An Uneven Life

     The drenching rain had stopped, carried away in swirls of wind that engulfed the apartment buildings on Istvan Street.  Elm trees in front of the three-story buildings shivered in stray gusts.  Water dripped from the last of their leaves and ran along the gutters of the black asphalt roadway.  Dark clouds began to break up, revealing a pale November sky.

     A scrawny boy, small for his five years, looked with sad, black eyes down into the street from a second floor window.  He stood in white shirt and gray trousers and stared at a brown motor van that waited in the street.  He’d seen such vans before, vans with no side or rear windows and with a crooked white marking below the window of the front door.  The vans always brought men in brown uniforms, men with guns.  This was the same kind of van, silent, foreboding.  It stopped across the street.

     Behind the boy stood a large, heavy woman in a loose blue dress, her long, gray hair twisted into a tight bun at the back of her head.  She called softly to him with a gentle urging, “Come to the table, Josef.”

     He did not move.

     “Come,” she repeated. “Lunch is ready.  I have for you an egg and also some marmalade.”

     Suddenly, Josef shouted, his eyes bright.  “There’s Momma!  Look, Mrs. Hortash.  There’s Poppa!”  She rested her hands lightly on his shoulders.

     A man and a woman in their early thirties came into the street from the building where Josef had been living with his parents.  The couple held hands and walked stiffly, their faces grim.  Two burly men in military uniforms followed.  The men wore  armbands with the same crooked marking as on the van.

     As the group neared the vehicle, Josef’s mother quickly turned her head and looked up for an instant to where the boy stood.  He saw her face and shouted, “Momma!  Poppa!”  His cries went unheard beyond the closed window.

     The men in uniform opened the van’s rear door and, with their short clubs, prodded Josef’s parents to go in.  The men stepped into the front of the van, drove to the next corner and turned toward the center of Budapest.  Josef stared into the empty street.  Where did they take Momma and Poppa?  Why?

     Vera Hortash put her arms around him and pulled him to the pillow of her bosom.  She stroked his wavy black hair and held him.  She is soft and warm, he told himself, but Momma is softer and has smell like roses.

     She rocked slowly from side to side and spoke in a soft voice.

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