by Tamas Dobozy
Görbe came into the room carrying two huge snifters filled with Crimean Cup à la Marmora, his belly brushing the doorframe as he squeezed through with a scraping of shirt buttons. “What’re you looking at?” He stopped when I pointed to the pictures of his wife. “Zella,” Görbe said, adding nothing more, just standing there, drinks in hand. I asked where she was. “Zella is away,” came his quiet response. “In a better place.” This seemed to break him out of his trance and he handed me a drink and changed the subject.
Whenever Görbe spoke about his work there was a complete absence of the technical or practical aspects of publishing. Just as when he read to my sons, he spoke as if he was a privileged reader rather than the author. He was never sure, he said, where the story was going even as his writing and drawing proceeded, always one step ahead of his conscious intentions. This was the real Görbe, I always thought, not the clown at the bar and readings, but the guy who, when he talked of his work, seemed eased of all the flesh he carried, his need to filter the world through a cigar, his overindulgence with booze and food. The real Görbe grew excited talking of clouds hollowed out by sparrows, of fire escapes woven out of iron roses growing miles into the air, of bricks made of compacted song turned into choruses conducted with wrecking balls. I’d seen him like that with my kids, and guessed that when he went on tours to the tiny libraries of Idaho and Arkansas and Nebraska he was like that too—naive, filled with wonder, released from the persona he climbed into, like some fat suit, every morning in Queens.
“You like my kids, huh?” I asked one night as we stood on the balcony of the apartment I’d been renting, subsidized by NYU, on the fourteenth floor with a view of the Empire State Building and its coloured lights. But Görbe just sucked his cigar and looked at me as if the question was a trap he wasn’t going to walk into. I scratched the back of my head. “Well, you see, it’s just that I was . . . Well, it’s weird that you’d be so friendly to me just because fifty years ago you dated my aunt. A celebrity like you.”
Görbe looked at me then as if he wanted to throw me over the balcony. “The reason I’m so friendly,” he growled, “is because you’re such an asshole.”
I looked at him and tried to laugh.
“You’re bumping your head on the glass ceiling of your mediocrity. And you’re wide awake to it—why your agent doesn’t return your emails; why the writers at NYU show no interest in you; why New York leaves you cold. Most people can look away from that, dream up excuses—‘Oh, my agent is just busy’; ‘Oh, the writers at NYU are all self-important dickheads’; ‘Oh, New York is so superficial’—but not you, right? You know better than anyone you’re not going to make it, and you can’t hide it from yourself.”
I think I spluttered. I had no idea how to respond. And then, in a moment I’ll never forget, Görbe reached for my hand. It was the weirdest gesture. I tried to pull back from it, but the touch was so lonely, so childlike, it seemed more for his sake than mine, and when I gave in to it Görbe seemed to shrink, to fall into himself, clinging to me in the Manhattan night with the cavernous streets below, snow drifting past. For some reason I felt the need to say something reassuring to Görbe, to whisper him an apology for the world—“Everything will be fine, you’ll see”—when in fact it should have been him apologizing to me.
It was partly because of that conversation, but mainly because of my curiosity about Zella, that the next morning I went into the archives at NYU—combing through old copies of the Times, Observer, and even the Post—to piece together Görbe’s story. My aunt said he’d been a prominent children’s author during the communist era, as far as prominence went in those days, and he’d certainly had no trouble, as far as she or any of their mutual acquaintances could say, with the Soviet authority. “In fact,” she admitted, “he helped me out with his connections when I needed it.” As for his books, she said they “were like a utopia.” The children in them wanted to stay inside a dream, to realize a better world, and the communists liked that. “The kids were the proletariat,” she wrote, “at least according to the communist reviewers.” The waking world was the world as it is; and dream was the world as it could be. It was a pretty simple-minded interpretation, like most of them, but it saved Görbe. In other words, he had a good life under the Party—made enough money, had a nice apartment, ate and drank well. So nobody was really sure why he left. “As for his wife,” my aunt’s letter said, “I met her only once. She was just like Görbe except worse—dreamy, childish, never comfortable among adults. In fact, what seemed good in him seemed somehow bad in her. But maybe I was just jealous.”
