Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  But outside his office I didn’t feel like I was going to miss him at all. And it was only some blocks later that it occurred to me, with a sudden and overwhelming disquiet, that it would sure be depressing to receive nothing from Monk’s estate but a polite, indifferent reply, which, I now had to admit, was probably the best we could expect. Now, instead of being released from the paranoia that had haunted me since I’d slipped the wrong envelope into the mailbox, I was overcome by an anxiety no less vicious. Now I was worried that we’d get nothing, that they’d dismiss Philip’s letter as the ravings of a lunatic and throw it into the trash. And if getting back a negative response, or, worse, the threat of legal action, would devastate him, what would happen if there was no response at all? Whatever evidence the report was of Philip’s obsession and craziness, it was also his attempt to communicate with the world, suggesting he was not yet fully lost, that he still believed there were points of view, forms of existence, even worlds, other than his own. Would receiving no answer seal him off once and for all, finally convince him there was nothing outside the confines of his skull?

  I dithered with this for days, maintaining my new attitude toward Philip whenever he was around, pushing myself on, inventing elaborate fantasies, trying to match him delusion for delusion. But I couldn’t help but see him slipping away, squatting down by the mail slot in the front door and flipping up the little lid to peer out, moving his head quickly to the side when the mailman slid through another load of bills and flyers. But instead of looking at the mail he would ignore it entirely, as if it was no longer the mail he was interested in but rather the world outside, which, for all its horrors—the people and cars and dogs and buildings—was becoming more and more preferable to the house he was trapped inside.

  Whenever Philip heard my footsteps approach he’d turn and scoot downstairs into his basement suite, eyeing me suspiciously all the while, leading me to believe that he thought the response from Monk’s estate had already arrived, and that somehow I’d gotten to it before he had, and hidden it away. I tried to counter this suspicion, as I then perceived it, by rhapsodizing about what the letter might contain, all the golden expectations it would fulfill, how Philip’s name would find its way into biographies of Thelonious Monk, histories of jazz, scholarly essays. But the more I went on, the more bewildered and skittish Philip became.

  I have to admit that playing insane wasn’t as much of a chore as I thought it would be. There was a release in it. Sometimes I would find myself in bed at night, or on the bus to work, or in the supermarket, coming up with ideas that would delight him, some of them so imaginative they even delighted me. I felt as if I suddenly understood where Philip was, in a land of so many possibilities that the ground was constantly shifting under his feet; and while it wasn’t a place I could get him out of, it was, I felt, a place where I could join him, providing company.

  And this, I guess, is how I found my way into the second-hand hat store. I’m not sure whether it was something I had planned to do or whether I was just walking down the street one day, saw the sign, and decided to go in. I say “I’m not sure”because, in retrospect, the idea had been on my mind for some time—putting together a package that would do justice to Philip’s expectations, that would give us a good excuse to celebrate—but I had not allowed myself to think of it as an option. Sure, I had play-acted and sympathized and even encouraged Philip’s fantasies, but I had yet to do anything truly dishonest.

  The proprietor nodded when I described the hat I was looking for, telling me it seemed to be “coming back into style,” which didn’t at all surprise me, having seen kids on the streets decked out in all things 1960s. He found one immediately, and threw in a box for free.

  When I got home I found that Philip had, as usual, quickly run downstairs, as was obvious by the fact that the television was still on in the living room, there was a glass of half-drunk lemonade on the armchair, and the couch cushions were still warm. I put the box on the kitchen table and called to him, “Philip, come up! Mrs. Venderbeeck phoned today. She said a box had been delivered to her by accident.”

  Philip came up the stairs slowly, throwing his hand ahead of himself on the banister and pulling the rest of his body after it, moving so reluctantly he might have been en route to his own execution. When he reached the top step I pointed to the box on the table, but every time Philip tried to train his eyes on it they would veer away, as though my package scared him, or he wanted to resist it. When he managed to get them settled I noticed he was staring at the table leg underneath.

