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Read an Excerpt From Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Goss
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Read an Excerpt From Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Goss
This themed collection of imaginary places, with three new stories, recalls Susanna Clarke’s alternate Europe and the surreal metafictions of Borges.
By Theodora Goss
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Published on October 8, 2025
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Letters from an Imaginary Country, a new short story collection by Theodora Goss, out from Tachyon Publications on November 11.
Roam through the captivating stories of World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award winner Theodora Goss. This themed collection of imaginary places, with three new stories, recalls Susanna Clarke’s alternate Europe and the surreal metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Deeply influenced by the author’s Hungarian childhood during the regime of the Soviet Union, each of these stories engages with storytelling and identity, including her own.The infamous girl monsters of nineteenth-century fiction gather in London and form their own club. In the imaginary country of Thüle, characters from folklore band together to fight a dictator. An intrepid girl reporter finds the hidden land of Oz—and joins its invasion of our world. The author writes the autobiography of her alternative life and a science fiction love letter to Budapest. The White Witch conquers England with snow and silence.
Dora/Dóra: An Autobiography
Dóra Muszbek was born on September 30, 1968 in Budapest, Hungary. I know because I have her birth certificate. It’s on thick beige paper, with designs and letters in green ink, and folds like a booklet. On the front it says “Születési Anyakönyvi Kivonat,” above a ten-forint stamp. Inside, the green lines are filled with information in fountain pen. Her birthplace is listed as Budapest, her father as Dr. Muszbek, her mother under her maiden name although she is married and a doctor as well. Inside the booklet, on both sides, is an escutcheon in green ink: the Hungarian flag, with sheaves of wheat on either side, topped by a Soviet star.
What I know about her early years comes from black-and-white photographs. Here she is in a cotton romper and bonnet, looking at the camera and laughing. Here in an inflatable swimming ring, floating just off a wooden platform on Lake Balaton. Here she is walking down a street in Budapest, holding her father’s hand, perhaps on her way to the swings in the park. That must have been before the divorce. Here she is in her grandparents’ apartment, sitting on the sofa next to her mother, with one arm around her mother’s neck and the other holding a stuffed bear. That must have been after, when her mother had moved back in with her parents.
Their apartment was on Múzeum utca, across the street from the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, the museum of Hungarian history. Her grandparents had moved there after the war, into a building that had once been the city palace of an aristocratic family but had long ago been divided into flats. The building was arranged around a central courtyard, where carriages had driven in and out. Their apartment was on the second floor, up a stone staircase. You opened the front door with an ancient key and walked down a hallway to the living room, one half of what had been a double parlor divided by a set of doors with panes of pebbled glass. The ceiling was eighteen feet high; the tall windows looked down onto the park that surrounded the museum. The other half of the parlor was her grandparents’ bedroom. Dóra and her mother slept in the living room on beds that during the day became sofas. Both rooms were heated by ceramic stoves that had to be fed with coal kept in the building’s cellars. Off the hall were a bathroom, a WC, and a small kitchen with a pantry where Dóra’s grandmother stored preserved plums and cherries. The stove had to be lit with a match, a procedure that always scared Dóra a little. I have a photograph of her at Christmas, beside a tree on which real candles are burning. There is a bucket by the tree, just in case.
Those photographs are all I have left of her, except a few children’s books with titles like Kisgyermekek Nagy Mesekönyve and the stuffed bear, named Dani. He is almost as old as I am, and has lost much of his fur.
After that, the photographs are in color, and no longer in Hungary. Here is one of her at the zoo in Brussels, with an elephant. Another of her eating ice cream in front of the Atomium. By that point, her mother had moved to Brussels, leaving on a visa that allowed her to visit for two weeks, with a suitcase, a small child, and the equivalent of twenty dollars in foreign currency. The visa expired, but by then she had found work as a doctor. I have been told that when he realized she was gone, her father searched for Dóra frantically, banging on her grandparents’ apartment door, petitioning the Red Cross. But I don’t know. So much has been lost, to secrecy and the inevitable passage of time, to forgetfulness and lies.
In Brussels she learned to speak French and brush her teeth twice a day. She had not realized the importance of toothbrushing, but in school all the children were asked to form three lines: those who did not brush their teeth, those who brushed their teeth once a day, and those who brushed their teeth twice. Having gone to the middle line, she quickly realized her mistake: good Belgian children brush their teeth both in the morning and at night. Perhaps that is why, after all these years, I am so attentive to my teeth, going to the dentist twice a year, flossing before I go to sleep every night. When the dentist tells me how clean my teeth are, I feel a small moment of triumph at being in the right line.
It was in Brussels that Dóra first lost herself. I have a certificate of name change, Dóra Muszbek to Dora Méliès. Why Méliès, I once asked her mother. “I wanted to be French,” she said. “There was no point in being Hungarian, not then.” Years later she added, “The Embassy kept calling, telling me that I should go back, that I was a traitor to my country. But I did not want to go back. There was nothing for me there. So I changed our names and telephone number. At the time, I thought we were going to stay in Belgium.” Sometimes conversations such as this one will go on for years, punctuated by long silences. By the time they resume, I will have forgotten what question her mother is answering.
Despite half a lifetime in the United States, her mother still speaks with a strong Hungarian accent. She still exhibits the tendency I have noticed, in Hungarian and Chinese speakers, to confuse gender—he for she and vice versa. Hungarian has no gender—male or female, you are ő. This has not resulted in any greater equality between the sexes.
So Dóra became Dora. She brushed her teeth twice a day, spoke French, and wore sweaters knitted by her mother in red or brown wool. From that time, I remember only three things: the toothbrushing line, the sweaters because they itched, and walking down the street in a blue-and-white checked dress that Dora’s mother had sewn for her, an exact copy of the dress she was wearing. A policeman who passed them asked if they were sisters, smiling, flirting with her mother, whom Dora thought was the prettiest woman in the world.
And then, the lights of New York through a circular plane window. Her mother had received an offer to continue her medical research at the National Institutes of Health, and who could pass up an opportunity like that? Her daughter would be American.
