41. Budapest, 1994
The music that pours from the building does not match its exterior. The building is old, perhaps erected before I buried myself alive, and it crumbles with ill repair. The entire city is this way, with bullet holes in aged stone structures, next to neon signs advertising western products.
After the Wall fell, I headed east to see what lay on that side of the world, a world everyone said was collapsing.
It was strange to walk through the graveyard of a civilization I did not know.
When Greece and Rome and the Caliphate fell, I was there to see it.
When the Christians rose from slavery and destroyed all that came before them, I knew what was lost.
I learned so much by listening, by wandering through bars and cities.
I learned of television, but that most of what I saw was not real.
Sitcoms, they were called. A group of people living in New York City, talking of their relationship problems. A man who sat on a couch and hated the woman he married.
These were from the west, from a country that did not exist when I tried to die.
It was in a bar that I met Réka. She had short hair she colored blue and metal in her lip and eyebrow. She wore old black clothes and military grade boots she found secondhand. She cursed loudly and openly.
She was a whirlwind of a woman, like nothing I’d ever seen before.
She saw me sitting at a bar without a drink and climbed onto the stool next to me. Her breath was warm with liquor, but her words were confident.
“New to city?” she asked in English.
“I’ve just arrived,” I told her. She smirked.
“Arrived? So formal.”
I’d tried to modernize my English with what I saw on sitcoms, but sometimes I still said something that made her laugh. She called me Mel and told me I was an old soul, that she could see it in my eyes.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Two thousand years old,” I replied.
She cackled and slammed the top of the bar, signaling for another drink from the bartender. He poured two small drinks that smelled like gasoline. I emptied mine on the floor before tilting it into my mouth. I copied her grimace.
“Where are from? Your accent…strange,” she said.
“Greece,” I replied.
“I’ve never met anyone from Greece,” she said, twirling her empty glass between her fingers. “Tell me, Mel, is the future socialist or capitalist? How do we escape the inevitable collapse?”
“Everything collapses eventually,” I said. “Nothing is forever.”
“Love, perhaps,” she suggested.
“Especially not love.”
She took me to the underground. It was metaphorical and literal—a culture ignored by the mainstream, hidden in basements and condemned buildings.
They listened to grating music on too-loud speakers that frayed and hissed with age.
Everything was repurposed. All trash went to building a new piece of furniture or to someone’s art.
She took me to slam poetry readings, where the youth cried and shouted and screamed their frustrations. There were no whispers of anger behind closed doors, no judgement to those who said their feelings aloud. The audience screamed with the presenter. It was raw and uncomfortable.
You would have hated it.
That’s all I kept thinking, everywhere I floated.
You would have hated this open display of emotion, been embarrassed by the people on stage. I could hear your offhand comments, dripping with cynicism, anytime the humans made a volatile point.
The music, you would have liked. The first time I heard the melancholy chords pumping through the speakers, I was suddenly in that house in Paris, with your fingers drumming a tune while I tried desperately for your attention.
How long were you with that other woman? How long had you been courting her, while I was finding friendship? The ache had dulled—I suspect being buried for centuries would do that to a hurt. It dulled, but did not disappear.
“Perhaps you have something to say?” Réka asked once. We spoke in Hungarian, a language so much like others I’d learned. They melted together, a past and present version of the languages I’d gathered over the centuries. She helped me with Hungarian and I helped with her English.
“There are no words,” I told her, hoping she’d understand.
“Then scream?” she suggested.
I did not fear being before the humans. The crowd was small, twenty or so young people who’d watched their world collapse while stuck behind an iron curtain.
I once thought humans incapable of understanding the depth of my feelings because their lives were so fleeting.
Everything was temporary to them, while I was eternal.
And you and I were eternal, once.
I worried what I might see when I looked down upon them. Would it be the reverence of the cult in Alexandria? Would it be the dissection of Le Sang Bleu? Would it be Zora’s glassy-eyed stare as she gazed at the ceiling?
“My mother used to say ‘the only way out is through,’” Réka said.
“What does that mean?”
“You go forward, even when it is hard. You just go forward, and eventually it will be behind you.”
Go forward. To where, though? How far must I travel to dig myself free of the cobwebs of what held me down? Was there a world where I did not long for my ending?
I stood on the makeshift stage and considered my words. When they didn’t come, I sang. I opened my mouth and sang one of the temple songs from my youth. How is it that I still remembered them? So many parts of my past were lost to me, buried under the weight of more significant events.
The songs, though, they stayed.
Someone hit a broken piece of furniture rhythmically as I sang, keeping a beat. Another tapped along his legs, his stomach, his head, percussing.
A woman joined in, her voice low and melodic, humming a tune to match mine. Someone else pulled out a recorder and captured it all, lifting the recorder high so as to take every sound.
