Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  For the next few days, Vera hoped Lujza would never be found. She hoped her vanishing would be the occasion for more stories. That she’d waltzed off to new adventures. New men. Finer clothes. Riches. The usual dreams. But four days later they fished her out of Lake Ontario. For some reason Lujza was not wearing the clothes she’d worn that last night at our house. She had on a black cocktail dress, some pearls Frigyes had bought, and a large hat, its peacock feathers matted and encased in ice, that she’d tied with string under her chin as if she was afraid the tides would carry it away, the strap of a purse tangled around her thin forearm. There was a letter inside leaving her entire “fortune”—that was the word she used—“to all the esteemed members of the Szécsényi Club of Toronto.” It was written in Hungarian.

  Holló hired a lawyer to sort out Lujza’s effects. It was also Holló, gossipy as ever, who let everyone know what day the lawyer was planning to go to Lujza’s to take an inventory. By the time he got there a crowd was waiting on the front steps of the semi-detached house Aurél had put a down payment on in 1963, and Frigyes had paid the rent on ever since. Carefully, the lawyer opened the front door with the key Lujza had folded into her waterlogged will. The lawyer asked everyone to stay back, not to come in. He needed to take an accurate inventory, without anyone tampering with (i.e., stealing) “the personal effects of the deceased.” For a while everyone did as asked, but gradually one person stepped over the threshold, then made room for someone else, edging in a little further, and soon they were tiptoeing between the twilit rooms, looking at the books and paintings, then touching things, poking around in the roll-top desk in the hall. It wasn’t long before they were actively searching.

  We were there, too, Vera and I, standing on the front doormat, gazing in as the lawyer came down the stairs and ran around trying to get everyone to keep their hands off Lujza’s things, when Anikó suddenly shouted that she’d found something, and everyone stopped what they were doing and gathered around her, forming a circle the lawyer couldn’t get through. It was at this point that Vera told me to wait, she’d be back.

  Anikó had found a ledger, one of those old-style account books, a black hardcover with silver lettering, tabs along the side. As the crowd formed, Anikó began reading what was written in it, notes that were somewhere between a list and a diary, recording each of the things Frigyes or Aurél had done for Lujza, including place and date and time, and beside these were figures, a code that repeated over and over with only slight variations, consistent for each man but with considerable differences between them. “It’s the sex acts she performed for Aurél and Frigyes,” said Anikó. Erzsi took up the book and tilted it, her eyes snapping open, and she said it wasn’t code at all but tiny X-rated cartoons. The book went around, everyone took a look, though there was more than one person who didn’t see it—people fucking. Eventually Anikó got the book again and paged forward, then lifted her face in false horror and said, “Look, here, now there are three figures having sex, not just two!” and a dozen hands started grabbing for the ledger.

  I can’t remember whether it was Aurél or Frigyes who, shouldering past me into the house, ripped the book out of her hands. Vera had phoned them, but they were already on their way, and in five seconds they accomplished what the lawyer had not managed in a half hour, grabbing everyone, women included, by the scruff of the neck and tossing them out.

  The last thing I saw, before Vera and I left as well, was the two men sitting on the couch with the ledger between them. They were running their fingers over it as if they might erase the dirty fingerprints of all those intruders, as if they could make the record of their relationship with Lujza pristine again. But looking closer I saw that Frigyes was nodding, and Aurél was hissing at him, his finger moving faster and faster in pointing out this or that, as if the more Frigyes agreed with him the less proof Aurél felt he had. Vera and I walked down the street and got into our car in silence. She’d seen what Aurél and Frigyes were doing too, and as the car traveled west we felt our togetherness as if we were separated by a hair, which was nothing compared to the miles of concrete those two men had put between themselves, and putting it there cemented their relationship forever. Lujza had been right after all, she was just the medium, a crushed telephone, through which they communicated their love for each other. All the way home I had them in front of me, Frigyes and Aurél, pointing to the ledger and arguing over which of them had loved Lujza the best.

