"Budapest runs on pálinka, ruin bars, and 1896 box windows that were never meant to move"
Léa Moreau is twenty-six, a street photographer from Marseille and a glazier's daughter who can tell from across a street how long a window has left. She shoots from the hip with a battered Ricoh, and her series Fenêtres is three years of lit windows at night, full of people who never know they are being seen. She has come to Budapest for a portfolio review with Judit Halász, who once told a New York Times photographer his work was very competent and made him cry. Then the district bans short-term rentals, her Airbnb vanishes, and the only bed left in the Seventh District is a cash-only lost-property room behind the reception of Szimpla Sleep (no relation), with the only real key left in the building.
The hostel is a six-storey 1896 tenement with iron galleries round a deep courtyard, and over the ruin bar in the middle hang two hundred and twelve salvaged windows on steel cables, the Window Garden. Zsófi runs the night desk and is proudest of the two words she added under the neon sign: no relation. Her great-aunt Irén, seventy-eight, a retired tram driver and the house's unofficial caretaker, met the man with the drill at her door with a rolling pin, and sweeps the fallen glass off the street before dawn. Priya Shah checks every bed for spiders after a very bad trip to Cairns. Bence, the stone restorer, has warned the owners in writing three times that the windows are tired. And in the Laughing Lady Suite under the carved stone face of Róza is Kendall Price, @kendallinframe, 1.9 million followers, who frames everything with her fingers and has come for the unveiling. The Wi-Fi password is KihajolniVeszelyes: leaning out is dangerous.
On Léa's first night, a pane slides out of a fourth-floor window and buries itself upright in the cushion where a stag-party groom in a pink tutu was asleep three seconds earlier. The Hub's ring shows amber in her photographs and blue to her eyes. The oak round the motor screws gives under her thumb like a sponge. When a whole frame falls out around Duane, a seventy-one-year-old guest from Ohio, Keaton-style, Kendall's video of it goes viral, and Léa becomes #WindowGirl, the French girl who thinks the windows are dangerous. The owners call it heritage. The police say that if it falls, it will be a police matter. On the first of May Kendall chalks her mark on the street, and Léa takes up her corner twelve metres away with the camera at her eye.
Age: 26
Type: Street photographer and glazier's daughter from Marseille
Fatal Flaw: Has never photographed a face that looks back
Role: Protagonist
Age: —
Type: Aesthetic lifestyle influencer, @kendallinframe
Fatal Flaw: Believes caution is a scarcity mindset
Role: Victim
Age: 25
Type: Gothic-literature PhD, fresh from Cairns
Fatal Flaw: Chose the city with no spiders to give a paper about houses that want to kill you
Role: Ally
Age: 78
Type: Retired tram driver and the house's unofficial caretaker
Fatal Flaw: In her flat, she is the motor
Role: Keeper of the building
Age: 31
Type: Stone restorer working on the Laughing Lady
Fatal Flaw: Puts every warning in writing, three times, to people who paint over it
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "The House Breathes In"
At fourteen minutes past three in the morning, Szabó Irén was already awake, because she had not slept past three o'clock since the spring of 1972.
That was the year they had given her the early shift on the number 6 tram. First car out of the depot at 4:02, Móricz Zsigmond körtér to Széll Kálmán tér and back again, all the way round the Grand Boulevard in the blue dark, with the night people getting off and the day people getting on and, for about eleven minutes somewhere near Blaha Lujza tér, both kinds sitting side by side, not looking at each other. Thirty-one years she had driven the 6. She had retired in 2003 with a pension, a certificate, a small brass tram from the transport company and a body that still, twenty-odd years later, sat up in bed at a quarter past three and reached for a uniform that was no longer there.
So she did what she always did. She lay in the dark and listened to the house.
She knew all of it. She had lived in it since 1968, when she was nineteen and newly married and Józsi had carried her over the threshold of Flat 12, on the second floor, and banged her head on the doorframe, and apologised for the next twenty-one years. She knew the tick of the old water pipes as they cooled, and which ones meant the pipes and which ones meant the family on the third floor were arguing again, except there were no families on the third floor now, only bunk beds. She knew the long iron groan of the gallery railings in the frost. She knew the cough of the drain in the courtyard after rain and the particular creak of the fourth stair from the top, the one that had been creaking since Kádár was in power and would, she suspected, go on creaking long after everyone currently in power was dead.
The house was a bérház, a tenement, built in 1896, the year of the Millennium, when the whole of Pest had gone mad with pride and scaffolding. It was six storeys of ochre stucco on Kazinczy utca in the Seventh District, a stone's throw from the Dohány Street Synagogue, with a big square courtyard in the middle and open iron galleries running round every floor. The gang, everybody called them. You walked out of your front door onto the gang and saw everyone else's front doors across the courtyard, and they saw yours. For a hundred and thirty years it had been impossible, in this house, to have an argument, a baby, a love affair or a bad haircut without forty other households knowing about it by breakfast.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Szimpla Sleep, quoted from the book.
☠ "the laughing lady is ready for her close-up. room 601 is fully booked. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper
☠ "two windows. one box. variable noted." — @HostelReaper
☠ "mark noted." — @HostelReaper