THE BARGAIN, Part 4
“I DO NOT BARGAIN”
“Budapest! Now!”
We flew over a green bridge and landed softly. People partied right on the asphalt and didn’t pay attention to a landing dragon.
“Disembark!” said the dragon.
I walked towards the embankment, legs like cotton wool, the wind still whizzing in my ears. The air was balmy. I reached into the pocket and found my melted lip gloss. My hair was swept back into a bun. I took a selfie.
Meanwhile, the dragon sprang up and then threw himself down, hitting the asphalt and disappearing in the cloud of dust — to step out of it a second later as a skinny, smallish gentleman in all black: a sleek suit, silk shirt buttoned up to his chin, and a long, thin tie. A gold-and-diamond pin sparked in the twilight.
He danced slightly in his pointed shoes, obviously Italian. His sharp face moved, at once young and virile, yet, ancient and frail — like that of an old heroin junkie. The light curly mustache, Van Dyke beard, a long thin nose struck me as awfully familiar — yet I could not remember where I saw him. His dark green eyes burnt me from underneath a filthy woolen hat pulled down his knit eyebrows. I smelled orchid cologne and some other odor, foul and dense.
A sea horse in a glass jar of cheap orange cologne! Yes, I once preserved a sea horse in summer, in Crimea, for biology lab lessons, and — don’t ask me why — but that was exactly the gentleman in black.
Oh the curls and twists of the human psyche: Here I was in Budapest — yet in my mind the images of a long gone summer flashed like a movie trailer, like screenshots. Crimea, a salty sea paradise, the most peaceful place on earth… now torn by war… a kaleidoscope of bright visions: semiprecious stones, jasper, opal, jade; delicious crumbling cakes — Napoleon, melting ice-cream, trembling sunlight, strange and scary sea animals.
The nightmarish gentleman looked like a seahorse and dolphin at once, preserved, curved, indecent, nasty and impossible to unglue your eyes off. Everything about him was fake. He winked and I recognized the Brexit poodle: the same black fleecy hair sticking from underneath the filthy hat like question marks, the same angled and protruding mug and small, yellow teeth. He bowed.
“Let me take you to my playground in the heart of this erotic continent,” he said.
He spoke in soft sweet baritone yet it was an order. He beckoned his index finger — a dim oval stone gleamed on it in a heavy golden signet. Filth blackened under the long curled nail. The mix of glamour and shabby bling in him was revolting. Yet, he was confident, scary, and definitely sexy. You wanted to listen to him.
The draft from the river tickled my naked legs. Down the streets and parks we walked, almost ran, with monuments and posters, fences and signs in Hungarian, unreadable —
“Wait! I’ve never been to Budapest! I want to see it!”
Immediately, a beautiful tour guide — slanted blue-gray eyes, the sleek ponytail coiled around the cape of her neck — stopped in front of us, pointed at a large cathedral and asked a group of sweating tourists: “Does anyone know who is buried in St. Stephen’s Basilica? Raise your hand? No? A soccer player! He is said to have had a holy left leg! He made our country great and he is our saint!” I joined the crowd.
A marching band of young Christians passed by the cathedral doors, singing hymns, drumming and dancing, waving banners, chanting.
“Come with us! To Krakow! Meet Pope! Confront terrorism with God’s love!”
I remembered that Pope just announced the 86 year old French Catholic priest slayed by terrorists during the mass in front of the congregation a saint and “the killing in the God’s name — Satanic.”
“Do you know that these young people are currently marching all around Europe — Prague, Vienna, Paris?” asked the guide.
We walked down a narrow street and ended up at an empty square in front of a fountain and a monument.
“Here the government installed the German invasion monument. You can see how they are re-writing history. Hungary here is a mere victim, attacked by the Nazi invaders. Nothing here indicates that Hungary entered the war on the Nazi side.”
“Here is a bit of history and statistics for you. Hungary entered World War II on the side of Germany and Italy. We had a Nazi government till 1943. Then we tried to go neutral and this is when Hitler invaded us. In 1944, the Arrow Cross Party, a Hungarian fascist party ruling after the German occupation, moved 70,000 Budapest Jews into ghettos where more than half of them starved to death. 15,000 Budapest Jews were killed in labor camps and death marches. The Arrow Cross lined up Jews along Danube, tied them with ropes and shot. The river carried the bodies away. Approximately 3,000 shot…”
“Before being killed, Jews had to remove shoes and leave them on the embankment. The shoes were a currency during the war.”
The iron eagle spread its wings — like my dragon. Fascism is inside every nation, inside every one of us, I thought. It’s in the fear of the unknown, alien, strange, in this divide “us” vs “them,” “mine” vs “alien,” “family” vs “foreign.” It is in the impossibility to fully face our fear, the frightening truth — the fainting, flickering truth.
