path: root/unseen/Book 1/buda1.txt

The rippling black sea of hats undulates in rows as the men make their way out of the square. The trolleys are stopped, silent and abandoned. The sea moves slowly down, turning on Andrássey Avenue, past the black flags, away from the smoking bronze torches of the catafalque and toward the Ring. 

His father's shoulders lurch in time with the crowd. A woman in a black tea gown walks beside them. The drooping brim of her hat shades all but the sides of her cheeks which flush as her faint boots stumble awkwardly on the wooden planks of Andrássey Avenue. At the front of the procession, just behind the hearse with its gilded horses and wreaths from governors and statesmen, three riders hold silver staves, black lanterns hanging down. Wafts of Myrrh and incense drift back over the crowd carried on the still-chilly May air blowing down off the distant hills. The woman trips again. A man to her right catches her arm and holds her steady. Theo watches them, wondering why the man has no hat. The crowd shuffles on.

On balconies above women curtsy the hearse. An old man in white linen suit doffs a bowler and makes a sweeping bow. Theo looks up to see the shining crown of the man's bald head. The man walking beside his father looks up as well and turns away smiling. He glances over at Theo and winks, but Theo is worried about the balconies. With the weight of so many onlookers he expects them to fall, crumbling into dusty rubble, destroying the waiters standing outside the café bars below.

His father is moving faster now. There is less theatre the closer they get to the city cemetery. Eventually only the obligated dignitaries and family will stand beside the grave in the violet twilight, watching as the body is lowered into the ground. Already the crowd is beginning to disperse into the cafés and coffeehouses, but the man continues to walk beside them. His pointed goatee and thin sideburns remind Theo of the Turkish boatmen that frequent his father's house. But he doesn't have the dark skin of a Turk, he is paler, but still olive complexioned and wearing the finest looking cloth Theo has ever seen. 

At Octagon Square the trumpeter's horn blows and the hearse turns onto the Elizabeth Ring. His father turns with the other Guild members and Theo catches a glimpse of the governor as he steps inside the coach. The cafés have pulled their tables back, a band plays traditional Hungarian songs. Even the derelicts, drunks and hustlers seem to feel the need to remain in the shadows, though he can see the glint of freshly lighted gas lamps on their greasy, threadbare jackets as they huddle in the alleyways and stoops, hats removed while the procession passes.

The man walking next to them begins to slow. Theo watches as his arm reaches out and grabs his father, who half turns and starts at first, nearly throwing Theo from his shoulders but catching himself just in time. The man without a hat steadies his father as he reaches up and lifts Theo's slight frame over his head, setting his feet down on the wooden planks. They talk for minute in hushed words Theo can't hear. The woman kneels down, smiling at Theo.

Did you enjoy the procession?

Yes ma'am says Theo shyly. She rustles his hair. 

Would you you like to have a cup of chocolate with us she asks smiling.

Theo looks up at his father whose face is turned toward the man, his jaw set back and half clenched. Theo stiffens, but smiles back at the woman. Yes ma'am.

His father hesitates but then shrugs and agrees, a nervous smile spreading slowly across his face. 

The somewhat awkward troupe settles into a corner table and the man and woman introduce themselves to Theo, but Theo is more interested in their clothes than their names. Both the man and the woman, whom Theo discerns is somehow or other connected to the man, have on a caliber of clothing Theo has never seen outside the shop windows along Vaci Street. The man's suit is impeccably tailored, fine and so deeply black that it seems to absorb the dull glow of the café's electric light. The woman's folds of chiffon rustle as she shifts in her seat, the delicate lace overlays and the velvet ribbon sashed high on her waist call out, begging him to crawl across the table and bury his head in them. She whispers something to the waiter and he disappears into the back, returning shortly with hard candy along with lager and spritzers for the rest of the table. Theo sits straight in his chair the way his father taught him, sucking deliciously on the crystallized candy while the woman tells his father about her own daughter, saying she would very much like to meet Theo, though Theo is unsure why that would be. He looks up to inquire about the daughter, but stops mid-thought when he sees it glittering on her neck. Before he can stop them, tears well up in his eyes turning the diamond broach dangling from her neck to a sea of starry crystals in his smarting eyes. He hurriedly sets the candy on a napkin and excuses himself to the restroom. 

In the back of the café, before ducking into the restroom, Theo turns around looking past that counter bar where a line of men in half-unbuttoned coats roar in drunkenly, sing-song welcoming the new century for the hundredth time. He watches his father talking to the woman in hoarse shouts, his face clouded by smoke from the cigarette that dangles from his slender fingers, the man between them smiles at Theo across the room. Theo turns and, after locking the bathroom door behind him, slumps to the floor and begins to sob uncontrollably. It starts as a single string plucked and then cascades like a bow pulled cross a full chord until the sound of his sobs fill the white marble tiles, dancing around the porcelain toilet, bouncing off the iron fixtures of the sink, muted by carefully laid towels that drive the sound down, under the closed door and out into the café where it disappears into the general murmur where nothing, not even a paltry echo, returns. Instead, something else creeps into his aural periphery, outside, through the window. Leaking in between the paint-flecked sill above his head come the sounds of a fiddle. Theo sniffles and forces himself quiet for a minute to listen closer, catching now the melody of a man singing punctuated by the clatter of a woman's boots on the hard stone of the alleyway outside. Theo stops crying entirely, caught up in the muted sounds just beyond the glazed glass. Listening closer he can hear the sound of a carriage further up the road, the murmur of dispersing crowds, the echo of men shouting on the street, the clanging of trolley bells, the clopping of horse hooves, and in the distance the fog horn of a barge departing down the Danube, but the woman's laugh pulls him closer, back into the alley just beyond the window above him. Theo stands up and fumbles with the weathered sill until he pries it open and looks down at the scene below.

