by Tamas Dobozy
“I wish I could help you,” she said. “But Tíbor is dead.”
Zoltán stood there with his military decorations and wondered why he’d come, given that the war was over, and with it his reason for seeking out Tíbor. “He’s dead,” Karola said again. “He was dead when we returned here from Budapest.” She pointed at the hole left by the bomb in the roof above the dining room, covered with a number of tarps inexpertly sewn together. She told him the story in a manner so offhand it was clear she was still in shock: Tíbor Kálmán had lost both hands when a Russian shell landed on the villa. He’d raised his arms to protect his wife, Ildikó, from the collapse of the ceiling, and a beautiful chandelier of Murano glass sheared off both hands at the wrist, though it hardly mattered to Tíbor by then because both he and Ildikó were dead, crushed by the weight of plaster, bricks, and several tons of antique furniture they’d stored in the attic overhead. Karola stood for a moment, as if waiting for Zoltán to respond, and when he didn’t she said, “Anyhow,” and he could see the effort it was costing her to repress a sneer as she scanned the medals on his chest, “you don’t seem to be doing too badly.”
There was something else, something other than scorn, in the way she said this, a quiet acknowledgement of what he’d come for, and at the same time a dismissal of the explanation he wanted so badly to make. “Vannay sent out radio messages to the Soviets,” he whispered, and immediately regretted it, as if even now, in attempting to make amends, he was still looking out for himself. “They weren’t taking any prisoners. I had to make them a sign of good faith,” he said. “I was only eighteen!”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, and he noticed that even while talking to him she was gazing elsewhere—at the orchard, the flight of birds, a fence fallen to its side—unable to keep her eyes on anything for long.
“I killed two boys,” he said. “I wanted to show that I had switched sides . . .”
“I don’t know anything about what you’re saying.”
“You do!” he shouted. “I was supposed to have come here. Tíbor was waiting for me, for boys like me. But I couldn’t get across the Russian lines!”
She shrugged. “We couldn’t make it either. We were trapped inside Budapest. There were many people who suffered.”
“I was part of Vannay’s battalion. It was during the breakout. When I saw the Russians coming I killed two of the boys I was fighting with.” He was shaking. He no longer had any control over what he was saying.
“Then you are not welcome in my house,” said Karola, and for the first time since she’d opened the door, Zoltán felt her gaze rest on him, and he realized, too, that she’d been looking away not because she was disinterested in him, but because her eyes had seen too much, absorbed too much, images impossible for her to contain, which made her look elsewhere for fear of passing them on. He felt ashamed then for not being able to do as she did, keep it to himself, or expend it by shifting his gaze to where it would do no harm—the birds, the fields, the sky.
“Then you do not deserve to come in here,” she hissed, and slammed the door in his face.
And so began Zoltán’s persecution of Tíbor Kálmán’s family, using every opportunity his status in the Party gave him—making false claims, denying them meaningful jobs, padding the files on Karola, her husband Boldizsár, their children István, Adél, Anikó, Jenő and László, citing their attendance at mass, their political support for the Smallholders Party in the elections of 1945, their open criticism of the Soviet occupation and its control of the police, factories, transit system, everything. But at the time there were so many people like this the Soviets couldn’t make them disappear fast enough. It wasn’t until he saw what was happening to the members of the resistance, old trade union leaders, those who’d been outspoken communists prior to the arrival of the Red Army—who had paved the way for it, but made the mistake of expecting Marxism in its wake—only when all of them were being arrested, sentenced in show trials and murdered, did Zoltán realize that the most dangerous thing of all, the most grievous of crimes, next to being a Nazi, was to have actively fought against Hitler in the name of communism. These men and women had had the courage to oppose the state, been brave enough to think for themselves, even at the cost of their lives, and it was because of this, exactly this, that the Soviets got rid of them. They were not the kind of citizens the Kremlin wanted, any more than Hitler had wanted them. Picking off the most loyal had the added benefit of amplifying the fear, of making everyone feel equally vulnerable, because if loyalties didn’t matter, if the liquidation of men and women appeared random, then survival had nothing to do with you and everything to do with grace, which arrived from the state, as mysterious and medieval as the favour of God.
Zoltán filed report after report to the Allied Control Commission, which was controlled by the Soviets, about the activities of Tíbor Kálmán and his family during the war: how they’d sheltered political refugees from Germany, how they’d helped young men escape being drafted by a government they despised, how they’d drawn up false papers for all of these. “Conscientious objectors,” he called them, and it was this, finally, that elevated the Kálmáns above the common stream of citizens complaining about the occupation. It wore the family down—visits by police, seizure of property, arrests and brief imprisonments that were hints, preludes, to the sentences yet to come—and then, in a final blow, Zoltán managed to get them evicted from the villa, and to have himself, the war hero, the decorated veteran, the loyal subject of the Party, installed in their place.