  I turned quickly and went to the table, picking up the box and bringing it over, practically skipping in my excitement. “Look,” I said. “It’s what you’ve been waiting for.” I pointed to the return address. “They’ve replied to your letter!”

  Philip touched the box lightly with his finger, and drew his lower lip between his teeth. Then, with the tip of that finger, he pushed the box away, holding it at arm’s length until I stepped back. “It must be some mistake,” he said, though I got the sense that what he really wanted to say was, “You’re lying.”

  I looked at the box. “What do you mean? It’s what you’ve been waiting for!”

  “I already got a letter from them,” he said. At this, I snapped to attention, and for a moment considered denying it all, telling him the arrival of the box repudiated the letter, that Monk’s beneficiaries had reconsidered whatever they’d written, that they wanted to take it all back. For a moment I thought of opening the box and pulling out the letter I’d forged, along with the grey fez from the second-hand hat store, even putting it on my head and running over to the piano to play “Epistrophy” as best I could, or do an impersonation of Thelonious Monk in one of his eccentric moods, where he’d do pirouettes, or walk in wide circles about the room, or mumble a few words nobody was supposed to know, a private language composed less of syllables than tones.

  “I got the letter four weeks ago!” said Philip, emphasizing how late it was to be playing a trick on him, though there was something else in his voice, too, a keening note, as if it was taking all his resistance not to grab the box and give in to the temptation I was offering. “They thanked me for my interest in Monk,” he said, pulling the letter from his pocket and unfolding it to read, “‘But due to the overwhelming amount of mail we receive regarding our sorely missed father and husband and friend we are not able to reply to every correspondent, though we want to assure you that this has nothing to do with the quality of your writing nor the nature of your concern.’”

  Philip glanced over his shoulder, into the basement whose darkness was crowding him so badly he teetered on the threshold, and then looked back at me, his shoulders thrown against the blackness below, as if it was only being kept down there because he was blocking the stairs. “I didn’t want to tell you,” he said, looking sadly at the box in my hand. “You get so crazy when we talk about Monk. I didn’t want you to be disappointed.” He put his hands to either side of the door frame, and in that instant I knew that his standing there, his extended arms, were a protective gesture meant for me rather than himself. For Philip’s desire to be down there, back in the basement, had nothing to do with returning to some magic kingdom (as I had imagined it to be), and everything to do with keeping that disorder from mounting the stairs, pushing its way to where I was, to where Philip had always needed me to be.

  And it was then I realized that the letter from Monk’s estate, the one held trembling in his hand, was, like the box held in my own, a hoax—one concocted by Philip to make me confront my own lie, and thus to end this business about Monk and his fez once and for all. He’d been carrying that letter for so long, crumpling it in his pocket, softening it, wearing it away, while he waited for the moment he knew was coming, when I would carry my performance too far and force him to step in, denying himself the illusion he so desperately craved so that he might prevent his madness from swallowing us both.

  I let the box dangle from my hand, and nodded, ackn
owledging that all along I’d been defining what he was going through by what I was going through, by seeing him as my opposite: so that if I was the one looking out for him, and he was the one looked after, then what for me was responsibility was for him release. But it was not that at all—not release—that Philip was experiencing; rather, it was his own vanishing, as the disease ate away at what he was, putting something else, another person entirely, in his place. You see,

  Dr. Manchester had been wrong: it wasn’t a matter of perspective at all. On the contrary, there was no perspective.

  “I’m sorry, Philip,” I murmured.

  He gave a half-smile then, and looked carefully at me, and at the box, and finally at the alcove beside the fridge. He seemed to catch himself in that moment, preventing himself from thinking or doing as he was prompted, because I could see the effort it cost him to shut the door to the basement behind himself, as if that instant of lucidity was all the agency he had.