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Letters from an Imaginary Country
Theodora Goss
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Letters from an Imaginary Country
Theodora Goss
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In the United States of America, the 1970s meant Wonder Bread, bell-bottom jeans, and watching Speed Racer on Saturday morning television. Dora developed a crush on the mysterious Racer X. She had to repeat first grade, because her English was not yet fluent enough for second. Then she skipped second grade and went directly into third. She had a green girls’ bike, a Ballerina Barbie, and a friend named Angela, one grade ahead of her, whose father kept Playboy magazines under his bed. She wore bell-bottom jeans and sweaters knitted by her mother, which she would stuff into her backpack as soon as she was out of sight because they itched, and anyway they were stupid. No one wore handmade clothes.
By that time, Dóra—no, Dora—had no idea who she was anymore. She would dream that she was trying to speak, but no one could understand her. Even she did not understand the language she was speaking.
They lived in a house with a yard in which there was a pine tree taller than the house itself. Throughout elementary school, Dora would climb the pine tree up to a place where three branches made a sort of floor. That was her nest. She would live there, the Dora-bird, the girl with wings. When she was a bird, she would speak bird language, which all the birds understood. Birds can fly anywhere. They can see anything. She would be able to as well. She never thought of flying back to Hungary, because it was lost forever behind a curtain of iron, like a country in a fairy tale. Once you left, you could never go back.
Every once in a while, she received letters from her grandmother in stilted, textbook English. She would have to write back. “Write back to your grandmother,” her mother would say, “but remember that the Secret Police will read it.”
What could she write? “Dear Nagymama: Today I was a bird. I have a crush on Racer X, who is secretly Speed Racer’s brother. I have forgotten how to speak Hungarian.”
In school, she committed two crimes that she would remember for the rest of her life. In first grade, she stole a sticker from another girl’s locker, and in third grade she plagiarized a story for a writing assignment. Both times she was caught, and the humiliation of the experience, of being “talked to” by a teacher, made her particularly cautious not only to do no wrong, but to be perceived as doing no wrong. She reformed, and became both Student Council secretary and a patrol, with a badge on an orange plastic belt. At lunchtime, she and the other patrols would escort kindergarteners home after their half day. If a car had come careening down the road, threatening to run over one of her charges, she would have leaped in front of it, putting herself in danger, like Robin Hood in the Disney animated version, or Nancy Drew.
For she was Responsible. Every day, after school, she walked home and let herself in by the key that hung on a string around her neck. She got herself a snack and did homework until her mother came home. Sometimes her mother would tell her to come directly to the NIH, so she would walk up the broad avenue to the main research building and take the elevator up to her mother’s laboratory. In those days, you could still play with the lab animals: rats and rabbits and mice, all bred specifically for experiments, soft and inquisitive and ticklish, smelling of their feed, and poop, and the wood shavings that lined their plastic bins. Sometimes she was allowed to give them more of the thick green pellets they fed on, or change their water. But most days she just waited, sitting at her mother’s desk, turning around and around in the revolving chair. She came to recognize the distinctive smell of laboratories.
She made a friend named Amy, the best friend she’d ever had. Amy’s parents were also divorced. After school, the two of them liked to go to the playground, sit on the swings, and talk about the books they were reading: mostly Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series. Someday, a dragonrider would appear in the sky and touch down near the kickball field. He would take them to Pern, where they would become dragonriders as well. It seemed a more logical ambition than being a doctor or lawyer. But she lost Amy forever when her mother decided to repeat her residency so she could practice medicine in America. They moved to a school district in another state.
One day Dora, now in middle school in Virginia and exceptionally lonely, found a letter from her grandmother that had fallen behind a bookshelf. What was she looking for? I suspect the big book of Indian art that had explicit pictures in it. That and Judy Blume novels, passed around in school, carefully hidden in lockers and under desks, the important pages turned down at the corners, were her introductions to human sexuality, for the Playboy magazines had been less than instructive. The letter was in Hungarian of course, so she could not read it, having lost that part of herself entirely. But tucked into the envelope was a photograph—of her grandmother, with a tall girl in a school uniform standing behind her. On the back of the photograph was written “Nagymama és Dóra.”
Dora knew at once what had happened. When her mother had taken her from Hungary, she had left Dóra behind. Not her twin—she had no twin, she knew that perfect well. No, the part of herself that had been Dóra had somehow been left behind. While she was growing up in the United States, trying to persuade her mother to buy her designer jeans, Dóra was growing up in Hungary.
She did not ask her mother about Dóra. She had learned early on that when she asked her mother questions, her mother responded with answers that were only partly true. Dora could not always tell which part.
“Why did you divorce my father?”
“Because he expected me to iron his underwear.”
“Why did we leave Hungary?”
“Because I wanted to give you the opportunities I never had.”
“Why can’t I wear earrings?”
“Because you will look like a gypsy.”
“What does that word mean? The one you say when you’re angry.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t repeat it to anyone who speaks Hungarian.”
She imagined asking her mother, “Why is Dóra still living in Hungary?”
Her mother would say, in her heavy accent, “Don’t be ridiculous.” She would roll her r’s: r-r-ridiculous. So instead, Dora imagined what life would be like for Dóra, living with her grandparents in a Communist state. Growing up in the 1970s in America, here are the things she knew about Communism:
Communists were not allowed to practice their religion. Dóra had been baptized in a Catholic church. Did she ever sneak into a church service? Did she, secretly, surreptitiously, take communion? In moments of stress and confusion, did she, like Dora, say a Hail Mary—although her mother had told her, in no uncertain terms, that religion was the opiate of the masses?
Communists owned no property. Her grandparents’ apartment, where Dóra presumably lived, was owned by the state. Dóra would sleep in the living room, on one of the beds that were sofas during the day. In the morning, she would be woken by the light that came through the tall windows facing the park and a cacophony of song from the birds in the linden trees. Then she would have breakfast in the tiny kitchen.
