by Tamas Dobozy
“It tasted like shit. That’s what crows ate in those days. The shit in the fields, the manure, the bugs, rotting leaves falling from the trees, the mud packed up on the sides of the ditches along the road, crumbs of bread fallen between the prints left by the soles of marching soldiers, rotted meat of fallen horses, broken eggshells on the floors of chicken coops, the grubs and offal from where the slaughter went on, both in the yards and elsewhere, out there, in the forest, where the Germans had marched those people from our village, out there from where the ringing shots could be heard, one volley, a pause, then another, wave upon wave, out there in the forest where we were forbidden to go—the crows eating it all up, whatever could be scavenged, whatever fit inside their beaks, until it was like they’d swallowed everything, from the dirt to the blood, until the crows seemed composed of the earth under the frost and snow and slush and our feet—composed of the country itself— bits and pieces torn away from the ground, flung up into the sky to land in my traps.
“That’s what we ate. And you complained and complained and complained, forcing it down past the tightening in your throat. Mother spoke of songbirds.”
And now, Ottó, in a spasm, forced his eyes away from the patterns they were weaving upon, or seeing within, the air; and with a supreme effort—as if by sheer will he could push himself one last time between the walls of pain that separated us—met my eyes with such intensity, I felt as though it would throw me from my chair.
“And how many times,” he said, his voice almost at a conversational level, “how many times, in all the thirty years since, would we have murdered for that taste, killed for it—betrayed everything for just one more bite?”
And with that he closed his eyes and died.
Krisztina, Cili, and Gyôngyi came to Ottó’s funeral, along with half the city. It was disconcerting to stand before what was easily five hundred people, most of whom were extremely uncomfortable watching me work the shovel alone, and would have gladly joined in had Ottó’s strictly worded testament permitted it. But I dug the shovel in, dropping dirt on the casket, until it was over, the crowd waiting patiently for me to finish, at which point they came and shook my hand, some of whom—not realizing I was Ottó’s blood relation—even stuffing money into my pockets.
The three women and I were strangers in the reception hall, where it seemed everyone but us knew everyone else, as if the businessmen and politicians, lawyers and accountants, and members of private clubs were Ottó’s true family, and the three girls and me only hired help.
“I wonder if any of these people knew who Ottó’s brothers were?” asked Krisztina, punching her fork into the roast beef.
I picked at the potato salad, thinking of the soup Ottó had described, before pushing my plate away. I sat for a minute more, watching the girls eat, then rose abruptly—a man jerked up, something biting at his spine—and staggered outside into the parking lot, where I wandered in a daze, back and forth between the bumpers and fenders, my jacket catching on side-view mirrors, my pants rubbing on dirty tires, feeling as if there were something out here, a place I might get to where I could alleviate this sense of loss; though there was only the endless parking lot, in which—no matter how I moved, left or right—I came no nearer to the perimeter, as if the cars had been parked there to perpetuate a maze without exit.
By the time Krisztina found me, I was nearly in tears with desperation, and she folded her arms around me, whispering, “You really loved those old men.” And though her tone and touch expressed sympathy, it was entirely without understanding, done out of love for the griever rather than in recognition of the grief, a comfort no different from what you might give a child on the death of a goldfish.
And how would I have explained it to her, had I lifted my head and managed to get the words out? “They were afraid—” I might have said, “—afraid all their lives.” But I was not looking to excuse them, to chart their offences as if every step had been decided by what they’d survived, as if those horrors determined, for the rest of their lives, what they would never again willingly face. For there is nothing like trauma to make one rage for certainty, to make one invest one’s belief in the ugliest of securities—fascism and greed— and to mistake the form this belief takes for reality, when the truth is you are too frightened, too demoralized, to cope with a world that does not accommodate faith. Thinking back now, I know this is what I should have said, not on behalf of those three men—they were too far gone to be helped—but on behalf of those who had lived with them, who had spent all those years trying to get them to negotiate the terms of a relationship, when any form of negotiation—and the compromise it entailed—would have forced them back to a world they could not abide, far from that nowhere untouched by change or violence or unpredictability that they’d invented to make the running easier. Their principal mistake was thinking they were in exile when they’d always been home.
