Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  “Our duty?” Sándor carried off Pfeffer-Wildenbruch’s fatigue perfectly.

  “I-i-i-it would not be cowardice,” Sándor stuttered, again playing Teleki. “Such words belong to narcissists, those who worry for their reputations, for how history will regard them. No”—Sándor shook his head as Teleki might have—“we must look beyond our egos, our timid wishes for glory. The war effort needs us . . . needs you . . . to survive this. You must sacrifice your pride for the greater good.” Then, in a flourish, Sándor removed his glasses, shifting his eyes side to side as Teleki had done so many times behind the lectern. “Obergruppenführer, sir, I’ve heard the men speaking of a plot on Lieutenant-Colonal Veresváry’s life. In the sewers, you will need men you can trust . . . to prove my devotion I will give you the names of the conspirators . . .

  “And so,” Sándor now said, returning to himself (or what Teleki was increasingly thinking of as the role of himself), “while men died by the thousands in the breakout, our friend here”—he indicated Teleki—“was splashing through the sewers.”

  The sewers. Here, Sándor’s knowledge was just as extensive. It was called Ördög-Árok, “devil’s ditch,” a name in keeping with what was to greet them, descending into waters swirling with suitcases, soggy files, fragments of memoranda, whole suits of clothing from which men and women seemed to have dissolved, a wooden statue of the Virgin face down, her hand entwined with the much smaller one of a body trapped in the waters beneath her. They ran into loose bands of SS. They waited below while men tried scaling the rungs of ladders to sewer grates above, poking their heads out, followed by the crack of a sniper’s bullet, the body falling back and knocking off all who were clinging to the ladder below it. They entered aqueducts that grew narrower and narrower, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch sending Teleki on ahead (or so Sándor said) into places he could move along crouched over, then only on his hands and knees, and finally on his belly, each pipe he went into smaller than the last, until he was overcome by claustrophobia and panicked, inching backwards on his stomach and chest like some worm reversing itself—only to find that Pfeffer-Wildenbruch and his party had already moved on, leaving him behind. It was at this point that he ran into two soldiers accompanying Hungarian commander Iván Hindy and his wife, who was still wearing the finery she put on every day, as befitted her position, the hems of her dress drifting out around her as she whispered to the men on either side, trying to keep the mood light, the company agreeable, even as the screams of men rang up and down the sewer. They were holding her by either elbow, but it seemed as if she was holding them, especially the soldier whose arm was in a sling, as if the sound of her voice could keep them going, as if in allowing them to hold her she was lending them strength.

  As Sándor’s story went—and it was a compelling story, Teleki had to admit, so much so that even he wanted to hear how it would end—Teleki was reluctant to accept Hindy’s order to bring up the rear of their little party. When Hindy, seeing his reluctance, suggested that he could take up the front then, Teleki again demurred. “Well, where would you like to be?” Teleki said he would prefer to stay in the middle, alongside Mrs. Hindy, and everyone laughed, their echoes bouncing off the walls and water until he realized they’d stopped caring, that he was trapped in a group of people tripping along cheerily to capture, trial, execution. “M-m-m-maybe we should try another few of the sewer grates,” he said, pointing up, waiting for a break in the laughter. “Would you prefer to go first or second?” Hindy asked, and when Teleki said second they laughed all over again—except for Mrs. Hindy, who reached forward (Sándor reproducing her movement for the benefit of the audience), and tenderly stroked Teleki’s cheek.

  It was decided that the uninjured soldier would go first, since he was the heaviest and needed two men to lift him within reach of the first rung of the ladder. He would see whether there were snipers present, and draw their fire away from the manhole, hopefully without getting his head blown off. Next would come Teleki, whom the commander could boost up alone, and who’d then help, from above, with the delicate job of heaving up the injured soldier, as well as the voluminous Mrs. Hindy, and finally Hindy himself.