What would she eat? Communists were poor and had to wait in long lines. Her grandmother would wait in line for food, first for bread at the baker’s, then for vegetables at the market, then sausages… For breakfast, Dóra would have bread and butter, a tomato with salt, and slices of ham. Then she would go into the ancient bathroom and put on her school uniform.
Communists wore red kerchiefs and addressed each other as Comrade. Dóra would tie a red kerchief around her neck and go to school, where she would be called Comrade Muszbek. Did she ever see her father? Perhaps on holidays. Once, when Dora had asked about him, her mother had said, “He has remarried. His second wife is a schoolteacher. He has two other daughters now.” So he would not have much time for his first daughter. Anyway, he had become a professor at the University of Debrecen, in the medical school. Would Dóra sometimes go there during the holidays, to spend time with her sisters? Did she even think of them as her sisters?
Subversive literature was banned. But knowing Dóra, she probably wrote subversive literature. After all, Dora wrote, so Dóra probably wrote as well—subversive poetry. It was subversive because it did not glorify the state. Rather, it was about a young girl’s search for herself, her thoughts on life, the world… She kept it in a notebook under the mattress of her bed, which was also a sofa. If her grandmother had ever found it, she had never said so.
She also read banned literature. Her copy of 1984 was hidden inside the dust jacket of an edition of Grimm’s fairy tales that had been destroyed when she dropped it into the bathtub.
Like all Communists, Dóra would do anything for a pair of American jeans.
Dora wished she could send Dóra a pair of her own American jeans, not bell-bottoms now but straight, and so tight at the waist that she had to lie back on her bed to zip them—or just talk to her. But if she sent a letter, the Secret Police would see it, and what then? Perhaps the Secret Police would send agents for Dóra, and even for Dora sitting comfortably watching television in her American living room. They would both be put in a prison, perhaps in the same cell. Dora wondered what sort of conversations they would have.
Dóra would tell her about school, which her mother had assured her was much more difficult than an American school, and about writing poetry, like an ancestor who had been a famous Hungarian poet. She would talk about going to Lake Balaton for vacations, about swimming in the muddy water among the reeds, sleeping in the house her grandfather had built after the war, watching her grandmother paint the shifting light on the lake from her upstairs studio. She would talk about eating fried fogas, a fish that lived only in the lake.
“And what is it like when you meet our father for ice cream in Budapest?” Dora would ask. “Do you like our sisters? Do you wish you had American jeans? Or your own bedroom? Are you popular in school?”
Dora would tell her about being in the Gifted and Talented Program, and definitely not popular. About reading novels and trying to write them, and never being satisfied with what she had written. “For vacation we go to Ocean City, on the Atlantic Ocean, and eat crabs in a restaurant where you have to break the shells and take out the meat yourself,” she would say. Dóra would want to know whether she listened to Michael Jackson, what Americans thought of Hungarians (“They mostly don’t,” Dora would have to admit), what it was like to grow up with a mother.
Would they be executed? If so, they could stand in front of the firing squad together, holding hands.
By the time Dora went to high school, her mother was no longer at the National Institutes of Health. Now she was in private practice as a physician. When Dora said she felt sick, her mother would say, “You’re not sick. Get up and go to school.” Except the one time she had appendicitis and her mother drove her to the hospital for an appendectomy. Ever after, she knew there were two responses to feeling sick: either you were on your way to the emergency room, or you were not sick and it was time to get up.
In high school, Dora was on the Honors track, which was essentially the same as the Gifted and Talented Program—fifteen students who spent the entire day, except homeroom and gym, going from class to class together. She tried to wear what the popular girls were wearing, the ones who were on the cheerleading squad and made homecoming court, but her mother did not think clothes were important. What you had in your head was important: it was the only thing you could take with you when the Russians invaded. Did Dora think it couldn’t happen here? Then Dora was naïve.
Perhaps that is why I have always assumed that everything can be destroyed in a moment. Perhaps that is why my basic attitude toward life has always been fear.
Dora rebelled by painting her room cherry blossom pink and hanging lace curtains over her bed. She read Barbara Cartland and Willa Cather and ElfQuest. She dated high school boys, and even one college freshman, partly to feel wanted, partly to feel that something in her life could be other than ordinary. It took years for her to realize that boys were actually quite ordinary—not that different from other human beings. At the time, they seemed to her like a fascinating alien species. She was always in love, sometimes with one of the boys, but more usually a film or literary character. Her most serious crushes were Sherlock Holmes, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Disney animated fox Robin Hood. She tried to smoke clove cigarettes, but never quite learned to inhale. She drank peach wine coolers that her friend Susan stole from her parents’ basement refrigerator. One day, she pierced her own ears with ice and a safety pin. Once they healed, she wore silver hoops. When she shook her head, she could feel them swinging against her cheeks. This was her Rebellious phase.
Meanwhile, in Budapest, Dóra was writing poetry. She wrote it in secret, and when it was published, it was in an underground literary journal, mimeographed and handed around the secondary school. She had fallen in love with a teacher at her school who had once been a poet, but who had been labeled subversive and sent to a prison camp. After such restrictions eased, he was released and assigned a job as a teacher of literature. In his teaching, he was always careful to be correct. He taught Hungarian translations of The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle, denouncing the evils of capitalism. But it was he who had started the school’s underground literary journal. Sometimes when he read Dóra’s poetry, he told her that she was a genius. He wore a sweater with a hole in the elbow and smoked Sobranie cigarettes, which she could smell in her hair. They met in his apartment, a single room in a building on Rákóczi út, to talk about poetry and make love, or what Dóra assumed was love. It was very much how the popular novels described—filled with endearments and recriminations. “You are so beautiful, little bird,” he would tell her. “Someday, you will fly away and leave me forever.” Then he would become moody and pace around the apartment, as though he were still in prison.
Sometimes, walking home from his apartment, she would stop for ice cream, csokoládé és citrom, and feel guilty that she was enjoying walking along Üllői út licking ice cream as much as she had enjoyed being with him.
