Page 82 of Delivered to the Devil

It’s a nice and well-kept building, but the walls are thin. I can constantly hear people moving around in the adjacent apartments. To make matters worse, there’s always some old lady trying to chat me up when I come and go.

If I had my way, I’d live in some remote place where I wasn’t constantly confronted by friendly people trying to catch a smile or a friendly chat. They’re all over the place here—neighbors, cashiers, even people in the street. It’s claustrophobic, really.

In Budapest, I rarely minded the crowds, not even when I was at my worst. Despite being closer to people there physically, I felt a greater distance. Everyone was a stranger, spoke a different language, and not least, minded their own business. I barely even knew how my neighbors looked. Even the tourists who spoke a language I knew were far from me—people passing through that I’d never see again.

Here, people are stuck. They want to know each other, settle down, and get comfortable in small bubbles of buildings and streets, routines and dead ends. Here, there’s not one and a half million people to get lost in; it’s only in the small city center that I feel a sliver of the anonymity I experienced in Budapest.

Some days, I consider moving far away from everything—find a secluded house in a forest or something. But fear and loneliness would eat away at me. Here in the city, it’s easier to keep them at bay. When I go to sleep at night, it’s reassuring to hear footsteps above me and faint music on the other side of the wall—signs that there are people close by who would hear if I screamed for help. Yet, my troubled mind often gets the better of me, tainting the sounds in dark, ominous colors to the point where I’m sure someone is trying to break in.

I rarely sleep through a whole night without waking with cold sweat on my forehead and my pulse pounding in my throat. Sometimes, I’ll even wake from my own screams.

It also happens that the guy in the apartment below comes up to ask if everything’s okay. He’s an athletic man in his early twenties, who clearly isn’t deterred by the idea of a violent boyfriend or a thief. He has no idea what kind of people are out there—men who’d break into a young woman’s apartment and rape her without qualms or regret. Despite his strong build, the guy wouldn’t stand a chance against a man like Janos, and sometimes I almost want to laugh at his reckless bravery.

And then I want to cry at the thought of Janos.

But at the end of the day, I’m grateful to live in a place where people show concern for each other—a place where you can count on the cops showing up no matter who the perpetrator is.

So I guess it’s not so bad living here after all.

It doesn’t take me long to get a job waitressing at a coffee house—one of those large chains that has several cafés in the city. The pay is only a little better than what I earned in Hungary despite the taxes being much higher here, and the working conditions are barely any better either. But I’m not going to complain. I’m just happy to have a job, so I won’t sit around all day alone with a slew of horrific memories.

Now that I have a steady income, I’m seeing a therapist once a week. András is the one who convinces me to do so. We talk several times a week, and since I rarely open up to him about what I’ve been through, he keeps insisting that I see a professional.

I try to be open with the therapist, but for some reason, I can’t tell her about Janos. I only mention him as a side character and never by name. What I do tell her, though, are all the horrible things Gabor did to me, which gives her more than plenty to work with. Talking about it is like living thenightmare anew. I spend several days after a session being utterly devastated, screaming my throat raw at night and crying my eyes out for hours on end, so I try to schedule the sessions before a day off.

Despite the breakdowns, my therapist keeps insisting that things will get better, and after a couple of months, I do start to feel the effect. My nightmares become less violent, and my drops into hopelessness are shorter and less devastating. But at the end of the day, everything feels meaningless. There’s nothing for me here. Nothing of importance and no one I’m important to. It’s like the pain dissipates and leaves an empty pit because there’s nothing new to fill the space. In some ways, the emptiness is as bad as the pain. I can go days without feeling anything at all—no devastation or anxiety, but also no hope or longing. I almost feel as dead as I did during the weeks Janos kept a cold distance.

One day, my therapist hits something essential within me—a crack in a solid wall that threatens to make everything burst and release the riptide into the open to destroy everything in its path.

Suddenly, I feel too much. I hate everything and everyone—my parents, who have written me off, my sister, who has gone back to calling once a month, András, who took me away from Janos, and Gabor, who sullied everything that once was pretty and innocent.

But most of all, I hate Janos. I hate him with the full force of my angry soul. Not only because he led Gabor to me and helped him violate me countless times, but more so because he sent me away—forced me away from the only person who ever mattered to me. I hate him so much that I come close to ripping the head off the little teddy bear several times, but somehow I always manage to rein in the rage long enough to stuff the bear into the back of a closet and start hurling porcelain across the room instead.

Almost two weeks go by in this furious state. One night when I can’t take it anymore, I take the bus to the ocean. The beach is dark and vacant, and hard gusts of wind have me shuddering in the cold spring air.

I haven’t been close to water since Budapest. It still makes me anxious, and the ocean never did appeal to me the same way a lake or a river did. It’s too violent and chaotic. Today, though, it’s just what I need. The waves hit the shore with wild splashes, and when I let out a furious scream, the endless ocean seems to swallow the sound. So I scream again and again as I step closer. Suddenly, the all-consuming urge to merge with the water that I often felt on the Chain Bridge rises within me.

I kick off my shoes, shrug out of my jacket, and discard my purse. Then I roll up my pants and step onto the wet sand. Here, I don’t need to fall over a rail to feel the water; I can walk straight in.

An icy shudder rolls through my body as the first splash hits my legs, yet the pull of the water is strong enough to urge me on. I take another step and feel the water wrap around my ankles. A few steps more and the edges of my pants get wet. A little farther and I’m in to my thighs.

The water is like a good old friend who knows me well. It understands the violent emotions whirring inside me, and it embraces my rage with open arms. For the first time since I left Janos’s arms, I truly feel like I belong somewhere, so I go farther out, screaming as I crash my angry arms into the wild waves.

My teeth chatter whenever I relax my jaw, and painful tremors have my body in a vise. But it’s nothing compared to the pain I’ve lived through. It can’t compare to the grisly feeling of a knife dragging across my ribs or the betrayal of my body climaxing at the hands of my perpetrator.

Most of all, it can’t compare to losing the only person who ever truly mattered to me.

After fifteen years of dreaming myself away into a postcard, I finally broke free from the smothering confines of my hometown and felt free. As quickly as I gained that freedom, it was ripped away, and I thought I would never find it again. But Janos gave me a place in life. It was dark and grim, full of pain and hopelessness, but when he was at my side, it was all meaningful—I was at home.

I hate him for taking that away from me. I hate him for throwing me away so easily—just another girl that Gabor was done with.

I scream into the vast endlessness and take another step forward. One more, and another. There’s nothing left for me in this life. If I can’t be with him, I can’t be anywhere.

A tall wave crashes into me, throwing me several feet back. I gasp for air and run my hands over my wet face.

Memories crash into me with the same force as the wave. The horror etched into Janos’s face when he found me on the kitchen floor and saw the knife I had cut myself with; the fierce possessiveness when he had seen András hold my hand; the sincerity in his voice when he said I was the only woman he’d ever cared about. Those are things I’ve remembered all along, but they’re not the only memories that slam into me. Shock and realization strike as I remember things that happened while my mind was shrouded in blackness or pain, unable to hold on to any information: Janos punching Gabor when he tried to cut my feet, the desperate edge in his voice when he cleaned my wounds and told me to stay with him, and the pain in his voice when he said goodbye.

I lean my head back and stare into the open sky, stunned by the things I’m only now seeing clearly for the first time.Janos betrayed Gabor to save me.

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