Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  So, as long as this “boyfriend” business didn’t get too flagrant, Ílona was as happy as Éva not to fight about it, especially since that might lead to people overhearing what they were fighting about.

  As for Éva and me, we were lazy. She was in her last year of high school, and the thought of leaving home to live with me, or, more absurdly, on her own, was ridiculous. She would have had to get a full-time job, figure out how to cook, do laundry, pay bills, all the stuff her upper-middle-class upbringing had not prepared her for, and, besides, as far as she was concerned things weren’t all that bad the way they were. Her mother was a pain, but it rarely stopped us from doing as we pleased.

  If anything, I was the problem, bitching about a situation I didn’t lift a finger to change, because despite my complaints about Ílona, or how Éva and I could never have sex at my place because of roommates, or the pain of fucking in the back of my car or her stupid tree fort, and despite the times I tried to convince her that getting a place of our own would be best for both of us, the truth is I was safe, and I knew it. Éva couldn’t make a move, and so I could take the high road as much as I liked, and in the meantime have it both ways—partying with the roommates when she wasn’t there, and professing my desire to be with her, and only her, whenever she came around, which was pretty much as often as I wanted her around. Looking back, I spent more time worrying about my thesis than my relationship.

  3.

  My days and nights were consumed with my thesis—what to write about, how the research was opening up possibilities rather than reducing them, and, worst of all, the deadline looming closer and closer.

  Short of actually giving me a topic, Holló tried to help. He loaned me his desk in the club’s library. It was huge, made of oak. He even cleared out several drawers, so that every day I’d at least have the thrill of squaring my notes, recapping my pens, stacking the books and journals I was looking at, and putting them away for tomorrow, as if his office was my own.

  It was an amazing library. There was stuff in there—books and newspapers and magazines and pamphlets—you couldn’t get anywhere outside of Hungary, stuff Holló brought with him from “the bad old communist days,” or had smuggled out by “friends” when travel restrictions became looser in the 1970s and ’80s, or even obtained recently from disbanded archives, estate sales, and private donations. Some of it was so rare I wondered how he’d gotten hold of it, and even just scanning the documents, without knowing exactly what they contained, I had the feeling they were more precious than most of the Hungarian holdings at the university library.

  For this reason, Holló didn’t allow anyone to take materials home. They had to stay at the club, he said, as if it were a real archive, though of course everyone was free to look at them, and he even granted me the special privilege of staying long into the night, after he’d gone to sleep. That’s how much he trusted me. His care for that library went beyond what I’d seen at the university, a delicacy when he touched the pages, a sense of sacredness, as if Holló would have given his life to protect what was filed there, or, more importantly, our access to it.

  It was this perception—as wrong as it was—that led to all the trouble.

  It was already the third week in April when I came upon the journal Piros Krónika in a pile of recently arrived material. From what I could tell it was an in-house publication, set up by Hungary’s Ministry of Culture to celebrate itself, inspire its workers, and even, in a way, reward them, showing that their efforts did not go unnoticed. Old and beat-up, its cover half-torn off, and dated 1951, the pages were so fragile I held my breath going through them, worried that a sneeze or cough would send the whole thing up in a puff of rotten paper and airborne ink. The sun was shining, and I paused for a minute before turning to the table of contents to gaze out the windows in what was once the attic of the old house, the only room large enough to serve as a library, with shelves and filing cabinets running floor to ceiling all the way around the walls, the air conditioning humming at exactly twenty degrees Celsius, the humidity hovering somewhere around forty percent, looking out over the trees and fields and hills of the back garden. Then I turned back to the journal and saw it: “The Ministry of Culture: Guardians of the Soviet Against Reactionary Propaganda,” by some apparatchik called Miko Tóth.

  I finally had my topic. At the time, young as I was, I thought it was the library itself that inspired me, sitting there day after day with those rare papers, aware more than ever of the importance of information, of access to it, as if there was a heroism in what Holló had done, smuggling it out, arranging for more, and beyond that the chore of taking care of it, making sure nothing disappeared, as if even shelving and cataloguing could be acts of war against an enemy whose power resided in limiting what we knew, and, with that, what we could think, imagine, and feel.

  Their names were there—Holló, Cérna, Adriána—along with many others in a caption under a photo taken at the ministry, their faces as dour and anonymous as every other photo of the era. I sat there for two hours and read every sentence, some of them twice because of my sub-par Hungarian, taking pages of notes. When Holló showed up at five saying I’d have to leave early because he had a wedding banquet to set up, I was so entranced by the ideas I was generating for my thesis that I didn’t even try to hide the article when he walked in. In fact, it took me a second to recognize who I was talking to.

  Not that Holló was interested in my work in the slightest. After saying what he needed to say he turned and left, busy with preparations.

