Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  “Whatever,” he said, shrugging. “What do you say?”

  “I hate chess,” she replied. “It’s a stupid game.”

  He stood back. It was the only time I’d see him at a loss. Aunt Rose smiled: “It’s one of the reasons I like collecting the figurines,” she said. “I like breaking up the sets.” She shrugged. “Chess is a stupid idea: a totally logical world with only one possible outcome.”

  “There are two outcomes,” I interrupted her. She looked at me surprised, and then smiled, already nodding at what I was going to say. “There’s winning, and there’s stalemate,” I said, but instead of smiling back at her I was smiling at Lancaster.

  “There’s also forfeiture,” she whispered, frowning at both of us.

  Lancaster would show up everywhere we went that last year. He always appeared with a chessboard tucked under his arm. Even when Aunt Rose took me shopping, the two of us wandering the sidewalks of Uptown, where I so rarely went, picking out the clothes I loved back then—leg warmers, jodhpurs, gauchos—somehow he was always there. I thought he was stalking Aunt Rose, though neither of us was particularly alarmed, since he seemed slick but harmless. To some degree she encouraged it, inviting him to sit with us, to set up his chessboard, then making a move or two before she waved him away, laughing, “No, really, it’s so boring.” She’d motion for me to get up, and I’d look back and Lancaster would be sitting there smiling at me, pointing at the chessboard, inviting me to take up the game Aunt Rose wasn’t willing to play—at least not entirely.

  If my father noticed, he said nothing. He was indifferent to Lancaster, didn’t know the guy, wouldn’t have recognized him on the street, never made a single comment when his name came up between Aunt Rose and me.

  It was a whole half year before I got up the nerve to walk into Lancaster’s store one evening, come up to the counter, and tell him I wanted to play.

  He was looking through a box of old jewellery, his fingers scraping the bottom as if looking for a hidden compartment. “You ready to play chess?”

  He turned over the sign in the front door, twisted the lock, and motioned with a finger for me to come into the back room, where there were two couches and a couple of easy chairs arranged around a low table covered with empty wine, whiskey and beer bottles that he swept into a box. He dragged the arm of his linen shirt across the table to clear away any remaining crumbs or ash, then pulled a chess set off a shelf and set up the figurines. I sat down, sinking so far into the sofa it felt as if I was going to fall out the bottom.

  Lancaster showed me how the pieces moved, basic strategy, took my hand and placed it on each pawn, rook, knight, and together we moved them along the white and black squares. “Would you like a drink?” he asked, and when I nodded he came back with two glasses of red wine, proposing a toast to “all the pieces left over” by Aunt Rose.

  It took me a second to get up, struggling against the pull of the couch. But I did it, leaning over to place my mouth on his. And then he was the one who couldn’t find his feet.

  We did eventually play, not just that night, but across many nights, huddled in that room half undressed, drinking wine, and laughing. I didn’t bother to hide it from my father, walking out the front door, through the overgrown yard with its piles of bricks and firewood and the two old trucks my father must have been interested in enough, who knows when, to put up on blocks and cover with blue tarps against the rain. I went along Michigan Avenue, my intentions plain for the neighbors to see, hoping they’d tell my father I was out at all hours, and finally arriving at Lancaster’s shop.

  Lancaster was self-involved enough to think I believed the things he said: that he’d inherited enough money to do as he pleased, and what pleased him, he said, were “Beautiful things.” We were on the couch when he said this, our bodies wedged beside each other, a quilt protecting us from the cold that winter in the uninsulated back room. “Beautiful things,” he said, running a hand down my breasts, lingering on my belly, between my legs.

