At the end of the block, a wide ramp steered him beneath the körút to an underpass, a colorful expanse with escalators leading down to the subway and steps up to the same trams he had seen from his hotel room. Folk musicians competed with bums for attention and spare change. Men sold telephone cards in front of a bank of blue, unused payphones. Burger King, TourInform, a flower shop, the locked entrance to a massive supermarket. A hallway beyond the escalators led, he remembered, to the rear of the train station. He found it difficult to differentiate the words being spoken around him, the signage. Viràg. An old woman, even older than himself, held a baking dish full of tiny, white, bulbous flowers in little leafy bundles, each maybe three inches tall. An elaborate, decorative scarf covered her head. Hóvirág — snow flowers. That was the name. Their appearance heralded the onset of spring, the end of another long winter. Harkályi approached her. “Csókolom,” he said. He had at his command the vocabulary of a child.
Her eyes brightened angelically. She appeared genuinely cheerful and merry, despite her degraded condition. Her cheeks revealed the frigidity of the atmosphere, only slightly warmer down here. “Jó estét kivánok.”
As a boy, he would with some anxiety await the first hóvirág of the spring, which, in a private ritual, he would wrap in similar bundles and present to his mother. They stayed on the windowsill of the kitchen, in cups of chipped and brightly glazed ceramic, some until the August heat descended from the Mátras, from Slovakia and farther.
“Menny?”
“Tessék?”
He spoke slower, “Menny?”
“Mennyi?”
“Yes — igen. Mennyi?”
“Száz forint.”
He didn’t have any coins, or even a hundred-forint bill. The automated teller machine at the airport dispensed only five- and ten-thousand forint notes. He offered her five thousand and she shook her head, dismayed. She pointed to the Tour Inform office, where he could get change, were they open. “No,” he said. “All of them. Minden.” He waved his gloved hand over the flowers like a benediction and she finally understood. From the bag at her feet she took out a sheet of newspaper from yesterday’s Magyar Hírlap, and laid it on the filthy concrete floor of the underpass. Harkályi expected to see his own picture looking up at himself again, but it did not appear. The old woman spread out the bundles of flowers on the paper, which soaked up water from the bottom of her baking pan. Lifting it from the corners, she placed the entire bundle in a flimsy plastic bag with vertical yellow stripes, loosely tied the handles together, and held it out for him. “Tessék,” she said, and quickly, with a furtive look around, slipped the five thousand forints into a pocket of her peasant skirt. “Nagyon szépen köszönöm,” she told him, collected her belongings, and walked quickly to the metro. He was left standing there with a bagful of soggy newspaper — yesterday’s news no less — and a garden’s worth of quickly dehydrating flowers. He could not help but laugh, and as he did a man of dark complexion, Gypsy maybe, or Turkish, slouched past and whispered, “Change money?” without looking at him.
3.
His glove gripped the conveyor belt, a dirty loop of black rubber leading endlessly into the abyss of the metro station below, circling beneath the iron teeth of the escalator at a greater rate of speed than that of the steps themselves. It moved too rapidly for his comfort, pulling his arm gently down ahead of him. But he did not want to let go; it was an extremely long descent, deep into the core of the city. Of the four long escalators only the outer two were in operation, one moving quickly upward and one downward. Vinyl siding the color of dark wood covered the walls and ceiling of the rounded tunnel and was plastered with stickers and crude illustrations upon which he refused to allow his gaze to linger. A series of plastic-framed advertisements whirred past him faster than he could discern them; a colorful fast-food cup slid down the metal barrier between his and the next escalator over. He watched it descend ahead of him and crash to the station floor. There was laughter at his back.
At the bottom, thrown from the machine, Harkályi was forced to step over the pile of ice cubes and in the process very nearly stumbled, regaining his balance only at the last instant. The bag of flowers fell from his hands and spilled to the ground, mixing with the ice cubes and cola. Four teenagers exited the escalator behind him and stepped on the hóvirág as they passed, smashing them with their boots. They continued past into the darkened corners of the station. Harkályi tried to collect the flowers again but nearly all were crushed. No one stopped to help him gather them from the ground. The old néni who had sold them to him was still waiting for her subway; she turned quickly away out of what appeared to be either embarrassment or disgust. He had no idea what to do with them now. To throw them away would be unthinkable. He left the most flattened of the bunch but returned the remainder to their newspaper-lined bag. They were a delightful burden. Magda would appreciate them.
The Nyugati M3 stop consisted of one long hallway interrupted by a series of metallic pillars. The silver letters above one of the tracks spelled ÚJPEST-KÖZPONT and, above the other, KÖBÁNYA-KISPEST. He was not sure which direction to take, as he did not yet have in mind a specific destination, so he moved toward the sound of the first oncoming train. When it stopped, dozens of people rushed from it, hollering and laughing and passing around bottles of wine and beer. A young woman wearing large headphones stumbled to a stop in front of him. He could not see her eyes through her sunglasses, but the volume of the so-called music emanating from her head was staggering. She looked up at him smilingly, reached into a pocket of her shabby coat, and produced a small safety pin, which, with some difficulty, she attached to the lapel of his overcoat. He made no move to stop her. When she finished he saw that affixed to the pin was a small ribbon of red, white, and green. She smiled and Harkályi watched her walk unsteadily away. She halted at the foot of the upward escalator, went over to the other, downward one, and picked up the remainder of his broken flowers. She gently dusted them off, tried to mend the damaged stems, and carried them in front of her like a bridal bouquet, back up to the city.
The subway left without him, a state of affairs he accepted as an omen to go in the other direction, south, toward Deák Ferenc Square. With the exception of several bums, Harkályi stood alone on the platform. Someone had spray-painted a swastika, of all possible profanities, on the wall map of Budapest, dividing the city into quarters, like Vienna after the war. He could feel the weight of the emptiness in his stomach. It was a Strange sensation to be underground here, again, yet not an entirely unwelcome one.
A rush of hot, stale air preceded the sound of the train’s arrival. Newspapers and paper bags took flight like so many sickly birds. Pulling to a moderately slow, metallic halt, the sky-blue cars appeared old and not very well tended-to at all. Dirt and colorless geometric graffiti covered the entire side of the train, which cracked open in two places and birthed another mass of red-faced young people into his midst. They jostled past him, taking with them their laughter, which ascended the escalator. As he stepped on board he could see, in the gap between the platform and the floor of the train, something shining amid the oily rocks lining the track bed; he couldn’t make out the precise shape before the orange light above his head buzzed and the doors slammed shut, sealed tight and airless by wide, vertical strips of black rubber.