There was almost nothing in the archives about Zella. For all the publicity given Görbe—starting with his defection from Hungary, played up relentlessly in the press, and by Görbe himself as an “escape towards the dream” (so much for the communist utopia)—there was only one article that dealt at all with his wife. Sure, there was a mention here or there, a comment about them having better “food and medical care and lifestyles” in the U.S., and a statement by Görbe saying his “private life” was “private” when asked in the early 1970s about how he and Zella were adjusting to New York. But that was pretty much it. There was nothing about their home life (not even one of those lousy spreads, so common with children’s authors, where some reporter visits them at home to prove that he really is a joyous family man with kids and a wife and colourful wallpaper and a house filled with constant storytelling); nothing about his career from “her” point of view (one of those pieces where the wife comments on her husband’s zany writing process, his odd schedules, his fun-loving ways with the kids in the park); in fact nothing about Görbe having a wife or any home life at all. Zella’s public appearances, rare in any case, stopped entirely after 1975, as did any mention of her on Görbe’s part. His entire persona was public, and, as such, especially after days and days of reading about it, totally put on, or so it seemed to me, for maximum publicity.
Most amazing were the pictures. My aunt had hinted at the transformation Görbe had undergone since the 1960s, but it was beyond what I’d expected. He’d been slight, almost pixyish, at the time of his arrival in New York, and what happened to him over the years was so extreme I could only think his metabolism had been damaged. There was no way you could get that fat in that short a time all by yourself. Part of the problem early on was that he hadn’t figured out how to dress for it. He was still wearing the clothes of a skinny man—narrow pants and tucked-in shirts—through much of the 1970s and ’80s. It wasn’t until the ’90s that he adopted the black suit and overcoat whose layers smoothed his folds and bumps of flab. It was why he took up the cigar as well—his features had sunk so far into the flesh of his face he needed something sticking out like that, a flag, to remind us he was still in there. And with the physical change came increasing accounts of bad behaviour—sarcasm, insults, fist fights. I was surprised so few articles commented on how a writer of such fantastical stories, of a world mapped out with such visionary innocence, did little more than satisfy his appetite for food, booze, tobacco and outrage. There was nothing beyond that, just the immensity of his cravings, as if Görbe had become the monster excluded from his books.
That, at least, seemed to be Zella’s opinion. The one article I did find on her was a page six piece from the New York Post, a single paragraph mostly taken up with the names of celebrities who’d attended a recent “bash” for one of Görbe’s books in 1975. They gave her three sentences: “It appears the booze was flowing pretty freely. Zella Görbe, the author’s wife, was acting ‘erratic,’ according to one guest. Before being escorted home by a private nurse, she regaled the room with stories of her husband’s weight, calling him a ‘fat disgusting pig’ one minute, then swooning over her ‘little boy’ the next.” There was nothing else, and however much I scanned through the information I’d gathered, returning to paragraphs and statements, there was no more about Zella’s “behaviour,” nothing to suggest she was a drunk, certainly nothing about a “priva
te nurse,” though I did note a number of photographs where there was a third figure present—an older woman, dressed well but very straight, always in the background near Zella. Since none of the photographs listed her among the guests, either the newspapers didn’t know her name or she wanted it kept out. She looked stern, a mother figure, and the pictures made me recall what my aunt had said about Görbe when he was twenty years old: still afraid of the dark, playing hide-and-seek, climbing into the attic as if it was the entrance to a palace.
During that last month I kept my research hidden from Görbe. I worried about how he’d react. But Görbe must have sensed something, because he paid more attention to me than before, coming over unannounced with presents for the kids, sitting by the kitchen table (as much of him as would fit, anyhow) complimenting Marcy’s cooking and listening to her talk half-jokingly about how I couldn’t enjoy New York because I was so wrapped up in making contacts here, so obsessed with publishing in the right places, so distraught at not getting on, that the kids had started jumping on my back while I sat at the computer just to get some attention. “Ah, ambition,” Görbe muttered. “Toxic as poison.”
