TE19 Iberian Adventure

Three Stories

tried to attack the residents’ committee. When my father and two other neighbours wrestled her to the ground and dragged her away, my mother put her hand over my eyes like she did when there was something on the TV that wasn’t meant for children. As time went by, the adults began to ask after my parents more and more often, and when I said I didn’t know when theywere coming back, they shook their heads in disbelief. One of them added that I could tell them the truth, that they wouldn’t say anything to ’them’. When they said this, they would always gesture with their thumbs over their shouldersandIcouldn’tbesureif theyhadotherneighbours in mind or were referring to the unknown ones who ruled over everything. There was more and more whispering about us in the evenings on the fifth floor as well. The rumour was that our parents had defected. That was how I found out in the end thatourparentswerenotcomingback,andthattheywanted to take us out too, not fromÁron, but fromour neighbours whispering in the dark. I tried to imagine what it could be like ’outside’, but I had only very faint memories of a family trip to Budapest: shimmering neon advertisements, shops that smelled of vanilla, a dark apartment where a lady kept on explaining something to us that I couldn’t understand the half of even though she was speaking Hungarian. We’d had crispy rolls for breakfast, with the most delicious milk I had ever drunk: it was cold, not boiled up and sold in plastic bags. There’d been a toyshop where the toys went round and round on a revolving stagewith many levels and 243