Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  Anna’s father had lived through the siege of Budapest, the subject his rants on Erdély inevitably came around to, grumbling how the Hungarians had no choice at all, between the Nazis on one side and the Soviets on the other, and at least Hitler offered to give back territory the country had lost—“Over fifty percent of our nation taken away”; “No country lost as much as Hungary did and we’d even opposed going to war!”; “the French hated us, that’s the reason for Trianon, prejudice pure and simple.” It was as if his vision of the siege—soldier after soldier, death after death, his own memories of being stuck in Budapest, hungry and thirsty and terrified, that parade of fatal images—spun off the inked signatures of Trianon. He and his country had endured the siege—endured what came before, and what came after—because of Trianon. Nothing could dissuade him. I heard it every time I went there, and its naiveté, its absence of even a respectable hint of fatalism, as if you really should be able to expect justice in this world, made me crazy, and, worse, reminded me of my father, who’d wanted no part of that flailing impotence and the military solution it craved—the happy days of Hitler’s Reich. My father had just wanted to forget, sitting in Toronto’s Szécsényi Club drinking pálinka and playing tarok, happy his son had married a Hungarian girl and that his grandchildren would one day speak Hungarian. That was enough for him.

  But it wasn’t enough for Anna’s father, and it wasn’t enough for her. She wanted an orphaned girl—first because it was so hard for Hungarians in Erdély already, and second because girls were subhuman in Hungarian culture (this was Anna’s refinement on her father’s beliefs, one he would never have agreed with). An orphaned girl didn’t have a chance. It was an act of “cultural rescue,” that’s what Anna said to the caseworker when he told us there were plenty of Romani kids, kids with AIDS, even some Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, and of course whole battalions of Romanian kids filling the orphanages in Bucharest to overflowing. “The Hungarians in Transylvania look after their own,” he said to us. “If you want a Hungarian girl there’s tons in Hungary.” But Anna shook her head. And when the agency did find us one, there was always some problem—a form we hadn’t filled out, a glitch in the paperwork, another hidden processing fee—and after that another wait from six to eight months, by which point the child was gone. Either that or we made it to the finish line, received the file—the family records, the medical reports, the photographs—and Anna took them to our doctor, who held them in the light and said, “Hm, see these shadows under the left ear, those bumps, that could be something.” He tilted the pictures. “Or it could be nothing.” Anna would come home and brood over Scotch and soda, and after a few days request more information, which the agency could never obtain, and finally she’d turn down the adoption. Then I’d lie in bed at night listening as Anna talked in her sleep, apologizing to the child, begging forgiveness, smashing her fists so hard against her face I had to wake and then hold her while she cried. Finally, we decided I should go to Romania, that maybe I could do in person what we’d failed to do through bureaucracy.

  “In the Museum of Failed Escapes there are sails made out of tinfoil,” I can still hear Judit saying, her voice slurred, on the verge of laughter. Her drunkenness, I would realize, was more an affectation than reality, all part of the act, and that any day of the week she could have drunk me under the table. “They are perfect mirrors,” she continued. The sailor set them afloat one day on the Sea of Hungary when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and they sparkled so that a man could swim unseen from one shore to the next, because the snipers were blinded by the glittering armada.

  “The Sea of Hungary? There’s no Sea of Hungary!”

  “There is. There are many. You don’t know anything about this country.”

  “Where are they?”

  “There’s a map of it in the museum. One day I’ll show it to you.”

