the stoNe MeN

by Timea Balogh

The first time I talked to a stone man was on the night of my first New Year’s Eve in Budapest. Rita, Fanni, and I stumbled out of a house party on Rákóczi Street at midnight with a bottle of champagne, staggering toward the park on II. János Pál Pápa Square, where Rita and Fanni watched the fireworks every year. The streets were flooded with drunk locals and tourists alike, whistling and blowing their tasseled horns, so that when we arrived at the park to find a subdued crowd, I was viscerally aware of a shift in atmosphere. With the Törley bubbling in my brain, it took several beats for my eyes to focus on the stiff, gray faces surrounding us. Then I realized that the low, harsh grumbling that echoed throughout the park was the sound of their conversations, like a bucket full of pebbles being stirred with a spatula.

I’d seen a few stone men before, heard Rita and Fanni talk about them, knew they were the projects of female students in many of the city’s art colleges, and that they had been made for sex, with permanently erect stone cocks. But that was about all I knew, because as someone whose mother was from this city and was sent here every summer growing up and now lived here, I couldn’t get away with calling myself a tourist any longer, and locals aren’t supposed to ask questions, they’re supposed to have the answers.

But living in a country you only knew at brief intervals throughout your childhood is like growing up with a joke whose punchline you’ve heard a million times but still don’t understand. I was seeing more by the day how patient my mother was for living in a foreign country.

“What are they doing here? What is this?” I asked.

“We’ve just won the lottery,” Rita said. She shoved the bottle into my hand and put her arms in the air, clapping her hands above her head like an amateur swimmer prepping to dive.

“I’ve never seen so many of them in one place. I hope they’re not trying to leave the graveyard and move here, or else our backyard is gonna become a whorehouse,” Fanni said.

And that’s when I remembered hearing that when the stone men’s creators went off to get married and start families they would set the stone men free, who would then go join the community of stone men who lived in the Fiumei Graveyard beside the tombstones of the Russian soldiers who’d died here before the Iron Curtain fell. In the four months I’d lived in Pest, I’d yet to venture into the graveyard, even though it was only a few blocks from our apartment, but I often heard packs of drunk women hollering about all the cock they were going to get as they stumbled past our building at night.

“They’re always whoring around on Népszínház Street, and that’s just a farmer’s spit away. I don’t mind them in our backyard if we get discounts,” Rita said. “Look at the bulge on that one.” She pointed to a stone man in a purple muscle tee and neon green running shorts. Though his tee came down past his groin, it did little to cover what projected from his shorts. The gray, bulging muscles in his arms, back, and neck were accented with blue lines that mimicked veins.

He was the least dressed of the group, the growing crowd of stone men all bundled up for winter like the rest of us, their stone cocks discreetly hidden under their many layers. Somewhere beneath my mounting desire for him, I admired his bravery for flaunting his body without shame. I wondered, though, if he would’ve dressed like that had the others not been around to protect him. 

Suddenly, a group of police officers sauntered into the square. Their easy strides sharply contrasted with the stone men’s rigid and heavy steps.

“Quick, let’s each grab one before the pigs ruin our fun,” Rita said.

The stone men’s chatter quieted as they scanned the park for exits. I could feel them tensing up, like any sudden movement or noise might cause them to scatter with fumbling steps.

Rita nudged me, hard. I lost my footing on the slick grass in my high heeled boots and smacked square into the stone man in front of me. Blood gushed from my nostril instantly, warming my cold face. I tilted my head back to catch it and met his gaze. He looked like a carbon copy of Michelangelo’s David. The same stiff mop of intricate curls. The slightly furrowed brows, bushy but sculpted to look combed to perfection. The full lips with fine edges. The crease on the bridge of his nose, the very same place where he was now touching my face, his two fingers pressing against my nose to stop the bleeding as he apologized in his raspy voice. His hands weren’t warm, but they weren’t the cold I was expecting. Every part of my body pulsed. I felt proud for finally gaining that sense Hungarian women have of determining with a single look if they want to take a man home or send him back to his mother’s twat.

“Please forgive me,” he said again. “Let me take you to the hospital.”

“No, it was my fault,” I said. “Plus, we live right there.” I pointed blindly toward a high rise next to the park. The blood was traveling down the back of my throat. When a clot dropped on my tongue, I coughed and spat between our feet. A few specks sprayed his boots, loose and worn from years of trekking around the city.

