“Egészségedre,” the man next to him repeated, and they finally sipped their wine, which was cloying, almost unbearable, in its sweetness.
“Why is it that you say you are an American?”
“My family, we spoke German at home — before the war.”
Recognition, perhaps even some vague, uncomfortable understanding, passed over them. The first man, the one next to Harkályi, motioned for a passing waiter. “Négy Unicum,” he ordered. There was silence for a measure or two. “Where did they send you?”
These were things that Harkályi did not talk about, yet his personal background had become public knowledge, a cultural commodity to be sold and bought and consumed. Despite his reluctance, his embarrassment, and his guilt, his story existed independent of himself; it was as well-known, or known better, than even his music. Some words were not fit to be spoken aloud, yet he invoked them here: “To Terezín.”
“You were very young.”
“I was fifteen years old when the camps became liberated. My brother and I, we went to America.”
“And now you have returned,” the fat man said.
“To the scene of the crime,” the slightly less fat man said. He was extremely drunk.
“Tessék,” the waiter said, and deposited four glasses of Unicum on the table. He also carried with him a small kettle of goulash, which was hung suspended above a tea candle he placed in front of Harkályi. He ladled a portion of it into his bowl for him. The combined smell of paprika and beef rose. Pristine, white cubes of potato soaked in the glistening, red broth. He was ravenously hungry.
“Good appetite,” the fat man told him, and added something indecipherable to the waiter.
“Egészségedre,” the men around him said, lifting their glasses.
“Egészségedre,” Harkályi repeated. He held the Unicum under his nose, then watched the other men swallow their own portions whole. They smiled and urged him onward, and he obliged them. The liquid tasted like burned rubber, and then like rotten vegetation. The other men laughed. “That is awful,” he told them.
“Maybe,” the fat man said, “but it is Hungarian.”
The three of them stood from the table. They left a small pile of colorful bills, and exited with a few awkward salutations. The steam rose from his goulash, which he ate feverishly. From a straw basket he removed a slice of fresh bread, of házikenyér, the likes of which he had often believed he would never again taste. When the waiter passed, Harkályi caught his eye and asked for another serving of Unicum.
5.
The stew in his belly, he feared, would not keep him warm for any good duration, so he walked quickly. His true destination, the great Dohány synagogue, which stood in the opposite direction, would wait for him as it had done so patiently and without complaint for so many years; it was expecting him. He will deliver the stone he carried in his pocket, an offering that will signify, to him, the distance that existed between remembering and never forgetting. First, however, he must see the Danube or, more correctly, the Duna.
He wound his way along crowded streets made cavernous by tall residential buildings that emitted a singular blue light from a thousand windows. A whole nation lay asleep in a bath of commercial entertainment. In the absence of streetlamps, the glow filled the path before him for several paces, then plunged him again into a different kind of darkness. The hue of the entire street changed by degrees with every new televised scene, growing brighter and then darker again, and even darker and brighter yet. He carried himself, so he believed, directly toward the river.
The streets did not align themselves to a grid but rather to some circular logic of their own, and they certainly were not designed to accommodate this number of parked cars. The narrowness and curvature of the roads necessitated the haphazard distribution of automobiles, all of them small — Lada, Yugo, Fiat, Trabant — upon the sidewalks, and he was forced to either walk in the road, a dangerous proposition, surely, although the traffic appeared to have ceased for the night, or to maneuver his aging frame through an obstacle course of bumpers and side-view mirrors. The lawlessness was intolerable, yet he attempted to maintain a lively, brisk pace in an effort, amply rewarded thus far, to retain the warmth of the coffee house. It was a wonder that the entire city didn’t sink under its own vehicular weight. As a child he had spent considerable time underground, hiding from the Arrow Cross. He pictured the entire surface of the city giving way, crumbling and cascading down into the cellars and catacombs of Pest, where he once subsisted on the furtive scraps that friends of Kodály could, on occasion, deliver to him, often at the risk of their own well-being.
Harkályi did not encounter another pedestrian until he reached the embankment, although several taxi cabs passed him, slowly, attempting to entice him out of the winter air. The taste of paprika remained on his tongue, warmed him, until he emerged at the left bank of the Duna. He was farther upstream than he had anticipated, just below the Chain Bridge. Directly opposite him was Castle Hill, its dome aglow in buttery lights. To the left of it stood Gellért Hill, adorned by a statue of a woman who once held up a cog seemingly taken from some monstrous machine. When communism fell, she exchanged it for a leaf of some variety, clearly plucked from an equally monstrous tree.
He had spent many similar nights, at this very hour, walking along this river in Vienna, yet here it both was and was not the same river. To him it will always be the Duna, not the Donau or even the Danube. The Duna. All Hungarian history was steeped in it, as was that of his own family. The wind was harsh, but also comfortingly recognizable and sonorous. The river smelled of rust and, he had to admit, familiarly, faintly, of urine. There was also blood in the air. Somewhere around here, likely over on the Buda side, in front of the Gellért Hotel, his grandparents, unfit to travel, were gunned down, their bodies left to the vagaries of the tide while, in the hotel, men and women, naked and segregated, took the waters of the mineral-rich thermal springs seeping from the fault lines at the foot of the Buda Hills. His family tried to assimilate — they changed their name from Specht to Harkály, and, soon thereafter, at the advice of some kindhearted neighbors, to the more grammatically plausible Harkályi. His father left for a forced-labor camp convinced that those same neighbors were responsible for turning him over to the authorities.
For all of these many years, Harkályi longed to stand again at this river, to feel in his chest its peculiar, bitter stench. He breathed heartily, and was comforted. He owned nothing belonging to his grandparents except for this stone, which he considered throwing in after them, returning it to them here at their grave. From his parents, he possessed only a simple melody, which they often hummed and half-sang to him and his brother, and to each other. The next day, in the final measures of his new opera, he would share that song with the entire world.
6.
The only people fit to wander the embankment at that hour were lonely, world-weary old men and the prostitutes who preyed upon them. Harkályi walked slowly north, against the tide, along the wide promenade and past a pack of hyenic street hustlers who eyed him hungrily but maintained a distance. The fading red embers of an unfiltered cigarette landed in his path, and there was giggling. He extinguished it in stride and with satisfaction. Experience told him that there existed many ways to prostitute oneself, and he had reason to suspect that the bartering of one’s physical self was the least spiritually demanding of them. He pitied these shivering, desperate boys, but also envied them.
He passed a series of luxury hotels, their riverfront patios closed for the night, if not for the season. Budapest had grown wealthy. The stone lions at the base of the Chain Bridge greeted him like old friends. As a boy, he named them Scylla and Charybdis; between them, on the other side, a traffic tunnel led beneath the castle and toward the promised freedom of Western Europe. Sadly, these were not the same lions from his childhood, but reproductions, their offspring. As the Red Army wrested control of Budapest, the Nazis destroyed all of the bridges over the Duna, waiting until rush hour to do so. By that time, Harkályi was already convalescing in a Vienna hospital, awaiting, per Kodály’s arrangement, a personal visit from Anton von Webern himself. There was talk of a temporary post at Radio Vienna. When neither the visit nor the position materialized, the latter of which he did not particularly covet, he left for America without telling his mentor and continued his studies at a conservatory in Philadelphia. For years thereafter, his letters to Kodály were returned to him unread, except, he suspected, by the Soviet censors.