Andrew Ervin - Extraordinary Renditions

The smell of burning wood followed him. It hadn’t snowed yet — the storm that hit Taszár would likely follow a few hours behind him. On the corner, a street sign affixed to the side of a house read XI. THÁN KÁROLY UTCA. The map indicated that he could take the road he was on all the way across town to the Danube. His immediate priority was to get someplace where he might not attract as much attention as out here in the burbs. Eventually he arrived at a bigger street, where Budapest looked more like a city. While he obviously wasn’t in the fashionable part of town, the wide avenue — easily twice as big as Broad Street — looked majestic compared to Philadelphia. The building fronts followed the haphazard curvature of the roads and formed a solid cliff face. An empty yellow trolley ran right down the middle of the road between the traffic lanes.

A few tiny cars puttered past with engines that sounded like souped-up lawnmowers and moved just as fast. When the sun hinted at breaking through the low tarp of clouds, the statuary and ironwork came alive. The buildings had red, ceramic-tiled roofs and strangely painted exteriors. Some looked like stone fortresses straight out of the Middle Ages. Red, white, and green Hungarian flags decorated every lamppost down the street. The ground floors contained shops and dingy bars and video-poker dens, all with ribbons of the same colors in their windows. Near the top of one building, two sculptures of men, each five times the size of a real man, held up the roof on their backs. Brutus stopped in a doorway to check the map one more time. The walk would take longer than he had anticipated, so he hailed the first passing taxi. It slowed, but the driver looked at him and kept going. Just like back home. He walked a few more blocks. Parked cars covered the sidewalks, and he had to dance his way around them until he could get a taxi to stop. He climbed into the backseat, clutching the heavy bag in his lap. The driver was an older dude. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and the smoke mingled with his breath and the car’s heater, which was mercifully bumped up.

“You speak English?” Brutus asked.

The driver turned all the way around in his seat. “No,” he said, with a smile.

Color brochures for strip clubs and massage parlors filled the seat pockets. Some kind of crazy violin music blared from the rattling speakers behind Brutus’s head. It sounded like rusty springs squeaking inside an old, dirty bed.

“I need a place for this.” He made motions like someone opening a locker and turning a key.

“Kulcsra?” The driver’s thick mustache looked like the head of a dusty broom.

“Yeah, a Coltrane. Take me there.”

The driver took the map and pointed to Déli Pályaudvar, the train station Brutus had just avoided. “Kulcsra,” he said.

“No, no. I ain’t going there. Where else?” The driver didn’t understand. “Another Coltrane.” Brutus made a circular motion with his finger around the map.

“Ah,” the driver said. He held Brutus’s wrist and used his finger to point at Nyugati, the western train station over in Pest. It was close to the big red circle, just a few blocks from Eve and Adam’s. Perfect. Cigarette ash landed on Margit Island, the tree-covered oasis in the middle of the Danube.

“O.K., there’s good.”

“Akkor jó.” The driver smiled.

Brutus had to laugh. “Yo!”

“Jó!”

In the speaker behind him, someone dropped a pregnant cat into a blender and hit frappé. The driver pealed off as fast as his little car could take them and started the meter, which reminded Brutus that he didn’t have any Hungarian money. He pulled a twenty out of his wallet. “This good?”

The driver’s eyes lit up. “Jó,” he said.

“Yo!” Brutus said.

The yellow streetlights couldn’t compete with the rising sun, which became a spotlight pointed at the whole city, and in it the old-world charm of the architecture gave way to a polluted modern metropolis. The filthy windows, cracked plaster, and bullet holes grew more apparent by the minute. Dirty mustard-colored paint must have been on sale when they built this part of town. The buildings looked ugly and gray, caked in car exhaust. There were tall buildings, but no skyscrapers. Nothing silver and shiny like in Philadelphia. But the details were incredible. The colors. People — artists — had spent real time making the buildings, but as the light increased, Budapest looked more and more like a city in an advanced state of decay. He tried to picture what Philly would look like in another two or three hundred years. He followed the taxi’s trajectory on the map.

The streets popped to life all at once, and an avalanche of cars, people, and crowded trolleys appeared from nowhere. The traffic sat bumper-to-bumper like on the Schuylkill at rush hour. Budapest wasn’t built for automobiles at all, much less for this many of them. After crawling for a few blocks, they got to one of the six or so bridges over the Danube.

Margit Bridge was four lanes wide, with another trolley line running right down the middle. The bridge was shaped like an elbow and halfway across, where the funny bone would be, a smaller road led down to Margit Island. To Brutus’s right, a small observation balcony extended over the water. Tourists were already taking photos, and he regretted leaving his camera behind at the base. He’d probably never see it again even if he did get back to Taszár. Or he would scroll through the pictures to find a shot of his own toothbrush jammed up Sparky’s ass. That was what the army was really about — the excuse to jam someone else’s toothbrush up your ass under the pretext of playing a joke. He wanted to get back there to bitchslap Sparky just once. That wasn’t much to ask.

Over on the Pest side, the parliament building came into view — spires and a dome and separate white marble wings that led in every direction. A man could get lost looking at a building like that. Structures so elaborate should never really exist outside a picture book, yet dozens of them lined the river; they were in motion, fluid, changing things. Many had huge neon signs on top. Several other bridges spanned the river to the south. More red, white, and green banners flapped on all of them. Behind him, back over in Buda, a huge statue of a woman up on an otherwise bald hill held up a huge leaf.

The cavern of buildings in Pest plunged him back into shadow, a man-made eclipse fashioned from century-old tenements; the first one on his left, overlooking a small rampart park, housed a McDonald’s painted a yellow so bright that it shimmered despite the lack of sunlight. Brutus spun in his seat to take in the sights. The taxi passed already-busy pizza joints and supermarkets, the Budapest Suites Hotel, and all kinds of places he couldn’t identify before the driver pulled over opposite a huge, glass-enclosed train station.

The Nyugati complex was incredible. Two cream-brick castles, one of them occupied by yet another McDonald’s, sandwiched a hundred-foot wrought-iron-and-glass wall that housed the train station. It looked like a set out of one of those English mysteries that the Mambo always watched on PBS. He handed over the twenty and managed to get a pile of coins from the driver for a locker. The old dude used hand signals to direct Brutus to the far end of the station and down a flight of steps — he made descending Yellow Pages motions with his fingers — then handed him a red, white, and green ribbon with a safety pin through it. A miniature Hungarian flag. “Tessék,” he said. The driver had one just like it on his collar.

“Thanks, bro.”

Brutus held on to the duffel bag and stepped into the melee of rush-hour pedestrian and automotive traffic. Everyone wore paper hats and many blew little plastic horns and buttwhistles like it was New Year’s. Kind of fucked up, but kind of cool. A citywide party. People were already getting drunk. A few of them stared at him. There still weren’t a lot of black people in Budapest.