“You should take her upstairs, tend to her,” Rita said.

I swatted at her arm, but she moved aside. “You don’t have to do that,” I said to David.

“She’s right,” he said. “This was my fault.”

“Damn right,” Rita said. “You wouldn’t want us telling the cops you broke our friend’s nose.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Fanni said. “She’s drunk.”

David rolled his finely detailed eyes, which sounded like marbles slowly circling a drain. He placed a firm hand on my lower back and guided me toward the crosswalk.

“Don’t waste a condom on that one,” Rita yelled after us. “You don’t need to with them.”

“I’m sorry about her,” I said. “She’s harmless. Usually a treasure. When I called her up after graduating and told her I was thinking about coming out here, she invited me to live with her and Fanni without a second thought.”

“Where did you move from?” David asked.

“Los Angeles.”

David’s eyebrows emitted a squeak as they rose on his face. “I couldn’t place your accent, thought maybe you were from up north.”

*

In my bedroom, David took off my coat and laid me down on my bed. His stone hands brushing against the polyester of my coat sounded just like my fingers did when they rubbed against my panties under my covers at night.

“Here, give me your scarf. I’ll throw it in the wash.”

I unwrapped it slowly, keeping my head level with the mattress. Blood still trickled down the back of my throat, though at a much slower pace. I handed it to him but told him not to worry about it. He laid it across the back of my chair, then handed me tissues from my bedside table. I dabbed them against my nostrils.

“What else can I do for you?” he asked.

“Well, since you’re asking,” I said, “you could satisfy my curiosity. You’re the first one I’ve ever met.”

He let out a laugh that sounded of something perfected over years of practice. “I don’t provide those services.”

“That’s good, because I don’t have any money.” I forced out a genuine-sounding laugh.

It had been a long time since I’d tried with anyone, but it had also been a long time since anyone had made my stomach flip. The last man I’d been with was someone I’d picked up at a club on Király Street the girls took me to my first weekend in the city. The guy was someone I probably would’ve forgotten had he not pulled off the condom in the dark of my bedroom without telling me. When I told the girls what he’d done, Rita said, oh, that, which Fanni followed up with a, could’ve been worse. I didn’t dare ask how. For weeks afterwards, an incessant itch followed me everywhere, but even after my results came back negative for STI’s, I still felt a tightness in my stomach every time my phone rang, fearing this was the call that my clinic had mixed up my results with another patient.

The front door opened. Rita and Fanni stomped in, burring their lips against the cold. The sound of pots clanging echoed in from the kitchen. “I don’t imagine I’ll have an easy time leaving now,” David said. He sat down on the edge of my bed. The mattress sunk deep beneath him, and I pictured what his creator’s mattress must’ve looked like before she found herself a husband.

“I’ll be a whore if I stay and an asshole if I go,” he added.

“Sounds about right,” I said.

He slipped off his own coat, scarf, shirt, and walked over to the radiator, which creaked under the weight of his hands.

“If you’re trying to warm yourself up, you’re out of luck,” I called to him. “They turn them off at six.”

“I don’t need it,” he said. “I was doing it for you.”

He came back to the bed, every abdominal muscle perfectly holding its place with each heavy step. He carefully unlaced and removed my boots, then my socks, which I expected he would have more trouble doing given how tightly I was keeping my toes curled no matter how relaxed I tried to seem. As he unbuttoned my jeans with his strong, delicate fingers, I thought to tell him that we didn’t need to do this if he didn’t want to, but by the time my pants made it to my ankles I forgot what it was I’d wanted to say, forgot I wanted to say anything at all. 

He grabbed my down comforter and threw it over us, then moved in between my thighs. His lips were cold, but his breath was warm, and the sensation of the two together had a dizzying effect. The pressure of his tongue was as strong as an index finger. And the feeling of buffed concrete against my clit, well—do you remember the first time you paired grapes with cheese? How, before you took the first bite you questioned the combination of the two tastes, but once they were in your mouth you couldn’t believe why you’d never tried the two together before? It was like that.

When my body shook to climax, he gripped my thighs, and the weight of the convulsions rang to the tips of my extremities, the ends of every hair on my body. I rode those waves until they rocked me into a fast sleep.

