She just tore it right up out of the planter. It was not a violent tearing. The soil was loose enough to release the plant, some of it coming up with the roots so that as she held the green clump—some sort of hosta in bloom, with its purple trumpets waving on green stalks above her fist—the dirt sifted down as a fine brown dust.
She was one of the smallest women I have ever seen, blue jeans hanging in a way that implied a pair of legs as skinny as a stork’s, and over them some sort of plaid dress that had probably come from a charity shop, and on top of that the raveling edge of a sweater under a puffed jacket—she was dressed for winter even though it was already spring and time for the hostas to bloom.
And a long scarf, probably hand-knitted by the look of it, and a hat that was also knitted but did not match, in a completely different color, on her small head with her white hair hanging out beneath it, all the way down her back, unbrushed. I did not see her face.
She held up the plant, then put it in a plastic shopping bag where she kept, I presumed, the rest of her floral loot.
Thief! I thought. You should be in some sort of botanical jail. Why are you walking around the city—toddling would have been more accurate—stealing plants out of their planters? Do you also steal them out of parks? Do the police ever catch you?
I did not want to confront her, in part because I could not think of how to say Why are you stealing plants from the planter in front of my apartment building? in Hungarian. The language twists my brain into pretzels anyway, and here it was already twisted by this diminutive plant thief. So, that day at least, I did nothing but gape at her in a disbelieving way.
But I saw her again, and then again. She did indeed steal plants out of public parks, and seemingly with impunity. I watched her steal blue Vinca minor, also called periwinkles, from the park around the Nemzeti Múzeum, or National Museum in English, pulling out the long vines with their roots. The next time it was yellow-flowering Alchemilla mollis from Károlyi Kert, which translates to Károlyi Garden because it was once the back garden of a palace owned by an aristocratic family of that name. Now it has a central lawn of green grass where dogs are not allowed, a fountain surrounded by lavender bushes and the soft silver leaves of artemisia, a children’s playground with swings and an elaborate climbing structure. I wondered what the aristocratic Károlyis would think.
Anyway, there she was, in another sweater wearing another jacket, lighter this time and the bright orange of a traffic cone, with another hat and scarf, but otherwise just the same. Into her plastic bag she stuffed the Alchemilla mollis, and then newly planted violas, the ones with purple petals surrounding a yellow eye.
Do you remember the elephant’s child from Kipling? It got into trouble because of its insatiable curiosity. I have the same character flaw, as well as a long nose that I really should keep out of anyone else’s business. But I could not help it. So far I had only seen my flower thief coincidentally, but after several such sightings I started looking for her, and following her when I could. Inconspicuously, surreptitiously. I always gave up when I was afraid she might see me or notice my attempt at botanical espionage. But she never did notice.
At least, as far as I could tell. She seemed completely incurious about her surroundings—she just gathered her flowers. One weekday, partly to avoid the research that was waiting for me back at my rented apartment, I followed her and followed her, longer than I had ever followed her before. That day, she carried her plastic bag, growing heavier with each flower theft, down the streets of Józsefváros, which is the district where I lived, filled with glorious examples of nineteenth-century architecture, half gentrified with fancy coffee shops, half covered with Soviet-era soot that has never been cleaned off the crumbling plaster. It is my favorite part of Budapest, and elegant if you consider fallen grandeur elegant, which I do.
I had been following her since I first spotted her that morning, in front of an Italian café where you can get tiramisu and those dry almond cookies, pulling up the stems of crimson and purple sweet William from a planter. The strange thing was that she never stopped at the places where a Hungarian néni, or elderly woman, would stop on her daily rounds. She did not go to the butcher or baker, or to the greengrocer. No, she just collected plants, toddling down one narrow street after another on her thin stork legs, with her blue jeans puddling around a pair of dingy tennis shoes.
Finally, she came to a building with the sort of large, arching front doorway common in Budapest, which used to let carriages drive into a central courtyard. She turned and went in, so suddenly that I almost lost her.
It was one of the soot-covered buildings, probably the sootiest I had ever seen, as though it carried within its pores the memory of all the Trabants and Yugos that had driven down that narrow little street in the Soviet era. Its windows were still in the old style, a previous century’s idea of insulation—an outer window and beyond it an inner one, so that to get fresh air you had to open both. Perhaps in that century, there had been fresh air in Budapest. The wavy old glass reflected the buildings across the street as though they were under water, and the paint on the frames was peeling.