“We have a referendum in October. The question is whether Hungary should let Brussels decide on the number of refugees let into the country…The Hungarian society is really divided.”
Down the streets lined up with shops selling pilot helmets, gas masks and goat heads, ice bars, and churches…
…we walked, the sense of the ending world getting stronger. Languages mixed — English, French, Hungarian, Russian, German, languages I have never heard…
The street lamps flamed like torches. We were back by the bridge… more people partied on the green rails.
The music boomed; trash cans overflowed; young women in short skirts and men in skinny jeans drank beer, danced and kissed; the heat was scorching.
RUIN BARS
It got darker and darker…
“These are the Ruins, the Jewish ghetto. After the war it stayed abandoned and ten years ago independent artists turned them into bars and nightclubs. Now the place is popular with trendy young people. On the weekend nights it is a huge party.”
“They party on the ruins?” I asked.
The guide did not answer. Instead, she evaporated into the darkness, along with her tourists. Jackie opened the heavy doors. Inside, the party boomed; red lights and burning candles swayed under the vaulted arches.
Young people danced between graves. On the stage, a cabaret show went on: fire eaters, contortionists and clowns.
I took a green drink — absinthe? — from Jackie and sipped it while he talked.
“I applaud you people. Dancing? Drinking? Like kids — no memories, no experience. All the bones and ruins underneath your feet, all the ashes — and you are dancing! You don’t feel the weight of history. You think you will live forever… or, you don’t think, do you? Bravo!”
I stopped listening to him. I, too, wanted to dance. The music poured and I stopped thinking about ghettos, wars, dictators, hubris, war — who cares?!
Walls of the ruins, the holes of the windows, the gaps of the doors and the bar shifted, shook and dissolved. I couldn’t see straight.
Jackie got close. His seahorse smell made me dizzy: orange cologne, dead dolphins and black cherries, my gone land. His lips moved, I felt his breath on my neck but I couldn’t move.
I was paralyzed like in a dream. He touched my eyeballs.
Terrible bright light cut me like a razor.
He touched my ears. Ringing and noise stopped and I heard everything: the clouds in the sky, the seaweed in the underwater currents and worms deep inside the earth. He pressed his fiery lips to mine and pierced his nails into my chest. The heat poured inside me like melting iron…
The last thing I remember before waking up in an emergency room was a voice from above — or maybe from inside,
“Rise! See and hear! Burn hearts with words.”
WELCOME HOME!
The police said that I was drugged, kidnapped and raped. Otherwise, how the hell did I get from London to Casablanca, Morocco, without a passport, credit card or money?
The cops in Morocco deal with this sort of things a lot. It was a possible scenario, and they wanted some logical explanation. Rape is real— always has been— everywhere; for women, men, and countries. The whole continent is named after the woman kidnapped and raped… Oh Europe, beautiful Europa, wide-eyed Phoenician princess of a fluttering veil — my heart bleeds for you, as the bull carries you further and further away from me across the blue waves…
…but this is not at all what happened to me — no, sir. No sexual violence here. I am good.
It’s just I didn’t tell police what happened. I did not mention Budapest or the flight. (I told them that I picnicked at St. James park with four strangers, blacked out and could not remember a thing.) They — understandably and mistakenly — concluded the drink was spiked with the date drug.
What was I supposed to tell them — that I had drinks with Count Usupov, Gavrillo Princip, Eva, Adam and a Devil? That I flew across Europe on the back of a dragon? That I saw the fires of Inquisition? That I ended up with a fresh tattoo on my wrist: “I do not bargain” and a prophetic vision?
Because I could not possibly tell them that my father’s ghost returned and explained to me the meaning of it all, could I? I would have ended up in a mental institution! But I can tell it here, on this blog.
Yes, my father came back with our family volume of Pushkin’s complete work open on Prophet poem…and he read it to me as I lay there like dead…
***
I flew back home as soon as the US Consulate in Casablanca issued me a new passport. Everyone was kind to me…
“Welcome home, Ms. Yampolsky,” said the customs officer. (It was two months before Trump became the President but that’s a different story…)
This is my last entry for this travel blog. My editor loved the story, and now I am also a contributing writer for Drunken Boat!
This summer I am planning to go to Thailand, Cambodia and, maybe, Nepal. Or, perhaps, Mexico. Who knows, right? We are still free to travel and think, aren’t we? We are always free to travel and think.
And as a writer — I know just what to do.
To be continued. (Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here.)
Netta Yampolsky is a staff writer for WanderingStars.com and a freelance travel blogger based in Venice Beach, California. When she is not busy exploring the unknown parts of the world, she drinks too much gas station hazelnut coffee, smokes Vogues, reads Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kundera and works on a film script “The Fall of Empire.” When she doubts her destiny she meditates on her last tattoo: “I do not bargain.” You can reach her at neya666@gmail.com.