  He never once asked what I was interested in, either thinking he already knew, or not caring, though I wouldn’t have known what to say if he had, only that I liked hearing about the places he’d gone, descriptions of Rome, London, New York, the view from the Eiffel Tower, pubs along the Thames, Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Schönbrunn, and the things he showed me, things that never made it onto the shelves of his store, already sold before he’d bought them, placed into registered packages sent out after hours. But what I loved the most, what he never stopped tempting me with, were the descriptions of Budapest, the city my father refused to speak about—lights along the Danube as casino boats and barges from Turkey and Bulgaria and Greece drifted in the night; the neo-Gothic architecture of the parliament buildings, like the whitened bones of a fallen bird; the grime of the ninth district and its alleys twisting onto some new bar, cellar restaurant, another statue of some failed statesman; the New York Kávéház and its chandeliers and steam and ghosts of a hundred writers and artists perished in wars, concentration camps, the interrogation rooms of the ÁVÓ and SS. They were the places I’d fantasized about long ago, when I was a girl checking out books from the library, but now I could ask questions of someone who’d actually been there, an emissary from my dreams. It was all my father had denied me, my heritage, a sense of self beyond the vinyl factory, the black-rimmed snow along Michigan Avenue at the end of winter, the phony room at Aunt Rose’s.

  Our relationship didn’t last, of course, and it’s easy to see now that beyond the stories, the exoticism that had more to do with recovering my father than any attraction to Lancaster, I really had no use for him. He was still part of that town, a mouthpiece for its banal escape fantasies, still someone I could get to by walking along Michigan Avenue.

  I was staying at Aunt Rose’s the night everything fell apart. We were supposed to have dinner, Aunt Rose flitting around the place more excited than usual, setting candles on the table, putting a bottle of champagne into the fridge, working hard at getting the roast just right, far more preparation than she normally did. When I asked what the occasion was she only winked at me. “Your father and I have been together for many years,” she said. “He spends more time here than he does at home.”

  I nodded. It was true. But I didn’t tell her it was because to have her at his place, night after night, was to let her in, and as the danger of that increased over the years he was always in Aunt Rose’s bed, which meant she was shut out completely.

  My father never showed up for dinner. Aunt Rose grew silent as the minutes ticked by, until finally she shrugged, told me to sit down, and I sat and ate in the midst of that empty banquet, watching her lean against the wall by the front window drinking glass after glass of wine, occasionally reaching into her pocket to clutch at something, drawing out her hand as if she’d been bitten by whatever was in there.

  He never showed. The grease congealed around the roast. Aunt Rose finished the bottle and opened another. I did my dishes, then watched TV, and finally went to bed.

  I wasn’t asleep long, maybe a couple of hours, when I heard the crash.

  They were downstairs. She was yelling. I snuck down the back stairs and peeked from around the banister. My father was standing in front of Aunt Rose, who was on the couch, one hand in her pocket. My father looked angry, wearing his work clothes, which were dirtier than normal, staring at her hard. “It was overtime. I can’t afford to say no to overtime. You know that.”

  “Mike . . .” She glanced at the telephone, but then changed her mind about what she wanted to say next. “It’s not the money!” she hissed. “It’s not just a dance once in a while, or someone to babysit your daughter, or a fuck, or your endless unchanging no surprises idea of security.” She made the last comment as if it was a revelation to her as well, as if she’d just realized it, since for a long time it had been yet another thing that attracted her to my father.

  “You don’t know a thing about my security,” he yelled. And he swept his hand alo
ng one of the shelves of the room, scattering chess pieces across the floor. He stood there as if he had no idea what he’d done, as if the action came first and the idea of it afterward. The chess pieces were everywhere, like tripwires.

  Aunt Rose did not get up. My father stood there, trapped among the chess pieces, not daring to move. “Do you even know what your daughter does?” she asked.

  “You don’t get to ask me that,” he said. “She’s my daughter.”

  The way he said it, “my,” made Aunt Rose wince. “She might have been mine, too,” Aunt Rose whispered. Her hand came out of her pocket gripping something.

  My father never noticed. He was looking at his hands too, inspecting the knuckles. “If it’s what I think it is. If it’s who I think it is . . .”

