Budapest

Wind wind wind. Wind, so strong it stopped me in my tracks, caught unprepared my unbuttoned jacket whipped behind me, like a rug pulled out from underfoot. Budapest, next to a turn in the Danube, was behind the Iron Curtain, but the fallen status could offer no more protection in 2010 than it had offered decades before. The people’s faces in Hungary, I’m sure, fell much sooner. Their demeanors were not the hard lines of people who had fought too hard for too long, neither were they etched with unspeakable grief. They were like the buildings. Cold and unseeing. Dreary concrete constructions from the outside with very few windows but a broken gate with many locks. From the inner courtyard you could look below ornate moldings and walk on intricately tiled floors, you could see that the inner walls were painted pastels grayed with time, but you had to get inside first. Things were private here.

In Pest, there were a great many people without homes. They laid side by side in the metro stations, or the pedestrian underpasses. Cardboard and beards. They sat ironically under statues memorializing the greatness of their country or they stood ironically selling bright cheerful balloons. They made their privacy with layers. Layers of clothes, layers of personalities, some had locked themselves from their minds. Too many locks.

The bus we had taken on Friday afternoon had left us tired. Our wanderings around the city in search of a place to stay had left us hungry. We took a break inside a coffee shop that had slot machines which blinked constantly with colors. Few people spoke English. Communication with them was performed rather than spoken. There was lots of pointing. Mostly we just talked with ourselves. We walked around Buda in the morning, to the top of the hill. Laughing, taking lots of pictures we covered the main sights until our feet couldn’t hold us up. Randomly we ate at a cheap Indian restaurant. Pale Hungarian women wrapped in saris gracefully served us on cheap metal dishes. The next stop was the baths; Budapest’s location on a fault line put to good use.

The famed hot springs were housed in a mansion with more pools than rooms—every temperature and shape imaginable, some scented, some full of people, some had fountains, some marked with lanes, some outside. The courtyard housed two half spheres with hot jets of water pouring from the bottom of two different, yet equally sensual, statues. One was a goose tweaking a woman’s nipple. There were stairs on the curved part where fit Europeans lounged—their ears getting cold in the 50 degree weather. Speedos abounded. A pair of older men played chess, the plastic board on a thick cement railing. It was a sight that made you laugh internally with the wonderment of it all. Relaxing, joking, people watching it was in every sense enjoyable. It felt good to be floating free.

It felt good until a man touched my leg. I glimpsed instantly into reality before shrugging it off as an accident in a pool full of people. I went back to lounging, keeping an eye on the good-looking man whose hand had brushed my thigh. The four travelers who made up our group entered a whirlpool where we were spun around with the current, racing each other and avoiding the elderly. My leg was touched again, too my surprise the same man as before was next to me. I told my friends and we joked about it. The third time it happened, I knew it was not an accident. The man became ugly in my eyes. I moved to a different area of the pool with my friends, we sat away from other people and talked about our plans for the next day. The man with short dark hair and a small blue speedo swam near. I moved further away and he quickly swum past grabbing my butt. The joking stopped in our group as I announced that I was going to take action.

The following moments could be surmised as momentous and surreal without actually being entirely momentous or completely surreal. Standing wet in a bikini, I was too angry to be cold. Speaking English to a fully-clothed guard, pointing out the man, hearing them speak Hungarian to one another, hearing the apparently drunk man’s excuse. Me announcing loudly with more pointing (so those who weren’t within earshot or couldn’t understand the language) could understand that this man was acting inappropriately. This was not the first time I had been sexually harassed, but it was the first time I had confronted the man. The fact that I was skimpily dressed in winter while doing so, added an element of humor, of the idea of equality. I was woman, hear me roar.