When I woke up, David was lying next to me on his back. His eyes were open, but when I crooned a hello he didn’t respond. I traced the outline of each hand-crafted muscle, but still he did not stir. He slept in gray boxers, only a few tones darker than him, but I didn’t see that familiar bulge I’d seen on the scantily dressed stone man outside. I feared the woman who’d made David really had imitated every detail of Michelangelo’s statue. I thought back to what Rita said about winning the lottery, and that if that was true, then letting David rest was like taking the money home, locking it in a safe, and never spending it.

I slipped my hand into the waistband of his boxers and yanked them down in one fluid motion. All I could see was a nub, shorter than the length of my thumb and the tip of it concave, like someone had broken his cock off at the base.

David spasmed awake.

I yanked my hand away, as if suddenly it had lit aflame.

“God, I knew it.” He crawled out of the bed, looking for his pants.

“I’m sorry.” I reached out for him. “I was curious. Just don’t—”

“None of you are ever satisfied. I swear, you all made us just so you’d have someone to grind into the mud.” He gathered his remaining clothes and stormed out.

*

When I woke up again, the fog outside my windows was so thick I couldn’t see the bare, black branches of the trees in the park below.

I found Rita and Fanni in the kitchen eating breakfast. I filled up the tea kettle and placed it on the stovetop.

“Where’s your stone man hiding?” Rita asked. “When am I getting a turn?”

“Where’s yours?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you came home alone.”

“The pigs chased them back to the graveyard not long after you left,” she said.

“I don’t know what they were expecting,” Fanni added. “They should’ve known they wouldn’t be able to get away with overrunning the city like that, even on New Year’s.”

“Well, in the graveyard it’s the banyas who try to chase them out.”

“Of course they do,” Fanni said. “Can you imagine you come to tend to your husband’s grave and some fuckers are camping there, desecrating the graveyard with their erections? And then the girls who chase them there at night with their panties on fire. It’s sacrilegious.”

Rita threw her plate in the sink and brushed the breadcrumbs off her hands and shirt. “So, tell us,” she said. “Did his sculptor gift him with a nice one or was it purely functional?”

I pulled the whistling pot off the stove gingerly. “I didn’t actually get to see it.”

“You chickened out,” she said evenly, like she wasn’t even surprised.

“I mean, he didn’t have one,” I said. “It looked like he once did, but—”

“Oh god,” Fanni cried through a mouth full of bread and salami. “Don’t tell me he’s one of those unfortunate fuckers.”

“Selfish bitches,” Rita said. “They make a perfect man and then leave him broken once they get sick of him just to ruin it for everyone else.” “You think the woman who made him did it?” I asked.

“Happens more often than you think.”

That of course made we wonder what David’s creator had done with his cock, whether she used it after her husband would drift off to sleep.

I drank my tea so quickly that I burned every corner of my tongue.

Then I bundled up to brave the cold.

The streets were quiet and thick with a still, milky fog, and on my way to the graveyard I didn’t see a single office or shop that was open. I passed a hospital and saw nurses and doctors blowing smoke into the air, ash falling onto their white scrubs. I was ready for the day the things I saw in this country would not shock me anymore. I thought that once I understood this country, I could determine whether I belonged here and answer my mother’s persistent when are you coming home? with an I’m not.

When I reached Fiumei Street, I walked along the red brick wall that sheltered the graveyard from the road. I’d walked this street on my way to the Arena Plaza several times, had noticed the tombstones peeking up over the wall, but not once did I dare go see the stone men in their habitat. Of course, now that I’d seen so many together, just as restrained in a crowd as they were while escorting a woman through the city, my fear had quieted to a low whisper.

The brick wall stretched on for what felt like miles, and when I finally found the entrance, I saw that the road split three ways. I headed left along the road lined with oak trees, but for many more steps I did not see anything but plaques on the brown grass. When I entered an area with well-tended tombstones, I didn’t see a single banya, who were apparently letting their dead rest on the first day of the new year.

The tombstones became progressively bigger as I walked on. Soon I saw statues of archangels, nuns draped in habits of stone, and hunchedover gargoyles. I expected them to move, but the only movement was the spidery branches swaying in the frigid wind. 

