Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  Within months, Gyôngyi and Li Peng were married at the Vancouver Hungarian Cultural Centre, the whole thing paid for by Gyuri, who walked among the milling crowds of confused Asians and Hungarians as a holy man might along a path of nails, the difference being that Gyuri’s coolness was the result of such self-control it was not coolness at all but rather a kind of psychological fascism. For if holy men transcend the self, achieving a plane above, Gyuri had liquidated it, and was thus nowhere. He walked as if his insides had gone dead and grey, and when I followed him into the alley outside the hall I found him leaning against a wall and weeping; and he, turning to see me, said,”I have escaped! I have!”and waved me back inside.

  Krisztina and Cili had it easier than Gyôngyi, but since neither of them married a Hungarian or German, Gyuri was not much more natural at their ceremonies either, especially after learning that Jason, Krisztina’s fiancé, had distant Jewish blood, and that Ed, Cili’s husband, belonged to a family with historical connections to the labour movement. The only thing worse than being of the wrong race was being of the wrong political persuasion.

  The three daughters, of course, had little admiration for Gyuri’s discipline. They saw only the beads of sweat on his face, the fingers digging at his armpits, the utter lack of grace, and resented him for never being able to relax around their husbands and kids (his own grandchildren!), whom he patted as if there were handprints telling him exactly where to place his palm and fingers. Unlike me, the three daughters had never had Gyuri’s image before their eyes, guiding them when everything else was lost; and I was incapable of explaining to them the connection between this image and the bully who’d raised them.

  By the time I buried Gyuri, Pál and Ottó were geriatrics, the former leaning on two canes, the latter with a private nurse to hold up his IV pole. I saw them from where I stood, both men having to be forcibly restrained (which wasn’t too difficult, given their infirmities) from grabbing and wielding one of the shovels struck into the dirt by the grave. Pál, being naturally lazy, was easy to dissuade, but Ottó was a different case, and his language became ever more colourful as he tried to shake off the nurse and me—cursing up and down about how he was a “free man,” how he’d overcome physical extremes “far worse” than old age and heart disease and encroaching mortality, and how “by Christ” there wasn’t a man alive, “not one,” with the strength to prevent him “doing right by family tradition”—in a tug-of-war that went on for twenty minutes before Krisztina finally had to step forth, lay a gentle hand on the old man’s tailored sleeve, and stare him down. The intensity of her tear-stained eyes forced him to relinquish the shovel and gaze at the ground in shame.

  And so, as I dug, and despite how obviously infirm Pál and Ottó were, I couldn’t help but see two men whose escapes, by the summer of 1954—because we had no information, because their letters could not get to us, because no one who’d seen them go had returned to tell of it—had become legendary. The two men looked so faint on the afternoon I buried Gyuri—their outlines chalk traces upon the day—that it made me thankful I was so young at the time of my escape, not because it meant I was healthy, but because of youth’s idealism and its accompanying amnesia, because if I’d really known what my uncles were like they would not have been there to guide my steps. For if history is determined by the quality of the explanations we offer for events, then the luck of youth is not to inquire too deeply into that quality, even when it carves its saints out of reactionaries. But perhaps I am only making excuses, because even later, once their characters came clear, I always tried to support them. And I suppose if this story is anything then it is the confession of an accessory who, while recognizing his sin, continued to help the men with whom he’s been condemned.

  Because they lost their lives. I’m not speaking biologically, of course, but I knew, even in the autumn of 1956, that to stay in Hungary and die was not to fight as they had, as only a single person can fight: by leaving. Theirs was the type of battle where you are always a casualty, a battle in which—rather than watering your country with your blood, making it fertile through martyrdom—you leave it worse for your absence. This was their paradox: that, when they left, they did not go for reasons of a better life elsewhere, but because dissent demanded it, because they wanted to strike some kind of blow, even while knowing that exile was a relinquishing not only of a country but also of the only life that mattered. It was this I thought of, often, in the year following 1956, when the things that had once provided warmth—my country, my village, my home, my people—lost all worth the second I went into hiding, the second I could no longer share them with anyone; so that no matter how I concentrated, struggling to remember every detail, they were as little use to me as a secret that cannot be told, a love letter without a recipient.

