Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  I started to say something, to tell Helena I planned to return it to her father, but something stopped me, and instead I said, “The way it’s written. Those sentences. Have you read them?”

  She shook her head. “They were meant for someone else.”

  Had I known this? Had I realized the extent of my theft? “The radio too?”

  “I think so,” she answered. “Although I didn’t realize it until I spoke to June, and she told me you’d shut the whole house down plugging it in. It was an emblem of some kind. For all I know, the journal and the radio were meant to go together,” Helena said. “But if you or the radio repairmen hadn’t taken it, I would have thrown it in the garbage.”

  “So Blik never told you?”

  “I think he meant to,” she answered. “He said there were still some ‘important things’ he wanted to say. But it all happened too fast.” Helena looked at the empty whisky cup in her hand, and I moved quickly to fill it. “When I first gave my father the journals he just looked at them. And when he noticed the last one was missing he started to cry.” Helena shrugged. “It seemed appropriate to me, at first, those tears, as if that’s what Blik had meant to do to him. My father and I didn’t talk much, Owen. Maybe his trail never went cold for Leon, but it went cold for me a long time ago.”

  “Do you want me to send it to him?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged again. “I didn’t get his address. Is there anything interesting there?”

  “It’s some kind of announcement, something Blik’s trying to broadcast,” I said. “But he spends the whole journal rewriting it without ever quite managing to finish. Anyhow,” I gestured at myself, “it reminds me, that way, in its being unfinished, of that breakdown I had. It reminds me of Blik’s help.”

  “You’d better keep it, then,” said Helena. “And the radio.”

  I drove up to Holman’s Ridge that afternoon following work, thinking, as my car threaded the switchbacks, of a recent book I’d read that had argued for “sentimentality” being the greatest crime of the twentieth century. Apparently, or so the author said, Hitler and his followers had been great sentimentalists. It wasn’t a new argument, by any stretch, though calling sentimentality a “crime” and equating it with Nazism showed a kind of superficial originality. And, yet, once again at the top of the ridge, gazing into that empty space and watching teenagers bank their kites—which were flying way out at the end of strings and down along the rock walls—I couldn’t help but wonder: what else is there, really, other than sentiment? Especially at the end. What good were those logics of vertical steel, facts harder and clearer than diamonds, visions so sober-eyed they went beyond all considerations of the heart, when, in the last second of the last morning of the last day, all you really wanted was a voice saying you’d done what you could, and that it was okay to go? When all you wanted was to feel as if someone was watching, no matter how far away? It must have seemed to Blik, as it seemed to me then, that sentimentality was the clearest realization of all: an acknowledgment of the loss and desire we spend our lives denying, mainly through these pastimes—reason, logic, objectivity—that give us no more hold on our lives, in the end, than their opposites. For what is logic, finally, but a mind longing to bridge the distance?

  And I did not know the answer to Helena’s question, whether our death is something we should share with others; I knew only that we are not able, in the end, to keep it to ourselves.

  Yes, I kept the journal. The radio. And sentiment is my only justification. Because even now you might find me—nights when my wife and daughter are away, when the house is my own, when I don’t have to worry about flipping back the fuse—sitting in front of Blik’s plugged-in radio and reading his journal into that inverted speaker, as if death were a message I could reply to, as if Blik’s idea of heaven was to be waiting there, on the other side, his ear still pressed to the speaker.