  The Miracles of Saint Marx

  NE OF THE WEIRDER PEOPLE to surface during the era of Hungarian communism (and it was a time of much weirdness) was a priest by the name of Monsignor József Szent-Mihály. There were a number of rumours concerning the man—that he was a fugitive in disguise; that he was a government agent rooting out anti-revolutionary groups; that he was somebody who just really, really wanted to be a priest—but none was more fantastical than the one about the book he was writing.

  The title of the manuscript (according to rumour) was “A Chronicle of the Miracles of Communism,” and it contained stories of such impossibility that people couldn’t stop recounting them—from Nyírábrány right across to Sopron. Naturally, this chronicle was a serious concern for the communist authority, for Marx had spent the better part of his life arguing that there were no such things as miracles—that we, and only we, made up our fate. And our fate, in fact, was to realize exactly this: that the collective was all and the individual nothing—never mind what the capitalists and Christians said—and that it was the job of the state to help everyone remember this (with brutal force if necessary) because without it there would never be a better world.

  But the stories were so interesting!

  For instance, there was the story of Vasily Baazova, one of those unfortunate men in the gulags who were designated as “cows” by their fellow prisoners. These cows would be approached, told that an escape was being planned, and invited along. Then, once the prisoners had made their getaway and were out on the barren landscape with nothing but snow and ice for hundreds of miles, these cows would be killed and eaten by the other prisoners, who obviously hadn’t had the chance to pack sandwiches for the trip. The search parties sent out from the gulags would find their corpses drained of blood and cut open, their kidneys gone—since blood and kidneys are the only parts of the human body you can eat raw, and since lighting a fire to cook the rest would have given away the escapees’ location. In this case, however, Vasily somehow managed to fend off the attempt on his life and get away, living for six weeks on the frozen steppes (which was five weeks longer than the other prisoners lived), drinking melted snow and eating pages from Das Kapital, which he’d only brought along as fire starter. When the patrols finally caught him, they couldn’t believe it, so he offered them a few pages, and after a bit of argument they agreed to try them, only to find that Marx’s writing was actually quite good, with a taste somewhere between kotleti and bitochki.

  Then there was the one about Ivan Baryatinsky, who was kicked out of the Party for refusing to accede to the will of the state, and afterwards spent the next three decades wandering the streets of Moscow with placards strapped to his chest announcing how Lenin, and then Stalin, had failed to practise Marxism. Miraculously, he was not only left in peace to do this, but his situation always elicited sympathy from those he met, who defied the authorities by feeding and clothing him. Stranger yet, anyone who came into contact with Baryatinsky couldn’t help but continue to extend this sympathy to others, so that wherever Baryatinsky went there was a sudden flowering of human fellowship, like a trail of roses left by a saint.

  There was the story of Beryx Baboescu, the mechanical engineer charged with coming to grips with “the Romani problem” in Romania, which meant getting them to give up their itinerant ways and settle down and begin labouring like everyone else for the state. Baboescu’s solution, in a visionary moment, was to create the blueprints for what he called “The Mobile Town of the Proletariat,” houses and stores and factories, an entire villa
ge in fact, mounted on stilt legs, powered by enormous batteries and cogwheels, that would follow the Romani wherever they went, so relentless in its pursuit that it would wear them out, forcing them to accept defeat and settle down. Shortly after presenting his plan to the Soviet Council, Baboescu was taken somewhere “for his own good,” but almost immediately there were sightings of his mobile town all over the Romanian countryside—reports of forests mown down by its passage, large depressions where the stilt legs had left their imprint in sand, stone, asphalt. Even worse, it was reported that the Romani, instead of being harassed by “Baboescuville,” ended up realizing—after fleeing in terror for some months—that it was exactly the sort of place they were looking for, the sort of place where you could settle down but still get in a bit of sightseeing. And so they ended up moving in, taking up residence, travelling the country in a little utopia that was so much closer to what Marx had envisioned that everyone else in Romania wanted to live there too. It became such a source of shame to the communists—whose towns and cities could never live up to comparisons—that it was all they could do to threaten and imprison and execute anyone who mentioned it.