I looked through the large doorway, down the corridor where carriages had driven, and into what was indeed a central courtyard.
Did I dare follow her? I waited for a few minutes, telling myself that only madmen and detectives went around following other people, and I wasn’t a detective, so what did that make me? Then, in my madness, because my curiosity had turned into a kind of obsession, I dared.
The corridor smelled of stale bread and cabbages. To my left was a staircase winding upward and an ancient lift. The courtyard beyond it was a just a slab of broken concrete. In one corner were the requisite trash and recycling bins, blue for paper and yellow for plastics. Next to them was an old bicycle, rusted.
There was no one in the courtyard. From the shadow of the corridor, I looked around to make sure none of her neighbors were watching me, then upward. All around the inside of the building, on the second and third floors (counting American-style, with the ground floor as the first, because I am always confused by the European system in which the ground floor doesn’t have a number), ran long, narrow balconies, like outdoor corridors. Along those balconies were the doors to the inner apartments—the ones which looked onto the courtyard rather than onto the street.
I could tell which door was hers. There, on the third floor, one entire side of the building had been turned into a garden. Along the metal railing, the balcony was lined with pots, and from those pots grew plants. Some of them twined around the metal of the railing so that the railing itself seemed to be sprouting leaves and blooming in such profusion that half the balcony, at least, was obscured. One clematis had grown so large and dense that its vines hung down from the railing, like purple stars waving over the second-floor balcony below.
Plants had been hung from brackets or trained to grow up the wall—she had turned the balcony into a green alley, and all of it was in bloom. At the end of the balcony was a door that I presumed led to her apartment—the highest and hardest to reach in the building. The windows, or what I assumed were her windows, were covered, as old Hungarian women’s windows are always covered, by lace curtains.
So that was it. Mystery solved. Here lived an old woman who had wanted to create a garden for herself in the city of Budapest, but being a pensioner, she had no money to buy plants, so she had stolen them. That was all.
I looked at my watch—it was late afternoon, and I had spent almost the entire day following her. But I had my own work to do. I was on sabbatical from an American university, during which I was supposed to research changes in the Hungarian educational system in the post-Soviet era. I should have spent the day writing an article, not following a harmless, if botanically larcenous, old woman around the streets of Budapest. It was time to get back to my own rented apartment, the corner of my bedroom that I had designated as a home office, the articles I had saved online.
And yet I stood there for a few more minutes.
As I stood, not quite waiting—what was there to wait for?—the door of her apartment opened. She stepped out, carrying a large watering can.
It was her—same baggy jeans, same plaid dress, now under a shapeless cardigan that hung over her frame. Same white hair.
But now it hung like a waving curtain down her back, and she could not have been older than twenty, thirty—she was young, she moved like a young woman, she was strong enough to lift what looked like a heavy metal can filled with water. She walked among the plants, watering them, leaning down to inspect them—almost as though she were having a conversation with each one. She could have been the daughter, or even the granddaughter, of the woman I had been following, except that she was wearing the same clothes, and her hair was still white, and there was something about her movements, a kind of birdlike delicacy, that had distinguished my flower thief.
I watched her water the plants all along that balcony, then go back into the apartment with her watering can and shut the door.
And that was that. I waited another ten or fifteen minutes, but she did not come out again.
On Friday I was supposed to have coffee with my friend Dr. Szabó Magda, which in the American system would be Magda Szabó—in names, as in many other things, Hungarians do things differently than the rest of Europe. And not just differently, but in opposition to, as though proudly, even obstinately, other.
We met in the Nemzeti Múzeum, where she has her main office—the other is in Eötvös Loránd University, where she teaches in the archaeology department. We went down to the basement café and ordered coffee. I also ordered a slice of cake—chocolate with layers of raspberry jam. In Budapest, no matter where you go, the cake is generally excellent, and I always order it when I can.
“I have a strange story to tell you,” I said, after we had exchanged pleasantries. (For academics, pleasantries consist of talking about the conferences you most recently attended and complaining about the state of higher education funding.) And then I told her about my flower thief.
