Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  And so Aunt Rose became a part of our lives. She didn’t care what Michigan Avenue thought of her, floating above the gossip, and with the way she danced and laughed and cooked, the way she kissed, both my father and me were happy to have her around.

  I knew she was good at kissing. I saw it on the nights I crept out of my room and peered over the banister, memorizing the way she stood on her toes, touched her lips to my father’s, the two of them drinking and dancing to the music on the radio. There was this one CBC program they listened to, The Neon Dancehall, between ten and midnight. My father could dance to anything, he knew it all—the waltz, the tango, the foxtrot—his lanky body strange and graceful in the worn millworker’s clothes that were the only clothes he wore. He said he’d learned to dance “on the trip across the Atlantic,” in the ballroom on the ship, as a way of dealing with the boredom. When I asked if there was a woman involved he always just winked at me and said “Ssshhh,” or, if he was in a bad mood, said nothing at all.

  It was this “gift,” as Aunt Rose called it, that kept her coming around after that first night, that plus the intensity that overcame him whenever she was around, carrying her laughing up the stairs over his shoulder, running out at midnight to get us all ice cream, the way he was unable to walk past her without kissing her on the back of the neck, behind the ear, under the line of her jaw. “You beautiful man,” she called my father, a phrase that made him laugh, with his patched clothes and packs of cigarettes, his days of stubble, the nicks and bruises he got at the factory, too macho to report the injuries to the medical office.

  Neither of them was young, both were in their mid-forties, though you could see they hadn’t left it far behind, the impatience with which they held each other, the look in their eyes that said they’d only recently become cautious, that they’d been burned badly enough by past relationships to have developed rules against the risk of opening up again.

  So when my father stopped in the middle of a dance and suddenly said he was tired, or paused in telling a joke and passed a hand over his face, or lost the thread of a sentence—“The thing I hate about Charlie Parker is that unlike the swing bands he made it impossible to . . .” pausing there, “impossible to . . .” then went silent—Aunt Rose would either not press him on it, or come out with something weak. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he’d say, irritated. A few minutes later he would say goodnight and goodbye to both of us, taking off his shoes with a grunt, and heading upstairs in a way that made it plain he didn’t want anyone—not Aunt Rose, not me—coming after him.

  I wonder now what would have happened if they’d gotten together earlier. Maybe Aunt Rose, with her knowledge and empathy, might have broken through to my father in a way my mother hadn’t been able to, or there might have been time afterwards, when it was clear there was no breaking through, for Aunt Rose to have taken me with her, since I would have been her daughter.

  I don’t know what deal the two of them made, but at 3:30 Aunt Rose was always waiting for me after daycare at the home of a local woman, or, as was the case later, school, and we’d go back to her house. She must have requested the same teaching schedule year after year, doing her marking and course preparation in the evening at a beautiful Biedermeier table while I sat doing homework, or reading, or watching TV. At eight, it was time for bed, we’d walk along the hallways lined with shelves on which she kept her chess figurines, up the stairs into what I now think of as my real room, set up when she first started taking care of me, the day she led me by the hand and opened the door with a flourish, hoping it would coax me out of the crying fits that started the minute I left school and didn’t end until my father showed up the next morning, coming for me straight off a night shift. The walls of the bedroom were filled with antique pictures, set side by side so tight you couldn’t see the wallpaper. I don’t know where she found them, they were fin de siècle children’s illustrations, horses in Swiss army uniforms, standing on their hind legs, gazing through telescopes, riding in air balloons, piloting submarines. There was a bed painted with sleeping maidens. A cut-glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling, spinning diamonds of light across the ceiling. It seemed less like a room than a place from which I could go anywhere, into whatever fantasy I chose, though all I really wanted was for it to simply be a normal room belonging to a normal girl with a father and a mother.

  Long after Aunt Rose was gone from my life, I’d remember her stories clearest of all, as if that’s where she too belonged, off in some fable rather than reality. She worked on collectors, she said, the men and women in history—kings, baronesses, industrialists, eccentric heirs—“and their influence,” as she wrote in one of her articles, “on what we now think of as the canon of great artworks.” They were the people who’d decided what it was important to keep, she told me, though it seemed during those nights that what really interested her were not the people who’d set the standard, but the others, whose collections she’d come upon by accident, along the margins, on some side track where history wasn’t written, the bits and pieces of research she couldn’t draft into her books and essays.

  She told me about Count Afanasei Naryshkin, the eighteenth-century Russian nobleman who collected “experience,” sending his serfs on “expeditions” and “travels” and “challenges,” some fatal, then installing the survivors, or their remains, in his dacha, where they could be questioned again and again by his friends on what it had been like to face a Siberian tiger bare-handed, to have wandered the length of Afghanistan in nothing but a loincloth, to have been the one and only survivor of Professor Artyukhin’s wondrous but ultimately flawed “flying machine” in the Himalayas. Those who could answer did so, the rest of the stories had to be guessed, with a fair degree of accuracy, from the corpses.