  His door has stayed closed ever since. And he no longer joins me for dinner, no longer wanders in hoping to hear me say something hopeful into the telephone, no longer crawls into the alcove between the wall and the fridge. I can hear him cooking sometimes, and I know he eats because I often wake up in the morning and find the fridge empty, the pots and pans of food I left on the stove scoured clean. The one time I dared open the basement door I found myself facing a wall of books and magazines that had been piled from the top step to the ceiling, preventing entry. Nor do I have any desire to go down there, having invaded Philip’s space far too much already, preferring to wait upstairs while he goes through what I hope are the necessary preparations to restore our friendship, and which he’s confided to Lucia, the few times she’s visited, “are well underway”—whatever that means.

  There are, as you may know, a number of great scenes in that documentary on Thelonious Monk, Straight, No Chaser, where you can witness the musician’s eccentric behaviour. It always comes up in the context of questions regarding his music or his inspiration, some reporter or fan asking him about why he plays the piano the way he does, or the technique behind his compositions, or the relation of his music to, say, that of Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Coleman Hawkins, and Monk will begin to spin and murmur and describe wide circles about the room, the smile on his face showing both amusement and pain. In the end, it’s impossible to say exactly what he’s thinking or feeling, or what, if anything, he might have to say—as if the only response adequate to questions about his music is to do something as incongruous as that music itself, as if it’s very important that we—all of us—understand the vast difference between what we seek, and what we find.

  Tales of Hungarian Resistance

  THE AGENTS of the Arrow Cross Party arrested my grandfather on October 25,1944. They found him at the Turul, a butcher shop notorious for having no fixed address—a place that would pop up, open for a few weeks, disappear, and then re-open in a district not under attack, following a string of addresses coveted by all but known only to an extremely exclusive, violent, and black-shirted clientele. Here there were pork chops for sale, and steak, even filet mignon if your timing was right—and none of that stuff everyone else had to eat, grey-green and scavenged from downed cavalry regiments, so riddled with bullets and shrapnel it was known as “metal meat.” According to my grandfather, he was inspecting a rod of salami when the SS marched in and carried him off to the Andrássy ut prison, where he remained until news of Hungary’s imminent defeat allowed him to slip past the distracted prison guards and haul his body—ravaged by six months of interrogation—through the shattered streets to where my grandmother lived.

  From this point, another story begins—that of my family’s trials throughout the years of Communism—but that is not what I am speaking of now. No, the event that concerns my grandfather, and by extension me, is that half-year he spent behind a thick wooden door, surrounded by stone walls, hemmed in by fences and barbed wire, while Nazi interrogators worked him over for information on the “Titkos Magyar Szôvetség”—the “Secret Hungarian Union”—a group of partisans either invented by my grandfather or imagined by the Nazis, and which, for the purposes of this story, I will simply call the “Hungarian Resistance.”

  We all know about the French Underground. They are celebrated in films and history books and novels. We know of the Polish Secret State and the Polish Home Army and their terrible betrayal by Stalin and the Soviet forces during the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944. And maybe the best thing about the publicity and respect lavished on these men and women—their sacrifices, their sabotage—is that it leaves a little less room in history for some of the more ambiguous aspects of World War II, such as Hungary’s opportunistic relations with the Nazis, either during Horthy Miklós’s nationalist dictatorship from 1920 to 1944—when he agreed to pass anti-Semitic laws in return for territory lost through the Treaty of Trianon—or during Ferenc Szálasi and the Arrow Cross Party’s government, imposed on the country by the Nazis near the end of the war. It’s true that in late 1944 a bunch of disaffected military men got together and formed an illegal organization called the “Committee of Liberation,”which lasted maybe two months before it was discovered and its general staff all imprisoned and tortured and executed; and it’s true that, around the same time, a related organization, known as the “Independence Front” formed in eastern Hungary, an unlikely alliance of remnants from Horthy’s administration, communists, and social democrats, united only in their hatred of the Arrow Cross Party. But there was no early and rigorous opposition to Hungary’s alliance with Nazi Germany. And when opposition did come, it was less out of hostility to the national and racial chauvinism of Horthy and Szálasi than simply a desire to exit a war Hungary was losing. So, if this story asks a question, I suppose it’s this: Were my grandfather’s tales of the Hungarian Resistance an attempt to erase this “troubling fact”—in an act of patriotic revisionism—or rather to correct it?