Her grandmother still made all her dresses, except her school uniform, following patterns that had been popular in the 1960s. Only the wealthiest girls in school had clothes from Austria or Italy. She still slept in the living room of the apartment on Múzeum utca and did not imagine that would change, unless someday she got married and her husband requested an apartment. But she did not know if she would ever marry—look at her stepmother, who complained about being the wife of a university professor in a provincial city like Debrecen. Women had to put up with a great deal, in marriage. No, she was going to university, to study literature. Her grandfather did not want her to go—his daughter, Dóra’s mother, had gone, and look at what had happened! She had left her husband, her daughter for them to take care of… and for what? So she could boast about her big house in America? Who was going to take care of them in their old age? But her grandmother said that nowadays girls must become educated. And as a professor, Dóra could travel to international conferences. Her father did that all the time, spending more time out of the country than in it. Perhaps someday, she could go to America and meet her mother.
She was not surprised that her mother wrote so rarely. After all, she had Dora, her American child. And her father had his two younger daughters. She was the one who had been abandoned, who had been left in Budapest with her grandparents. Of course, once she was a famous poet, they would realize that they should never have forgotten about her. That’s who she was: the forgotten one. She wrote a poem with that title, and it won first prize in the school poetry competition. The prize was a medal, which her grandmother hung in the glass cabinet where she kept her most precious possessions, including the miniature of an ancestress who had been a noblewomen and hosted Napoleon at her country house. In America, Dora entered an essay contest. She submitted an essay about leaving Hungary and coming to America, about losing herself. When she won and the essay was reprinted in the local paper, her mother told her that she had put them both in danger: the Secret Police might read it, find them, and take them back to Hungary. There were things her mother told her that Dora no longer believed: that wearing makeup made you look like a prostitute, that politicians were always corrupt, that American children were spoiled and ungrateful. She seriously doubted that the Secret Police read the Loudoun County Gazette.
Dóra’s examination scores were good enough to get her into Eötvös Loránd University. She would still be living with her grandparents, but now she would be a university student. In high school, she had studied English, German, French, and of course Russian. I have noticed that in Hungary, although everyone over a certain age took compulsory Russian in high school, no one admits to speaking Russian. Everyone says, “Oh, of course I took Russian—it was compulsory. But I don’t remember any of it.” It’s a sort of linguistic amnesia. Dora had studied French and Latin so she could do well on the SAT. When she opened her acceptance letter from the University of Virginia, she was both delighted and relieved. Yes, that was where she would go. For one thing, it was in-state and she would not have to take out loans. For another, she had been to visit, and fallen in love with its red brick, white columns, and green lawns. It was one of the oldest universities in the country—the oldest part of the university had been designed by Thomas Jefferson himself. She had only recently become a naturalized citizen. Maybe going to UVA would make her feel American, as though she belonged. And it had a good English department. She could study literature, maybe even go on to get her PhD.
At the university, Dóra studied Faulkner, Proust, and Hesse in the original languages. She read Chekhov, remembering Russian for the sole purpose of studying literature. (“I can’t speak conversational Russian, of course,” she would say. “I’ve forgotten it all.”) Every morning, she would wake up, make herself breakfast—muesli and yogurt because she had become a vegetarian, which her grandmother insisted would cause her to die of starvation. She would get dressed, walk down the stone stairs of the apartment building, and cross Kálvin tér. Then it was only a few blocks to the main university building. She would take classes, meet with her professors. For lunch she would go out with her friends or eat brown bread, curls of smoked cheese, and slices of tomato in the park, under the linden trees. She no longer saw the literature teacher. She assumed he had taken on another student, female of course, as his acolyte.
Six years of university, and she would have a Master’s degree. Then she would teach or go on to get her PhD. The laws were so much more permissive now that she might even be able to teach elsewhere, in Austria perhaps, where you could make more money. Her father had been permitted to form a private consulting company, and her sisters Judit and Eszter were going to Vienna regularly to buy clothes. Dóra could not afford such luxuries, but went to the secondhand stores that students frequented on Rákóczi út. There she could find jeans and sweaters, and if they were a bit torn, that only made them more fashionable. She wore bright red lipstick and Chanel No. 5, from a bottle her father had given her after a conference in Paris. They were her trademark, you could say. She had cut her hair short and looked a little, she thought, like Claudette Colbert.
Dora wore pearls to class. She had a set of pearls that her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday. They were supposed to be for special occasions, but the other girls wore pearls to class, so she did as well, with ripped jeans, a twinset, and ballet flats. She wore pink lip gloss, and Charlie on her neck and the insides of her wrists. Every morning she would put her hair in hot rollers so it fell in curls down her back, then hairspray it so it would stay curled. She took classes on the history of English literature, from Chaucer to Joyce, and one on magical realism in which the professor introduced the students to Allende and Márquez. After class, she would go back to the French House, where she had a room so small there was space only for a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, and a square patch of carpet on which she could turn around and get dressed. She would eat with the other students in the communal dining room (French was compulsory), then go to a meeting of the literary and debating society she had joined. She still wanted to study literature, and maybe someday be a writer, although she scarcely understood what that meant. But it had been decided, mostly by her mother, that after college she should go to law school.
Her mother had taught her three things:
Life is hard.
People are out to get you.
Literature and art are fine as hobbies, but you need a real profession. Like law.
In the summer of 1990, Dora sat on the floor of her boyfriend’s apartment, in front of the television, watching German teenagers break off and carry away pieces of the Berlin Wall. They had met a few months ago, through a mutual friend. On their first date, he had taken her to his parents’ house in the hills above Charlottesville—horse country. The house was old, surrounded by a hundred acres of pasture merging into forest. They walked out to the barn, saddled the horses, rode along a forest path. It had been years since her brief experience with riding lessons—nothing, like riding or violin or ballet, had lasted long. Her mother would move, or money would run out. Writing was the only thing she had been able to keep up, all that time. Would she have married him if he had taken her to the movies rather than to such an obvious symbol of the stability and wealth she had never experienced in her life? One of his ancestors had fought with Washington at Valley Forge. Three years later, when she walked down the aisle of the Episcopal church in her white silk Laura Ashley wedding dress, she wondered if now, finally, she was becoming a real American.