At another fork in the road, I followed a trail that was slick with mud and mulch. Here, the few tombstones on either side of me were overgrown with ivy, the stone a grittier and darker shade than the ones along the paved path. I heard a gravely grumbling and trekked on. The tombstones and the trees soon ran out. The mud that squished under my boots and splashed up, knee high, turned a paste-like consistency. Suddenly, I was in a muddy clearing dotted with muddy slabs of concrete leaned against each other like tents.

A stone man crawled out of one. His skinny legs brushing against each other sounded like sandpaper buffing a hard surface. His upper body was bare, his arms long and thin and painted with black tattoos of angels and demons. His stone hair reached to his waist and carved onto his chest was a rosary with an upside-down cross. He was humming.

“Is David here?” I asked.

His pointed chin shifted for his mouth to open. “Which one?”

“The one who looks like Michelangelo’s David.”

“But which one? A lot of the first-gens were based on Michelangelo’s.”

That’s when it occurred to me that I’d never actually caught David’s name; I’d only assumed his name was David because he looked like that. I racked my brain for a feature of his that didn’t resemble Michelangelo’s original, but could only think of that divot where his cock should’ve been.

A series of heavy thuds approached from behind me. I turned around to see David, wondering if it really was him. “What do you want now?” he said.

So that solved that.

“To apologize,” I said.

David scoffed. “Okay, you’ve done that, thanks.”

I looked around the clearing. More stone men were climbing out of their tents, the sandpaper sounds rising, but none made eye contact with me. They barely seemed to register I was there.

David brushed past me.

I grabbed his arm. “Wait,” I said. “I hiked through all this mud just to apologize. Doesn’t that deserve some credit?”

“Are you waiting for applause?”

“You’re the one who came home with me,” I said. “Didn’t you expect that—”

“You’re right, I should’ve expected you to grope me.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Your friend wasn’t the only wild card there. With the cops around, I had no idea how the night would end.”

“I told you she was harmless,” I said.

“And if we all took everyone’s word for that then more of us would end up as piles of rubble in the street.”

At that, the stone men around us let out a low grunt.

I wondered if that was why they all hung out here. If that was why, when they wandered out of the perimeter of the graveyard, they did so in groups, like they had last night at the park.

“I really am sorry,” I said. “I acted on impulse. It’s just that, when I’m around you—”

“Please, don’t. I know you think it sounds like a compliment, but it’s not.”

“I am sorry,” I said again, quietly this time. I brought my chin down to my scarf and puffed out my chest, nibbling my lower lip.

I didn’t expect for the move to work on a stone man, but David grabbed my hand then and said, “Let me show you another path out where there’s no mud.”

 *

I had to go back to teaching at the language school just a few days later. I’d asked my students to read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening over the break, hoping to discuss how our society still places the kinds of expectations on women that Edna’s husband places on her to tame her drives and fold herself into a quiet life, but my students seemed adamant on convincing me that this wasn’t the case anymore. My few but vocal male students, anyway.

I prodded them to explain what they meant until a guy with a long neck and an underbite finally came out with it: things were different now because of the stone men.

A young woman in the corner of the room with spiked hair snickered. 

Then a woman sitting beside Long-Neck, one who wrote lyrical if pretentious essays until she started sitting next to him, said, “The only thing the stone men have changed is now we don’t have to tolerate bullshit for physical intimacy.”

That sounded like a lot more to me than how she’d tried to make it sound. 

Long-Neck leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He didn’t speak for the rest of class.

When I stepped out of the brick building of the language school, it was dark outside. My cheeks stung instantly from the cold air, and I questioned yet again why I’d ever left the warm California sunshine, when I noticed a pile of rubble a few feet from me. I scanned the sidewalk for construction cones, and when I didn’t find any, I whispered a Jesus, and told myself to stop shaking, it’s only a poorly managed construction site, or a rogue citizen’s spontaneous construction work, as I headed for the 4-6 tram stop.

I thought again about my colleague who’d said one night after our orientation week that he chose Hungary because he knew about all its problems and he also knew that you can only fight the system from within.

My choice to move to this country had never been that clear. I had this sense that Rita and Fanni thought I felt deeply Hungarian, like I never felt at home in the States. They always introduced me to their friends with wide eyes and a Can you believe it? She grew up in the USA and moved here, equal parts amazed and proud. I still couldn’t put into words why I was here. I typically settled for, “Because Budapest is fucking awesome.” No one ever disagreed with that, not even my mother, and I wondered now if it was because they didn’t want to disappoint me.

