He didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t care. The city of Budapest loomed overhead, oppressively tall. People downtown swarmed the sidewalks, so he drove away, finding the less inhabited neighborhoods that stayed empty at night. Here the snow fell quietly under the street lamps, and only a few pedestrians bothered to wander the streets.
Spired churches and decaying walls loomed over him at every corner, and he soon came to the Danube, the dividing line between the two parts of the city. He parked at the side of a bridge and got out of his car. The cold of the night could not numb the hot rage he felt boiling inside of him. He walked to the middle of the bridge and stood there, looking out onto the river below him.
He remembered the last time he had been in Hungary. Over a decade ago, and every moment of that day stood out as clear in his memory as a picture in a frame. They lowered her into the ground, the coffin made out of fine polished oak. To last for years, the undertaker had said, and Eliot wanted to shake him by the shoulders and scream at him for the careless words. Years? What did that matter? The body inside of the casket would stay lifeless, forever, no matter how expensive the wood crate around it.
White rose petals covered the top of the coffin, and as the military men lowered it into the earth—Otto had insisted on a military guard—one corner had dipped down briefly a few inches lower than the others, sending a cascade of white petals over the dark glossy side of the coffin. The men quickly corrected the error, but Eliot could not erase the image from his mind. The petals like snow coming down like an avalanche over the coffin’s edge. The smell of the roses and the wet cold earth. The people around him crying, and his cheeks dry through it all.
When he returned home, sitting on the mantle inside of the house was another bouquet of white roses, sent from his brother; nobody else knew his address. A card of condolences tucked into the top, unsigned. Eliot had hurled the vase of roses against the wall and still felt nothing inside of him as he watched the glass shatter, the petals fall to the floor. There the shattered bouquet stayed for three days, the flowers wilting and turning brown on top of the burnished hardwood floor, until it as just another sweet dead thing. The housekeeper would sweep up the glass and the petals carefully when she came the next week, and then they would be gone too.
The day after the ceremony he stood on another bridge overlooking the Danube. Perhaps it was the same as the one he stood on now, but he could not remember. The winter had come on full force and the ice floes crackled, breaking and refreezing under the surface frosted in snow. An hour he stood there, looking down and wondering if the fall would be enough.
Sometimes all there was to live for—all he held onto—wasn’t enough. Numbness only masked the guilt that threatened to break through at any moment and send him over the edge, but still he stood, and stood, until someone called the police and an officer came to the bridge to see what the trouble was.
“Just sightseeing,” he said, when asked what he was doing.
“You don’t live here?” the officer asked. Eliot couldn’t tell if the man recognized his face.
“No,” Eliot said. “I don’t live here.”
As he said the words, he knew they were true. He couldn’t continue living in a place where the same ghost occupied every street corner, every sidewalk. He went to the airport and asked to buy a plane ticket to America. He wanted to leave the continent behind him, to start anew, and he knew that America would help him. In America, nobody knows or cares about ancestors. In America he would be able to look to the future, and let his past stay where it was, frozen under a layer of ice.
Now he stood again, looking at the Danube. The same, yet different—the water, all of it, different. How can we give rivers names when they change from right underneath us? The name points to the idea of the river, not the water. Not the river itself.
He had fled to America to escape the grief that he knew would haunt him here. He returned to Hungary buoyed by hopes and faint memories of wonderful things, icicles like lace on the rooftops and roses in the garden. But the roses had died back in the late chill of fall and would not bloom again this year; the icicles hung sharp from the entryways, pointed and dangerous. Dead and deadly things.
Brynn lured him with her beauty and snared him with her mind, and he had dutifully avoided temptation. He’d thought selfishly that she would wait for him until the time was right, but he could not blame her for her impatience. Beautiful as she was, she deserved a young man whose heart was not stitched up halfheartedly with still-festering wounds. His was a burden to carry alone, and he had no right to hope that she would love him, much as he desired it.