  The story that was to occupy agent Flóri Nándorrfy of the Hungarian secret police—otherwise known as the ÁVÓ—was her own, the one Szent-Mihály would come to call “the Nándorrfy Network.” At the start, though, her job was simply to find the priest, and his fellow counter-revolutionaries, and stop these subversive stories once and for all.

  Insofar as Flóri was concerned, she was famous too, though to a much lesser degree. Back in 1945, at the end of the Second World War and the siege of Budapest, she’d infiltrated the so-called Vannay Battalion, a combat unit put together by László Vannay, a right-wing fanatic who decided to support the Nazis even when all was lost, rounding up a bunch of old men and boys—none of whom had proper combat training—and sending them out against the Red Army. It was suicide of course, and when Vannay ran out of old men and kids, he’d get more by raiding the cellars where civilians were hiding, enlisting those who could fight by showing them his pistol and offering them a choice between two deaths—one immediate, one probably later. As the official records had it, she’d disguised herself as a boy, infiltrated the battalion, and helped the Red Army dispatch a number of its more “dedicated” agents, contributing in her small way to the eventual defeat of the Nazis and the Arrow-Cross Party, and winning for herself a number of commendations and decorations and a plum job assisting with the Soviet spread of terror once the war went cold. It was in this capacity that she was assigned to Szent-Mihály. It was, as Comrade Maxim Zabrovsky, her superior, put it with a wink, the sort of “tactical betrayal” she “excelled at.” Flóri agreed, for it was exactly this reputation that had kept her alive, useful to the state, though not alive and well, for she had been drinking for years by then, quick nips during the day, and entire bottles by night.

  She couldn’t remember when the rumours of the Monsignor and his chronicle first began, and this was itself a problem as she started out, winding her way through the reports, vague reminiscences from men and women and even children who said they’d seen the book, even held it in their hands, or spoken to people who’d done so, or heard its contents read or recited (even, she discovered, in the way of bedtime stories)—for without a point of origin she could not measure their distance from the truth. Mainly, she found herself in the usual bars and outlying villages, broken-down places, filled with people the Soviet had always prided itself on helping, but for whom their arrival—preceded as it was by bullets and fire, by soldiers killing and dying, by cities in flames—had only been another event in the ongoing cycle of deprivation. She tried to look the part, and she needed to, because everyone was suspect now, you couldn’t count on your unimportance, your expendability, to save you, not in a time when people were imprisoned and sent to work camps and executed to maintain a sense of arbitrariness, when anyone at any time could be picked up without a reason, as if the state’s caprice could keep consciences clean. These people could no longer sit around complaining about the local councils or the soldiers or the politicians as they once had about the emperor, the nobles, the bourgeoisie. She infiltrated them by appealing to their sense of wonder—speaking of things so distant from reality they seemed to have no bearing on the state—so that when they told her what she needed to hear they had no idea of the magnitude of their offense. She made sure they saw how drunk she was, slurring her words and gazing around in disorientation, so that they could also believe she was in the midst of a blackout, an episode she wouldn’t remember—that she was, in fact, one of them.

  But the drunkenness was real. Looking back, the memory of those times would appear to Flóri not as a series of dates—discreet occasions—but as one long moment, a smear of occurrence, filled with faces any one of which she could have picked out, accused, had imprisoned, making up the reasons and evidence as she went along, even after the fact. It was how she’d been working for the last two or three years, an agent of arbitrariness herself, bent on folding the world into her personal chaos.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of the book,” the man told her, fingering his collar. “I’ve heard of you, too.” She looked at him, surprised, but he was already on his feet, moving into the mass of people going crazy in the bar—because it was already two in the morning now, those hours after closing time when drink opened onto hallucinations, transgressions of law, of not only what was permitted but what was conceivable. Some were dancing, alone or in pairs or in groups of four or more, including one man doing a soft shoe under that soggy part of the roof where the rain came in—and by the time Flóri heard the man’s voice again she was sitting on a toilet watching the dirty water inch up around her shoes.