Dóra watched the wall coming down on her boyfriend’s television as well. He was an East German studying in Hungary, and eventually, although he did not know it then, he would have a German passport and travel freely throughout the EU as a financier. Dóra would see his name long after in a newspaper article covering his indictment for fraud, but she would have lost touch with him by then. She had decided that she would never marry, after seeing her best friend Ildikó finish her graduate degree, marry a dentist, immediately get pregnant, and take a government job that offered two years of maternity leave. Now when Dóra visited her suburban house, all she did was complain about her swollen ankles. Her other best friend Anna was going to be an actress, and they had decided together over the Tokaji served at Ildikó’s wedding that they would never get married, never put husbands ahead of their ambitions or careers.
Her first year at Harvard Law School, during the misery of a long-distance relationship and the realization that she hated law the way she hated calculus, although calculus had a moral purity that the study of law lacked, Dora received a letter:
Dear Dora:I hope you will excuse my English, which is probably quite awkward. I have not studied it formally since high school, or what we call gymnasium. Our grandmother received a letter with your address in it, so I thought I would write and say hello. Hello! Do you know about me? Has our mother told you? Perhaps you have seen photographs.I have seen photographs of you, and I think we look very much alike, except for the hair. Mine is much shorter, and I think yours is lighter? Perhaps you have lightened it. Mine is very practical, for with university classes I do not have much time to take care of my appearance. I think yours is more pretty!When I learned that you were at Harvard, I was most impressed! I am at Eötvös Loránd University, which I think is the best university in Hungary, perhaps like Harvard in the USA. I am studying comparative literature. When I finish my degree, I hope to become a teacher, but really I would like to write. I have had some of my poetry published already. I would send you some, but I think you do not speak Hungarian.I hope that you will write back to me, and also that perhaps someday we may meet, now that the political situation has changed.
Puszi (that means I kiss you),Dóra
It took Dora three days to write back.
Dear Dóra,It’s good to hear from you. Strange, but good. Harvard is a lot less impressive than you would think. To be honest, I kind of hate law school. What I really want to do is be a writer. Coincidence, hunh? I’m writing a fantasy novel—it’s like The Chronicles of Narnia, but from the White Witch’s point of view. It’s in my desk—sometimes I work on it when I’m supposed to be studying.I have a boyfriend—his name is Jefferson (no joke, it’s one of those Southern names, his father and grandfather both have the same name so he’s actually “the Third”) but I call him Jeff. We’re engaged, but he’s down in Virginia, in medical school.Yes, I know about you—not much, though. Tell me about yourself. Do you like school? What do you do in your spare time? What is our grandmother like?Do you know Mom changed my name? You wrote Muszbek on the envelope, but it’s been Méliès for a long time now. No one knows how to pronounce it, and in middle school some of the kids called me Smelly. And then in high school it was “Hey, Malaise!” Sometimes people think it’s Mexican and start talking to me in Spanish.I have to go study for my crim exam—my professor is a famous criminal defense lawyer. He’s always on talk shows. Yesterday, he told us that if we ever found evidence implicating our clients, we should hide it. Which is, um, illegal? Anyway, sorry if I sound really spacey. I just don’t feel like I belong here, you know? Write again, and I hope to meet you some day.
Love,Dorap.s. Tell me about Dad?
Every couple of months, Dora would get a letter on thin blue airmail paper. Every couple of months, Dóra would receive the same. Dora would sit at her desk in the Cambridge apartment she shared with a roommate, and then in her apartment in Brooklyn, New York, with a cat on her lap. Dóra would sit at the kitchen table in the Budapest apartment, and then on the sofa in her own tiny apartment in the same building. And they would read…
I am very sorry to tell you that our grandfather is going to a home for old people. He has Alzheimer’s disease (I hope that is the right word) and cannot remember whether he lit the stove or where his shoes are. Our grandmother is afraid he will hurt himself. I am very sad to see him go. I remember when I was little, and I walked holding his finger. Sometimes he does not remember who I am.
We’ve planned the wedding for the summer after I graduate. I’ll take the bar exam in July, and then we’ll get married in August, which is a little crazy. But Jeff got a residency in New York, so I’ve taken a job at one of the big firms there. It’s not what I want to do, but I’m $80,000 in debt (!!!) so I have to figure out a way to pay it off. Mom said she would help me, but instead she bought another house.
I had a wonderful visit to Prague with my boyfriend. I mean my new boyfriend, Attila—I met him after Dietrich, who decided to move back to Germany. Attila is a filmmaker and also a photographer. He took a photograph of me that I like very much. I am hoping that if I can have this poetry book published, I can use the photograph on the back cover. It is very difficult to publish anything in Hungary nowadays because of the economic situation.
It’s not very good, but here’s the story I mentioned: “Swan Girls.” I’ve given up on the novel—I don’t have much time to write anymore, and anyway, I don’t think I’m ready to write one. So I’m going to focus on finishing short stories and sending them out to magazines. Meanwhile, I’ve started taking the Kaplan course for the bar exam. Kill me now.
I spent a week in Balaton with our grandmother. I do not know if you remember the house our grandfather built. I hope someday you can come see it. It’s not very luxurious, for there is no heating or hot water. But there is a large plum tree in the garden. We made a great deal of lekvár (plum jam). I am enclosing a little embroidery that our grandmother asked me to send you. She is very sorry that she cannot write to you herself, but nowadays she has a pain in her hands—rheumatism, I think you say?
Here are some pictures of the wedding. I wish you could have been there—you could have been my bridesmaid, instead of Jeff’s sister! In the end, Mom didn’t show up. She even called Jeff’s dad, the cardiologist, to tell him that he should call it off—as though he could have. Basically, she doesn’t like Jeff, she doesn’t like the fact that we got married at his parents’ house (as though we could have afforded anything else), she hates the fact that I took his name and refuses to call me by it. At this point, you probably have a better relationship with her than I do, despite the fact that you’re on the other side of the Atlantic.