But, in truth, the only thing that occurred to me, the only images that came to mind, the only words I might have articulated, were exactly the ones Krisztina would not have understood. Her anger, and her suffering under Gyuri, were too strong for her to comprehend my debt to these three men. Or, rather, she would have understood, but without experiencing, what it was like to wait weeks and weeks in absolute silence, listening to the ticking of a house and the rumbling of your stomach; rationing your remaining food in ever tinier portions, halving and halving and halving what remains until you seem to be splitting atoms; wondering who will deliver the next knock at the door: the man with the fresh bread and safe addresses, or the guards too happy to hammer your fingers from the table leg as they drag you away; and, finally, risking capture to make one last visit to your mother, to the one person not defaced by absence and isolation, only to realize she said goodbye to you a lifetime ago, and because she is no longer part of this world, neither are you, having lost so much in those tiny rooms that flight is not a risk but an admission that you’ve survived all you care to survive, stumbling by night through the driving snow, having said goodbye, crawling west across an almost unprotected stretch of border knowing that even before the first step you have already gone much farther than you wanted, along a journey from which none of us returned.
Because the tragedy was this: during that winter trek, there was only one light strong enough to blot out the memory of my mother—or strong enough to redeem what had happened to her, to my father, to me—and it was the faces of my uncles glimmering through the snow and trees in defiance of the distance ahead and the greater distance behind, assuring me that certain acts of resistance require you to run not to save your life but to lose it, and in losing it add another corpse to the dead piled on the doorstep of those responsible. I was, in a sense, joining them and my mother in the only form of dissent left us. And I realized then that what I had been looking for in the parking lot—and even from Krisztina— was forgiveness, when the only thing I had any right to truly expect was condemnation. For if in the moment of defeat I had been drawn to my uncles as to a light, then it was my failure, and crime, that nothing they did or said after that terrible winter of 1958 had ever really been able to diminish it.
The Laughing Cat
WE CAME UP with the idea on graduation night 1976. I suppose it was the combination of rye and Cokes and dope and beer, but before I knew it we’d made a vow to get together at the Laughing Cat Delicatessen for at least one hour every Saturday—rain or shine or twelve-hour nightshifts or family commitments notwith-standing—for as long as we were still alive.
Things went pretty smoothly at first. The five of us would carry on from whatever we’d been doing the night before, sometimes walking down to the deli straight out of a speakeasy or party, or waking up in one of our apartments, crawling out of sleeping bags, eating a batch of eggs, toast and bacon, then arriving at the Laughing Cat for the first of many Americanos.
But as the years went by, and most of us became occupied with girlfriends, wives, kids, and dying parents, it became less a q
uestion of heading there together than catching up with what everyone had been doing. And I was always there first—fresh from a batch of marking, or a reading list for a course I was designing— waiting on their company.
And, then, in 1986, when Nathan Soames’s wife took off with an accountant, and that accountant quit working, forcing Nate to near-bankruptcy with support payments out of his meagre mill-worker’s salary, things got drastic. Ben and Hank asked Joe Mara and me to take Nate aside and tell him the last thing any of us needed was him ruining another Saturday by ranting on about how bitter life was (something we were realizing just fine on our own, thanks). But it was Nate’s reaction to this—”Oh, so it’s okay for Mara to talk about his ‘nervous condition,’ or Ben about scamming that insurance settlement, or Thomas about how studying leaves him no time to socialize, but I can’t complain about Katie walking out on me?”—that made it clear we were going to need some rules.
So it was decided that, One, we were men getting together every Saturday; and therefore, Two, we were not there to discuss “emotional issues,” since there were plenty of those back in the homes we were seeking relief from; and hence, Three, it was advisable to limit our conversation to sports, politics, and (as best we could) philosophy—though it soon became clear that what we loved most were Joe Mara’s stories.
Mara’s entrance into the Laughing Cat on the Saturday of November 26,1996—the date from which I chart the dissolution of our little group—was typical of how he always entered the deli: giving the sense that he’d been standing in the doorway for some time, though not quite visible until the moment you saw him, as if he’d congealed out of the city’s smog with a mug of coffee in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other, his once neatly trimmed hair now long and slicked back, eyes jagging from one thing to another as though tracing the flight path of a mosquito.