“The thing is,” I said after a mouthful of chocolate ganache, “I don’t know much about flowers, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t supposed to be flowering, not all of them. I mean, not all of them at once. That’s not how it works.”
I may not know much about flowers, but my mother is an avid gardener. Her own parents fled Hungary after the Second World War with their two young daughters, and she grew up in an American suburb. But somehow she inherited an ancestral gene for planting and growing things, so while I was growing up, everything flourished in our suburban garden. My aunt Judith, by contrast, inherited the embroidery gene, and flowers grow riotously across her linen canvases. There, they flower all together—like in my flower thief’s balcony garden. I am neither a gardener nor an embroiderer, but I vaguely remembered that every plant has its season, and clematis would not flower at the same time as lavender, for example. And yet, in that balcony garden, I was fairly certain that all the plants had, improbably, been flowering together.
Magda is one of the most practical people I know. She has the same short haircut my mother has, a style that is not a style, and a face wrinkled by the sun of archeological digs. She is typically Hungarian—she complains about the government; lives in an apartment she inherited from her grandparents, who moved there during the 1930s; and cooks a miraculous goulash soup, although she says her mother’s was much better. When you talk, she looks at you as though she is really listening.
“Go on,” she said, and took another sip of her coffee. Her English, learned in a Hungarian high school and perfected during a Fulbright at UCLA, has a faintly Californian flavor on top of her basic Hungarian accent.
“There isn’t any on to go,” I said. “That’s it. That’s all I know about her. She’s an old woman who somehow also looks young, although maybe I just wasn’t seeing her clearly, and the plants in her garden seem to be flowering all at once, although again, maybe that was just my imagination. Maybe I’m going a little crazy? Do I look a little crazy to you, Magdi? What is Professzor Szabó’s verdict?”
Magda looked at me intently for a moment, then drank the last of her coffee.
“It is, of course, possible that you’re going crazy. We’re all mad here, right? Especially in Hungary. Have I told what the government is doing now to the universities? There is a new law—no, I don’t even want to talk about it. Tell me again about your flower woman. What did she look like?”
So I described her again for Magda.
She frowned and a little V formed between her eyebrows, like geese flying in formation. “Your description reminds me of something,” she said. “Come on, I want to show you—”
I finished the last bite of my chocolate cake, then returned my plate and fork to the counter.
“All right, I’m ready,” I said. “What do you want to tell me?”
“I said show you, not tell you about it.” She was already waiting impatiently at the entrance to the coffee shop. “Come on.”
I had never been in the private spaces of the Nemzeti Múzeum before. Magda led me through a door behind the coffee shop that said:
Tilos Belépni
No Entrance Museum Staff Only
The private parts of the museum are not as fancy as the public spaces. Here there were no marble columns rising up to frescoed ceilings. We walked by dimly lit offices, including one with Dr. Szabó Magda on the wall plaque, until we came to a door covered with an iron grille. Drawing a bunch of keys out of her tooled leather bag, which looked as though it had gone through several archeological digs with her, Magda unlocked the grille, and then the door behind it. The grille looked modern; the door behind it looked as though it had survived from the nineteenth century.
“This is the main storage area,” she said.
And it was. High metal shelves were piled with stuff, all the stuff that doesn’t get displayed on a regular basis. Ceramics and textiles, glassware and metalwork, pieces of furniture—all neatly cataloged, rising to the ceiling like books in university library stacks. It was like walking through a library of Hungarianess through the centuries.
As I marveled at glimpses of Turkish armor and Hapsburg memorabilia, Madga led me through the shelves to one corner of the room. It was a somewhat dark, dingy corner, with what were obviously bits of Roman statuary.
“Welcome to Pannonia,” she said.
As you may know, the Roman province of Pannonia once covered what is the Carpathian Basin, from Budapest into Austria and down into Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. It was originally conquered by Augustus and subsequently fought over by a succession of emperors, until it was finally ceded to Attila and his Huns in 433 A.D. You can still see the remains of Pannonia in Hungary. There are Roman ruins under some of the Budapest metro stations, and farmers in the countryside regularly dig up coins or bits of armor. Builders of new vacation homes around Lake Balaton may come across what were originally the foundations of vacation homes for Roman nobility.