I am sad to write that our father’s mother has died. She was a very sweet woman who lived in a village near Debrecen. I did not know her well, because I was only able to visit a few times, but she always sent me Christmas gifts she made herself. Last year she knitted me a hat that I like very much, with a pattern of roses. I remember she had a garden full of beautiful roses, red and pink and yellow. I do not think our grandfather will last much longer. It is so hard losing the old people. They have seen so many things, and when my life is difficult, I remember how much more difficult it was for them, living through the war.
The truth is, New York scares me. I’m working on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan, and all I can think about is what would happen if I fell out the window. One day the window cleaner came and actually opened the window and leaned out and cleaned it. He had on a harness, but I was watching him through the doorway and I swear I had to go to the bathroom and throw up. All I want to do is leave here, as soon as Jeff finishes his residency.
Here it is, my poetry book! I am so sorry that you cannot read it in Hungarian, but I have translated one of the poems for you. Of course a translation can never be as good as in the original language, but I hope you will think it is not too rotten. I do like the cover, and I think the photo Attila took of me is very good. It has even been nominated for a small poetry prize for emerging European writers!
I’m really lonely. Jeff has to be at the hospital all the time, and when he’s not working he’s sleeping. So when I’m not working it’s just me and Cordelia. This is Cordelia! (In the picture—she’s such a fluffball!) I found her wandering around the apartment house parking lot, mewing at me and running away whenever I got close to her. I watched her for a few days, then caught her in a Havahart trap baited with tuna. For a couple of days she hid under the bed, but then she started letting me pet her. Right now, she likes to knead my lap and chew on my finger, both of which hurt. Meanwhile, I’m trying to repay my law school loans as fast as I can—we’re basically living on Jeff’s salary so I can pay them off. I have a plan, but I don’t want to say anything about it yet, because I’m not sure it will work. If it does, I’ll have time to write, and I’ll be doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time…
I met our mother. It was a strange meeting, as you told me it would be. I am sorry you have not spoken to her in some time. She told me how disappointed she was that you are leaving the law and going back to graduate school. I tried to explain how much you dislike being a lawyer, how tired you are, working late every night. But she said I was a typical Hungarian. She thinks socialism has ruined Hungary, that we are all lazy, only wanting to be comfortable. She says that in the family, she is the only entrepreneur. I know she makes a lot of money, but is she truly happy? She does not sound like a happy woman. She and our grandmother quarreled a great deal, so I often went to my own apartment, or to see Attila. I do not know why they quarrel so much, but it is all about the family, about how our grandfather is being taken care of at the nursing home, and some of his cousins I have not seen in many years because our grandmother does not like them and tore up their pictures.
So first of all, today a billionaire threw a pen at me! He’s a client of the firm, and I was at his company’s office doing the legal work for a complete reorganization of its subsidiaries. He needed to sign something, so he borrowed my pen, and then he didn’t want to walk all the way back to me, so he threw it. At least the cap was on—it hit me right in the chest. He’s a Swedish media mogul, with blond hair combed over his balding head, and he can only be in the US a certain number of days a year for tax reasons. I’m pretty sure I’m going to use this in a story someday… In the meantime, here’s a copy of the magazine! They sent me two. Ignore the babe in chain mail on the cover. I think my story’s actually pretty intellectual, definitely not genre fantasy. It’s on p. 12, “Tale of the Rose.” My first professional sale!
Attila wants me to live with him—he has a large apartment in Buda and is doing very well for himself. My friend Anna says he would make a good husband—he is handsome, hardworking, very talented at his photography. Yesterday we went to my favorite restaurant, the Építészpince Étterem, at the Architectural Institute behind Múzeum utca. I had hortobágyi palacsinta, which is very filling, but I am a little thin just now because I have been working so hard. He talked to me about the future, about how he would like to build his business. He said someday we should be married and have children, a boy and a girl. Or two boys, but at least one boy for him. Anna says I am foolish not to move in with him, that life as a single woman is very hard. But I want to stay in my little apartment and write poetry. Is that foolish, do you think?
I’m glad I met him while he was here, although it was pretty awkward—I didn’t know what to call him. I couldn’t just say “Dad” after all these years. He didn’t have much time because he was one of the keynote speakers at the conference, but I took the subway up to Columbia and we found a cafeteria where we could sit and talk. You’re right, he does look sort of like one of those old film stars. I still don’t understand what happened between him and Mom, and I probably never will. He showed me pictures of Judit and Eszter. They both look just like him, very blonde and blue-eyed. I suppose I take after Mom. He said he hoped someday I would be able meet them. He also said he was proud of you—he called you “very clever, and really a good writer.” I thought you would like to know that! Sometimes I wonder… but it’s not really worth thinking about how life would have been different if I’d been someone else. I’m not, that’s all.
I am very, very sorry to tell you that our grandfather has died. Here is a little sketch that our grandmother did for you, so you can remember him. It is of him as a young man, when she first knew him. It makes me very sad to look at…
We’re leaving New York on Sunday! We gave away almost everything we’ve accumulated here—anyway, most of it was from thrift shops, because it’s not as though we can afford real furniture. We’re only taking as much as we can pack in the car—books, clothes, and Cordelia, who’s probably going to drive us crazy, mewing the entire way to Boston. It’s hard to believe we’ve been here three years. Everyone at the law firm stared at me incredulously when I told them I was leaving to go back to grad school. I didn’t even mention that my loans are COMPLETELY paid off. I’m really glad Jeff got that fellowship at Mass General. It will be nice being back in Boston, or at least better than New York.
I have been offered a position as a teacher at the university—I am what you might call a “lecturer.” I thought of finding a position abroad as Attila wants, but if I leave Hungary, who will take care of our grandmother? She is getting old now, and it is difficult for her to carry groceries up the stairs. I am grateful that our mother is sending money, but grandmother needs someone to live here, to make sure she is taken care of. I go almost every night to have dinner with her, so she will not be alone. Dora, I feel as though there is something missing from my life. Is it a husband? A child? Another book? I look at the future and I cannot see it as any different from now, living in this little apartment, teaching classes at the university, having dinner with grandmother, quarreling with Attila. Perhaps I am one of those people who will never accomplish anything?