  “Then what?” she said. “Find him, find all of them, and kill them?”

  My father looked at her. He was helpless, shaking with rage at his impotence, but with something else as well, the desire to find a way out when there was none.

  “It would be so much easier to do that,” she said. “Dance instead of talk, fight instead of figure out, labour instead of work. Passion is always easier, isn’t it, Mike?” Her voice was quiet now. She rubbed the back of a hand against her forehead. “But that’s all there ever is, just passion, laughter and rage and intensity and whatever it is in your mind that takes you from me in the middle of the afternoon, during a conversation, that makes you sit in the bathroom hissing at people, who knows how long dead, threatening them—”

  “She’s not your daughter,” my father interrupted her. “She’s just a deal we made that went on longer than it should have.”

  “You think this . . .”Aunt Rose closed her eyes. She waved her clenched fist at the room. “There was no deal, Mike,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I told you about Hungary.”

  “No, Mike.” She got up and went to him, chess pieces crunching underfoot, and took him by the hand. “Did you forget what happened that night? You couldn’t get out a single sentence.” She held his hand. “You never told me about Hungary.”

  My father looked away. He was scared. “Quiet,” he said, “you’ll wake her.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Mike.”

  “That’s right.” He smiled, and it was horrible because although his words were hostile he was ranting like a man being led down a corridor toward something he’d rather not face. “Fuck me. That’s what we’ve been doing these years. And that’s all it’s ever going to be. You will never be my wife, and she will never be your daughter. Never!” It was the most hurtful thing he could have said, but I do not think he was trying to hurt Aunt Rose, not really. He was just terrified of where she’d gotten to, trespassing on his isolation from where he’d always hoped to keep her, the careful dance of the last fourteen years all gone to waste, when he would have happily gone on that way with her—dancing—forever.

  “You’re right,” she said, and her voice had gone quiet too, but soft in a way my father’s was not, without the hardness that puts edges around a whisper. “If I could have had you I’d have gladly taken the rest,” she murmured, opening her fist on a tiny velvet box, from which she took a ring and placed it on my father’s finger. He stood there, shocked, unable to move his hand out of hers. She kissed him then, as soft as her voice had been. “Goodbye, Mike,” she said, and she turned and brushed past me on the stairs.

  My father stood there, staring after her, staring at me.

  “Goodbye,” he finally said, and I could not tell which of us he was talking to, but he motioned to me, and as we left I heard Aunt Rose run down the stairs as if she wanted to say something else. I never heard what it was.

  She was gone in a week. I remember going back to the house, standing outside as the movers arrived. But she wasn’t there. I watched as they carted out the bits of my old bedroom, and as I stopped myself from rushing up the steps to make them put it all back I finally understood what had happened in those pawnshops over the years, the pieces Aunt Rose left because as beautiful as they were they weren’t the one thing she loved the best.

  I did not stick around for long after that either, five months. Then I was gone, too, not with Lancaster, but on my own. They were not easy, those first years, though things grew easier afterwards, once I figured out all I had not been able, or permitted, to figure out when I still lived on Michigan Avenue. I even got to Hungary, though that was decades later, after my father had died, lungs rotted out, indifferent to my occasional visits home, as if in leaving I too had died and this phantom who came back once in a while to visit was not the girl he’d help raise but an intruder into that place he’d drifted to, one that must have looked like peace to everyone else, no more yelling or rages or wild nights. But peace was not where he was at then, or at least not peace in the usual sense, just an indifference so profound nothing mattered at all, not even me. He rarely spoke, simple requests only: “Pass the salt”; “Don’t forget to put gas in the car”; “Sure, I’ll see you next time”—nothing about where I was going, who I was with, what my life consisted of. I was young then, and I didn’t want to deal with parents anymore, nor any of the people I’d left behind on Michigan Avenue, coming and going as quickly, quietly, and as rarely as possible.