  The soldier nodded, taking a long swig from a bottle of Napolean brandy he said he’d found floating in the sewer, then stepped onto the hands held out to him and reached up for the ladder, crawling up it quickly and pushing open the grate. Click. There was the sound of a firing pin hitting a dud cartridge. Looking up, they saw the soldier staring directly into the barrel of a Soviet gun, though in the next second he’d thrust the bottle of brandy into the Russian’s face, rolled quickly out of the hole, and ran, the Soviet soldier giving his head a shake, and then chasing after him. Within seconds, Hindy was holding out his hands for Teleki, who looked at them, placed his foot tentatively into the knitted fingers, then boosted himself up, only to have Hindy remove his hands the instant he’d grabbed the rung, leaving him dangling there, too weak to pull himself up and too afraid to fall back into the sewer, from which there would be no second chance at escape. Hindy and the injured soldier were laughing again, but not Mrs. Hindy, who was telling them to stop and trying to reach up, to help him, only to be met by Teleki’s gaze, desperate and pitiless, as he placed his boot squarely in the middle of her upturned face and pushed off, feeling her nose crack under the sole. Then he was up the ladder, rung over rung, and out the manhole and running, while they called after him to help pull them out.

  Sándor stopped, intending to continue, but the audience had begun booing in Teleki’s direction, the sound growing louder and louder until he left the stage.

  Strangely, Teleki slept very well that night. There was something about surrender that was incredibly calming, as if the loss of desire could compensate for defeat. But by the middle of the next day he was squirming again, for his agent was sitting across the table from him in the café sliding across one article, feature, and editorial after another, all of them reporting on the “creative sabotage” of his lectures. In keeping with Teleki’s recent luck, the writers devoted far more space to Sándor than to him, mainly because none of them had been able to dig up a single thing about his nemesis. They were fascinated by this blind man tapping his way out of nowhere to deliver his long apocalyptic monologues, setting the record straight and exposing the liars. In these articles Sándor was a moral force, and Teleki a con man.

  “There’s one here that speculates on whether you guys are working together,” said the agent, pushing across a copy of the New York Times. Teleki glanced at it for a second and then quietly told his agent he was quitting.

  “Quitting!” the agent responded. “You can’t quit!”

  “I think I just need to disappear for a while,” said Teleki. “Once this dies down we can talk about what to do next.”

  “We? There is no we,” the agent told him. “Not if you quit!”

  Teleki looked at him, and in an instant realized what had happened. “You’ve been talking to Sándor, haven’t you? What, you’re representing both of us?”

  His agent looked out the window, then back at him. “You know how often something like this comes around? A sleeper like this?”

  “Tonight’s my last show,” said Teleki, rising from the table.

  It wasn’t like Teleki to fulfill a contract—or any other kind of promise for that matter—if he didn’t want to, and yet he found himself fighting the impulse to just walk away. Maybe he wanted to prove to Sándor that he wasn’t afraid, that he couldn’t be so easily chased away, that he could take whatever was thrown at him. But there was a more dangerous realization as well, and all that afternoon he seemed on the verge of confronting it only to get scared and turn away, channelling what he felt into a rage so acute that more than once he was seen talking to himself, having imaginary arguments with Sándor from which he always emerged with the decisive victory. By nightfall though, shortly before he was due onstage, Teleki finally admitted to himself that Sándor’s descriptions of the man using two children to get out of
military service, or exposed by Pfeffer-Wildenbruch as a totally expendable soldier, or being mocked by Hindy and his men for cowardice, was not without a certain comfort, as if there might be something to gain from having your stories turned inside out, from having the hard moral decision—whether to lie or tell the truth—taken away from you.

  And when Teleki finally took the stage that night, standing on the podium, he was no longer the showman of six months ago, when Sándor had first turned up at his lectures, nor even of the day before yesterday, when he’d tried to defend himself. There was something serious in him now, as if having come to the end of all this, having failed to defend himself, he was beyond loss, free, unconcerned for his reputation.

  It was in his eyes, the need to survive, irrespective of honour or glory or anything else, as if he was once again looking at what Sándor had begun to describe, standing to interrupt Teleki five minutes into the lecture: the worst of what happened in the siege, all those men forced to take part in a breakout that should have happened months earlier, and which was now little more than a mass human sacrifice.