He even showed up to two dismal readings arranged by my U.S. publisher.
“Well, that sucked,” he said, afterwards. “It’s interesting that the woman in the audience—or I guess I should just say ‘the audience,’ period—didn’t even bother to buy a book. With all our eyes on her you think she’d have the decency.”
“The only thing worse than giving a reading is having to attend one,” I replied.
“Absolutely,” said Görbe. “You note that I never read myself. I just get up there and bullshit for a while. It’s all they want to hear anyhow.”
“More of your bullshit.”
“Right. More of my bullshit.” He laughed and blew a big cloud of cigar smoke. “You should think about that some time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I read, I don’t read, it’s all the same.”
“That’s the spirit!”
It was, I think, the only way he knew to cheer me up, though of course I didn’t need to be cheered up. My failures were something I’d accepted, or at least stopped trying to avoid or explain. And that was the problem: the more Görbe came to my readings, or said he liked my book, or tried to get me to not take it so seriously, the more tiresome it became. I had become his foil, the failure against which he could measure his success, the person he might have been had he not so successfully managed his public persona and with it his career. Time would prove me wrong, of course—that is, I was Görbe’s foil, but not in the way I thought—but during those weeks I was irritated by his condescension, and one night, at two in the morning, after we’d consumed more Brandy Sangarees than advisable, I turned to Görbe and said, “How’s your wife?”
“My wife?” Görbe turned with the cocktail lifted partway to his lips. “My wife is none of your goddamn business.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “You’re the only one who’s allowed to get personal.” Görbe said nothing, but I could see he was ready to hit me. I felt tears come to my eyes, not because of the implied violence, but for exactly the opposite reason, for the effort Görbe had been making, in his own way, to make me see what was important, and instead of which I was trying to get to him, to bring him down to my level, which was also a way of raising myself to his. “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying so hard with me?” I pressed my face closer to his, not caring what he did. “When I called you I thought we’d meet for coffee and you’d give me the usual bullshit about writing and living in Manhattan, and I’d give you the usual bullshit about how honoured I feel to be here, and we’d never see each other again.”
He grabbed my shirt and lifted me off the bar stool and slammed me against the bar—it felt as if my spine had snapped—then hauled me out of the room so fast my feet couldn’t keep up, and dumped me on the sidewalk out front. Then he went back inside.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, blind with humiliation. The feeling was so intense it somehow rebounded on itself and made me shameless, sitting on the pavement not caring who saw me, my clothes soaking up the slush, indifferent to Görbe’s voice back in the bar telling everyone how lucky I was. I got home and Marcy asked why I was wet, and I couldn’t look at her, and I couldn’t look in on Henry and Benjamin asleep in their beds. I was so consumed by what Görbe had done I couldn’t focus on anything.
The next morning Görbe left his apartment at ten, hopping the subway into Manhattan and then the M35 bus to Ward’s Island. He was dressed as always—black suit, black tie, the overcoat, the cigar. He wasn’t reading anything, wasn’t looking around, wasn’t muttering more than a quick hello to the bus driver. He took a seat and stared straight ahead, and once in a while he’d open a big sketchbook on his lap and make a note or doodle a picture for the next installment of the Atlas.
The morning started with snow, by noon it was rain, and I got off a block after he did to avoid suspicion and got soaked running back to catch Görbe checking in with the receptionist and moving down one of the corridors of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. After he was gone, I went up to the receptionist and said I was there to visit Zella Görbe. She looked at me a bit, wanting to say something, but in the end kept it to herself. “Her husband just checked in, too,” she muttered.
I crept down the corridor after him, hoping not to be seen, and when I came to Zella’s room I skirted it and then snuck back and peeked in the window.
He was sitting in what seemed an absurdly small chair, all that weight on those spindly chrome legs, his coat hitting the floor in folds around his ankles.