We finished together. I don’t know how, but they understood when the song was over. They understood when I no longer needed to sing.
I joined Réka, ducking my head at the clapping that followed.
“I did not know you had a voice,” Réka said, shoving my shoulder.
“Neither did I,” I admitted.
That is when I stopped walking toward death, and instead through it. It was not a conscious decision, not a moment I knew and understood. It was a slow unsettling. I’d spent so many centuries wanting to die, and now I did not.
I did not want to live, but I did not want to die either.
Budapest was where I began to walk through it.
I stopped ignoring what drove me underground and instead tried to feel it.
I sang songs from my memory and let the disillusioned youth clap along and add their voices.
It did not drown my own, it added to it.
It was strength, it was resilience, it was growth.
I moved through without being dragged under again.
Tonight I am to sing at one of the clubs. It is different from the slam poetry meetings. This is a party, where the humans come to get drunk and do drugs and have sex. It is a place where they forget, not remember.
I take the stairs to the basement, where the music grows louder and louder. I have to put cloth in my ears to stand it. I don’t know how the humans do, I am sure they will go deaf one day from it.
Réka meets me at the base of the steps.
“I thought you were chicken,” she says.
“Chickening out,” I correct.
“I thought you were out chicken,” she says, then grins when I try to correct her again. “Mel, you are melancholy,” she says and kisses my cheek. She is no stranger to closeness, to intimacy. The new world does not care if you hold hands in public, or if you are kissing on a street corner.
Unless you are two men or two women, or two people they cannot shove into those boxes. Then they become angry.
But not down here. In the basement, no one cares.
“Réka, you are…” I trail off, because I do not know the Hungarian word for what I want to say. “Fotiá mou,” I land on.
“Is that Greek?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“Directly? My fire. But indirectly…no translation.”
Réka grins and grabs my hand to lead me to the man in charge of the music.
“This is her!” she yells over the noise. He holds up two fingers and we slip into the crowd for two songs. Réka is close to me, her body pressed to mine. We say hello to others we recognize; we mingle along the edges of the crowd.
Then the music man motions for me, and I take the microphone.
I sing a song from Rome, a tragedy of a lover lost to war and a woman who waits for his return.
It’s haunting, one of my favorites. I wonder if anyone remembers this song.
Not the words—the Romans were famous for recording things.
But the way it was sung, how you pause for a long time after you mention the ship on the horizon that blinks away.
Did time erase the tones? The tune?
Is it still the same song if these rules are not remembered?
The music man adds his twist. He understands the song is sad, I told him it was. I told him it was about longing for something that no longer lives.
“Something that no longer lives? Like a dead person?” he asked.
“Something like that,” I agreed.
When we are done, the crowd claps and whoops and I return to Réka. She wraps her arms around me and pulls me close, pressing her lips to my neck.
“I love your voice,” she says.
“It is too loud in here,” I say.
“It is loud everywhere,” she replies.
“Not everywhere.”
I take her to my home. I’ve brought no one here since I claimed it. The invasion of the cult in Alexandria, the woman in our sitting room in Paris…I cannot have that. My home is my home, and I will not have anyone in it.
Réka looks around the space, her eyebrows climbing up her face.
“How did you get this?” she asks.
“I killed the first owner,” I say. She laughs, shaking her head.
“You are very funny sometimes. How do you joke without a laugh?”
Then she pulls me against her and presses her lips to mine.
I knew this was coming. I’d watched her gravitate closer with a mix of dread and apprehension.
I’ve longed for the comfort of closeness of another.
When I fall asleep in the morning, my fingers reach for someone that isn’t there.
I wake with my hands curled in my grave dirt.
I kiss her back, and I wait to understand what it is I feel. I wait for arousal or clarity or or or…something.
I wait to feel something other than empty.
Réka does not bring that clarity. Even as her mouth moves along my jaw to my neck and her hand slides under my shirt to caress my breast—I feel nothing.
When her teeth graze my collarbone, I think of you.
You, with your head between my legs, your teeth in my inner thigh.
You, watching this, your lips turned down in disapproval.
I push away from Réka. She blinks at me with swollen lips and hooded eyes.
“Are you not…?” she begins.
“Silence,” I say. Her jaw closes, her eyes unfocused. I pace the room and run my hands through my short hair. I feel your eyes on me, I feel you on my skin, I feel you in the bit of saliva left on my collarbone.
I wheel on Réka.
“You do not know where I live. We parted in the street. I told you I’m leaving for America. You wished me well. You will miss me, but it will fade. I am just another woman.”
“You are just another woman,” she repeats.
This is my problem, I realize. I have walked the known world with you, I must visit the world unknown. There is another half I’ve not seen, another half untouched by the memory of you.
I will go to America, because the only way to the other side of you is through.