He’d find our table and drop into a seat sideways, turn his profile to us, then extend his mug to the side while puffing silently on a cigarette (this, despite the fact that Vittorio, the proprietor, had NO SMOKING signs posted everywhere—including one on our table, and one on the wall above it). Eventually, Vittorio or one of his nephews would walk over and fill Mara’s mug, shaking their heads at the fact that he never even acknowledged their service with a nod. (They had tried, once or twice, to see how long he could hold that mug extended before being forced to ask for a coffee or to lower it, but the other customers had been so disturbed by the sight of Mara sitting there, arm trembling spasmodically as the minutes ticked past, that Vittorio, not wanting to lose any business, finally ran over and filled it.)
“You guys ever heard of Selwyn Hughes?” asked Mara. “Contemporary composer. Post-Stockhausen. Lush orchestral pieces intercut with electronic swoops and skronks?” He waited, looking at us expectantly. “C’mon, the guy took apart the twelve-tone system!”
On any normal Saturday, we would have observed the ritual Mara’s storytelling demanded: we would have sat there quietly, not responding at all to the question even if we knew the answer, because the unanswered question was Mara’s personal muse. The problem on this day, however, was that Hank Davis had brought along a friend—without first checking with any of us—by the name of Alvin Parker, whom I recognized immediately as a fellow professor of literature, although at the city’s other university. Every time he spoke I found myself lowering my eyes, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me, or that the guys wouldn’t mention my name. “Sure, I know him,” Parker said smugly. “Wrote ‘The Last Stage of Evaporation.’Wonderful music. He stopped composing— sold his records and disappeared—about ten years back.”
It was the first time I’d seen Mara off balance. He retracted his head as far as his neck would let him, then lifted the mug and cigarette in quick succession to the place where his lips used to be, doing this twice before he realized they’d moved a couple of inches south, so that by the time he’d managed a slurp and puff he looked like someone chasing after himself. “Who are you?” he asked. But when Parker offered his handshake, Mara pushed his head even farther back, as if the hand were reaching up to grip his throat. “Parker, huh?” Mara considered the information, peering at him from a long remove.
Everyone shifted in their seats, except for Parker, who looked around ingratiatingly, unaware of what he’d done. With great effort, Mara pulled himself together and did something else I’d never heard him do: he stuttered. “Y-y-y-you know who I saw him with yesterday morning at the corner of Bloor and Ossington?”
“Yo-Yo Ma,” said Parker and Mara simultaneously.
The hand holding Mara’s cigarette dropped to his side. “What the fuck?” His face was ashen. “H-h-h-how … How did you?” And when Parker explained that he’d seen a picture snapped by some paparazzi and buried in the back pages of the weekend Entertainment section of the Globe, above a short article on the enigma of Sel-wyn Hughes, Mara rose from the table and looked around the deli frantically, as though desperate to avoid capture. Already I could see Vittorio and his nephews edging toward our table, ready for trouble. “Did the article say what Hughes and Yo-Yo talked about?”And then Parker—finally realizing he’d broken with some protocol Hank should have warned him about—replied that no, the article had only remarked on Hughes’ disappearance from the music scene, and on how rare a sighting of the great composer was, adding quickly, and by way of an attempted apology, that he would now stop interrupting Mara’s “delightful picaresque,” and be happy just to listen to the “episodic narratives” Mara “inscribed on the streets of Toronto.”
“Picaresque?” asked Nate. “What’s a picaresque?”
Ignoring the last part of Parker’s response, Mara pointed the butt end of his cigarette at him, saying, “I knew it! Only I’ve got the story!” And with that he turned on his heels and rushed for the door, twisting one last time toward us as he hit the top step, saying, “I’ll be back soon. Very soon!”
It took a second for what had happened to sink in. Parker turned toward Hank in his seat, hands up in a protestation of innocence. I looked at the door through which Mara had exited, then over at Nathan and Hank and Ben, seeing the same question in their eyes—before Ben finally rose and began shouting at Parker and Hank, which gave Vittorio and his nephews exactly the excuse they needed to jump in and escort us out of the Laughing Cat.