  Uncle Pál, like Uncle Ottó, did not have any children. He loved keeping tin goods unopened, stacked in tall columns in the kitchen, until whatever was inside began to rot, expelling gasses that bent the tops and bottoms of the cans convex, making them even more precious to Pál, who hoarded them in the absence of all usefulness, treasuring them though their contents were spoiled, inedible, a testament to a hunger so great you’ll stack rot against the fear of experiencing it again. As I learned after Pál died, he spent most of his life writing for right-wing periodicals published by Orthodox Catholics, radical Hungarians, and other fascist nos-talgics in Australia, who sent him money to supplement his unemployment insurance and welfare cheques, and (when things got bad) the money I gave him for helping sort nuts and bolts, steam clean engines, and—when he didn’t find it too demeaning—make coffee and stroll down Kingsway to pick up lunch for my mechanics.

  Pál often spoke about having children, lamenting not his own failure in this regard but mine. “You need to get yourself a wife,” he’d say. “A Catholic. One who’ll go around and clap your kids’ hands together to pray.” And on those nights when I was unable to sleep, I would move around my apartment and look down at my slack, skinny belly (loss of appetite was only one legacy of my time in hiding), pacing in circles, thinking how little difference there was between Pál and me, both of us so afraid of bringing children into the world that we were awkward in the company of women, flinching involuntarily from images of suffering, whether in magazines, or on TV, or in our imaginations, as if what we’d endured made us incapable of considering anyone else—much less a child—having to face even a tenth of it. We’d lost our faith not only in humanity but also in the process of being human, though I hope that I, at least, was not stuck in a holding pattern, hanging onto the days until one finally came along that defied my grip. And on these sleepless nights I knew I could call him, no matter how late, that he would be up when no one else was, and that while the conversation would be stilted and halting there was at least something to listen to other than the ticking of the clock and the relentless churn of memory.

  We had quiet arguments whenever he came to the garage. During these, my responses were always silent. He’d make a remark about the shape of one of the mechanic’s noses, or about some customer who’d tried to shortchange us, and I would simply stare at him, or off to one side, leaving him unsure of whether my unre-sponsiveness was agreement or dissent. Afterwards, he’d disappear for a few days, though he always came back, saying he needed the money.

  I remember Krisztina coming to see me the night after the police entered Pál’s apartment. He’d passed away days earlier in the solitude of his home, meaning that his body had begun stinking up the corridor between suites before anyone noticed. “The police came to see me,” she said. “They had a boxful of books and papers. You should have seen this stuff !” She shook her head. I didn’t ask Krisztina what Pál’s writing was about because I already knew, thinking back to those nights when we’d spoken on the telephone, back to the things he’d said, both of us speaking through the fevers of insomnia. “The policeman wanted to launch an investigation, but there didn’t seem to be any collaborators.”

  �
��He didn’t have anyone,” I said, answering a different question. “You know that he made me and my sisters his principal beneficiaries? We don’t want any of that money!” “He didn’t have any money,” I said.

  “Are you kidding?” Krisztina replied, pulling out a file prepared by the lawyer for Pál’s estate. “He had it squirrelled away everywhere!” I held the bank books, squinting down the neat columns of deposits, which Pál apparently made on regular dates, times when he’d come begging to me for work, and during which he’d received the money I’d given him (he insisted on being paid in cash) in cupped hands, as if receiving the Eucharist. But where had the rest come from? (Surely, hate literature didn’t sell that well?)

  “I’ve spoken to Cili and Gyôngyi. None of us wants the money. There are organizations. Jewish museums. Holocaust education. We could donate it….”

  “That would be a good idea,” I said, quietly.