  Four Uncles

  THOUGH KRISZTINA wondered at my loyalties, I buried them all: Uncle Gyuri, who, having emigrated from Hungary in the early 1950s, and having watched his taxes go to social programs, insisted he’d “left one communist country only to end up in another,” and who, in a fit of apoplectic rage one election night, refused to let his daughters out of the house, barring them with a shotgun because they threatened to vote Left; Uncle Pál, who wore scars on his back from the barbed wire he crawled under to escape a POW camp in 1946, and who, in defence of his Roman Catholicism and anti-Semitism, refuted the argument that Jesus was a Jew by saying, “Technically speaking, Christ could not be Jewish since his father was God—a non-racial entity—and his mother, Mary—a being conceived without original sin and thus not human in the classical sense either;” Uncle Ottó, who, as a boy, trapped crows for his starving family to eat during the famine that accompanied the Soviet Army into Hungary at the end of World War II, and who had no time for unemployed Quebecers and Newfoundlanders refusing to move to where the work was, saying he’d left behind not only his region and culture, but also his country, language, and family, and had arrived in Canada with nothing, working his ass off in the face of considerable obstacles to build himself a fortune, and if he could do it, then damn it they could too and with a whole lot less sacrifice and pain.

  I buried them all.

  I’d come out at the start of 1958, having spent the previous year in root cellars and attics. Friends would show up now and again, either with food, or directions to the next hiding place and the exact dates and times when I should move. Mostly, though, I was alone in places without running water, or electricity, or heat, at the mercy of shivering fears—of capture and interrogation, of being sent to a Soviet work camp—glancing between the curtains, jumping at every creak in the architecture, and reaching the point of ravening hunger before I dared go into the street, in the dead of night, to scrounge in garbage cans. Invariably, once down there, I would become so frightened of the noise I was making in my haste to find something to eat—so scared it would give me away—that I’d sprint back empty-handed to my hiding place. Within two months I’d lost fifty pounds, and was a twitchy mess.

  In my solitude I began reading every book, magazine, and newspaper at hand, their content increasingly irrelevant as my situation worsened, until only words mattered, the thought that someone out there was writing against my solitude. And as minutes turned to hours and hours to days and days to weeks and weeks to months, ever more noises broke the silence of my hiding places, or, rather, what sounds there were—the ticking of walls, muffled voices from above or below, gargle of pipes—became magnified, and began to make sense, forming intelligible rhythms; until I found myself imagining that somewhere in that intelligence— both on the page and in the air—were messages from the people I’d known. And when my associates came around, once every six weeks, they’d find me eating the rot I’d scrounged on some midnight run, or drinking rainwater from the pots I dangled out the windows during thundershowers, or sitting in my room with an idiotic grin and a mass of writing spread across every surface, as though I had all the company I needed.

  But when opportunity came at last—when a friend burst into the room to tell me that the time was right, that a blizzard was blanketing the western half of the country, which would help me cross the border unnoticed, and that there was a driver waiting to take me—there was only one person I had time for: my mother. I had kept track of her in my seclusion, relying on outside reports, in the hopes that I could bring her with me when I escaped. Things had not gone well for my mother after 1956, as they had not gone well for anyone whose immediate relatives were involved in the uprising. Denied all assistance by the state, and having no other resources, she moved in with her sister; and it was there I went that night, rushing so I would still have time to meet the driver, slipping through the heavy snows that hid me from policemen into my aunt’s house, skinny as a stray dog, sneaking from room to room until I came upon the tiny broom closet where she lay in bed.

  “Mother!” I hissed, leaning ove
r her. I’ll never forget it: the room so quiet you could hear snow falling beyond the open window, a clock ticking somewhere far off; and, instead of the closed eyes and sleeping face I’d expected, I saw my mother staring at me as though she’d been awake all night. And in response to my quiet cry she began to hum, and to hum, and to hum, a tune I’d never heard before. “Mother!” I hissed again. “Mother, it’s me. I’m alive.”

  She hummed on.

  And for a moment longer I stared into her eyes, thinking insane thoughts—that I might bundle her up, lead her into the blizzard, get her to ride in the truck to the border and keep quiet as we crawled past the fences and dogs and snipers. Then I gently took her hand, realizing there was no point, that she was already released, having hummed herself free of history: free of her father’s death at the battle of the Don; of her mother’s murder at the hands of Soviet soldiers who discovered them—her and the children— hidden in a cellar in Budapest, and who decided on a kind of Rand R not at all entertaining to the children, and only entertaining to the soldiers because they’d spent two years throwing themselves in front of bullets and marching through Russian winters in boots flapping at the soles; free of her three brothers’ disappearance into fates she obsessed about, bolting up in bed or in the middle of lacing her shoes, as one tormented by waking nightmares; and, finally, of the apparent deaths of her husband and her one and only son, who’d both been too active in the cause of 1956.