I’ll be in Hungary for a whole month. It’s not as though I have any money, but I’m going to use part of my student loans for the year (loans again! I’ll never get out from under them). I’ll fly to Frankfurt, and from there to Budapest. Can you tell me how to get from the airport to the apartment? Honestly, I’m a little scared. But if I don’t do it now, I don’t know when I’ll be able to. After this summer, I have to start writing my dissertation, and Jeff and I have been talking about having a baby… Anyway, my life seems to consist of doing things that scare me—I don’t know, maybe that’s very American, or maybe it’s just me. SO, SEE YOU IN JUNE!
I wondered what would happen when Dora and Dóra met for the first time. Would it be like a science fiction movie? Would they merge into one another, or create some sort of space-time anomaly, or combust? I was apprehensive.
But no. They just went out for ice cream.
Dora’s Lufthansa flight landed at Budapest Ferihegy International Airport, which was so small that passengers walked from the landing strip to the terminal. She went through customs, showing her American passport almost with a sense of shame, and announced the reason for her visit: tourist. Then, as Dóra had told her, she took the airport shuttle into the city, to Kálvin tér. She pulled her wheeled suitcase over the cobbled intersection to Múzeum utca, found the apartment building, and rang the bell for her grandmother’s apartment. When she heard the front door buzz, she pushed it open: it was a small door cut into the larger one that had once opened to admit carriages into the building’s central courtyard.
Budapest was changing. On the streets, in the late 90s, you could see Mercedes and Peugeots, but still some Trabants, looking like toy cars next to the French and German models. Slowly, building by building, the soot of the Communist era was disappearing, although some of it remains even now, a reminder of the past. Buildings were being repainted in the distinctive colors of Budapest: lemon yellow, pale rose, pistachio, burnt umber. The old Hungarian flag, with the crown of Szent István at its center, was flying again. There were beggars on the streets, and rich Russians and Germans going to the casinos that had sprung up and would be gone by the end of the decade. The buildings on Kálvin tér were being either restored or replaced by modern contraptions of steel and glass. Soon, next to the bakery and antiques store selling Zsolnay and Herend, there would be an international hotel. Soon, not too soon but in the foreseeable future, Hungary would join the European Union. There would be a California Coffee Company on the corner of Múzeum utca, selling Italian coffee, a Hungarian interpretation of American sandwiches, and sour cherry brownies. But that was in the future for Dora and Dóra. That is in the future you and I know.
“Hello!” Dóra called out, standing by the apartment door, as Dora made her way up the stairs. “Do you need help with your luggage?”
“No, I’m fine, thanks.”
“Did you have a good flight?”
“Yes, but I think Frankfurt airport is the most confusing place in the world.” Their voices echoed off the stone walls.
Dora reached the second-floor landing. This is when I might have expected a combustion, a space-time vortex, or something equally spectacular. Instead, there was the awkward dance of an American who goes in for a hug and a Hungarian who tries to kiss you on both cheeks—like two people waltzing who are both trying to lead.
Dóra helped Dora with her suitcase. For the first time since she was a child, Dora walked down the hallway of her grandmother’s apartment. It had not changed. The ceilings were still high, although not as impossibly high as they had once been. The walls were still painted a pale yellow, faded now. They were still covered with her grandmother’s paintings of flowers, boats on Lake Balaton, a few friends. The tall windows still opened onto the park around the museum.
“Ah, Dóra! Nagyon szép vagy!” Her grandmother was several inches shorter than her, with white hair in a sensible cut, wearing a housecoat. What would it have been like growing up here, in an apartment with furniture that had no doubt been bought cheaply in the 1950s and was beginning to fall apart, and doilies crocheted by her grandmother on every surface, and the clear light of Budapest coming through the windows? What would it have been like growing up with a woman who called her nagyon szép, very pretty? Well, she had only to ask Dóra.
“Would you like something to eat? Nagyi is making dinner, but perhaps I can give you a little something beforehand. Do you like pogácsa?” Dora nodded. For parties, her mother had made the small biscuits, spreading butter on the dough, folding it over, letting it rise, rolling it and spreading butter and folding again. Dóra put several on a small plate.
She looked curiously at her American self, the one who had gone away and grown up across the ocean. Dora was the same height, but a little heavier than she was, almost chubby. Her hair was longer, lighter in color. In a letter, she had mentioned getting “highlights.” She wore makeup, but it was less visible, unless you knew how to look for it: the colors more natural, the application subtler. Her clothes were newer, more fashionable, and her suitcase was heavy. What did she have in there? (A curling iron, among other things.) Also she seemed more confident than Dóra, as though she wore invisible armor that she never took off.
They sat in the living room, which had once been Dóra’s bedroom as well. Their grandmother had gone into the kitchen to finish cooking dinner, but she had left old family photographs. Dóra explained who they were, the men in wool suits, the women in silk dresses trimmed with lace, the babies of either gender in christening gowns of white lawn. “Your grandfather’s father was a schoolteacher. And here is his wife, your great-grandmother, holding your grandfather.” How strange that this toddler, looking distinctly feminine in an embroidered cap, would grow up to become an engineer, and live through the Second World War, and finally forget the life he had known, dying in a home for old men, most of them veterans. Dora felt time pressing down on her, time and tragedy, the way she never did in America, where even the air seemed new. Time and tragedy were, she would discover, as much a part of Budapest as the sunlight and the ice cream vendors. “And there is the home that our grandmother grew up in. It was a farm, a very large farm, owned by the church, and her father was the… manager, you say? Or supervisor? It was a hereditary position, but he had no son, and anyway the Communists took it. Now it is a museum. Our grandmother went to art school in Szeged, and that is where she met our grandfather.”
