Viv Pencz

Decades after escaping its borders, my parents took me to their hometown, this dreamlike city torn between East and West. The graffiti shouting, “Russians, go home!” had disappeared. But the past still sang urgently down the old-world streets, all pink, green, and gold.

The Szechenyi Baths are golden yellow like krémes. Locals play chess there in the water, their legendary melancholy absent. My dad claims he once played three games simultaneously and won them all. Outside St. Stephen’s Basilica, a woman walked by us with a pig in her arms. It oinked with every step she took, and my dad laughed until he cried. “Only in Hungary,” he said.

Mystically quiet by moonlight, my sister and I snuck up to Fisherman’s Bastion in the summer rain. We stumbled upon a memorial to teen revolutionary Peter Mansfeld, a statue falling toward the pavement from the dark sky, forever suspended between life and death. We clinked our beers together and said “Egészségedre!” to revolution.

In the sun-shrouded morning, we visited the former KGB headquarters. I felt past lives breathing in the cellar where my own relatives were once imprisoned and tortured. We took the metro back, its local passengers olive-skinned as myself. The rush of the train sounded like an impending bomb, and I couldn’t wait to get back above ground.

While driving along the Danube after dinner, my parents asked if we should visit Grandma’s grave. The Hungarian Parliament shimmered like a magic altar afloat the river. I didn’t know how to tell them that I felt I couldn’t go. Then my mom said, “It’s okay. To be honest, I don’t want to. She doesn’t know if we go or not.”

It would be a better tribute, we decided, to spend our time absorbing the land she called haza all her life. And my thoughts lingered over her like the gulls over the Parliament’s dome, though she’d never know it.

Published in the NOSTALGIA issue of SAD Magazine.