While Vittorio stood on the sidewalk, shaking his finger and reading us the riot act, I saw Nate lean toward Parker and ask again, “What’s a picaresque?” When Parker walked off, head bowed, Nate followed, still asking questions.
I, of course, walked the other way, not toward home but along the avenues, searching for some sign of Joe Mara through Chinatown and Kensington Market, then Queen Street, before reluctantly boarding a bus outside the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Truth was, I had no way of finding Mara and I knew it, and once I got home that night I reflected with an unwanted nostalgia on where, exactly, the Laughing Cat had brought us. Thinking of the rules we’d devised in the wake of Nathan’s divorce—put in place to guarantee that the deli remained impervious to change, that it always afforded the same experience week after week, without the ups and downs, the bewildering flux, that defined life outside its walls—it became shockingly apparent that each of us had long ago lost track of what the other guys did in terms of work; whether they were single, married, divorced, remarried, or lonely; how many kids they had. Even the phone numbers we’d once been able to recall by reflex were now lost in the lists of “J. Mara’s” and “N. Soames’s” and “H. Davis’s” and “B. McCormack’s” in the phone book, names we couldn’t reference against a single known address. For the last ten years, or perhaps fifteen, I had no idea what any of them had been going through. Oh, sure, there were telltale signs—the shaking of hands when Nate reached for his coffee, Mara’s increasing abstractedness, Ben quietly asking one or another of the guys to foot his bill for twelve months on end, the spots of baby food that all of a sudden vanished from Ben’s clothing—details I’m sure we’d
all noticed, but which had faded into the background, or disappeared altogether when their trials, whatever they were, passed, and they returned to being the people we’d always known. But none of us ever asked what the matter was. It was the rules. And it was the rules I blamed that night, tossing and turning, afraid I’d never see my friends again.
This, as it turned out, was not so unreasonable a fear, because the very next Saturday, Vittorio, upon seeing me enter the deli, ran over to prevent me from sidling up to our table. “You can’t meet here anymore,” he said, arms folded. I glanced at the front counter and saw his nephews staring at me through the aperture that separated the deli from the kitchen. “I’m fed up with you guys,” he said. “With your crazy stories. Shouting and yelling and laughing. Disturbing my customers. And that guy Mara and his cigarettes. Can’t he see the signs?” He waved his hands in the air as though I had a cigarette in hand at that very moment and he was fanning the smoke from his face. “It was okay at first,” he continued. “You made my place look busy. But now …” He dropped a hand onto my shoulder. “I can’t afford to give up a table to a bunch of guys who do nothing but order coffee.” I scratched my head and looked at the customers, who were looking at me.
By the time I’d made it home—again searching for Mara through the neighbourhoods around Little Italy and downtown, though more frantically than before—I had already figured out what it would take to appease Vittorio. But there was an undertone to my thinking that day, a trace of guilt, for whenever I thought of us getting back together it occurred to me that in listening to Mara we’d actually been doing something to him, that our passivity as an audience was in fact an activity, and a harmful one at that. And as I punched in the URL for the online menu of the Laughing Cat, and tried to stay undisturbed by the usual silence of my phone, calculating the kind of order we’d have to place to make it worth Vitto-rio’s while, I kept brushing from my mind the sight of Mara standing at the corner of King and Yonge—Mara in his long hair and threadbare clothes, the shoes that looked more like slippers (were they slippers?), the way I would always avoid him while going to work so he couldn’t ask where I was headed, the way I couldn’t help watching him anyhow, sometimes even following after him, intrigued by the possibilities of his life. Mara was often just standing there, staring up, searching the sky, or leaning against a bank or a lamppost, checking out the passersby, or strolling in a way that showed he had no destination in mind, coffee cup and burning cigarette always in hand, absently waved at and welcomed by the waiters and waitresses of coffee shops and greasy spoons, as if the whole city were his living room. I spent the better part of that day fighting off these memories, as well as those from before: Mara receiving the Principal’s Award in high school, giving a speech at his wedding, telling us how quickly he’d risen from clerk to manager—all these memories from the days before our rules came into play, and which I couldn’t square with the days that came after except through the saddest of theories.