by Tamas Dobozy
“People assume sex was somehow abolished by the Soviet system,” he said. The way historians wrote it was as if those old wooden men spent all day in the politburo haranguing and backstabbing each other, then put on their dark overcoats and went home to their stale wives and wiretapped phones and produced a child or two. “But the level of perversity was exquisite,” Holló admitted, “maybe because it was so furtive, so hidden away, so scary.”
I finished my last note on the word “perversity” and waited.
“You were expecting something else?” Holló smiled.
I shrugged. The truth is, it looked like a strategy, as if by losing himself in these fantastical descriptions he might lose me as well, leading me away from his work as a censor, and for a moment I was tempted to say I didn’t believe him, that the truth was probably quieter and greyer and more desperate, all those closeted transvestites and cross-dressers and gays and lesbians meeting in dreary communist parks and housing projects and public bathrooms trying hard not to speak their names, to give anyone a good look at their faces, and when there were parties they were probably more like funerals, everyone too tired and afraid for that kind of heightened revelry.
As for Party officials being involved, and misappropriating funds for flowers and champagne, I found that totally unbelievable. He’d made the whole thing too heroic, this group of people blatantly defying political reality, and the terrible price they’d pay if they were discovered. Looking back, of course, it was Holló’s final attempt to switch me from the track I was on, to interest me in something else, as if he was counting on me not believing him, on being curious about how things really were, and following that toward a different research topic. It was my last chance to leave it alone, him and Adriána and the makeup and the censorship, but I was too fixated on what I’d discovered to change my thesis now, and he could see it in my silence, my indifference.
He sighed. After another minute, desperate to break the silence, I asked him what happened to Adriána, and Holló glared at me as if he was going to take my head off. But then he spoke.
“It started with sloppiness,” he said. “I think Adriána started sensing an indifference on my part, as if she’d opened a door and I was more interested in seeing what was on the other side than lingering with her on the threshold.” She almost willed it to happen, her fear of losing Holló becoming greater than her fear of being discovered, because that would at least mean they’d been separated artificially, that whatever happened, wherever she went, wherever they put her, she’d at least know the thing with Holló was unfinished, and, in that way, everlasting.
Holló’s voice was even now, with none of that rapture of before, as if all that was left was the routine end of another story of illicit love during the Kádár regime.
“She risked meeting me when Cérna was around. She went out without a disguise. She tried to get me to do the same.” Adriána told him she was tired of hiding, of being afraid. She took greater chances at work, throwing herself on him when there were others around, making remarks too easily overheard. She started writing him notes he got rid of by flushing down the toilet, which was suspicious in itself, all that back and forth as if there was some problem with his bladder. It was not just the limits of his loyalty that Adriána was testing, Holló realized, but also of their entrapment, as if with enough violations, enough flagrant behaviour, she might prove there were no limits.
He got out just before her arrest, walking away from his apartment after a long night of watching shadows in the street from under the curtains. “It was no way to live,” he said. “I just panicked, I guess. I put on my best dress, packed a suitcase with all the makeup I had, and never went back.” They came for Adriána late in the day, November 23, 1955, he still remembered it, and she never returned, though whenever he was in Budapest he went by her place, or where she’d worked, always in disguise of course, hoping to catch a glimpse of some rehabilitated Adriána. But the only person he ever saw was Cérna, looking ever more hollow, ever more in tune with the demands of the time, and after a while there was even a new wife, as if Adriána had never existed at all.
“And what did you do? I mean, how did you do it?” I asked.