That was late in 1946, the letter from the state informing the Kálmáns that their villa was being “reallocated” to “a more suitable candidate.” In return, they would be given a cowshed in Csepel. The shed had held three cows and could easily fit six people, which meant that only one member of the family would have to sleep outside. So the family finally left, driven beyond exasperation, beyond fear, beyond even the love of their country. Rumour was they escaped to the west, following their eldest son, who’d left the country six months earlier. In many ways, Zoltán was happy to have been part of their forced removal, and he was delighted to think of what it was like for them out there, wherever they’d gone—not speaking the language, not making any money, not having their degrees and expertise recognized. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, it was helpful to know that in some way they were suffering at least a fraction of what he’d suffered during the siege, at a time when he should have been with them, in Tíbor’s care, being given a new identity and a new life.
But in the end, he had to admit, it was not the Kálmáns he’d been after, not really. It was the villa, the freedom to walk inside, to feel its mass around him.
He never forgot his first time crossing the threshold. There was the falling plaster, the bullet holes still in the walls, the water damage along the ceiling, the bits of furniture and possessions the family had left behind. There was the room where Tíbor Kálmán had died, its door nailed shut, the debris still inside as it had been when the family returned from the siege. But more than this was the feeling Zoltán had, walking down the hall, entering the rooms, that he was not yet inside, that he was still searching for a point of entry. “Another step and I will be there,” he told himself, speaking into the emptiness of the home. And with the next movement, he said it again, “Another step and I will be inside.” Eventually, he would exit the villa, stand in the courtyard bewildered, then cross the threshold again, hoping this time to get it right, haunted by how he’d dreamed of the place, hoped for it, imagined being safe inside these rooms, when in reality he was facing bullets and starvation and disease in Budapest. And killing people.
At night, unable to sleep, he would shake off nightmares of the siege by fixing up the place—the water damage, the rotten studs and joists, the plastering, the paint, the careful work of reconstructing the villa—as if by restoring the building to what it had once been it might finally open up to him, truly open, and he’d step inside to the lif
e he should have had.
After the third week, he ripped off the boards covering the door to the room where Tíbor died, and a day or two later, steeling himself, went inside, staring at the mounds of rubble, the debris strewn along the floor. The Kálmán family had already exhumed and buried the bodies, touching the rubble only as much as was needed to pull it apart. After that, the family kept the door nailed shut, Zoltán had thought, because they couldn’t bear to face the site where Tíbor and Ildikó died, but as he began to clear away the rubble, he discovered why they’d really left it as it was, for once the bricks and plaster and shattered beams and bits of glass were swept aside, he found the hole in the floor where Tíbor had kept his workshop, and inside, the stacks of messages he’d received during the war from the resistance, from places as far away as Cologne, and the equipment he’d used to forge identities, along with the lists of names and addresses under which Tíbor had hidden the refugees. Zoltán would use these lists to keep himself useful to the state, exposing identities one by one whenever he felt the pressure to demonstrate his loyalty. In return, they let him keep the villa. The villa with its printing press, the one they knew nothing about, his escape.
The names would run out regardless of how carefully, how slowly, he delivered them. In fact, if he delivered them too slowly the Soviets would grow impatient, demand that he tell them where he was getting his information, and then, when he refused, they’d come into the villa to find out for themselves, and his last hope would be ended.
He went looking for someone to help with the press. He met Ági later that year, as the first wave of deportations, imprisonments, and executions took place. Her father and mother had been devoted communists dating back to Béla Kun’s brief dictatorship of Hungary in 1919, and were persecuted in the white terror that followed against Jews and leftists when Admiral Horthy established control over the country for the next twenty-four years. Her father had been both—Jewish and leftist—and more than once it was only the thickness of his skull that kept him from being beaten to death, just as it was his skill with the printing press that kept all three of them alive during the period of anti-Semitic laws, ghettoization, the Holocaust. “If you wear the yellow star they will kill you,” he once told Ági, tossing hers and her mother’s and his into the flames, “and if you do not they will kill you.” He stirred the fire. “So why bother?” But he had done more than just that, drawing up papers for many others—Jews, but also members of the resistance, fellow communists, British soldiers parachuted into the capital, others who needed to escape, for one reason or another, from the powers bearing down on them—whatever he could do to subvert the fascist cause. As a result, Ági’s father, like so many other communists, was arrested after the Soviet occupation on Malinovsky’s orders, not so much for his vocal criticism of the Russian “liberator”—for asking what good it had done them to await liberation when it meant free looting for the Red Army, rape, robbery, extortion, the requisitioning and hoarding of the country’s food for the military while the general population starved, the ransacking of the nation in the way of reparations, mass arrests, murder—but because he wasn’t afraid for his life. They were to be sent to a prison camp, one of the many the Soviets had set up, in Gödöllő, when Zoltán stepped in, saying he needed someone adept at “paperwork.” Malinovsky had reported to Moscow that he had captured 110,000 fascists, but as he only had 60,000, the rest had to be made up by dragging people at random from the streets and their homes, and Zoltán was put in charge of making these substitutes look legitimate.
