Nem tudom

A goodbye in a language I never learned

We went to Hungary so my grandfather could die where he was born.
That’s not how anyone phrased it, but that’s what it was.
A quiet exodus. A return. A man folding himself into the soil he came from.

He was a man who knew everyone.
Like, everyone.
The kind of man whose cell phone rang so often it felt like part of his pulse.
One of the first people I knew to have one. Back when they were still bricks, still miracles.
He talked to friends like they were family and to strangers like they were friends.
If he had your number, you had a piece of him.

And before we left, he called them all.
One by one.
Or maybe all at once, like men of his generation do.
With stoic hugs, long silences, and sentences that meant more in the pauses between words than in the words themselves.
I didn’t understand any of it at the time.
I thought we were going on a trip.
I didn’t know I was following someone to the edge of their life.

He tried to teach me Hungarian before we left.
Three weeks.
Quick lessons over breakfast. Repetitions in the car.
Words that sat sharp in my mouth, pebbles I couldn’t quite swallow.
I retained only the numbers. And one phrase.

“Nem tudom.”
I don’t know.

That night, in the bathhouse, I sat across from him for the last time.
Ancient steam rising around us like the breath of the dead.
Stone archways older than memory.
His face still, like he was finally home in his own bones.
I was watching the people, the mosaic tiles, the sky through the cracked dome.
He was watching me, with the look of a man who’d already let go.

He didn’t say much.
Just enough.
The last words I’d ever hear from him.

He died the next morning.
At the train station.
Collapsed with his suitcase in hand, like his body waited until he was done carrying everyone else’s goodbyes.
We were supposed to board a train to Vienna.

Instead, I was suddenly in charge.
A boy becoming something else.
I didn’t have a phone. Didn’t think to use his.
Just stood at the post office, shaking, trying to remember any number that might connect me to someone.
The woman at the desk spoke Hungarian. I didn’t.
All I could say was “Nem tudom.”
Over. And over.
I didn’t know how to explain what had just happened.
Didn’t know the words for death. Or help.
Didn’t know how to be alone with it.

I spent the rest of the trip in silence.
Living with family I didn’t know.
Sleeping in a house full of strangers who shared my blood but not my language.
We watched TV together like it meant something.
Shrek, in Hungarian.
I remember laughing, briefly, until the news interrupted.
A train had crashed. The Vienna line.
The one we were supposed to be on.

People died.

And I didn’t know what to feel.
Didn’t know why we were spared.
Didn’t know what to do with all that survival.

I flew back with a casket.
Sat next to it like a bodyguard for a ghost.
Watched as his phone stopped ringing.
For the first time in my life, it was quiet.

Hungary tastes like grief and sparkling water.
And to this day, the bubbles still catch in my throat.
Like I’m drowning in something no one else can see.

And “I don’t know” still lingers on my tongue.
Not because I’m confused.
Not because I don’t have the answer.

But because it’s what I say when I don’t want to talk about it.
When someone asks a question that lands too close to the wound.
When I feel that boy again, alone in a bathhouse, trying to memorize the way someone looked when they let go of this world.

“Nem tudom.”
I don’t know.
I say it now the same way he did.

As a goodbye.
As a shield.
As the final word you speak when you’ve already said everything else.

// Scorpio Veil

For the ones who watched someone they loved finish their last chapter in silence.
For the ones who stayed behind to carry the weight.
For the ones who still don’t know, because they can’t say it without breaking.