He smiled. “I became Árpád Holló.” He looked at me and I wasn’t sure if he meant an alias or he simply became himself after years of trying to be something else. “I guess you might say I didn’t survive. Not in the full sense of the term.” He went underground, joining others who made a living outside sanctioned channels—doing odd jobs under the table; moving from place to place without any of those securities you could only get through the government, such as a place to live, a bank account, a bed in a hospital, though there were enough doctors also leading a double life that you could get any problem looked after if you had enough money, or a nice bottle of Scotch, or a couple of chickens to barter. When I asked what he did to earn money during that time, he smiled. “I used the one skill I had outside of inventing accusations: I did makeup.” Along the way, Holló learned the rest of it as well—manicures and pedicures and cutting and dyeing hair—though he was just as often forced to take whatever came to hand—gardening, carpentry, painting. “I learned a lot,” he said. Mainly he worked for the people who went to the parties he’d described, who either hired him themselves, or put him in touch with others—actresses, opera singers, wives of Party officials—who had no idea who they were paying. He lived for a time in all of Hungary’s major cities, Budapest, Debrecen, Sopron, Szeged, Pécs, Miskolc, Tihany, circulating through them attracting as little attention as possible, never staying long enough for people to mark him. Then, in 1956, just over a year after his affair with Adriána, he escaped altogether, leaving the country on a fake vacationer’s permit to Yugoslavia, and from there, via a sickening boat ride inside a coffin, to Trieste, and, from there, to Toronto and the Szécsényi Club.
Holló finished speaking. I said nothing. “You know the rest,” he finally said.
“Didn’t you miss Adriána?” I asked, though what I really wanted to know, but didn’t have the bravery to ask, was why he hadn’t tried to find out what happened to her.
“Sometimes.” He smiled, then grew thoughtful. “What I miss most about Adriána,” he laughed, “is the times she wore suits. She’d wear them to bed. I stayed in the dresses. I miss how open she was to that. As if she knew what she’d awakened in me.” Holló lightly tapped his empty teacup on the table.
I nodded, looking at the pages of notes I’d taken, then wondered how it was going to go when Ílona, my father, and the rest found out what I’d written. Nothing about Holló wearing makeup as a mere disguise. Nothing about him being just like they were. Nothing, really, about Holló having entirely average (whatever that was) appetites. It was a record of exactly those things they’d always suspected about him and talked themselves out of, and whose revelation would make it impossible to ignore his “obscenity,” “perversion,” “immorality,” and all the other phrases Ílona would use in her campaign against him. Those who wouldn’t object to him being gay, or whatever he was, would certainly object to the work he’d done as a censor, or, worse, hide their objection to his sexuality under objections to his past, his politics. When I looked up from my notes Holló was sitting there unmoving, a smile still on his face, the room receding into darkness as evening came on, heightening the noise of cars in the street, the city rumbling, children calling after each other as if in preparation for summer.
“I’m tired,” Holló finally said. He waited for me to speak, then for a moment it looked as if he was wrestling with something—disbelief, exasperation—but it was soon over, he suppressed it, and returned to his tired but elegant manner. “I’ve made no secret of who I am,” he continued.
No, I shook my head in agreement, he hadn’t. Instead, he’d allowed them to make a secret of him, obscuring what was blatantly obvious, and, for them, so objectionable, with a mollifying fairy tale, since they could only take what Holló offered if they could ignore
who was offering it. The fact was, he didn’t need to hide—they’d done the hiding for him. And I didn’t know who was worse, people like my father, so complicit in that, or like Ílona, who wanted Holló exposed even if it meant impoverishing the community. Or people like me, I realized, who were doing exactly as Holló wanted.
I looked at the notes I’d taken, at Holló sitting there waiting for my reaction, at the whole chain of events from my father telling me to come to the library, to the hours in Holló’s company as he guided me through the holdings, to the day I found Piros Krónika, the dinner at Éva’s, our argument, the spray paint on the door, everything. There was no way Holló couldn’t have known what I’d find—he knew everything about the library down to the last misprinted word. He wanted me to do this, to write my thesis, to expose him, and I was angry at being manoeuvred into this position, for the way he’d kept me from discovering Piros Krónika until three weeks before the deadline for my thesis, for making me not only responsible for destroying him, but worst of all complicit with Ílona in the process.
