow as they take the step together and are borne vertiginously down, handrail jiggering.
    â€œSo this wouldn’t have been nearly complete by the time you left,” he says. “Work on the metro halted in…1953, I think. It was this massive, hubristic exercise in Soviet symbolism. The deepest metro in the world, vertically superior to any other subway. I wish I knew who thought of the idea first. What chaos. Thousands of workers shipped in from the country to dig with shovels and pickaxes at fourteen different locations.”
    â€œIt’s true, I—”
    â€œThe dig under Rakoczi Ut was apparently the deepest. That’s the remarkable thing: there was absolutely no structural or engineering reason to tunnel so deep. Of course, in the absence of reason, one Soviet science journal claimed that tunnelling would expose the buried secrets of Budapest’s prehistoric past, bringing them to the surface for the enlightenment of all workers.”
    His mother seems surprisingly unworried by the dizzying, speedy descent, the look on her face almost seraphic. When they get to the bottom, she steps unhesitatingly as harried people push past.
    They sit side by side on the cold vinyl bench, and the train carries them under the Duna. His mother grips a bouquet of flowers—calla lilies, ferns, three yellow roses, some pink carnations—wrapped in stiff, crinkly green paper. With one gloved hand, she fiddles with the paper.
    â€œThe Soviet propaganda said that commuting via subway would save workers nine million working hours annually. Can you imagine? One newspaper declared that meant millions of Hungarian people could watch more than four and a half million movies. Right, Soviet movies, exactly. But then after Imre Nagy came in as prime minister—the first time, I mean, not for those few revolutionary days—the Soviet leadership ordered it all to stop. All the workers went home. They’d decided the workers needed apartments more than they needed transit. So they started building up instead of down.”
    The subway grinds to a halt. An electronic voice announces that the doors are opening. People pour in. The voice warns, “Careful. The doors are closing.”
    â€œThey built it so deep so the top party officials and their families could be kept safe in case of a nuclear attack,” she said. “That’s why they went so far down.”
    â€œWell, that was the rumour circulating, yes.”
    â€œThere were stores of food down there when the rest of us had nothing. ”
    â€œIt must have seemed that way.”
    â€œThey were preparing for war. Many people died building those tunnels. Country people. We learned that later.”
    She always did this, corrected him, as if to remind him that no matter how much history he studied, his knowledge could never match her real-life experience. She ambushed him with her past. In a grade six geography class, he learned about borders. Distraught, he confronted his mother after school: “Hungary is part of the Soviet Union?”
    She looked at him, confused. She was peeling potatoes into the sink and when she turned, one pink-rubber-gloved hand held the peeler, the other the potato. “What are you talking about?”
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me?”
    â€œWell, where did you think it