  If you listen to my grandmother, who’s outlived her husband by ten years, his stories were bullshit, complete bullshit, from beginning to end. Of course, I know what my grandfather would say, if he could sit up in his grave and get the worms out of his mouth for a second; he’d say the subtleties of the form that resistance took escape her, because with her German temperament and upbringing she’s unable to appreciate anything as resistance that isn’t all-out assault. But she has outlived him, and I guess that’s a victory of sorts, one that lets her have the last word on what happened. In the end, she knows more about resistance than he ever did.

  About the background, there’s little you need know. In 1943, Admiral Horthy, witnessing the terrible casualties inflicted on his armies by the Russians at the Battle of the Don, began “adjusting” his relations with his “ally,” Germany, and his “enemies,” the Allied Powers—adjustments that eventually came to the attention of Adolf Hitler, and culminated in Horthy’s displacement in 1944 by Szálasi and the Arrow Cross Party, a group of rabid pro-Nazis who made up for Horthy’s July 7 decision to stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews by quickly sending another thirty thousand to Auschwitz. My grandmother recalls how those Jews who remained were herded into the Danube and shot, left to float downstream and snag on the bridges connecting Buda to Pest, so that walking across you saw bodies swirling in the eddies around pilings and foundations, most of them on their backs, the bullet holes in their foreheads looking up like eyes singular, cyclopean—the only gaze equal to a sky raining bullets and flame.

  It was Szálasi who employed a man by the name of Ákos Mennyászky, an expert interrogator who was to prove my grandfather’s most frequent visitor at Andrássy ut prison.

  To this day, Mennyászky is still the person I sympathize with, still the image I find peering at me from shop windows, pools of water, mirrors—the haunting figure who glides through my brain, ransacking the memories of my grandfather for hidden compartments, for the real information that will let him close the case and go home for the day. But there’
s nothing to fasten onto, no memory that isn’t suspect. And after all that grandfather and I went through, after all the explanations and accusations, the only legacy that remains is this sympathy for a Nazi who, like me, starved for lack of evidence, losing himself in the act of seeking an impossible verification. I am haunted by Mennyászky because his obsession is my obsession, because I am, like him, not able to trust my information, and because I have become my grandfather’s interrogator.

  Mennyászky was blasé about his job, and so his co-workers hated him. They’d seen all sorts of interrogators: vicious bastards like Klaus Barbie, who went into the chamber more enthusiastic about the way they were going to get the information than about the information itself, or quiet men like Hans Scharff, who became friends with every prisoner they ever questioned. But Mennyászky wasn’t like either of these—neither psychotic nor sympathetic; he never saw his work in metaphysical terms, as a higher calling. In fact, most of the time he seemed as tired and disgruntled as if he’d been filing papers for the last ten years in some mid-level bureaucracy. Even while someone’s fingers were being broken or his skin broiled with torches, his face showed the boredom and absent-mindedness you might have seen on a clerk inserting numbers into a ledger. He was often caught sneaking out of work early, and so he’d be turned around, going back in his hangdog fashion— “Okay, okay, I’ll give you another ten minutes …”—back to the room from which screams would shortly issue, only to emerge again at five o’clock, right on the button, often leaving the informant in mid-sentence—cut off in the act of finally revealing what they’d been trying to pry from him all these weeks and months— and saying “Quitting time is quitting time”when the commanding officer reprimanded him. If not for his perfect record at cracking recalcitrant prisoners, they’d have relocated him to the front years ago. His dreams, Mennyászky’s colleagues said, were as dusty and shopworn as a pair of old, comfortable shoes.