  She told me of Frithjof Damkjær, the cloth merchant who lived in Copenhagen in the first half of the twentieth century, and claimed to have amassed over “a million types of death.” After he passed away, his eldest son, Thormod, went into his father’s home to draw up the estate, and was never heard from again. His daughter, Silje, went next, trying to figure out not only what happened to her brother (though she was secretly glad that, as primary heir, he was out of the picture), but also what kind of wealth her secretive father had hoarded away. Her body was found days later; the cause of death looked a lot like the depressurization an astronaut might experience on rupturing his spacesuit, though of course the doctors at the time had no idea. One by one his children died, along with a number of solicitors—one looked like she’d been mauled by a swarm of Howler monkeys; another was found covered head to toe in radiation burns; another had been hacked to pieces with some kind of cutting weapon that cauterized the wound as soon as it made it; another was found dead “by bula-bula,” a death of such savagery the papers refused to describe it. As for Thormod, since his body was never found it was ruled a “death by misadventure.”

  She told me of Sister Ingrid Van Buren, the seventeenth-century nun who collected “acts of charity,” renouncing a life of aristocratic privilege by donating her dead husband’s estate to the orphanages of Amsterdam, entering a nunnery, taking a vow of poverty, always volunteering for the hardest jobs—scrubbing floors, stripping varnish from pews, walking twenty miles a day dispensing food and clothing to the poor, and in the end travelling to India to live among the lepers, contracting the disease, her body rotting away, and yet still continuing to work among them to her last breath. After she died they found a logbook among her possessions in which she’d recorded every single charitable act, including some she’d performed as a young girl, as if it had been a lifelong project, rows of dates and times kept in meticulous order, including sum totals she’d calculated during the last days of her life: Fed the hungry: 2, 015 times; Clothed the naked: 3, 582 times; Ministered to the sick: 4, 871 times. The priests and nuns looked at the book as if it were obscene, as if her vocation had not been the cloister at all but the opportunity to accrue as many selfless works as po
ssible. There was something greedy about it, and they drew back from the figures and columns, remembering the times she’d pushed others aside to get at some sick or dying person, the lengths she’d gone to make sure the worst assignments fell to her, the two or three hours she slept a night, unable to tear herself from the work. The logbook was her collection—Aunt Rose had seen it—no different from an album of stamps or hockey cards.

  There were dozens of others. She said that for many of these collectors there came a time, after many years, when everything faded to unimportance, as if contrary to what most people believed collecting was not the amassing of things but a way of cutting yourself off from them, focusing so exclusively on one object that all else—your clothes, your food, your job, your friends, your lovers—fades. Sometimes, she said, they reached the point where even that, their one thing, their sole focus, abandoned them, as if they’d finally arrived in that place they’d always wanted to get to, even if they hadn’t known it starting out, where nothing mattered at all. “Some of them,” she said, “would start giving it away then—the precious jewellery, the holy books, the sacred relics.”

  She was talking about my father, of course, how his one focus, those unspoken memories, made him insensible to everything else, all the good things that might have been his, and how that obsession, too, would one day seem irrelevant and leave him with nothing, not even remorse over what he’d squandered.

  I got a sense of this, her coded prophecy, on those evenings when Aunt Rose put on her special dinners. There was expensive wine and prime rib and pie. At the end of the night the subject would always circle around, over the digestif—which was always Unicum, that bitter stuff brewed by Zwack and Co. that Aunt Rose picked up on research trips to Hungary—to what I came to think of as their game. It seemed pathetic to me, not so much when I was a kid but later, the way they pretended that the last thing they wanted, ever again, was to share their homes or lives with someone else, making fun of married life as if the false confidences and camaraderie of cynicism could make up for the attachment my father was too scared to risk. “Who loves you?” she’d laugh, setting down his food. He’d gaze at the plate: “You keep feeding us like this, honey, we’ll be fat as pigs.” “Just imagine,” Aunt Rose would lower her voice, imitating one of her mother’s sayings, “how much you’d pay for all this amazing food at a restaurant.” “I wish I’d learned to cook!” my father would reply. “It’s one of my great regrets!” “Next Christmas we’ll buy a turkey big enough to last a week,” she’d say, “just the three of us sitting around living like kings. What do you think, Mariska?” My father tilted back in his chair, “Now that,” he said, “is what I’d call living!”

  At one of these dinners, my father did something I’ll never forget: getting up from the table, he lurched drunkenly against a shelf of figurines and caught them as they fell, picking them out of the air one two three four five as if they were suspended there, holding them between his fingers afterwards, staring, as if he was more amazed than any of us at his reflexes, at the fact that he’d managed to do it.

  “See, Mariska,” Aunt Rose said, “it’s nice to have a man around.” But she didn’t seem very confident then, gazing at my father in bewilderment, as though she not only hadn’t expected him to catch the pieces, but didn’t want him to, as if watching them shatter on the floor would have been preferable to him standing there amazed at his capacity to save something. The thing she was after, the thing she wanted from him, it would not happen until he was no longer surprised by that—his capacity to step forth, reach out, and take hold.

