Headed to Heves

Boldog Csutuktokt. Happy Thursday.

Hungary, at first glance, is exactly the same.

Hungary feels the same. A pair of Ferihegy kisses on Eva’s cheeks is the same warm happiness. I still stand on tiptoes to hug Kat, but I can wrap all the way around Harpswell’s neck. Joyous indifference. My fingers still remember their way over the keypad of my recycled t-mobile cellphone. (36-30-812-85-91, if you ever have the urge.)

Hungary tastes the same. The ice cream is the same, more dainty than delicate. The gryo tempts with the same grizzle. A simple two deci-liters of Coke Light satisfies so much more fully than back home. Otthon. Palinka still burns. It always will, of course.

Hungary hits the nose the same, too. The same stench of sewer lingers in exactly the same way, wafting every now and then, even when you least expect it. The train is the same sweet sweat of hundreds of weary Hungarian travelers. And others with less certainty of their surroundings.

I’m the later at the moment. As familiar as it seems, I’m completely uncertain of my surroundings.

Empowered this time around with a laptop, I’m typing on a train. The car is new, I’ve never seen this style before. The seats are green. Comfortably fuzzy, not well-worn and repeatedly torn. Each car has an individual smoking booth, like a dunce-cap of a time-out-chair in the corner, sealed in with glass. The luggage rack above the seats peeks into the aisle in a stylish peak, as if more than a moments thought was given to form, not just function.

As familiar as some parts feel, Hungary seems so different to me at this moment in time.

I oscillate wildly between feeling almost certain I’m on the wrong train to vaguely optimistic that I’m headed in the right direction. I started worrying when Matt, Noemi and I started to run to Platform One at Keleti because we lingered too long over delicious shakes on List Ferenc ter. Then the ticket-sellers kept closing their windows right before we stepped up to get buy a ticket.

(The price is different, too. It used to cost 1420 forint to get from Heves to Budapest. Now it costs 2040 HUF to cover the same distance. Coupled with a weak dollar, the price jumped in the one year I’ve been gone from $6.45 to $11.33 for the 140 km journey.)

I didn’t have a lot of time to double-check as we ran to the platform. The final destination was right, Miskolc is well past Heves in the right direction, but the middle city was something I’d never seen before. There are certainly many tracks between Budapest and Miskolc, was I sealed into a train headed down the right track? Not a single twist and turn looked familiar. Not a tree or town or hill struck me as something I’d seen before. The train went under highways I’d never seen before. Stopped at stations I’d never laid eyes upon. I was so worried I debated calling Kat or some interneted friend to double check the itinerary on that former bible-of-sorts, www.elvira.hu.

It might be dehydration. It’s ridiculously hot in Hungary, summer arrived early.

But even as unfamiliar hills and forests and lakes whizzed by, the map confirmed that each stop, labeled by big white block letters on the front of each train station, was one step in the right direction. And slowly, I was able to recognize the big things, they were the first things that I recognized. The big Matra hills were just were the used to be, just like they used to be. The nuclear power plant just south of the hills was etched in hazy clouds and a setting sun, just like it used to be. And the Kal/Kapolna station was just like it used to be, so I hoped off.

Kicsi Piros (little red) was waiting, it always is. Heves is only two stops down the track that runs from Kal/Kapolna to Kisujszallasz. But even on that little line to Heves, one I’d taken so many times before, the unfamiliarity was shocking. I noticed a cemetery for the right time on the west side of the tracks. Cemeteries, almost by definition, cannot be new. A lake. A grown forest I’d never seen before on the east side of the tracks. Where had they been every other time I’d kicspirosed down the line. Or had I kicspirosed down some other line? Was I where I had always been? Or was I somewhere new?

Hungary is the same, of course, even in the newness, but not too me:

I was watching a movie after reading the book.

The big picture might be the same, but I was unnerved by the differences in the delicacy of details. I felt like I was entering a story. Someone else’s story. A story I had memorized because I had treasured it so much every time I heard it, the many times I had heard it.

The church steeple.
The water tower.
Highway 31.
The retired railroad car turned watermelon stand.
A pretty girl in a pink dress.
The little white station branded “HEVES.”

I stepped off the train, slowly, one foot at a time. I was home to a place that had never been my home.