  “You’re not …” Krisztina looked out the window. “I mean you wouldn’t contest it if we did that …?”

  I turned my eyes to her, stunned. “You think I would mind?” I couldn’t help it, I was shouting. “I knew he hated Jews, but I didn’t know he wrote that—” I waved my hand at her, though she wasn’t holding anything other than the file, “—that garbage!”

  “Well.” Krisztina smiled carefully, neither out of amusement nor happiness, but rather in defence of my aggression. “I know you were close to Pál bácsi, and I thought maybe …”

  “You think I was sympathetic to that?”

  Krisztina looked at the ground. “My father spoke highly of you. I can’t see him doing that unless the person he spoke about was like him…. He and Pál bácsi got along, you know.”

  I opened my mouth to yell some more, then closed it, at a loss as to how to justify myself to Krisztina, to explain my devotion to her father, to Pál, to Ottó, without at the same time implicating myself in their insanity. Anyhow, I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t implicated, since the trauma that had warped and ossified their thinking, that had made them brutal and obsessive-compulsive, was also my trauma, though I would have liked to think I was not a fascist, and that Krisztina and her sisters knew it. And yet, how else could I explain an affection for the three men that was prepared to overlook almost anything (though that was wrong, too, for I certainly would not have given money to Pál had I known of his stash, nor tolerated the publication of his anti-Semitic rants)? Instead, I asked, “Did your father really hurt you that badly?”

  “I didn’t have much of a father,” said Krisztina, after a moment of silence. “He was never really here. I think history ended for him the moment he left Hungary. I don’t know what kind of truths they had then, but it seemed like he held on to them long after they’d become the worst kind of lies.”

  And to that, really, there was no response.

  The priest and I buried Pál. I suppose Father Conklin pitied me that overcast day, grabbing an extra shovel the minute he’d finished with the service, the two of us working in silence as a warm wind blew in from offshore, carrying a spring rain so gentle it felt as if we were passing through spiders’ webs. There was nobody else willing to come to the funeral, not even Ottó, who claimed to be too sick, though I knew for a fact that Pál had disgusted him, and that, for Ottó, Gyuri’s funeral had been a happy occasion, since it was the last time he would ever have to see Pál again or acknowledge their relation. On hearing I was burying Pál, he’d said,”I hope he left you something in return!” Well, he has left me something, I thought at the time, though both Ottó and I knew that neither Gyuri nor Pál (nor Ottó himself, for that matter) were inclined to financially reward the duties of tradition.

  It took the priest and me twenty minutes to pile all the dirt on Pál’s casket, and maybe another five for the priest to utter a few parting remarks.

  And then it was over, an entire life done with, and not a soul except me to acknowledge or weigh it against Krisztina’s condemnation, which, it seemed to me, was relevant not because it addressed Gyuri and Pál’s failure to escape the truths of their times—to acknowledge the contradiction between its Christianity and hate—since, let’s face it, very few are capable of this, but because it addressed their failure—both of them having outlived those times—to gaze back in recognition, and use the remorse that gaze should have occasioned against the illusions that comforted and rotted them for the rest of their lives.

  Upon leaving the cemetery I thought I saw Krisztina’s car moving off the avenue that led from the cemetery to the freeway, but there are too many red cars in the world for me to be sure, and it was probably just an illusion of my own, a hope that Krisztina’s presence at the funeral in some way signified an awareness of the failure, this time mine, that demanded I be present at Pál’s funeral.

  But if she was there, she never mentioned it.