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you want this?”
I’m not sure what response I was expecting. Maybe I thought he’d push aside the tray between us, maybe with enough force to send it crashing to the ground, and then yell something—that he was sick of not being seen, that he’d been working at the Szécsényi Club for over twenty years and not once had anyone acknowledged who he was, that all his life he’d been invisible. But Holló didn’t do any of that. He was as composed as ever, putting down his cup, folding his hands in his lap. “I don’t want anything,” he said. “I’m telling you this because you asked. For your thesis.”
“If this gets out,” I said.
He shrugged. “Nothing will happen.” He seemed so sure of himself I was at a loss to come up with a warning equal to it. “It’s not like it’s the Rákosi era,” Holló laughed.
5.
From there, the days accelerated. Half the time I was in a daze, wanting to quit the whole project, desperately trying to think of another thesis. The other half I was at the club, working like a demon to get the thing written by deadline, hopeful that it would happen, that I’d actually get my degree, that I wouldn’t have to face the prospect of temporarily withdrawing from the program to work some awful job just to get money for another semester of tuition. I wanted to graduate and follow Éva to Hungary, scuttling Ílona’s plan—which relied on my laziness and poverty—to keep me from her daughter.
Holló would come into the library once in a while to water plants, adjust the thermostat, do the dusting, and he’d peer over my shoulder and nod, his face perfectly neutral, composed, but still projecting this awful power, as if he was guiding my hand through every paragraph. As for the thesis committee, they were overjoyed with the proposal I handed in, commenting on the “clarity and rigour” of the argument, asking for minor editorial changes, signing their names to the ethics form required for the interview with Holló that had already taken place, then telling me I had two weeks to get the whole thing in, eighty to a hundred pages, most of which, by that time, was already written.
The dinners at Ílona’s were more frequent now. I was invited every other day, including the sacred rite of Tuesday evening, in the company of Anuska Néni, whose optimism about the situation with the Szécsényi Club and Holló seemed even more sinister than Ílona’s hostility. She was old, at least eighty, and Éva told me she was fêted every Tuesday because she was rich, and Ílona her only remaining relative, which should have been an open-and-shut case of inheritance except that Anuska Néni was also, unfortunately, a philanthropist. She’d donated money to the Szécsényi Club in the days before Holló, as well as to the Church, various anti-communist newspapers, the Conservative Party, and pro-life organizations. Ílona’s greatest fear was that when Anuska Néni died the money would die with her, frittered away in one last gesture on her pet causes.
“You know, I think a change would be good for the club,” Anuska Néni said, looking at me kindly. “Oh, there are a lot of people who will say Holló has done a good job,” she said. “But, you know, the place has been one way, his way, for a long time, and it’s good to see things done differently once in a while.” She smiled. “That’s what’s so great about living in a democracy.” She rocked back and forth at this for a little longer than normal, and I had the urge to grab her shoulder and make her stop.
Following this, Ílona asked how the writing was coming along. I told her the thesis was days from completion. She nodded and said she’d love to see it when it was done, and I nodded back and said everyone would be able to see it, given that all theses presented in the history department were bound and shelved in the library. There was a pause then, and I quickly added that of course I’d give her a copy. Éva smiled at me across the table, and Anuska Néni looked around at all the smiling faces and then smiled herself, more broadly than anyone, clearly not sure what was going on, her eyes darting back and forth to make sure we didn’t stop smiling before she did.
After dinner Éva and I went out, with Ílona’s blessing, and Éva was so thrilled at how well things were going that she straddled me in the driver’s seat after we parked in one of the darkened lots by the lake, saying that now for sure Ílona wouldn’t send her to Hungary. “You could go to graduate school, and we could live together. I’ll be eighteen by then and my mother won’t be able to do a thing.”