The fiddler is standing on a crate swaying back and forth to the music, head cocked half belting out a slurred song while he watches a man and woman dancing badly in front of him. Her skirts swirl, the man stumbles on the uneven ground and nearly causes her to fall. Theo rests his head on the windowsill and thinks about his dream, the same dream he has every night. His mother is there, someone is playing an accordion, another a fiddle, the room is dark lit only by a handful of candles burning on the table where he sits waiting for something. People are dancing round the open room in front of him, his mother among them but he can never see her clearly, only the faded and yellowing image from his father's bureau, spinning between the others before him, singing and laughing, but drained of color and life. At some point the apparition always crosses the room and leans down to whisper something in his ear before scooping him up in her arms, his forehead nestled against her skin, her neck warm against his face, the soft line of her jaw nestling his head beneath her chin where his lips purse on the hard and glittering diamante brooch. Out the corner of his eye the room is always a dizzying blur, his mother spins with the music, revealing to Theo a whirl of chairs and bookshelves intersected by men in long coats fanned out with the motion of their feet, women at the end of their outstretched arms, their skirts a blurry kaleidoscope of blues and whites and always the room begins to spin, creating its own momentum, turning and turning as more strings fill in the music, violas and cellos now, until a whole symphony is assembled and heading toward a crescendo when suddenly the bottom begins to drops out, one stuttering note at a time, slowly collapsing until the images begin to blur and fade away, first the cello, which disappears into the swirling flower patterns of the wallpaper, followed by the pounding timpani and marshal sounds which crumble into the wainscoting, until the fiddle falls silent and the accordion wheezes slowly into the smoky background, replaced by a suffocating blackness. Theo is falling now, looking back up at the faces above, watching him as he rushes downward and a sound begins to fill his ears, a sound like the Danube spilling its banks in the spring, it curls in under his toes and he feels unafraid, but certain he will die, and then the faces become too distant to see and the light disappears into a pinpoint star between the edge of everything and total blackness, until Theo starts upright in bed, gasping for breathe.

He watches now as the man tries to spin the woman along his outstretched arm, away from the rotting cabbage and potato peelings of the alley gutter, but the stones beneath his feet seem to give way and he loses his balance and slowly falls in a crumbling motion into the rotting vegetables and sewer water, laughing as he goes. The fiddle player stops in concern. The man slowly picks himself up, still laughing and struggling out of his now filthy coat which he lets fall back into the gutter. He throws his arm around the woman and they walk off drunkenly, zigzagging up the alley and out into the street leaving the musician still standing, fiddle in hand, looking after them.

Theo?

The voice startles him away from the windows. Yes? He unlocks the door and the man in fine clothes slides in. 

What are you doing in here?

Theo shrugs and gestures to the open window. Watching.

The man studies his face for a moment and then asks if everything is okay.

Theo thinks for moment and decides that this question is not meant to be answered.

Theo watches as the man turns to the mirror and studies himself for a moment, idly dancing a gold coin across his knuckles and between his fingers. He looks at Theo through the mirror and turns, still flipping around the coin. And then suddenly it's gone.

The man smiles and shrugs. 

Theo laughs and instinctively clasps the man's hand within his own, turning it over in search of the missing coin, but it isn't there. 

Where did it go?

It's gone. 

Yes, but to where?

Somewhere you can't go.

Where is that?

Look. The man turns over both hands to ensure that Theo can see he does not have the coin. Theo nods.

The man then reaches up behind Theo's ear and pulls back with a large diamond stone dangling from a thin velvet choker that's laced between his fingers.

Theo stands for a moment gaping. How did you...

The man just shrugs. Clean yourself up and come back to the table and then maybe I'll show you. The man turns back to the mirror, touching his hair and smiling back at Theo before turning to disappear out the door. 

Theo steps up to the sink, standing on his tiptoes to wash his face when he notices at the bottom, near the drain plug, the missing gold coin. 

Theo looks up in surprise, but sees only his own face staring back at him. There is a moment of displacement and for the first time Theo sees himself as others must, a young boy in cheap clothes brushed and manicured to appear nicer than they are, it takes him a minute to realize that the reflected face in the mirror is his own. But when it dawns on him, he can feel his face freezing up, crystallizing into the form Theo will henceforth know, the smooth, almost angelic skin of a statue frozen in a moment he will soon forget. Though eventually spots of stubble will come in, and by seventeen a full beard much like his father's, will begin to grow, the smooth foreign skin will never entirely fade and the beard will never cover that momentary realization, the feeling of being an impostor in his own skin that lingers long after the realization has passed.

That night, lying in bed listening to the barges plying their way down the Danube, Theo's dream changes. This time instead of dropping off into darkness, he remains, nestled against the rough coolness of the stone, his mother's neck warm against his check until the room gives way to the stars, puncture holes in the ceiling of the room at first until they begin to break free and the room falls away, down into the blackness away from Theo who finds himself beside the river watching as the man without a hat stands alone on the quay, dressed in the same black suit waving to Theo from the far shore. And then he disappears.