  In Hungary I managed to learn a bit of the language, enough to comb through the National Archives and libraries. You see, I had followed in Aunt Rose’s footsteps, but only in order to follow my father’s. I retraced his life back to a time before Canada, before his transatlantic trip, an orphan of sixteen having seen too much during the siege of Budapest. I found an address on the back of one of his photographs (though the date that accompanied it was from long before the war), an apartment in the seventh district, which later became the Jewish ghetto, and saw pictures of what happened to the people who lived there (had my father been one of them, or had his family left by then?)—emaciated bodies in the streets, frozen to death in rubbled buildings, hanging by their hands, wired to wrought-iron railings on the wrong sides of stairwells. I read the essays and memoirs and journalism. I learned of the rapes of women by the Red Army, men standing on women’s faces while their comrades took turns, girls young as fourteen locked in rooms visited repeatedly, and afterwards the gift of a bayonet slashed from crotch to throat. I read of children forced to walk in front of detachments, their small bodies big enough to absorb the bullets. I read of the camps their parents were sent to, digging holes in Siberia, bodies cut down by malnutrition, frost, sadistic guards chopping off fingers, and, later, when the thaw came, the earth refusing to harbor them, their bodies resurfacing in old coats and jackets, pockets stuffed with faded folded pictures. It was too much, it was enough, and in the end it still wasn’t the specifics of what my father had experienced. But I understood why he couldn’t talk about it, and why, with all that happened there, with whatever he’d gone through, an entire world lost before he even knew what the world was, he’d struggled to lose even more of it, even the memories, never repeating what he’d experienced for fear it would grow ever more vivid in his mind. I would never be sure if his inability to let go of that meant he couldn’t hold onto anything else, or if, in fact, it made him terrified of holding on.

  It was the only clue I obtained to Miklós Berényi. I found nothing else except stories, sitting there night after night as fascinated by it as Aunt Rose had been, filling up pages and pages with a history that was also mine, since his remoteness had become my own. This was my “research specialty” now: the passing of trauma from one generation to the next.

  I was at a conference, giving a talk on exactly this, when I ran into Aunt Rose again.

  She’d aged almost beyond recognition, another of those professors emeritus you see at conferences, full of the ease that comes when the bad work—students, marking, committees, faculty rivalries—is behind you, when at last there’s only the work you love: research, writing, and the endless debate.

  “Hi, Mariska,” she said, stepping up to the bus stop outside the hotel
where I was waiting for the shuttle to take me to the conference. She was peering from under an umbrella, this old lady withered to four feet tall, and it was a minute before her eyes gave her away, still full of that energy, and without thinking I threw my arms around her. She smiled tightly, patting my shoulder. “I’ve been watching you for a half hour,” she said.

  “I didn’t even . . .” I started to say something but couldn’t finish. There was too much. I pulled the program from my bag. “I haven’t looked at the presenters yet, otherwise I . . .”

  “You’ve been doing what I would have done,” she smiled again. “I’ve never been fond of looking back, either. But your father was better at avoiding the past than either of us. Maybe we should have left him alone about that.”

  Her left hand was gripping the umbrella, and I looked at it instinctively and saw the gold ring. She caught the glance and shrugged.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and in the rush to cover up my embarrassment I blurted out my sense of guilt. “I should have visited you. After you moved away. I thought of writing . . . A few times I thought I should try.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You inherited that honestly: leaving, never going back. It’s important that some things end.” For a second I wondered if she was talking about herself as well as my father.

  “Well, we’re here now.” I tried to laugh. “Do you have plans for dinner?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she mumbled. “I won’t have plans.”

  “So why not meet, then,” I said, taking her hand, “after the conference today?”

  “It might be nice,” she said.

  The shuttle arrived and I boarded it thinking she was coming too, but when I looked back she was standing outside smiling and nodding at me while the other passengers got on, and soon the shuttle was on its way, and she was still standing there one hand raised, not quite waving, having said all there was to say.