  Of all my uncles, Ottó’s was the only death at which I was actually present. Unlike Gyuri—whom he liked but didn’t have a lot in common with—or Pál—whom he hated—Ottó had never seen me as a confidant, never come to me in moments of familial or financial crisis, though we met often enough, sitting on his back verandah and telling jokes, talking politics, reminiscing, our brains awash in more than a few shots of pear brandy. Our relationship consisted of maintaining the distance required by politeness, like waltzing partners determined to keep a full twelve inches between their bodies, so that when one of us moved forward (metaphorically of course, say by asking a personal question), the other would move back (answering with another question, or with an impersonal reference, bringing up a historical or political reason for why they had broken off with this or that woman). Ottó always wore a suit, often of linen, and his shirts were crisply pressed, his style so impeccable that it dominated his personality and made it impossible to think of either Gyuri or Pál as his siblings. Ottó was a member of not just the local Hungarian club, but was a “friend” (financial contributor) to the Vancouver Symphony, as well as a host of other cultural institutions. He was the sort of man who received invitations to formal functions, and nods in the hallways when business took him to city hall.

  “You know,” he said as I sat by his bed the night he died, “Pál was an idiot. Really! I shouldn’t talk about him that way,” he interrupted his confession with an extended period of wheezing, and I saw the fear in his eyes afterwards, as if—for reasons of death, and whatever might lie beyond it—he was considering not making fun of his brother, though a second later he shrugged and continued, “but what else can you say about a man who smokes two packs a day, doesn’t exercise, eats mouthfuls of lard, and then tells you, because he doesn’t like to bathe, that a lot of our health problems today can be traced to the fact that our society showers too much? ‘Washing away all of our natural oils,’ he’d say! ‘That’s why we’re all so sick and allergic to everything.’ You know what my response was? ‘You stink!’ That’s what I’d say. ‘You stink!’ And he’d reply, ‘It’s a manly smell.’ A manly smell! Can you believe it?” Ottó shook his head, smiling at the memory.

  “And then there was Gyuri,” he grimaced. “Pig-headed, that’s what! You could have used his skull to hammer nails! I can’t believe that his daughters didn’t poison him.” He began laughing now, as the pain of the cancer and the euphoria of morphine confused his responses. “Maybe they did, maybe they did,” he said, growing thoughtful and quiet, and taking his eyes from mine to let them wander in sudden fits and starts along the pictures mounted on the walls, the collection of leather-bound books on the mantelpiece, as if whatever he was looking at wavered before him; and when he spoke next it was exclusively to these flitting spirits.

  “Stop it! Both of you,” Ottó shouted. “You—neither of you!— don’t know what it was like. You only complained.” Ottó’s voice faltered now, and when he spoke again it was lower than a whisper. “You only knew what it was like to wake up with teeth inside your stomach. Staring at the dark. You knew the coldness of the room but not what it was like to step into th
ose boots. It was like putting your feet into blocks of ice. Then out, while it was still night. Along the fences, under them, every step in fear of unexploded shells. I was only twelve years old! And what kept me moving were those teeth, gnawing upwards from my stomach, burning in my throat. Twelve years old: the oldest boy, but smaller than a man. Under the fences, in the fields. Sometimes hiding for hours beneath a bridge, in empty pigpens and henhouses, anywhere the Russians might not look. With Grandfather’s watch in my pocket—something to give them if they caught me. My fingers so stiff with cold I was afraid to bend them.

  “Then to the traps, the crows, some already frozen, some feeble, gone the whole night squawking, flapping their wings, losing heat. One twist of the neck with my child’s hands, then into the bag. Baiting the traps again. And then back home after being out in that winter—why was it so cold then?—sometimes for hours, back home, on a good day, with one, maybe two, standing in the kitchen with my hands in my armpits, trembling with cold. I had to pluck the birds. Mother refused to. Refused to kiss me until I put my cold hands in the cold water to wash them.

  “And then the two of you and father at the table. Mother ladling out the soup. The smallest amount of grease on its surface. Twiglike bones coming to the surface. Wrinkling your noses, eating only out of the most desperate hunger, pausing to catch your breath between each spoonful, looking at me accusingly. ‘Couldn’t you catch a sparrow?’ father said. ‘There are better birds out there than crows.’ ‘A crow belongs to the songbird family,’ mother always replied.