For the Romans, Pannonia was a source of military recruits, hunting dogs, and a barley beer they called sabaea. They tried to hold on to it as long as they could before internal troubles made it easier to cede it to the barbarians.
Magda stooped down and searched on the lowest shelf, behind what looked like a pair of broken garden urns. It seemed as though what she was searching for had been placed all the way in the back.
“Do you need help?” I asked. She did not look very comfortable, crouched down with her head stuck under the shelf above, on which I could see a stone dog that had probably once guarded a tomb. On his pedestal was written cave canem.
“I’ve got it,” came her muffled answer. She emerged, a little dusty, holding a terracotta statue. “Here it is,” she said, looking grimly triumphant. “Perhaps I should start going to yoga classes. My knees are too old for this.”
The statue was small, about the size of a doll you might give your niece. It was not particularly sophisticated, for Roman work. I could see why it had been stuck on a shelf instead of displayed in the museum. It seemed rude and rustic—a product of the provinces, created by a peasant potter, rather than a more sophisticated import from Rome.
The statue was of a woman, wearing a long dress with a skirt shaped like a church bell. Her hair was coiled around her head in an elaborately braided style, over which she wore a crown of flowers. She held her arms out stiffly to the sides, and in each of her hands were flowers as well. Around the hem of her dress were piled more flowers, so that you could not see her feet. The statue still bore traces of paint—once, her dress must have been blue, and the flowers in her hair and hands, and at her feet, must have been multicolored, like real flowers.
“She comes from Aquincum,” said Magda. “She should be in the museum there, but they did not have space for her. They wanted to display their best items, and this little Flora—well, you can see it’s not the best example of Pannonian craftsmanship.”
Aquincum was a Roman town that is now in a suburb of Budapest. You can take a commuter train there to visit the ruins, next to a shopping center. There is also a small museum filled with artifacts excavated in the vicinity. On holidays the museum arranges not particularly accurate recreations of Roman life, as well as crafts for sale and games for the children. I went once and had some very good, but not at all Roman, sour cherry rétes.
“She’s supposed to be a statue of Flora?” I said.
“You can still see it written faintly on the base,” said Magda. “Here.” She showed me, scratched faintly into the terracotta—FLORA among the flowers heaped around the hem of her dress.
“We think she was probably a garden statue of some sort, set in a shrine because the weather hasn’t damaged her too badly. But look.”
Magda turned the statue around.
The back of the statue was another statue, with the same dress, the same flowers, but another face. She was indeed like a doll—one of those cloth dolls you can flip over to find another doll underneath. Even in the dim light, I could see that this face was very different from the one in front. She was still dressed in her bell-shaped skirt. She still had her elaborate braids and flower crown, still carried flowers in her hands. Flowers were still heaped at her feet. But—
“She looks—she looks old.” It was hard to tell on the weathered terracotta face, but it seemed to have been intentionally sculpted to look like an old woman. The Romans’ most important contribution to art was imperfection. The Greeks learned how to represent the perfection of the gods. The Romans learned how to present humanity with all its flaws—age, disease, even death. They showed us emperors and slaves, gladiators and dwarves, even the group least represented in statuary—old women. This, despite the flowers in her hair and the crudity of the representation, was clearly an old woman.
A young woman and an old woman—two sides of one goddess.
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t Flora the goddess of flowers? She’s not supposed to have two faces.”
“Apparently, some people thought she did,” said Magda. “We’ve only found three of these statues—one more from Aquincum and one from Brigetio, which is now the town of Komárom. Have you been there? No? It has a very good thermal bath.” She turned the statue back and forth, so I could see both faces—young, old, young, old. “This one is the best preserved. Putting a statue in a garden is not the best way to preserve it, as you can imagine.”
“But what does it mean?” I asked. “Why does she have two faces?”
“I suppose because Flora is the goddess of youth, rejuvenation, rebirth. Perhaps that also makes her the goddess of age, decline, and even death. We don’t really know,” said Magda. “I asked colleagues in Italy if they had ever seen a Flora like this one—I sent them some photos attached to an email—and they said no. They have a lot more garden Floras, and theirs are all young women. But I’ll tell you what I think.”
“You usually do.”