The woman in the bed looked as if she’d been there all her life. But for some reason—maybe because she’d been there so long, removed from the stresses of lived life, taxes and sick kids and getting to work on time—Zella looked radiant, her face smooth of wrinkles, her skin white, her hair carefully arranged, to the point where I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that someone came around every morning to clean her up. As I peeked in further I saw the woman from the photographs, the one always in the background, aged so much I wouldn’t have recognized her except I knew she’d be there—the private nurse Görbe had been paying for who knows how long to look after Zella. For a second it seemed to me that the nurse, with her thinning hair and withered face and bent back, was somehow paying the price, physically, for Zella’s radiance. Closing my eyes I leaned against the wall and listened to her and Görbe. They were speaking Hungarian. It was the first time I’d heard Görbe use the language. The nurse’s name was Zsuzsa, and what they spoke of was Zella’s condition, how often the orderlies shifted her body to prevent bedsores, whether there was anything Görbe needed (“No” was his reply, though he thanked Zsuzsa for her concern), how his next book was coming along (“On time as always,” was his tired reply), and whether Zsuzsa needed anything (“You’ve looked after me just fine,” said the old woman). Then, after a short pause in which both of them seemed to be avoiding the next topic, Zsuzsa asked Görbe if he’d reconsidered “the treatment” proposed by “Dr. Norris.” He replied so loudly I heard every word: “I’ve told you, I’m not ever going to agree to that. It’s too risky.” Zsuzsa’s silence made it plain just how much she disagreed, or how little she believed that the “risk” was for him the only, or even the main, consideration.
“Can I help you, sir?” I was startled out of my eavesdropping by a nurse. I opened my eyes to find her standing in front of me, her hand on my shoulder as if she was worried I’d fall down. “Are you okay?”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m just tired. A bit dizzy.”
“Come over here.” She did as I’d hoped and led me away from Zella’s room to another waiting area, returning a second later with a glass of water.
“I was on my way to see Dr. Norris,” I said.
“Oh, he’s not in today,” said the nurse. “Did you have an appointment?”
“Well, no . . . I’m a writer. A journalis
t. I heard he’s been experimenting with some new treatment and I was thinking maybe there was a story in it.”
She looked at me strangely. “Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She got up and smoothed the fabric of her uniform on either hip, and said, “I hope you’re feeling better.” I told her I was, and the minute she was gone I rose to leave as well.
It didn’t take me long to look up Dr. Norris and discover he was a research physician at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center working on an experimental procedure for patients with “severe catatonia resulting from schizophrenia.” I didn’t have a lot of use for the article—it was filled with technical jargon I didn’t understand—except it gave me the window onto Görbe I’d been looking for. Zella was schizophrenic, the disease had worsened over time, and the reason Görbe lived in such poverty was because he spent all of his money on her care, and it didn’t matter to him, because without Zella there was no life for him worth spending money on. I sat in the Bobst Library with the research in front of me and wondered what I was doing, how I’d come to this, obsessing over the troubles of a man who’d gone through more suffering than I could conceive, and beside which my own failures in New York amounted to nothing. I wondered, too, why Görbe had not taken up Dr. Norris’s offer, for it seemed to me that neither he nor Zella had anything to lose. I’d seen her on the bed, so vegetative that whatever position they moved her body into it stayed there, like a mannequin. Even death seemed better than that. So why didn’t he agree to it? And I think it was this, the hopelessness of Görbe’s situation, his inability to do what he knew he had to do, that made me get up and call him.
We met in a Cuban diner, Margon, on Forty-sixth Street near Times Square. It was the dirtiest place I’d ever gone to in New York, but the food was the best, and Görbe was already into his third plate by the time I arrived. He watched suspiciously as I made my way along the narrow space between the tables and the people lined up by the counter. I’d told him over the phone I really wanted to “clear the air” over what happened at Lotus, my voice edging into an apology when he just coughed nervously into the phone and said, “Forget it, it’s nothing, come have lunch at Margon.”