Part 5

The train lurched forward, the snaps running down its length like the crest of a wave as coach couplings tightened, and we accelerated first in shadow and then in the morning’s glinting sunlight once out of the station.  My day had started hours earlier, rising with the sun to eat a quick breakfast of accumulated snacks, then to stuff my camera, more of the snacks and a water bottle in my pack, and then to walk the four miles or so from far north to far south across the city, through familiar streets to the Institute and then onto the Rathaus, and then veering right off the Ring, through a posh neighborhood adjacent to the Belvedere and thick with embassies and consulates representing countries throughout the world.  I had had the spontaneous idea that, given my current proximity and that I was unlikely to travel to eastern Europe very often, I should take this opportunity and a train to the capital city of some neighboring country, and had rather randomly selected Hungary and Budapest as my destination.  I dozed off and on, as much as the upright molded plastic second-class seat and an elbow on the window sill would allow, but was awakened around the stop at Györ by a ticket check.  A few seats in front of me was a complicated discussion in Hungarian between conductors and a newly boarded passenger, with passports out and open, more conductors arriving from the front or rear, exchanging words, and then rushing on to consult someone or something in a far away cabin.  The terminus of this train was Budapest and we had already started on again and though I knew no Hungarian, it seemed like the passenger with a conductor or two hovering over for the duration of the ride had not paid, but there was nothing to be done until we decelerated and the couplings slacked and again rang out.

Over the next six hours, I walked down the boulevards of Pest, past the birthplace of Theodor Herzl just a few blocks from the train station, across the Chain Bridge and up the hills of Buda, taking in the view and panoramic pictures of the Danube, the spires of the parliament building and the technicolor tiled rooftops that lie below, circling the top of the hill, from the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, its façade riddled with bullet holes seated in the bombed stone plaza to the courtyard of Buda Castle up to the Fountain to King Matthias and the open-air excavation of an ancient, ruined church.  Down I went, crossing the Chain Bridge back to Pest, and turned upriver toward the parliament building, but paused at the abandoned, empty iron Shoes on the Danube Bank and then  with my back to the river, headed inland, arriving at St. Stephen’s Basilica as a newly married couple first exited the open doors in a rising, drifting halo of iridescent soap bubbles and then descended the steps, surrounded by clapping and cheering friends and family, and where I snuck to the side entrance to climb to the balcony for a view back to Buda.  This entire time, I was never tempted to enter a restaurant for lunch and only stopped in one shop on the ramrod-straight Andrássy Avenue, a ceramics store where I found a cute mug on which a frazzled cat was painted, and once enough tissue paper surrounded and cradled it, gently tucked it in my pack, and marched on, a mile further due northeast and entered the City Park at Heroes Square, greeted by the bronzed Seven Chieftains of the Magyars.

Time until my train was now running short, so I turned from Városliget to walk the few blocks back to the train station.  I kept my feet moving while I slung my camera and backpack from my shoulder in one move, unzipping the pack to tuck the camera in, but in doing so obscured the view of anything directly in front of me on the sidewalk, and just as the camera slid in, bang went my knee and up went a scream from below.  I had inadvertently kneed a child, by their size, no more than four years old, thankfully not hard enough to get hurt or fall, but sudden enough to get startled.  Louder came the screams and tears erupted from the child’s eyes, and I asked in vain in English about “Mom” or “home”, but the response was only more pathetic sniffles.  The sidewalk was far from deserted but no one stopped, and it even seemed that they avoided me and this child, sped up their gait, or turned their gaze away, as if we and the air around us carried some sort of infectious curse.  Still no one came to the aid of this child, no one acknowledged the child’s whimpers, and as moments stretched to minutes, a panicked  sweat dripped from my temples as anything I was doing was in vain, neither calming nor raising the faintest sympathy from strangers, so I left him there and continued to the train station, and at the next crosswalk looked back, but no sound was to be heard, nothing for the crowds to evade, the child had vanished.