  He remembered the morning, February 11, when a rumour went round that the radio operators had begun destroying their equipment; remembered the illusions many of the soldiers clung to: that only Romanians were guarding the breakout point, that they’d run the minute they saw the horde of fascist soldiers; that it would be no more than a half-hour march through the empty city to the place where German reinforcements were waiting; that, absurdly, the Russians were no match for the tactical brilliance of the Nazi and Arrow-Cross commanders. Like Sándor, Teleki knew that Veresváry had assembled his men at the Bécsi Gate before the march, that they were hit by a bombardment out of nowhere, their bodies ripped open, dismembered, even before they’d had a chance to set out. He could have followed Sándor word for word in recounting what only a very few men—a mere three percent of the 28,000 who set out that day—could recount seeing, or refuse to recount, crushed as they were by recurring nightmares of that three kilometres of city, so overwhelming that to begin speaking of it would be to never speak of anything else again. Mortar fire along avenues and boulevards. Flares hanging in the sky overhead. Soldiers screaming in a rush of animal frenzy, all semblance of reason gone as they realized the Soviets were stationed along the route—that they’d prepared for the breakout, that tanks and rockets and snipers were in place to kill every single one of them—now crushed into doorways, stumbling in the dark, crawling over comrades missing arms and legs and begging to be shot—one last mercy for which no one could spare the time—pushed on by those behind them, a river of flesh squeezed out between the buildings bordering Széna and Széll Kálmán Square, into a night kaleidoscopic with shells, tracer bullets, flares, panzerfausts, the light at the end of machine guns flashing without pause, a city shattered into ever more impossible configurations—a maze without discernible routes, choices, even the certainty of dead ends.

  There was a pause in the auditorium at the end of this. Then Sándor, gathering himself up, began to speak again, his glasses aimed at Teleki. “This is what you saw when you emerged from the sewers. This is what you’d supported—you and the men like you—so eager to champion Horthy when he signed with the Nazis, and then, when he was deposed for wanting to break with them, to shift your support to Hitler’s puppet, Szálasi, and the Arrow-Cross. Honour! you said. Bravery! The nation above all! But it was always someone else who paid for this allegiance, wasn’t it? Not you. You slithered out of every situation, every duty you so loudly insisted upon, all those high standards and noble causes you so loudly proclaimed—always the job of someone else. And at the end of all that, in the aftermath, when you saw the breakout, realized what you’d done . . .”

  “You went blind,” whispered Teleki into the microphone. “You went blind.”

  “I’m talking about you!”

  “No you’re not,” said Teleki, and he pushed back the lectern and walked off the raised platform and up the auditorium steps to where Sándor was standing, who drew back as Teleki approached. “This story you’ve been telling is your own, Sándor.”

  “It’s yours!” Sándor shouted. “You know it’s yours!”

  Then Teleki, in the most inspired performance of his career, threw his arms around the blind man whispering, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” just loud enough to be picked up by the microphone pinned to his lapel.

  He had tightened his hold until Sándor stopped struggling, and all the while he’d continued to whisper soothingly of how this was Sándor’s public confession, how he could not have described the things he’d described unless he’d seen them, or known the things he knew unless he’d been there. He said he knew Sándor could still see, and that what had darkened his eyes was not physical in nature, but moral. Sándor had shouted and hollered and tried to fight him off, but Teleki merely continued to hold him, and the audience had inclined their heads, finally, in sympathy, as if they’d never for a second thought of Sándor as anything other than a refugee from himself, using Teleki’s lectures to disclose his conscience in the only way he could—obliquely, by projecting his guilt and shame onto someone else. They even clapped when Teleki finally let go of the exhausted, defeated Sándor and taking him by the hand led him from the hall, down the steps, out the back exit off the wings of the stage, where the blind man flung Teleki’s hand away, told him he should be ashamed of himself, and stormed off as fast as the tentative tapping of his cane would allow, tripping over the first curb he came to. Teleki smiled.

  And he’d continued smiling late into the night, wrapped in his robe in the hotel, drinking the champagne his agent had sent up along with a note of apology Teleki never read, already knowing what it said. He gazed out over the city and wondered what Sándor might be doing in it now, who he was with, where he was headed. For that was Sándor’s way, Teleki had realized, incapable of functioning, of getting from one place to the next, unless there was someone, preferably a crowd, to help him, as if his blindness was a way of restoring people to some sense of community, as if by helping him they were ultimately helping themselves, as if there was another map of the world, not of nations and cities but intersections of need, of what draws us together.