  I do not remember how I felt, sitting by her bed that night, though I recall consoling myself with the thought that she was beyond loss; for she said nothing as I described how I’d passed the year since the uprising—how afraid I’d been to compromise her by making contact (even to say I was alive), why I was running, and from whom, and what would happen if they caught me—because she seemed not to be listening, neither replying nor glancing in my direction nor hardly breathing.

  Instead, she simply looked around the room as if its walls formed the limits of her world, beyond which there was nothing to speak or hear of. It was as if the year I’d spent in similar confines demanded—in an inverted logic—another person, my mother, to be driven crazy for reasons opposite to those that had nearly claimed my sanity : the sight of all that space—trees and lakes and mountains and sky and whole nations—into which her family had vanished; the proximity of people in the cities she’d searched, crowds upon crowds upon crowds, everyone in the world but the one she desperately wanted to see; all that language forced into her ears and eyes by people who demanded dialogue: the local workers council who expelled her from her job for having “harboured” (that is, given birth to) a counter-revolutionary; neighbours who scolded her for raising a son of dubious character; policemen who’d come by, day after day, demanding she tell them who my “friends” were; and, finally, the only person she could rely upon, her older sister, who took her in but spent the days disguising her anxiety with long sighs. All those noises except the few words she needed to hear. Until it was not so much what she’d lost that my mother battled against, but the sense of loss itself, a battle she could only win—or so my aunt told me later that night, handing me a bag of clothes and food for the journey—by turning from the agents who followed wherever she went (in the hopes that she’d lead them to others like me); twisting away from the mailbox (word never arrived) toward a small room at the back of the house where she made her bed one night; by avoiding all language that was either a response or which required one, and humming, instead, quiet songs in a place so little, so already a prison, that no one could ever take it away.

  I have added her—my mother as she was on the night I last saw her—to my teetering tower of guilt, though even after all this (indeed, perhaps because of it) I am not sure she still wouldn’t have wanted me to fight, to take part in the suicide that was our October of 1956. I do not know whether my escape from Hungary was enough—finally enough—to kill her, but I too wake at night, bent on the sheets, imagining that room she chose for herself, to which the price of entry was dereliction of self, a dropping of everything that defined you like a worn coat in the doorway.

  You would not believe the network of refugees they had in the 1950s. You could head over to the Arany Tyúk in Toronto and mention to a waitress the name of some relative you’d last seen in 1944, and whom you thought may have come to Canada, though perhaps Australia, and within months she’d introduce you to some old guy in a leather hunting cap (which made him the laughingstock of everyone on the street), who’d tell you he’d shared a shack in an Austrian refugee camp with your long-lost relative, and had recently received a postcard from Vancouver with his signature at the bottom. In those days, we specialized in everything, including coincidence.

  So by 1965, a short seven years after my escape, I had made contact with all three of my uncles.

  Gyuri died first, on a bitter February day when he realized that, despite the corruption everywhere evident in the Liberal government, the Conservatives were not going to win the next election. I was there a few days before he died—along with his émigré wife and three daughters—when Gyuri rose from the sickbed and pointed emphatically at the mantelpiece, continuing to rise and grunt and point, wasting his remaining strength, until they brought everything on it down to him: a vase, a picture of himself as a young soldier, a ring that had belonged to my grandmother, and, finally, the item that calmed him—an envelope containing his official membership in the Conservative party. He died holding that paper to his heart.