Naturally, Ági’s father objected, and so Zoltán took him aside, reminding him that the youngest women raped by the Red Army were 12, and the oldest 90, which meant that both his wife and daughter were within the normative range; he spoke, too, of the sorts of venereal diseases they could expect, not to mention how long it would last, given that some women were locked up for two weeks “entertaining” as many as thirty soldiers at a time. In the end, Ági’s father agreed, and to soften the blow Zoltán made sure they were provided for, keeping his promise even after Ági’s parents, having done the work they were asked to do, were visited one night by the ÁVÓ and taken away for “unauthorized forgery of government documents,” and Zoltán inherited Ági.
He made a nominal attempt to save her parents, trying to get her on his side, to make her believe he wasn’t really an apparatchik, that he was just using the system until he could make his escape. So he made sure she was there when he made inquiries and phone calls, made sure that when they came to the villa for her as well, agents of the ÁVÓ knocking on the door, he was there to bar the entrance, listing off his decorations and accomplishments and contacts to make it clear he, and by extension she, was “protected,” though in truth, no one was protected, no matter how high up your friends were, for the most dangerous friend of all was the highest ranking, Stalin himself.
It was an act of bravery, maybe the only act of bravery he’d ever performed, though it was only due to his hope that Ági would fix the printing press hidden beneath the villa. He knew that she could repair and operate the press with her eyes closed, the old man had said as much, boasting that she’d been more than his little helper. When her father was called away on business, she’d run the whole show.
Ági was silent through it all, absolutely quiet, the look in her eyes exactly the same as Karola’s had been, too hard for a girl of nineteen—still lithe, a little boyish—meeting his gaze with one in every way its equal. The war had made them old. He saw it in the way her eyes left him isolated, a lesson on shouldering what he’d done alone rather than lessening the burden by passing it on, by turning it into a secret she had to share.
It always seemed to be winter, down in the hole, Ági squatting above the trap door peering at him, listening to the clack and whir as Zoltán tried, without expertise or success, to start up Tíbor’s old machinery, the presses and lamps and generators. Nothing worked. All that happened was the clashing of parts, the tearing and spewing and grinding of paper, the flickering of lamps. The generator hummed dangerously, and charged every metal object around it so badly Zoltán was continuously cursing the jolts and shocks.
Ági would leave his dinner at the edge of the trap door, listening for a moment and then hammering it with the heel of her shoe, making him jump in the midst of whatever repairs he was attempting, so that he would lose his grip on the screw or wire or flashlight and have to scramble after it in the dark. Zoltán sometimes felt she was transforming the villa by her presence. The smell of her cooking in the kitchen. The bedroom filled with the rustle of her turning in sleep. The shaded gallery, with its columns and ivy, unbearable for him because the only time a smile ever played across Ági’s face was when she stepped out onto it and took in the smells of the garden and sunshine she and half the country had dreamed about in cellars and shelters during the siege, when all they had was the sound of bombs, the slow fog of plaster shaken from the walls and ceiling and floor with every explosion.
Instead of helping him, Ági reminded Zoltán, day after day, of the terrible things he’d done. She made love to him without flinching, without motion, the daughter of a man he’d killed, a woman unlawfully his, stolen, forced against her will, as if nurturing his hopelessness, his self-hate, his absent courage.
When he grew frustrated with the work he’d sit with her in one of the ruined rooms, Ági staring at the floor, not at all there. “What would you have done?” he asked, as if having told her about the press, his plan to create a new identity, to get away before scrutiny of his activities became too intense, he was now free to tell her everything, all of what that scrutiny might uncover. “What other choice was there?”
She stared at the hatch he’d left open, or the slow work of renovation he’d begun, trying to re-plaster the walls, to repair the hole in the ceiling, to paint over a half decade of water stains, her silence refusing him the one thing he most wanted: to hear someone, anyone, say that they too would have done what he did. But all he h
eard was the villa, rain on its roof, the ticking of radiators and plumbing, the wind playing on the windows, as if it was telling him it took a special person to do what he’d done, to have shot those boys. “No one but you could have done that,” the villa said.
At other times he would remind her of those he’d assisted—the legless girl in the infirmary, Ági herself—and ask her to help him square this against the other things he’d done—to her parents, to the two boys. “How is it that I could do any good at all?” he asked. “Maybe I haven’t gone so far. Maybe there’s still something of me left,” he said, waiting for her to speak, the villa answering instead.
When he grew angry with her silence, he threatened to stop protecting her from the ÁVÓ. Ági never raised her eyes from the floor, and he would shout that they were both going to die there, in the villa, and then he’d go back down the hatch, kicking and beating the useless machinery. “If only you would help me!” he yelled up through the trap door, letting it out before he could stop the words. “We could use this machine.” But it was pointless. For years now, his job had been destroying names, not creating them.