  There are certain retreats you make—retreats that seem to come naturally—when your marriage is spent. I saw it with some clarity in Budapest, sitting up at night, Judit asleep in bed beside me, thinking back to that moment when things were at their worst, six or seven years ago, Miklós was two or three, staring out a window then as I was staring out of one now, dreaming of what it would be like to get the whole thing over with—the arguments, the divorce, splitting up our stuff, arranging custody, and then, after that, starting all over, the initial freedom, the loneliness, followed by another relationship, followed by a marriage that would more than likely end just as this one had. The problem in the sequence, no matter how I arranged it, was me. For years now I’d been doing more and more as Anna asked—keeping an eye out for dirty laundry; for meals I could make; chores around the house; driving Miklós here and there; sitting on the veranda with her at night drinking and talking, trying to be pleasant—a hundred minor obligations and pleasures, the careful work of putting your needs to one side to make sure that everything goes well, and then collecting your rewards: a child’s laugh, your wife smiling thank you, your neighbour visiting with extra strawberries from the garden. It’s perfect enough on the surface, but that’s all it is, containing less and less of yourself, of what you really want, until one day you realize that the only life that matters, the only place you exist, is on the inside, a world you no longer mention, filled with wants so unrealizable there’s no point in even talking about them, whole continents of desire taken off the map, excised but ever-present even as your wife and child talk to you and you pretend to listen.

  This, I suppose, is why on one lonely business trip I ended up leafing through the Yellow Pages looking at the ads for escort services. It seemed ideal, the intentions were absolutely clear—sex on one side, money on the other—and none of the stuff people who had affairs, and I knew a few of them, had to deal with: running a second relationship involving as many compromises as the first, the fear of exposure, the snowballing of desire into demands: “I want us to take a trip together!” “I want you to leave your wife!” “If we’re to continue together we have to do it honestly and in the open!” And so these people, most of them men, would be forced to choose between a home life that was, except for the occasional irrepressible urge, the one they wanted, and a life that had no basis except for those urges. Who needed that kind of stress? As far as relationships went, my marriage was as good as I was likely to get, and beyond that I just wanted to be left alone, and to have sex. The call girls, prostitutes, whores, whatever you called them, provided all the benefits of an affair with none of the risks.

  Except of course an ever-increasing loneliness whenever I placed another call, ushered another girl into my room, handed over another wad of cash I’d covertly put aside. Every night I spent with Judit I’d awaken at three in the morning, the worst possible hour, and gaze at the twinkling city, the Danube, thinking of how to get out of my situation, of what could still be rescued or restored and what it would take.

  Then Judit would wake up, her hand would travel up my spine, and she’d tell me another crazy story about a sailor in the Museum of Failed Escapes, consoling me not so much with alternatives as with putting off the decision, not thinking about it, so that when she finished I was still in exactly the same place. She knew exactly what to do, what I wanted.

  We met just after I arrived in Budapest, one night when I’d gone out hoping to lose myself in the city as I’d done on nights in countless other cities, wandering in and out of bars, looking for someone to hook up with, a businessman out for a drink, a banker from the U.K., some Hungarian guy, men who’d also taken off their wedding rings. I think on this occasion his name was Gergő, and he took me to the Tip-Top Klub, one of the city’s strip bars. I was too drunk, about to get more drunk, and already listening with regret to the rising sound of morning traffic.

  Judit was one of three girls we ended up sitting with, Gergő strolling over to their table and asking if they’d mind. They didn’t mind, they didn’t care, they were sitting in identical shorts, tight, low-cut T-shirts, drinking straight cherry pálinka o
ver ice. I ended up sitting next to Judit, who turned to me with a sour smile and asked what I was doing in Budapest.

  Two hours later, on the Margit Bridge, I stood in the first light of morning holding up Judit, caressed by one of those cool summer breezes that almost makes you happy to be drunk, sleepless, and still up that early. I shuffled her around to face Margit Island, then around again to gaze past the parliament with its neo-Gothic spires, at the Lánc Bridge beyond, then the Erzsébet Bridge, the green river winding itself away. All of the girls Judit had been sitting with danced at the Tip-Top Klub. I knew what “dancing” meant, and Judit knew I did, and that more often than not they danced for people like me, “men from the west,” as she said, who’d get drunk, have their Visa cards overcharged, and if they didn’t mind spending that much money the girls were told to offer them other things at similar rates. I knew enough about it not to ask why she did it, why she didn’t quit, why we were standing on the bridge at five in the morning.

