Budapest » [Clintasha]

Chapter Sixty-One: Budapest

Wednesday 14th November, 1990

Budapest, city of spires.

The skies were a watercolour of greys, daubed inconsistently with splotches darker and patches lighter. Shafts of cold sunlight split the murky heavens, bisecting the caliginous shadow that masked the ground.

Snow flitted down in feathery particles, veiling the city, obscuring the distance. Snow stuck in archways, and gathered in the nooks and crannies of the bigger buildings; the first snowfall of the year.

Steeples, turrets and domes silhouetted the skyline, the gothic buildings with their barbed embellishments and ornamented arches on a Goliath scale. Beige brick, terracotta tiles and wrought-iron augmentations.

Lanes and roads intersected shabby streets, with crooked paving-slabs, wobbling cobbles, and slanted buildings. Window frames were set awry in their sockets, and doors lopsided in their frames. The potholes in the pavements were the vestiges of weathering winters, and defaced and derelict buildings, the face of a bureaucratic nation.

Bullet holes marred walls, other buildings singed down to their skeletons, flame-licked and scorched from arson. The insignia of the rebel cause branded bleak alleyways on dislodged bricks in walls, sprayed in cursory font. Rubble remained, sites of rebellions, debris torn down in the riots.

The citizens spirits were as dampened as the dank backstreets, with mossy flagstones and eroded cement. People hustled and busted about their business, the roads choking, sidewalks busting, alleys teeming - a veritable hive, buzzing, alive.

They suffered in the damp, garbed austerely, not enough to save them from the bitter chill, or conceal them from the snow. Children shivered, burrowing into their mothers sides, teeth chattering in their skulls. Families convened on street corners, huddling under awnings, and the least fortunate advertised their misfortune, scrounging, begging virtuous strangers.

The wind bit, and Natasha winced, her lips tingling, numb. She loitered under a spiny archway that resembled a crown of thorns.

She was on the outskirts of the Great Market Hall, looking in. The crammed circus was brimming with produce, stuffed with people, crowded with stalls. A cacophony of voices rung out, accented, their poetic language like a stave of classical music.

A concoction of smells wafted through: steam scented with aromatics from a local delicacy vendor - garlic, chilli, onions, freshly fried -, the briney stench of fish a few days old, limply tossed on a bed of ice, the pong of a cheese salesmen a few stalls down, his produce pungent.

The colours were indigenous to the marketplace; advertisements with bold signage, vivid fonts, in bright plastic boxes. The goods of the exotic fruit salesman were like a tropical rainforest; obscure foodstuffs, like a rainbow, on display. A silk seller further down in the bustle had a rippling stock of materials; patterned, embroidered, dyed, all waving like flags in the wind.

Natasha surveyed it with a solemn smile, this was their normality, the normality that she would never have. Labouring on a stall, selling fresh food, and bringing home income to an unconditionally loving family. Her hand dropped to her belly, she fingered the outcrop of her scar through her blouse. It would've been a small life, a simple life, a quiet life.

Perhaps the reason she'd been blessed with leafy green eyes was that she was born to look up, and envy, what she was never to have.