When I stepped off the tram at Blaha Lujza Square, I automatically headed left toward Rákóczi, then backtracked and headed right for Népszínház. I had homework now.

I always avoided walking down Népszínház, especially at night, because Rita and Fanni had too many stories about their head-on collisions with blind drunks and policemen and the migrants they said would hit on them, and side-stepping the men who tried to hug them on the subway was enough for them as it was, they’d say. But I was certain they were also looking to avoid being tempted by the stone men who loitered between the smoke shops and liquor stores. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the whole block lined with them, all spread out in front of the buildings, like they’d divvied up stations amongst themselves.

Most wore black sweats, black hoodies, but the outlines of their various figures were still visible even under their layers, and their distinctly shaped faces jutted out from beneath their hoods.

Many of the women on the sidewalk wore casual clothes and approached the stone men in pairs or small groups. Most of the loners were older. The woman in front me was middle aged, a grocery bag in hand, her high heels tapping quickly along the pavement. I kept pace with her and scanned the stone faces as aggressively as she did. Suddenly she stopped and pointed at a stone man with an angular jaw and high forehead, a side-sweep to his tall, concrete hair. “Pull them down,” she said. The stone man stared off to the side, pulling his sweats down his thighs. His cock wasn’t impressively long, but thick. “Come with me,” she said sternly. They turned back toward Blaha, and the sidewalk thumped where he stepped in her wake. I couldn’t register the faces around me then, because the scene was something straight out of what I’d read about how the Arrow Cross would check the pants of men in the city they suspected to be Jews. When I came back to focus, I saw a David loitering beside a small, Kashmir market.

“You’re fucking everywhere,” he said.

“You can just do the acceptable thing and ignore me,” I said, and walked up to him. “I thought you didn’t charge for these kinds of services,” I added.

He scanned the street. “You’re gonna ruin my business.”

I leaned my ass against the cold building. “Do they always ask you to pull your pants down?”

He looked at his shoes like he might cry, and I wondered what that would look like. Dust, maybe?

I wrapped my fingers around his arm and squeezed, but I wasn’t certain that he felt it.

He must’ve though, on some level, because he looked up. His eyes looked clearer, more chiseled than I’d remembered them. “Some of them forget to, and when they do, it’s nice to sleep in a bed.” “Is that why you all do this?” I asked.

“You’ve seen how we live,” he put simply.

“Come on,” I said. I started down the street.

“What about your roommates?” he asked, but he was already following me.

*

At home, I tried to usher David into my bedroom quickly, but we bumped into Rita in the hallway, who put on the voice she uses with waiters and said it was nice to see him again. I supposed she felt sorry for him.

I told David to get comfortable and excused myself to go shower. I didn’t want to leave him waiting, but I felt the need to subdue that tight clawing in the pit of my stomach whenever I was around him, so I removed the shower head from its hook and placed it between my legs, pressing myself hard against the cold tiles on the wall.

When I went back into my bedroom, I watched the landscape of David’s face shift into a sly smile.

I looked at him with expecting eyes.

“Couldn’t help yourself, could you?” he said.

“What are you talking about?” My face grew hot. Beads of sweat formed along my spine. “You masturbated.”

“Since you have a hole in place of a cock I figured I’d get off where and how I could.” I didn’t want to bring up his deficiency, but I didn’t like him knowing about me what I didn’t tell him, like he could see inside me.

He leaned his back against the wall gently. “I got you off last time, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d enjoyed it, given—” I wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence. I realized I didn’t actually know what he enjoyed, or could enjoy.

“I think you and I experience pleasure in different ways,” he said. I joined him on the bed and started moisturizing my arms.

David’s neck cracked as he scanned my room. “What’s this?”

I knew what he was pointing at without having to look. It was the only thing on my wall. “A postcard from Venice beach,” I said. “My mother sent it.” Every few weeks she’d send some knick-knack or treat through the mail, like she could coax me back over time with so many frozen churros and seashells. It was a tactic she’d inherited from my grandmother, who when my mother moved to the U.S. would send her pillows embroidered with poppy flowers, crystal vases that arrived in shards, and once, a whole frozen duck.