Dóra wanted to talk about more than the past, more than black-and-white photographs. But now was not the time, and anyway dinner was ready. They ate at the kitchen table: a pörkölt with noodles and cucumber salad. Dora realized that all the dishes her mother had made, her signature dishes at dinner parties, had been only an imitation of Hungarian food, like a ghost. This was the real thing, with the right ingredients: beef from the local butcher, paprika grown in Szeged or Kalocsa. It was like the Hungarian language, both familiar and utterly alien. She felt a sense of dislocation that had nothing to do with the food or jet lag. When she had last tasted these flavors, she had been a child.
“Nagyi, that is what I call her, like grandma, it is an affectionate term. She says that she missed very much seeing you grow up. She says you are very tall and pretty, like me. These plums came from our house in Lake Balaton. Perhaps you would like to go down there? During the summer we go down almost every weekend to pick the plums. There is a train that takes us to Szántód, that is where the house is located. She says she will do a painting of you. After dinner, she wants to show you all her paintings, but perhaps you would like to go for a walk and see Budapest? We could get ice cream.”
Dora nodded and smiled at the little old woman who was nodding and smiling at her, talking in rapid Hungarian. She was sure Dóra was not translating, could not translate, it all—and it was coming back to her, just a little. No, Dóra was saying, I will not tell her again how sorry you are that you do not speak English. She knows. She already knows. Dóra felt the strange irritation of being in two worlds, translating between her grandmother and her American self. Why could Dora not have learned Hungarian? Then they could all speak comfortably, but here she was, trying to think in two languages at once. She saw something in Dora, an unconscious arrogance in how she carried herself, that she both disliked and envied. Dora ate the pörkölt and noodles—called nokedli—and cucumber salad as though she would never taste them again, as though that particular complexity, the hot sweetness of paprika, the coolness of cucumber in vinegar and sour cream, would once again be lost to her. Was she really here? She swallowed the last bite of pörkölt and wished she could lick her plate clean.
After dinner, Dóra washed the dishes and Dora dried. Then Dora put on a jacket, for it was growing chilly—the evenings are often chilly even in summer, said Dóra. Be careful, be careful, said their grandmother behind them, as though they were still children. Together they walked down to Kálvin tér, then turned left onto Vámház körút, a large commercial street that led toward the river. “I’ll take you to Váci utca,” said Dóra. “There are many places on Váci utca to eat ice cream.” They passed a pharmacy, clothing stores, restaurants with signs that said “Traditional Hungarian Dinner 2500 Ft.” And there was the Nagy Vásárcsarnok, the Central Market Hall that had been built a hundred years before, where the tourist buses stopped and their grandmother liked to buy vegetables, doing her marketing each day with a string bag. Across the street was Váci utca, and yes, right there in the square was an ice cream vendor.
If you want to know what Hungarian ice cream tastes like, from any ordinary street vendor in Budapest, go to the best Italian gelato shop you can find in New York City. That’s what it tastes like, except some of the flavors are distinctly Hungarian, like somlói galuska, which is the ice cream version of a Hungarian dessert that involves sponge cake, raisins, and walnuts soaked in a chocolate rum sauce.
Dóra asked for scoops of chocolate and citron, Dora asked for scoops of hazelnut and raspberry. Dora insisted on paying. “Would you like to walk down Váci utca?” asked Dóra.
But across the square…
“Is that—” said Dora.
“Yes, that is the Duna,” said Dóra.
There it was, the river over which so many armies have fought, down which so many ships have sailed: the Danube. They walked to the embankment and stood looking over the railing at the stone steps that went down into the water. It was as green as jade. Dora vaguely remembered a Hungarian swinging song in which someone was thrown into a river. “Hinta palinta,” it started, but she could not remember the rest. She felt like crying. Instead, she bit into her ice cream cone.
Dóra looked down at the river she had seen so many times, crossed so many times in her life. Attila’s apartment was on the other side. Usually, she took the trolley over. For the first time, she saw it as something immensely old, immensely powerful, and she wondered if she would ever get away from it. Perhaps she ought to marry Attila and move to Germany? Or even France? But then what about Nagyi? For a moment, she hated Dora, who would stay for a month in a city she obviously thought was magical, eating magical food, going to all the museums, trying her best to speak the language, laughing when she could not wrap her tongue around it. And then she would fly away on an airplane, waving a passport with an American flag on the cover. That was another kind of magic. Dora thought she had never had such good ice cream in her life. She was beginning to feel better: perhaps it was the air? It seemed so light, not like the heavy air of Boston. She finished the bottom of her cone, into which she had pushed the last of the raspberry with her tongue.
There we stood, the one or two or three of us: Dora, Dóra, and Dora/Dóra, separately and together, looking down into the jade-green water of the Danube as it flows through Budapest.
There were things neither Dora nor Dóra knew, but I will tell you. Dora did not know that she would have a child, a red-haired girl named Cordelia with eyes blue and green and gray as the Atlantic, who would never wonder whether she was truly American. She did not know that she would get divorced or become a professor at a university, although it would take her longer than she wanted or had planned. Dóra did not know that Attila was already having an affair with a model, and that he would move to France without her. Before she was entirely over that betrayal, she would meet an Englishman who was teaching at the International School. With him she would move to England, and it would all be easier than she imagined because Hungary had joined the EU, and also because Nagyi had died at the respectable age of ninety-six. The apartment was left empty, with paintings curling on the walls and dust gathering on the furniture, although she would try to go back as often as she could. But by then she was doing a graduate degree at Oxford, and also she would have a little boy named after his father, although she and Arthur would never marry, because who got married anymore? They were committed to each other—that was enough.
Dora and Dóra kept in touch by email, and they became Facebook friends. They “liked” and commented on each other’s posts. When Dora was going through the divorce, it was Dóra she turned to. When Dóra lost the second baby and learned she could not have another, she texted Dora and they talked for hours, despite the time difference. Dora traveled to England. Dóra traveled to the United States. Their children got into a fight about which Doctor Who was the real one, the ninth or tenth.
One summer, they both returned to Budapest, to the apartment. They were in their forties now. Dora was a college professor, in a beige linen Ralph Laure
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