that. It was completely blank.
She’d known I would never take her. She’d known I’d waffle in the last minute, known it from that first night standing over the Danube, stringing me along until she got every last cent. She knew, too, that what I was really paying for was not Janka but my freedom, not just from her and Janka, but from everything that had brought me there, to Budapest, in the first place. That blank letter, which would have stopped me dead at the border, which would have gotten me arrested if I’d tried to take Janka with me, was what I’d really been after all along.
It turns out there is a Museum of Failed Escapes, and that it is, as Judit said, in the ninth district. I went there once, many years after that day on the plane with the blank letter. It had been a private collection during the eighties, nineties, and early oughts, opening to the public in 2007, after its owner, András Fabiani, died and bequeathed the property to the city. During the time it was private, entry had been limited to a tiny circle of collectors, politicians, VIPs (and, I supposed, certain exotic dancers) favoured by Fabiani, who was one of those very well connected members of the communist elite who’d profited beyond imagining when the iron curtain came down and left him and his comrades well positioned to sell state property, hand out foreign contracts, and pocket most of the money. The museum was an obsession.
Despite being public, you still needed an appointment to get in. An older man met me and the other visitors at the door. His name was Mihály, forty-five or so, incredibly well dressed, and led us from room to room in the converted apartment that was a disquieting mix of vernacular architecture and supermodern minimalism. There were three floors to the museum, each one devoted to a different medium of escape, “land,” “water,” and “air.” After the tour, when the other visitors left, I asked Mihály if it would be okay for me to go back to level two, where I marvelled at how accurate Judit had been, because it was exactly as she’d said—all the different ways her sailors had tried to escape. Mihály accompanied me as I looked at the plastic boat, the hand-drawn map of the “seas of Hungary” (code for the lakes and rivers that crossed various borders to the west), a vial filled with the tears of the sailor who tried to cry himself to sea (the inscription said they were gathered from a failed escapee who’d been sentenced to ten years in the notorious Csillag Prison), the car outfitted with the ridiculous wheels meant to paddle along the Tisza, and a hundred other things.
There was a video on the wall showing an old guy in a sailor’s suit, his toothless mouth moving endlessly, underneath it a speaker quietly playing back his words—about constellations, trade winds, shifting tides. “There was a sailor who tried to . . ?” I looked at Mihály for help.
“To talk himself to sea. To make his mouth a sail. As if his words were so much wind.” The attendant looked serious for a minute, then smiled, and broke into a small laugh.
“Did you by any chance ever know a woman by the name of Judit?”
Mihály looked at me strangely. His face coloured. He shook his head. Then he changed the subject. “I worked for Fabiani a long time. He entrusted this place to me. He had nothing to do with exotic dancers . . .” Mihály paused, started over. “This is what I call ‘a poetic museum,’ as I said when we were upstairs.” He gave me a look that said I should have been listening more carefully during the tour. “Technically, not everything in here, not every piece, was part of an actual escape,” he continued. “Some were.” He nodded at the plastic sailboat. “But others were escapes of a different kind . . . It was Fabiani who found all these, and who believed they belonged together. These are escapes as he defined them.” Mihály paused again, waiting for me to say something. “The collection,” he finished, “says more about his notion of escape than anything else.”
I looked at the video screen, listening to the old sailor’s quiet disquisition on longitude and latitude and how the Soviet agents, if they followed you far enough, would become lost at sea, because Marx only ever wrote about people on land.
“A woman,” I finally said, “once told me about this place. Stories about these things . . .” I laughed. “Part of me thought I might find something of her here.” I waited. “This was a long time ago. When this place was still closed to the general public.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he said, sensing my disappointment. “Was she, were you . . ?”
“I was married then,” I said, not sure if this was an appropriate answer.
“Children?” he asked.
“A boy. Miklós.” I smiled. “He’s with cousins right now. Didn’t seem all that interested in coming here.” I shrugged and laughed, glancing at Mihály, who seemed to relax a bit. “He’s liking Budapest,” I continued, “it’s his first time.” I wanted to add something about Anna here, to tell him that Miklós’s mother was Hungarian too, and how jealous she’d been that our son was going to Budapest instead of her, and how she’d kissed him the morning I came to pick him up, and then kissed me, too, on the cheek, before going back inside to János, their daughter Mária, and that whole other life she’d come to after the divorce. And I’d taken Miklós’s hand and walked off into mine.
But before I could figure out how to phrase it, or even if it was worth phrasing, Mihály remembered something. “Did you ever hear about the sailor who tried to come back?”
“She never mentioned him,” I said.
“Her,” he said, guiding me to a glass case mounted on the wall behind which were large pieces of paper that appeared blank. Mihály told me to look closely at them, and I did, noticing how worn the paper was, as if it had been rubbed over and over with a wetted fingertip until there were only the faintest of lines, traces of red, blue, green. “She thought it was just a question of erasing the maps,” he said, “and she’d find herself once more in that place from which she’d started out. I mean when she’d started,” he corrected himself, “before she’d discovered anything of the world.” He came close to the glass to look at it with me. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
“It is,” I replied. And it was, like some transcript of dreams, written days later, when all you remember is the faintest of traces, a world already gone before it registered. But there was no surprise there, looking at it, only gratitude for what Judit had given me and what a woman like her, trapped in that life, would never be allowed—that hopefulness her sailors felt in their moment of escape, when home was still everywhere, glimmering out there, and where every mistake, every wayward decision, was for a moment erased.
The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived
ÍBOR KÁLMÁN. Tíbor Kálmán’s villa.” That’s what Györgyi told Zoltán the night they went AWOL from the camp, the two of them huddled in the barracks amidst the other conscripts, boys like them, but asleep, some as young as sixteen, called on in the last hours of the war in a futile effort to salvage a regime already fallen, a country and people already defeated. “We need to get to Mátyásföld,” Györgyi said, “that’s where the villa is. Tíbor Kálmán will give us papers.” But Györgyi didn’t make it far, only to the end of the barracks, to the loose board and through the fence, frantically trying to keep up with Zoltán, who always seemed to run faster, to climb better, to see in the dark. Zoltán was already waiting on the other side of the ditch, hidden in the thicket, when the guard shouted, when they heard the first crack of bullets being fired, Györgyi screaming where he’d fallen, “My leg! I’ve been shot! Zoli, help me,” and Zoltán looked back at his friend for a second, calculating