  And here’s where my troubles began. Krisztina, Gyuri’s eldest daughter, only five years younger than I, recalled to me our family tradition, which I knew little about, having left Hungary before being fully introduced to ancestral lore. It was she who came to visit me a few days after we’d sat around Gyuri’s bedside, watching the respirator rise and fall.

  She was carrying a letter, old and creased from having been folded and refolded, as though the sender had been unsure of the writing he’d placed upon it, or to whom it should be addressed. It was Gyuri’s will. “In accordance with the tradition of the Kassai family, I would like my remains to be buried by my nearest male blood relatives.” Frowning, Krisztina fanned the letter in my face. “That’s you,” she said.

  I looked at the clumsy handwriting, the left-out or misplaced accents, the interruption of the flow of Hungarian by the occasional English word conjugated to fit, and then gazed at Krisztina with an expression that indicated how far we’d come from Hungary (she and her sisters had never even been there!), as well as the obligation I felt to the history we’d suffered through. “You know,” she said quietly, looking at me, “I thought you would be happy to ignore this.” She glanced at the letter as if she wished she’d never brought it to my attention. “I loved my father,” she continued, the softness of her tone edged with a bitterness verging on hostility, “but I can’t say I liked him. He never had time to listen to us. We were women. Pegged us even before we were born. And, you know, that’s the main thing he instilled into us: loyalty to principles first, loyalty to people second.” Krisztina laughed humourlessly, “I wonder what he’d think if he knew that my principles say we—my sisters and I—should be the ones to bury him. And him and his wishes can come second.” She looked at me and smiled then, putting the heel of one hand up to her eyes. “Why weren’t we good enough to bury him? Can’t women hold shovels as good as anybody?”

  I looked at the paper, recalling how Gyuri had treated his daughters, a bear of a man, stained sweaters and emphysema, the way he could slam a door or stare at the boyfriends they brought home, standing at the kitchen table glaring at them as though they were strangers come into the house uninvited, utterly silent, before finally asking, “Are you Hungarian? Are you, at least, German?” They never were; and when his youngest, Gyôngyi, took up with a foreign exchange student from China, Gyuri once again went into the envelope I was holding, and made another of his thousand emendations.

  “A Chinaman!” roared Gyuri (in Hungarian, of course) that day in the
office of the transmission repair shop I’d managed to scrape out of the earth and pile up on a corner of Kingsway. “I’ve always told my daughters! Always!” he continued, “One of the beautiful things about this world is all the different races in it. A wonder— all these races!” he shook his finger at me. “And we have a duty and responsibility to keep it that way!”

  While he was staring out the window in rage, I reached forward carefully and plucked from his grasp the wedding invitation sent by Gyôngyi and her fiancé.

  I tried very hard not to think badly of Gyuri then, watching the stillness of the fingers I’d taken the invitation from, quivering as though they’d lost their grip on something, though he refused to believe it, thinking this something just beyond reach, as if the right strings were dangling just millimetres above, though of course he gave himself reason upon reason for not reaching up, since he did not want to risk the fact that everything that had defined his life—that he still defined it by—was not only out of range but out of existence.

  I waited in a chair, the smell of carbolic on my hands, trying to find some way to present my thoughts in the form of praise, though in truth I had little to say, wanting only to point out that by turning his daughters into mementoes of the country he’d left he’d also turned them into reminders of the consequences of leaving, so that every time he looked at them, they rubbed his nose into a soil he’d risked life and limb for them to walk upon. And while he prided himself on this, he had never once, really, touched down on Canadian earth, moving along as if he were somehow insulated from it by the layer of Hungarian dust he’d been so careful not to kick from his heels. It was, perhaps, time for him to look down.

  And, in the end, this bit of equivocation, this “perhaps,” was the only concession I could make to Gyuri, and he reacted to it exactly as expected, turning from the window to shout that he had escaped Hungary, he really had, and I was a seggfej for suggesting he hadn’t. Moreover, he was more than “man enough” to take Canada on its own terms.