  Earlier that night I’d told Judit everything—Trianon, Erdély, Anna and Miklós, the orphaned girl. It was a lame attempt to prove to her that I sympathized, that things were not good for me either, though remembering the clichés about women like Judit—those without options, unable to make the switch when communism fell, forced to cash in on their beauty, five years of work, ten at the most, before the steady slide down the rungs of the sex trade left them wasted, addicted, dead—I realized how ridiculous it was, how narcissistic.

  “It’s good that you’re married,” Judit said. One of the last casino boats of the night—those golden barges that sail up and down the Danube—pulled into dock, blaring music, lit up, filled with men and women at the roulette wheel, playing blackjack, dancing. “A child should have a father and a mother,” she continued, slurring her words in that way she’d perfected, pulling up her slumping head, letting it slump again. A fleet of Mercedes passed on the bridge behind us, smaller sedans grouped around a limousine, racing along the körút into Pest.

  “Where do you live?” I asked, hinting that it was time for her to go home.

  “With my mother and daughter,” she said, then went quiet.

  It would be a long time before she said anything else, but by then I knew I’d be going there too, stumbling along the streets of the Nyócker, following the direction of Judit’s wavering finger, up the stairs to Janka in the hall.

  There was a man, Judit said, a Swede, who liked to watch her cry while she danced. He always brought a towel to soak up the tears. It was a relief, she said, to know he was coming back to Budapest, to the club, that he’d be asking for her, and she wouldn’t have to pretend. He would sit there, his smile brightening, as she danced until her breasts were wet, until the makeup ran down her cheeks, until she lifted the towel to her eyes and kept it there, dancing on, her body remembering that three feet of stage with a memory all its own, until it was over and he paid her and gently wrapped up his towel in a plastic bag and left.

  She laughed after she finished telling me the story. “There was a landlocked sailor who tried to cry himself to sea.” Once Judit was asleep, I sat there imagining this sailor, sitting on a sidewalk in some city dreaming up the saddest stories, hoping his tears would turn into a waterway and carry him off. Were those eyes, I wondered, plucked out by the communist authority, by some guard in some horrific camp, on display in the Museum of Failed Escapes?

  There were so many sailors. Judit had an endless supply. I’d lie beside her watching as she wiped the drink or me off her mouth with the back of a hand. The Nyócker was in the southeast part of Budapest, narrow neighbourhoods where the ornaments on the secessionist architecture were inches thick with grime; bullet holes still in the walls from the siege or the revolution; crammed corner stores where you dug through rotten peaches and plums, brown lettuce, yellow peppers covered in black spots; Romani children in the street staring at you with crazed smiles, bags filled with glue held in their hands like the necks of chickens; their parents wandering by, back and forth from the eastern train station, where they sent younger children to beg; men with blue tattoos, strange lettering across their backs and chests, less decoration than a series of messages only a select few, those who knew the code, could decipher; and their wives just like Judit’s mother, with handkerchiefs or shawls on their heads, holding bags filled with poppy, pumpkin, hemp seeds they sold for next to nothing outside sports stadiums, metro stations, public parks; and of course the whores, not only in Rákóczi Tér, but deeper in the district, like nothing I’d ever seen, lined along the tiny streets as if someone had measured out and marked exactly the spots where they should stand, less like the girls strolling and chatting at the intersections in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, than some regimental line called to attention, at most lifting a cigarette to their lips, sometimes extending a leg.

  Janka would come and go from the apartment where her mother and I lay in bed, never telling anyone where she was going, never asking permission, somehow always back in time for dinner, or for the bedtime story she brought up to me one time, a battered book that looked as if it had been paged through every night for years, holes punched in the spine with a knife, held together by bits of string. It was about the wind—on each page either a boat blown along a lake, a kite through the sky, pigeons up to belfries, autumn leaves—and when I read it her eyes widened, as if she’d always imagined a different story, different words, to go with the pictures.