She put the Flora statue back on the shelf, but this time in front of the two garden urns, with its older face turned outward. At least Flora will be able to see something now, I thought.
“What I think is, there must have been some sort of goddess here already—a goddess of gardens and flowering plans. Maybe a goddess that grew old and then young again, or something similar—she could have had some sort of seasonal significance. There are such goddesses in many mythologies. Anyway, here come the Romans, and they do what they always do. They just graft their gods onto the most similar gods of the local pantheon. So this seasonal goddess became the Roman Flora. That sort of thing happened all over the Roman Empire—it was one of the reasons the empire remained stable for so long. No religious wars. If the Romans saw that your tribe already had its own gods, they just decided your gods were versions of Jupiter or Mars or Minerva, etcetera.” Magda pronounced it et ketera. She smiled and added, “They collected gods the way some people collect stamps.”
“But what about this local goddess—the one that became Flora. Do we know anything about her?” I stared at the Flora statue, and she stared, not back at me, but in the general direction of my knees.
“Not as far as I know. The tribes that inhabited this area before the Romans didn’t leave written records. I think they were Dacians, Dalmatians, Sarmatians—don’t quote me, this is nowhere close to my area of expertise. The Magyars didn’t come until later. The important thing is that we really don’t know. I wish I could tell you more, Zsuzsi”—her Hungarian way of saying Susie, which sounded like Shushi—“but this doesn’t explain your old woman anyway, does it? Probably you didn’t see her that well, or maybe she has a granddaughter who happens to have blonde hair that looked white in the sunshine. Or she could bleach her hair? Teenagers sometimes do, nowadays. And I’m really sorry, but I just realized that I have a meeting in twenty minutes. It’s a committee on how we can attract more foreign students. We have to, or we won’t survive. Not enough Hungarian students are interested in archaeology nowadays. They want degrees that will get them jobs in Austria or Germany. But let’s have coffee again soon, oké?”
My nearsightedness or a punk rock granddaughter—those were the logical explanations for my flower thief. Or maybe I had just imagined that the old woman had somehow become young. Magda was too kind to have mentioned that as a possibility, but I could see she had been thinking it. And it was the most logical explanation of all.
I visited her once more, my flower thief.
I did not dare steal flowers for her, but I bought potted plants at the market—pansies, pinks, some potted hyacinths, as many as I could fit into a reusable plastic shopping bag from the grocery chain Spar. I carried them into her building and, making certain no one saw me—I did not want any of the other residents asking me, in rapid Hungarian, what I was doing there—left them at the top of the stairs, next to the door that opened onto her balcony. They were either a gift to an old Hungarian woman who was clearly too poor to buy her own plants, or a tribute to Flora, goddess of youth and maybe also age, rebirth and maybe also death. I left the bag as well, folded up between the pots and the wall, then sneaked back downstairs, walked home, and tried to get back to working on my research project.
I saw her again a few times, usually around twilight, stealing plants. She would yank them up out of the ground, then put them in a reusable plastic Spar shopping bag. Once, in Károlyi Kert, I thought she saw me. I was sitting on a bench, sipping an evening cup of takeaway cappuccino in preparation for a late night of revisions. And then I saw her, stooping next to the central bed of flowers, the one that has a sign saying Tilos a Fűre Lépni (meaning Don’t Step on the Grass). She pulled up a specimen of flowering sage, still covered with purple blossoms and probably a few angry bees. She stood up and turned—then, just for a moment, she seemed to glance in my direction as though aware of my presence, watching. But I could be mistaken.
When my sabbatical was up, I left Budapest and returned to New Hampshire to begin the fall semester at my university: the inevitable round of meeting new students, teaching old classes in a way that makes them feel fresh, writing letters of recommendation for students applying to graduate school. The academic cycle, repeated over and over again since universities began.
Sometimes, as I stand in front of a lecture hall, or sit in my office, or stop at the campus Starbucks for what Americans call coffee, I think of her, scuttling around Budapest in her thrift store clothes, eighty or maybe eight thousand years old, and smile to myself. I like to think that I live in a world in which old women continue to steal flowers, and the old gods have not completely passed away from this earth.
(Editors’ Note: “The Woman Who Stole Flowers” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 69B.)
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© 2026 Theodora Goss
