Prologue — The Device in My Hand, The City in My Chest

The phone hums inside the racket cover like a trapped firefly. Onscreen, my heartbeat stutters into a rhythm the app can read. The SIR — Smart Innovative Racket Cover — looks simple: a fitted shell, a balance of weight, a slot that cradles the camera at the angle a coach wishes he always had.

They say a film is coming — Marty Supreme, Christmas Day 2025 — and some of the opening frames might look like a 1950s ping-pong parlour reborn in Chinatown. The present keeps borrowing from the past. I keep borrowing, too.

[PHOTO-P1: SIR prototype] [VIDEO-P1: Shadow-pong teaser clip] [AUDIO-P1: Music clip placeholder]

I raise the paddle and the present snaps open like a clapperboard. And then, as always, it snaps shut — back to where the film begins.

Chapter One — The Balcony and the Bomb

Budapest, October 23, 1956. The city is gray enough to drink. I’m eight; my sister is five. We press our faces through the railing at Rákóczi út 40 and watch the street below thicken with bodies and sound. From above it looks like a holiday. Flags. Hymns. Chants that climb the buildings: “Ruszkik haza!” — Russians go home. “Rabok legyünk vagy szabadok!” — Be slaves, or be free.

[PHOTO-C1: Balcony / street crowds] [VIDEO-C1: Archival Budapest clip]

That night, tucked into bed, we hear firecrackers — until the radio and the screaming say otherwise. The AVO, the secret police, are shooting unarmed students at the Radio building. The party becomes a war in the span of a lullaby.

A shell punches through our bedroom wall, cants the floor at a dizzy angle. In our living room wall, a bomb stops and doesn’t finish the sentence. My grandfather, Dr. Iván Apatini, a respected physician, retrieves it with a surgeon’s calm, carrying it downstairs like a ceremonial object.

[PHOTO-C3: Dr. Iván Apatini portrait] [ILLUSTRATION-C1: Unexploded bomb]

November 4 brings two hundred thousand Soviet troops. Radios beg the West: Help us. Governments look elsewhere — to Suez. Some Russian soldiers think they are at the Canal. A few defect. Most press forward. Boys throw Molotov cocktails; flags fly with the emblem cut out like a wound.

[PHOTO-C4: Freedom fighters on tanks] [AUDIO-C2: Radio static / chants]

We flee. Train, then night hikes: snow, fences, tracer fire in the sky. At a crossroads two farmhouses glow. My father points to the farther light. I tug his sleeve. “Papa, the closer one.” That instinct saves us. The other light was a Soviet checkpoint. Eight lives survive because of it.

[MAP-C2: Escape route map] [PHOTO-C5: Border fields in winter]

Vienna brings relief, not certainty. My uncle Paul Apatini and his college friend Peter Bogár secure U.S. visas first — in Vienna — and sail ahead. They will later host us in New Orleans in 1959. For us, the road swerves: buses over the Alps, and at last — Rome.

Rome turns the world to color. Under the Italian Red Cross, I survive a grand mal seizure. My father befriends Domenico Modugno and predicts two songs will conquer the globe: “Volare (Nel blu, dipinto di blu)” and “Ciao, Ciao Bambina”. He’s right.

[PHOTO-C6: Italian Red Cross camp] [AUDIO-C3: Music placeholder]

Years later in America, he records those songs on a U.S. album and founds Hungaria Radio in 1966. The broadcast lasts for decades, helping over a thousand newcomers find jobs and community. He was anti-Nazi, anti-Communist, pro-American. At home, he tuned to Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” — a melody that still unlocks my life’s color.

[PHOTO-C7: Hungaria Radio studio] [AUDIO-C4: Radio bumper]

The Revolution is crushed. But the wall cracks. My family carries the rhythm forward — dance, table tennis, music, invention — until one day, decades later, I slip a phone into a racket cover and the past becomes present again.