Read Online Under Budapest by Ailsa Kay - Free Book Online Page A

was?”
    He was at a loss. He felt how hot his face was, how sweaty because he’d walked so quickly all the way home just to ask her this. “But people are poor there. And you can be arrested just for speaking your mind. It’s like a prison, and there’s an iron curtain all the way around it.”
    â€œThat’s true. Now aren’t you happy you are Canadian?” She went back to peeling potatoes. “Na. What did you learn in French class?”
    Now she fiddles with the crinkly paper of the bouquet. “My mother was only sixty-three when she died. I’m more than a decade older than my own mother. Can you imagine?”
    The subway jostles. “She was probably about forty when I left. She seemed so old. Old and angry. My God, always angry. We couldn’t do anything right. Zsofi and I, we used to go out at night just the two of us, sit in the courtyard, or wander up and down Szent Istvan Korut, just to be free of her.”
    As his mother rambles, Tibor turns his mind to the coffee house near Ferenciek Ter—its elegant round tables and soaring ceilings—and the reading he’d brought with him. If they spent thirty minutes in the cemetery, an hour even, he could still salvage the late afternoon. She’d need a rest and he could get away, finish his paper, join his friend Peter later for a drink, as planned. Tibor wanted to talk to him about this paper he was working on, about the tunnels and the creation of fear, fear and far-right paranoia. He and his mother ride the rest of the way without talking.
    â€œHere we are.” His mother pats his thigh. Grasping the rail, she stands while the train is still moving. It shudders to a stop and she sways, finding her balance.
    Forty minutes later, Agnes picks her way along the rough stone paths of the old graveyard, map in hand. The map is drawn in blue ballpoint on a sheet of paper torn from the kind of little notepad only old ladies carry in their purses. It’s getting soggy in the rain.
    â€œMom, can I just take a look at that?”
    She hadn’t asked him to come. She hadn’t asked for a lecture on Soviet architecture or his solicitous hand at her elbow. She doesn’t need his help reading the map, though he’s already twice reached out his hand for it. “I am fully capable of reading a map, Tibor,” she’s said each time, but she doesn’t want to seem secretive or raise his suspicion. He’d never believe her, for a start. He has his own ideas about history. That’s fine. Historians tend to miss the point.
    â€œI don’t think we’re going in the right direction, Mom. Could you just let me see the map?”
    The rain had started almost as soon as they’d exited the subway. A cold, thick winter rain. She’d worn waterproof boots, in expectation of slush. Tibor had not, and his suede walking shoes were getting soaked through. She says nothing about his impractical shoes or the slush or the creeping cold. Neither does he, though they’ve been wandering in circles for more than an hour.
    Agnes looks around. Nothing is quite as it should be. The paths veer left where they ought to be straight. Trees obscure what she’d been assured were obvious markers: the sculpture of a couple, dressed in 1950s workers’ garb. A tall angel, wings spread. The rain is creeping under the collar of her jacket, and her umbrella is next to useless. A fool’s errand, made worse by her son’s immaculately contained seething.
    The map is from a Hungarian woman she’d met in Toronto at a funeral. It was funny, the way it happened. So coincidental, she couldn’t help but think it must mean something. The service was over and Agnes was downstairs in the church basement, eating a sandwich. The Hungarian accent was the first thing she noticed.
    â€œWe were four women to a cell. There was me, Klara Lengyel, Marta Horvath, and Zsofi…Zsofi Perec? No. Zsofi Teglas