  Sándor’s world, Teleki thought. His. And he wondered for a moment what it was like—all those people working together—having long ago learned to count on nobody and nothing, groping his way all alone through the darkest of places.

  The Society of Friends

  UJZA GALAMBOS was the lover of both Frigyes and Aurél, but her death solved nothing, the two men continued to fight over her until the end of their lives. For instance, Frigyes would lend Aurél an outboard motor, which Aurél never returned, though he complained about it, telling Frigyes it was without a doubt the shittiest piece of equipment he’d ever attached to the back of his boat, sputtering so bad it felt like he was sitting on “a goddamn earthquake,” sending up blue clouds so noxious there was “no point,” he said, “in even thinking you’re anywhere outdoors,” and guzzling so much gas it was a wonder he hadn’t run dry the first time he used it, stranded in the middle of some lake rowing half the night just to get home.

  Frigyes took back his gift, repaired it, and returned it to Aurél, who yelled at him that it still wasn’t working right. “You give me this motor, you say it’s fixed,” Aurél shouted, standing in Frigyes’s driveway holding the piece of equipment as if he wanted to throw it in his face, “but then I have to buy new spark plugs for it. Why can’t you ever just do something properly?”

  Frigyes smiled. “Perhaps you would allow me to take you out to dinner as a way of apologizing.” It was just the sort of gesture—so sweet, so kind—that drove Aurél crazy.

  But Aurél wasn’t listening. He was gazing up at the bedroom window where Lujza was looking down on them, a sheet draped around her shoulders, smiling and waving. Frigyes followed his friend’s gaze, then waved at Lujza too, and when she blew both of them kisses the two men glared at each oth
er, though what they were really doing was angling their faces just so, trying to catch more of that windblown affection than the other guy.

  The next week Frigyes went over to Aurél’s and offered to pay for the spark plugs. Aurél told him he’d not only have to pay for the spark plugs but also the time it had taken to go buy them. When Frigyes asked how much, Aurél said, “Twenty-five dollars an hour. That’s how much I’m worth. It took me four hours to get them out, go to the store, find new ones, pay, come back, put them in.” He held out his hand. Frigyes smiled, dipped into his wallet, and pulled out a hundred dollars. “These are all twos and ones!” Aurél yelled. “Don’t you have anything bigger?”

  “It’s all I’ve got. Let me make it up to you. I’ll mow your lawn.”

  “Last time you mowed my lawn you left big clumps of grass everywhere!”

  “Then I’ll fix the transmission on your truck.”

  “Last time you did that I had to go out and buy new transmission fluid! There isn’t a mechanic in the world who’d make his customer do that!”

  Frigyes smirked, deciding not to mention that no mechanic in the world would have done all those repairs for free.

  Frigyes and Aurél were friends of mine, DPs like me, escaped from Hungary in 1956. We spent a lot of time together at the Szécsényi Club in Toronto, especially in the early days, playing tarok, bowling in the wooden lanes out back, trying to tell the most hilarious joke, the two of them always fiercely competitive with each other, though in those days it was part of the camaraderie, the fun, no hard feelings. I still have pictures of them, kept in a shoebox—Aurél and Frigyes drinking Metaxa at a picnic table; Aurél and Frigyes standing in front of some trout they’d caught; Aurél and Frigyes dressed as shepherds on the puszta—old colour photographs now faded to a golden haze, as if to commemorate how inseparable they’d been, long before Lujza arrived, long after her death. In those last years they became an old bickering couple eating at one of Toronto’s two Hungarian restaurants, everyone would see them there, Frigyes treating them to appetizers, sometimes several main courses, wine, to which Aurél would respond, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Well, that was pricey. It cost five times what I normally spend at a restaurant, if we’d gone to the place I recommended. So I guess you owe me four more dinners.” After all, he hadn’t asked Frigyes to take him somewhere so expensive. It was the sort of insane logic, a complete lack of gratitude, that would have caused most people’s brains to melt, though the truth is it was a torment tailormade for Frigyes, who rolled his eyes and shook his head and then smiled that sickly smile and treated his friend to four more dinners.