  She was sick of the game they played.

  I’d see that look on Aunt Rose’s face many times over the years, nights I’d awaken to her sitting on my bed staring at me, as if I was a problem for which she had no solution.

  “Go back to sleep,” she’d whisper. “I’m just checking on you.”

  But it was impossible, closing my eyes while she was looking at me like that, and as I got older they became the times we really talked, as if the late hour, the lights off, gave us permission to broach subjects otherwise left alone.

  “Did you ever want kids, Aunt Rose?”

  She sighed and shrugged, muttered something about her “first husband,” one of “those pseudo-radical academics,” she called him, “about as far from your father as you could get, a narcissist who didn’t realize that having an ‘open relationship’ applied to the wife as well as the husband,” and then something about the “dedication” required for “making it as a woman scholar. Men have wives at home who take care of the kids,” she said, “but I’d never have that, and without the time to work I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.” She shrugged again, looking at me. “And I’m too old for that now.” She continued sitting there a while, the room filling with whatever I was expecting her to say, something to do with my father, that it wasn’t what she wanted but what he didn’t want that was in the way—not just between the two of them, but between her and me—his inability to risk loss, to lay claim to anyone or anything. She said nothing, and I knew, even then, that it was her way of trying to protect me from disappointment, from what she had already predicted would and would not happen between them, though if she stayed quiet long enough, unnaturally enough, I might hear it anyhow—the silent admission that she didn’t need kids because she had me, because I was her own—and that this withholding of what I wanted her so badly to say would, long after, be both an admission and my protection from it. Had she spoken the words it would have led me to form an even greater attachment to her, which would only have further confronted my father with what he was too afraid to have, driving us all apart. Though the truth is, her not saying it had exactly the same effect, at least for me.

  I was nineteen when their relationship ended. But I was on my own long before that, in the way you’re alone when your parents haven’t yet realized how separate your life has become, how innumerable your secrets, though I was still nominally at home, nights when I wasn’t out with friends, with boys, in deserted playgrounds, drinking, smoking dope, giggling as we rode merry-go-rounds, swings, even the slides, as if childhood joy could be restored with something as simple as booze. More often than not part of me was hoping my father would find me—I would make a point of going out when he wasn’t working nights—that he’d walk square shouldered into the field or playground or bush party and catch me with Jim MacDonald, whose hand was up my shirt, and break his arm or teeth. But he never showed.

  Then there was Marc Lancaster. He was the one dealer Aunt Rose couldn’t crack, never once looking distressed when she left behind the remains of a chess set. He dumped them into a bin and sold them for a quarter each, kids coming in to replace some pawn or rook gone missing from the game back home, and which was pure profit since Aunt Rose had already paid for the full set. I don’t know how many times I stood there with her, trying to appreciate a bit of jade or tortoise shell or walrus tusk carved into the shape of a rearing horse. “Master Diederich made truly sublime knights,” Lancaster would say. “His pawns look like something a dog spat out, but knights, they were his forte.” Sometimes he tried to give her the chess pieces for free, but Aunt Rose refused, and the best he could do was keep a constant lookout for things she was interested in. He even travelled to Europe in the summers, always bringing back some treasures just for her.

  His shop was different from the other places we went to, neat and orderly and regularly dusted. There was none of that smell you get in pawnshops or standard junk stores, the scent of something people have lived with for too long, on which they’ve spilled one too many beers, smoked one too many cigarettes, lain one too many children sweating sick with flu. His place was a shop of wonders. There were original copper etchings of the collections of Albertus Seba, pictures of two-headed snakes, rare shells, Amazonian plants and butterflies laid out as if it was possible to collect every detail the world had to offer. He owned a cabinet of curiosities that belonged to Alexander Von Humboldt, beautiful with
its ebony veneer, its floral marquetry, the nooks and crannies still rich with dust from the eighteenth century. One time he even showed me one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, which I spent an hour looking at, filled with vials and clippings from old maps, Lancaster leaning over my shoulder saying Cornell was a collector masquerading as an artist.

  Unlike the other shop owners, he was impeccably dressed, in bespoke suits, with that perfect drape of fabric picked up in London and Paris and Milan during the summers, and worn with the kind of carelessness that makes clothes look even better.

  I loved him. I couldn’t help it. He was younger than Aunt Rose and my father, though still quite a bit older than me. Compared to what I knew of the world, or the little bits of Hungary my father let slip, or Aunt Rose’s anecdotes, so odd as to be unreal, Lancaster seemed a window onto what I could know, all that was still obscure but tantalizingly out there, a real life that I might actually encounter beyond the books and stories I was already bored with.

  “Why not have a game with me before you defile the set?” he’d smile, flirting with Aunt Rose. He’d reach under the counter and pull out a bottle of cognac and wag it side to side. “We could have a drink. Your daughter here could keep track of the moves.” When he winked at me his eye stayed closed for longer than it should have.

  “She’s not my daughter,” Aunt Rose said. By then I was too old, or too disheartened by their refusal to marry or move in together, to care.