“Why did you leave?” David asked.

“I’m not sure anymore,” I said, my first time answering that question honestly. I don’t know why I expected him to commend me on that. I was glad he didn’t push the question. When people asked me what prompted the move, I’d usually respond with American gun crime statistics or tell them how I’d been rejected from grad school. I cared less these days about why I left and more about how long I’d stay, whether I’d renew my lease next year and my contract at the school, and what for exactly. “Have you ever been to America?” I asked after a while.

“They won’t give us passports,” he said. “Or let us on planes, because of the weight limit.”

“That’s bound to change,” I said.

“Who knows. This country is slow to change.”

Ironic, I thought, for a country that had seen three regime changes in the past century alone. 

As though he’d affixed his ears to my brain he added, “Not the country, really. The people. The way they think.”

I snapped the lid of the moisturizer closed and set it on my nightstand. I shifted under the covers and laid on my back, summoning the stillness I saw on him the last time he was in my bed.

“Why did you choose this place?” David asked. He laid his arm across my chest. The weight of it felt no more constricting than wearing a turtleneck.

I didn’t want to answer with another I’m not sure, so instead I talked about what it was like watching the leaves change, the Christmas lights get put up on the light poles and the trams and buses, the taste of the roasted chestnuts at the Christmas fairs, the color of the Danube as it turned from green to gray, and he said that hearing me talk about Budapest made him want to live there.

“You do live here,” I said.

“Not in the city you’re describing.”

I put my hand on his forearm and pulled it into me until my chest was so heavy it felt like I’d smoked a pack of cigarettes in one sitting. I wedged my arm out from beneath him and stroked his forearm with my fingernail, up and down, as if filing my nails, my strokes growing longer. Soon, I was at his elbow, where I felt small, angular indents.

“What’s this?” I asked. I turned his arm and noticed a TRS.

“The woman who made me. She left it there so her classmates couldn’t claim me.” He didn’t meet my eyes as he said it, but his tone was uninterested, like telling someone you love them for the six-hundredth time.

“When did she leave you?” I asked.

“She didn’t. I left her after she defended her dissertation, and she never came after me. Maybe she made more of us or maybe she got married. I don’t know, I don’t care.”

“So, were you the one who—” I looked down toward his groin.

He let out a raspy sigh, his arm feeling several pounds lighter. “Yeah. At the time it made me feel—it felt good to make decisions for myself.”

I didn’t want to ask him how he did it, where it was, whether it was intact or if he’d broken it to pieces, if he did it alone or with others, how many have done the same since. I didn’t like when near-strangers questioned the biggest decision I’d ever made in my life, so I wasn’t going to pry. I didn’t want to, I decided.

*

Some weeks later, Rita, Fanni and I went to the Gellért Bath House. We couldn’t have afforded to get in ourselves, but Rita’s boss had given her passes as a late Christmas present, so we made a day of it. I had a meeting the following morning with the representative of a company that was recruiting English teachers to teach in Italy for the summer, so the outing felt like an early celebration in a way. I was curious to see if a place where I didn’t speak the language and had never been to and therefore had no expectations about might actually offer me a tangible reason to live there. Swimming under the stone archway of the Turkish bath, surrounded by potted palm trees, a skylight open to a clear sky above us, made me feel like I was already on some Italian coastline.

The harsh noises of the city were a shock to my ears when we stepped out onto the street. Police sirens wailed at this end of Liberty Bridge. Crowds formed around the police cars and along the handrails. Rita jogged across the street to join them.

Fanni dragged her feet. “Probably some lunatic climbed the bridge again. If he hasn’t jumped yet, I don’t want to see it. It’s so suffocating.”

We walked up anyway. I craned my neck over the people in front of me. A dense tower of rubble in the water was nearly level with the police cars on the bridge. People on the docked ships nearby that had been turned into restaurants were holding onto the guardrails, watching the scene. A rescue boat with men in bright orange life jackets was making its way along the choppy waves towards the tower.

“Twenty of them,” someone next to me said.

“Fifty, at least,” someone else said.

 We watched the clean-up crew tear apart the tower of rubble. The tourist and party boats crawled along as they passed them, managing to keep their distance without clipping any of the rocks near the shore. By the time the city’s lights warmed to an orange glow, the clean-up crew had cleared the tower to just below water level.