  I described it all to Anna over the phone, telling her I was in Bucharest, superimposing one set of streets over another, lying about Janka’s origins. When Anna said, “Well, I don’t know,” when she became vague, I told her about reading to the girl, about what her mother had done for a living, how quiet Janka was when not talking in perfect Hungarian about what her village in Erdély had been like before her father’s death (for a minute I thought of telling her he was killed by Romanians, but decided not to push it), which forced her mother to move to the city and sell herself. Her mother was arrested, put in jail, and Janka ended up in an orphanage. I hoped the pauses and slight reversals in my story made me sound breathless, excited, and I guess in a way I was, and not just because I was worried that Anna would catch me in the lie, but for reasons that had nothing to do with the story, or even with Janka, reasons that had come to me only after I’d picked up the phone and dialed our number hoping to catch Anna in a moment when she was surprised, receptive, wide open to the sound of my voice.

  “Hm,” Anna said. “I don’t know . . . it’s because she’s five I guess. I don’t like the idea of her mother still being alive.” She paused. “I’m sorry I said that. It’s not very nice . . .”

  “Anna, I’ve come all the way out here to Romania. We’ve already talked about it.”

  “I know, I know. I said it might be a good idea. It felt like it at the time. What’s her name? Janka? She could go back once in a while to visit. We could pay for her mother to come see her sometimes . . .” She paused. “No, it’s nothing,” she sighed.

  “We’re going to need more money,” I said. “There are some additional costs . . .” I had been expecting enthusiasm, and now I was looking for something to jolt her.

  “Oh sure,” she said, after a quiet laugh.

  “So I’ll go ahead?” I said.

  “Yes, you go ahead,” she answered, faster now than before, as if she’d caught up to my excitement. “It’s what you’re there for!”

  “There was a sailor. I think this was in 1967 . . .”

  “Listen, Judit, I’m trying to talk to you about something.”

  “Just a minute,” she smiled, taking the bottle out of my hands after I’d grabbed it, and unscrewing the cap. “The sailor wanted to build a boat so fast its hull would not touch the water. One night he got very drunk and built these wheels, they were like balloons, except with fins, and attached them to his car and drove it into the Tisza . . .”

  “We need to talk about Janka.”

  “You can have her,” she said, still smiling
.

  “Have her?”

  “I can’t take care of her,” she said. “I don’t take care of her, Mother does, but she’s so old. Janka would be better off without me.”

  “Where you live, it’s no place to raise a child. It . . .”

  “Your place would be so much better. Filled to the roof with money.”

  “Look, if it’s a question of money . . .”

  “Always.” She laughed. “It’s always a question of money.”

  “You’re her mother,” I said.

  She put down the bottle, and came over and looked me in the face, and opened her lips in a way that brought out her teeth. But then something slackened in her, and she grew soft, and patted the place where she’d grabbed my shirt. “Yes,” she said, “I’m her mother,” and then she put the cap back on the bottle and sat on the bed and hugged her knees to her chest.

  “You could come out, too . . .” I was safe in saying that. I knew it.

  She shook her head. “And do what?” She laughed. “It’s the same out there for me as it is here.” She opened the bottle again. “There was one sailor who made it, only to find that the place he’d arrived was the place from which he’d departed.”

  “Could you stop it with the sailor thing? This is important. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.”

  “Don’t you want to know what happened to him?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

  She shrugged, tracing the sailor’s route with a finger along her bare thigh. “It’s why you invited me back to your place, wasn’t it?” I said. “For Janka? It’s why . . .” I looked around the decaying apartment, the missing parquets from the floor, the balloons of yellow water stains on the ceiling. “It’s why we’re always here. Why I read to her.” I shook my head. “You didn’t expect me to believe it was for me, you bringing me here? You could do much better than me. And I’m sure you do.” I knew it was all true, what I was saying, but I still expected her to contradict me.