I felt Éva’s weight, her breath close, but all I wanted was to get outside, into the darkness past the grass ringing the parking lot, down to the lake and the wind driving the waves onto the beach. But I didn’t know how to climb out from under her without making it look like rejection. “What about Holló?” I said. I told her I’d spoken with my father, who said the community was in an uproar, some of them had even gone to the club to confront Holló, who sat in total silence, smiling at them as if he had no idea what they were talking about. “That place is Holló’s life,” I said. “If they get rid of him . . .”
Éva sighed. “Who cares? That’s not even what I’m talking about. Haven’t you been listening?”
I pulled the handle on the door. The summer air rushed in with a fragrance of water, the tarmac of the lot, the night-blooming flowers in planters all around, and I slid from under Éva and stepped out as if I was rising from some contorted sleep, stretching, breathing deep, and walked down to the shore.
It didn’t take long for her to join me. The wind was warm that night, sending up a fine spray from the lake.
“You know what Aurél Bácsi told my mother?” Éva said, standing so close I could hear her hair whipping in the breeze. I shrugged. She continued anyhow. “He wondered who was going to serve him rántot hús every Saturday if Holló wasn’t around. Or where he was going to go for a nice glass of aszú. Or what he was going to read without Holló stocking the latest edition of Népszava.” She didn’t laugh. “Then you know what Aurél Bácsi said? He said he didn’t believe it. He said Holló probably did some low-level work for the Party when he lived in Hungary just like everyone else. He said you were probably just making it look bigger than it was so my mother would agree to you dating me.”
I turned to Éva. “What business is it of his, you and me being together?”
“Everyone knows about it. My mother talks.”
“I didn’t realize we were a community concern.”
She put her hand on my arm. “People like your father. They’ve been on your side.” She waited. “Until now. They think the thesis is just your way of sucking up to my mother.” She paused again. “A lot of them agree with Aurél. Some are even making comments about the two of us trying to ruin the place.”
I looked out on the lake, thinking of my father, of our recent conversations, how hesitant he’d been, asking careful questions, giving little in the way of replies, as if he was weighing not so much the believability of what I was saying—he believed me, I was sure of that—but whether everyone else would believe it, or how the information would have t
o be presented to save my reputation, which was of course his reputation as well. Maybe, I thought, watching stray headlights play over the dark waves from a nearby overpass, he was also thinking of how to save Holló. But saving both of us was impossible, I saw that, and in that moment my father’s dilemma was mine as well.
“My mother swears she’s going to prove to everyone that what she’s been saying about Holló is true.” Éva shuffled her feet on the sand. “If you help her.”
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is what your mother’s motivation is. She loves going to the club as much as anyone.”
“The club is the only place my mother is visible,” said Éva. “That’s the most important thing—making them pay attention to her.”
I turned, and saw that she was hugging herself against the breeze, her eyes fixed on something at the shoreline. “I was thinking this could work out so well for us,” Éva said. “But maybe that’s not right.” She looked up at me. “I don’t think you should do it if you don’t want to.”
Then I did just as Éva wanted, I put my arms around her, and with that I thought it was decided. I would hand in the thesis because Éva wanted it, and because Holló wanted it too, an end to deception, an acknowledgement of who he really was, whatever the cost. But the truth is the decision had been made long before, and all I was really doing, that night by the lake, was pretending, squeezing the situation for every last bit of drama. I was going to get that degree on time, no matter what, even if it meant exposing Holló, turning all those rumours into fact, and destroying what he’d built at the Szécsényi Club. I wasn’t going to give Ílona the satisfaction of separating me from Éva.
6.
Everything that happened after that night played out like a script. My father called later, once we returned home, Éva asleep in my bed in complete defiance of her mother’s rules, while I tiptoed into the bathroom with the phone and listened to my father say that Holló had finally taken a stand, refusing to let him into the library to look at the research materials I was using, saying they were “reserved.” When I asked my father why he’d gone there in the first place, he let out a short laugh. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” he said, “but I wanted to see them myself, to see how explicit they . . .”