Growth

by Zary Fekete

1979

The snow fell like ash that first winter in Budapest. I was seven, and the world still smelled of smoke. Not fire, but a kind of chemical fatigue, as if the walls themselves had given up something invisible. Our third-floor apartment hummed with the brittle song of the water heater until the day it coughed a black puff of melted plastic across the bathroom tiles. Mom didn’t scream. She took my arm in a firm grasp and backed me out of the apartment so she could keep an eye on the flames. Then, she dragged me down three flights in our house shoes to a neighbor we barely knew, a man with crumpled pajamas, breath like garlic and mothballs.

She spoke to him urgently, gestured, pointed upstairs. I tried to shape her panic into the Hungarian I barely knew. “Tűz,” I said. “Víz. Ég a ház.” Fire. Water. The house is burning. It wasn’t.

The firemen came anyway. They thumped above us while I sat on a stiff chair eating cheese biscuits from the stranger’s tin. I wondered if my Matchbox cars had melted into shapeless ghosts.

That night, after the ruins were hosed down, we ate bean soup at the corner restaurant with cracked windows and a dusty wall rug in the vestibule. A violinist played a folk song about abandoned children. I translated the lyrics as best I could. Mom’s hand tightened around mine.

“Eat your soup,” she said. But her eyes stayed on the snow outside, calculating the weight of everything she’d left behind to follow Dad here.

1989

At fifteen, I learned that risk could be measured in car roofs and girls’ laughter. It was a Saturday in March. My friends dared me to jump the old East German sedan parked in the alley behind the Ukrainian grocery.

Natalie stood nearby, arms folded, face unreadable. Her eyes, the blue of hospital scrubs, watched me approach the car. She wore a leather jacket with one torn sleeve and smelled like school chalk and cheap hairspray. I wanted her to think I was the sort of person who said yes.

I sprinted. My friends’ jeers faded as the cobblestones flew beneath me. For a suspended moment, I was nothing but air and ambition. Then the roof cracked my toe, and the alley rose to meet my skull.

Stars. Silence. Then: laughter…too loud, too sharp, a crackling chorus of triumph and relief.

Two days later, Natalie let me kiss her behind the McDonalds near Vaci Street. Her mouth tasted like pistachio…and joy.

1991

That summer, the city opened like a bruise…widening, tender, strangely alive. The statues of Lenin and Marx were gone from the squares, but their pedestals remained, like amputated stumps. I spent afternoons walking on familiar, old streets that all had new names listening to old men complain about inflation. Some days, I walked past the Jewish quarter and counted the bullet holes that no one had patched.

1999

The expat book club met in the Jacksons’ flat, where we nibbled cheese and pretended to care about Conrad. I hated us all…our American salaries, our performative altruism, the way we said paprika with a hard k.

On the walk over, I passed the vacant clinic lot. Weeds clawed through the fence. A fading mural of Soviet children grinned from the wall…one of them with a crack through his face that made his smile look accidental.

I climbed in.

The waiting room was still there, ghostly green. The benches were splintered, the floor sticky with moss and mud. A single IV pole lay half-buried in the dirt like a flag surrendered.

A bee circled my shoe. I thought of the homeless men who played chess in the park with broken pieces and wine-stained hands. I wondered if they had once waited here too…sick, hopeful, watching the nurses flick past in shoes that squeaked.

That night at the book club, someone used the word “authentic” to describe the fish stew they had eaten in Eger. I excused myself to the balcony and didn’t come back in.

2009

István’s hands shook when he found the newspaper. We were clearing out my basement…a tomb of Pfaff sewing machines, opera records, and unopened letters.

He paused beneath the swaying bulb, staring at a yellowed photograph in the obituaries of an ancient newspaper.

“My father,” he said.

The editor’s face was sharp-jawed, defiant. The kind of man who once edited samizdat newsletters on stolen mimeograph machines. István’s own face had been worn smooth by years of sleeping on benches and sifting through lomtalanítás piles on city cleanup days. But the shape of the brow… yes. I saw it.

He tucked the paper under his arm and limped up the stairs. I didn’t ask where he’d take it. Some ghosts need no translation. Some reunions do not require permission.

2019

Hospitals teach you the grammar of lies.

This won’t hurt, the nurses said, as they lowered the needle. My five-year-old son’s left eye darted like a trapped bird. Mastoiditis bloomed like a red halo behind his ear, and I counted the seconds between heart monitor beeps to keep from unraveling.

I played Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” on my phone, volume low.

“What’s he singing?” my son asked, stacking Legos with his good hand.

“A lullaby,” I said.

He nodded. He trusted me.

The songs clawed at my spine…O look at those eyes, so full of light!...but I let them play. I needed to believe that someone else had survived this ache before me. Even if the lullaby had been sung for the dead.

Later that week, a nurse smiled and said he could go home. My son asked if we could stop for ice cream. He didn’t remember the songs. He never asked about them again.

But I did.

2023

There’s a stretch of sidewalk near Széll Kálmán tér where the concrete still bears the faint impression of a child’s shoe. I walk over it twice a week, and each time I wonder who left it, and whether anyone else ever notices.

The city has changed again. The cafés are full. The trams are cleaner. Asian students with falafel wraps gather near Gellért Hill to post photos.

I grew up to be a writer. But some things are still difficult to capture in words.

BIO: Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella Words on the Page out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social