  I sat there another fifteen minutes, wondering what to do. Would Holló miss the journal if I snuck out with it? Would he look through my papers? Would he even care that I’d discovered his secret, or was it so long ago now that it didn’t matter to him? In the end, I left everything there. For all I knew Holló had already registered the arrival of Piros Krónika and, knowing his meticulousness, its absence would only have alerted him to its importance, whereas if I stacked it with my books he wouldn’t think twice. As for my notes and papers, he never looked at them, I knew this for a fact, since they were always exactly as I’d left them the night before, my pens sitting on top of the pile. I decided it would be better to hide what I was doing in plain sight.

  But I told Éva his secret. “He was a censor,” I said, whispering in a darkness lit only by the cherry on the end of the joint we were smoking, weaving its orange glow in the air as we passed it back and forth. Evá’s face, her reactions, were hidden. She was absolutely silent. “I can use the sources in his library, then interview him, if he’ll let me. My profs will love it. They’re really into that now—getting real testimony from people who were actually there. I’ll have to fill out an ethics clearance form . . .”

  Éva rolled over, and onto me, kissing my mouth. “Enough about Holló,” she said.

  “But it’s important,” I replied, moving aside.

  “If you’re right,” she said, sounding hurt, “what makes you think he’s going to want to talk with you? Maybe he’s going to want to keep it with his other secrets . . .”

  “No,” I said, barely listening. “I think he wants me to. It’s the whole library, the way he looks after it. You should see how he handles the books and papers, like he wants the information out there.”

  “Or something,” she said, getting out of the bed and into her clothes, her movements sudden, angry. But I was too busy thinking about Holló to ask what was wrong, and as Éva left I barely acknowledged her departure, the sentences and paragraphs of my thesis as visible in the dark as the burning end of the joint. I lay there for two hours, long after Éva drove off, thinking of the questions I wanted to ask, how I’d approach Holló, telling him there was nothing to be ashamed of, I wasn’t judging what he’d done, in fact I’d have done the same thing, and that this was the whole point of my thesis: the ways in which history is written not by heroes but by the most ordinary of people, with only their insecurities, their fears, and their desires to lead them on. The instit
utions of history, I would tell him, not only make up our society but our selves as well, and only the rarest person can see beyond that and act against the world as it’s been defined for him. Yes, I was far from 1950s Hungary, but I wanted him to know I’d write as if I was inside it, setting down the words in sympathy with what he’d faced.

  The problem was, I told Ílona about my project one night. We were sitting around the dinner table, Ílona once again speaking in a whisper whenever the name of a young man with a background more suitable than mine came up, or displaying her marvellous range of historical trivia at my expense, and, as usual, complaining about the state of Canadian society—its irreversible drift into liberalism, its inability to understand how little it mattered in the world, its embrace of civil rights at the expense of morality. It was at this point, hoping to pre-empt another tirade (or so I thought my motivation was at the time), that I brought up my discovery in Piros Krónika.

  Ílona stopped talking. She looked at me with amazement, and let me go on. I was so unnerved by this that I ended up chattering faster, louder, and longer than I wanted. I told them about sitting in the library working on my thesis; I told them how strange I’d always found Holló, with his makeup and mannerisms; I told them about the moment I first picked up the journal and knew it was exactly what I was looking for; and I told them what was inside, about the names, the men and women who’d worked as censors, the sheer volume of literature suppressed. In many cases, I said, great works were lost forever, not to mention the damage to writers, some of whom even committed suicide. I worked myself into a moral outrage I’d never felt before, until I found myself snarling with condemnation, Ílona nodding along. It was only when I’d finished, when she finally spoke again, “I always knew that man—if you can call him that,” she snorted, “—was no good,” that I remembered the thesis I’d planned, though by then it was too late, because Ílona and the guests had launched into a long discussion, including personal reminiscences, of those who (unlike them) had fallen in with the Soviet program, who’d used Party membership for social and economic advantage, who’d spouted all that ideology they didn’t believe in because they either wanted a step up on those around them, or were afraid not to, or had no loyalty at all to their country. When I left that night Ílona kissed me on both cheeks and seemed sad that I was leaving so early, saying to Éva, “You kids should go have some fun,” and I couldn’t look at Éva at all, wanting to get as far away from them as possible.

  But I couldn’t get away. Éva was delighted at my coup, and the two of us walked to my car, got in, and drove off. At first Éva was laughing, euphoric, fantasizing about all the things we’d be able to do now, as if one minor victory would totally reform Ílona and her attitude. For the first time I felt the difference in our ages, separated by three of the most formative years in my life, and despaired at the thought of having to wait for Éva to catch up. It was at least a half hour before she noticed I was not responding to her, and that I’d driven to the Szécsényi Club, where we idled on the side of the road just off the entrance to the parking lot, watching lights blink on and off in the various rooms as Holló went about his business. It was only then that Éva asked what was wrong.