Another life boat with men in scuba suits sailed over the choppy waves. Rita said we have to go before her hole freezes shut. I suddenly became aware how numb my fingers were inside my gloves.

We caught the Metro 4 home, and as we passed under the Danube I held still and listened hard for that vibration in my body to pick up, the one I felt with David around. Nothing. Maybe it was just too crowded on the metro for me to focus, and of course Fanni sobbing next to me was not exactly comforting.

At home, we turned on the news, watched it for what felt like days, waiting for the police to release the names of the victims. But they never came forward with such a list. I missed my meeting, whether by accident or on purpose I can’t remember anymore.

Once the news stopped reporting on the incident, I went back to the cemetery, but all the tents were empty. I started hearing or maybe dreaming rumors that they moved camp to People’s Park or Margit Island. In the first few weeks following the incident, I walked them both. I walked all the parks surrounding the inner city, actually, stopping short of catching a train to Zugló or Kelenföld and digging through the junkyards there looking for David. Even in the daytime, I wouldn’t have encroached on the territory of the homeless men who camped there. But I never ran into stone men on the street anymore, and Népszínház was stripped bare of them too.

*

I continued looking for David everywhere, on the street, on the trams and subways. As time passed, I searched for him less and less. Sometimes I’d go days without searching the faces on the street for him, and then I’d feel a sudden urge to retrace my steps.

Months after the incident, a group of activists got ahold of the remains and reconstructed the bodies. The state wouldn’t let them display the stone men anywhere public, so they reached out to museums, and, with the help of the creators who took interest in the project, they turned the display into an exhibit at the Műcsarnok, eventually absorbed into their permanent collection. The green, copper statues of Hungarian kings that populated Heroes’ Square across from the Műcsarnok wore pompous, judgmental expressions the evening we lined up for the exhibit opening.

My chest was a steel cage as I passed the stone men stood along a white wall, a red, velvet rope separating us spectators from their chiseled but broken bodies. None of them had been put back perfectly. The hairline fractures between the chunks of stone gave the impression that they were covered in cobwebs. I inspected the slivers of space between the stone chunks as closely as I could from behind the rope, looking for what I wasn’t sure, an electrical current perhaps, or steam, something to prove what it was that once powered their sturdy bodies.

Some of their cocks were fully intact and pasted to their groins, probably a donation from the creators. I marched along with the rest of the crowd slowly, carefully eyeing every feature of every statue, and while I found half a dozen or so David or David-inspired ones, I couldn’t find a David in the line-up who bore those familiar, indecipherable lines on his arm. I went back to the beginning of the line and took pictures of each face so that I would have something to calm myself with when, later, I would begin to wonder if I had missed him.

The crowd was dotted with the creators who all wore the same busy mom pixie cuts as they beamed, elated to leave their suburban lives for the art scene, if only for a short time. Some of their husbands stood beside them, petting their shoulders proudly, while their children weaved among the crowd. I thought about approaching the creators but reconsidered, wondering how many other women had lost a companion, and how many of them would approach the creators with similar questions, pleas and bribes to locate their stone men, to bring them back to life or to make more, and the thought made my throat so dry I had to leave the museum, afraid I might vomit sawdust.

I never looked at the pictures I took that night, but I didn’t delete them either. I stored them, so I wouldn’t have to look at them. Eventually, I got a job teaching at one of the universities in the city, moved to Buda, found someone who gave me another reason to stay.

But there are still times when I walk along the Danube that I think about David, wonder if he’s one of many left in the riverbed, imagine the mud and algae that’s buried him over the years, and whether I dove in right now, swam to the bottom and waved my hand over his face, I could get him to spasm awake again. 

Timea Balogh is a Hungarian-American writer and translator with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her debut short story was nominated by Juked for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Another story of hers is forthcoming with Prairie Schooner. She is a scholarship recipient and graduate of the 2019 AWP Tin House Fiction Workshop. A 2017 American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellow, her translations of Hungarian prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in The Offing, Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation, Asymptote, Waxwing, Two Lines Journal, Lunch Ticket, Arkansas International, Washington Square Review, and the Wretched Strangers anthology by Boiler House Press, among others. She studies literary translation in Budapest. You can find her on Twitter @TimeaRozalia.