  I had no answer. It wasn’t the betrayal of Holló that bothered me. Finding the article felt like something he’d planned, giving him a chance to come clean. No, it was how involuntary that betrayal had been, not only giving in to Ílona’s expectations, but also taking pleasure in it, the hot thrill of righteousness, the violent solidarity with everyone at the table. I’d had no control over it.

  “They say he likes boys,” Éva said, nodding in the direction of the club. I looked at her. “That’s what they say,” she continued. “He goes off to Church Street. Seventeen, eighteen. He pays them.”

  “What has that got to do with anything?” I said, spilling over into exasperation.

  “You don’t have to get mad,” she said. “I’m just telling you what they say.” I looked at her for another second, then back at the club. “You’re so naive,” she said. “You don’t think a person like that, just because he’s so nice to you, and works for the community, you don’t think he could do something like that? You don’t think people can do good things and bad things?”

  For a second I had no idea how to respond to her, to that screwy logic so sensible on the surface that its corruption was almost impossible to get at. “No, that’s not . . .” I said. “You’re missing it.”

  “You want a good buzi, nice and cultured. You don’t want to hear about who he fucks.”

  “No,” I yelled, “what I’m saying is you’re wrong! There’s nothing bad about sleeping with sixteen-year-olds. Or paying for it. How old were you when you first had sex?”

  I knew the answer, of course. Éva went silent, and gazed not in the direction of the club but away from it, over the surrounding houses. “My mother’s right about him,” she finally said. “You haven’t been the same since you started going there. It’s all you ever think about.”

  “What, you think he’s going to convert me?”

  Éva shrugged. “I want to go home now,” she said.

  Holló was not around the next day, but he’d left a key. Within seconds of being inside the library I was already at work, spreading out my notes, opening books, and for the first time I spent the whole day reading and writing, not even stopping for lunch. By the time I left that evening I had the introduction written, and was starting on chapter two, a detailed account of censorship during the Rákosi era. I was onto something important, something that needed to be understood, and the sense of mission temporarily dispelled the remorse I’d felt since Ílona’s dinner.

  When I got home and tried to call Éva, nobody picked up. I knew she was at home, her aunt Anuska visited every Tuesday, and I thought there was no way she’d rather listen to her than me.

  I was getting on my shoes, grabbing my coat, when the phone rang. It was my father. Without any preamble he asked if what Ílona was saying was true, whether Holló had once worked as a censor.

  I was less shocked by how quickly the news had spread than by the worry in my father’s voice. Hoping to counteract the negative portrait Ílona had drawn, I told him about Piros Krónika, the work Holló had participated in, but also the thesis I was planning, as if the careful argument I’d constructed would in any way impress my father, much less change his opinion. All I got in return was a snort. “We always knew there was something queer about him,” my father said. “Ílona’s been trying to get rid of him for years, but nobody had to listen to her until now.” He paused. “Are you sure? Is that journal a good one? Did you find the information anywhere else?” I could hear it in his voice, a reluctance, as if he, and by extension the community, would rather prove Ílona and me wrong—even if they knew we were right—than lose out on Holló’s services. At the same time, if Ílona had real evidence, there wasn’t a person among them, including my father, who’d stand up to defend him.

  “I’m planning to talk to him directly,” I said, though what I felt was not confidence but that ache in the stomach that comes from having started something now spiralling out of control.

  4.

  The next day Holló looked as neat as always, though instead of standing in the garden with a watering can, as he normally did in the morning, he was scrubbing spray paint off the door of the club. I could make out the words “piszkos buzi”—dirty fag—in faint traces across the wood. But he seemed as happy as ever, wiping his hands on a rag and smiling, his makeup slightly marred by the sweat oozing from his hairline. I’d called my thesis adviser earlier that morning hoping he’d nix the project, but he’d been so enthusiastic, no doubt because by this point he was expecting me to have given up on it, that he said it was the most interesting project he’d heard of in some time, especially if Holló agreed to the interview, and had “real potential to be published in a scholarly journal,” which would pave my way into graduate school. But the excitement generated by this convers
ation disappeared the minute I saw Holló.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said, glancing again at the graffiti.

  “I know,” he replied, and opening the door he extended his hand for me to go in ahead of him.

  I must have sat in the library for over half an hour before Holló joined me, carrying a tray loaded with tea, pastries, chocolate, and a vase of flowers. I was amazed at how he was able to keep his composure, continue with his usual style, given what was going on. While he was clattering in the kitchen I’d gone into the desk and pulled out my notes and reread them, finally turning to a blank page and staring at it, wondering if I really had it in me to go through with the interview, much less ask if he was willing to do one, or whether it was just a question now of apologizing, gathering my things, and then finding some way to undo the damage I’d caused.