  “The Vannay Battalion,” she heard. A whisper. Flóri shook her head, unsure if it came from the stall to the left or right, or whether it had come, as it had so many times before, from somewhere inside her skull. And, as quickly as that, out came the rest: “You were hiding in the cellar during the siege. It was your parents who cut your hair, thinking that if you looked like a boy you might escape the fate of so many women then—the Red Army coming in, sore, tired, traumatized beyond morality—and the free looting they were granted by their commanders didn’t only extend to pockets and suitcases and wristwatches, did it? But Vannay came along first, forced you to join up, and he did something to your parents that made sure you would never tell him who you really were. But you revealed yourself in the end, didn’t you?”

  By this point Flóri was already up, drunkenly and unsuccessfully yanking on her pants, stumbling out the door, ripping open the stall beside her, then all the others, gazing overhead, running her eyes along the floor. He was nowhere, not a footprint or a strand of toilet paper or a running tap to mark that he’d ever been there.

  In the days that followed, Flóri kept her flat cap down over her eyes, moving between the homes of people she’d seen in the bar, not many of whom (like her) remembered what they’d been doing that night, at those hours, never mind the person whose face she described. But Flóri had some of them arrested anyhow, and so they opened up with all sorts of information, none of it useful or true—talking and talking just to say something, to avoid the admission of guilt that came with keeping silent.

  How could he have known what happened to her back then, during the siege? There were no real records, no photographs, no eyewitnesses, nothing. And while there was suspicion among the members of the Party as to the extent of her “infiltration” of the Vannay Battalion, that suspicion was more the standard relationship between people, especially in the Party, than anything derived from evidence. Yet he knew.

  At nights she stayed up thinking about his face, sketching it again and again on a pad of paper. At first, she thought his face looked weathered, stripped away, disfigured to the point of being less than what it had once been, as if his skin and bones bore out the wasting that takes place in a person as they become legendary, when identity becomes the property of tr
ue believers rather than the self, but as the days went on and she moved along the track of stories and possible sightings she thought back to how he’d looked in the bar that night and changed her mind. The face was less than it was only because it had been added to—as if he was wearing bits and pieces of the faces of others, as if he’d carried away with him a trace of those he met, others like him, on the periphery of a state that wasn’t supposed to have a periphery, that was supposed to have abolished it—taken what was best in them, but without absorbing it, as if it was possible to give them room, to maintain them as they had been, in that place where he had the most to lose himself—his appearance. Flóri realized he’d taken something of her as well—the secret of her time with Vannay—something she was determined to get back, and then to destroy once and for all by destroying him. Except of course that in some way he’d already given it back, for in allowing her to revisit the siege, even if only with him, he’d also allowed her to testify to those she’d betrayed, to speak their memory rather than hide it behind science and ideology and booze—even from herself. The miracles and fantastic stories that surrounded him were only camouflage for what Szent-Mihály really offered, the most ordinary of escapes.

  She was at mass the second time they met—or, more accurately, made contact, because once again he was gone before she was aware of him. This was the time—the early 1950s—when Cardinal Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, had been arrested—threatened, starved, refused sleep for days on end, had broken glass forced up his ass, made to sign documents he’d repudiated in a public letter prior to his arrest (saying anything he signed while in the hands of his interrogators would be invalid, the result of “human weakness”)—all because he’d refused to cede churches and schools to the communist authority. It was the time when the Party sent agents (known as “snitches”) to mass to transcribe the sermons of priests for use in show trials afterwards. A time when being Catholic meant you couldn’t be in the Party, couldn’t rise in the ranks of the communist aristocracy, couldn’t get a decent job. A time when people often met this way, in churches makeshift or in ill repair, according to a schedule that somehow arrived to them, along routes so twisted you couldn’t imagine the landscape it had been carried through. But of course the Party knew of them, and so the Monsignor knew Flóri would be there, not so much recording every word as figuring out what she would say the priest had said. She was sitting in a pew when someone slid an envelope over her shoulder. By the time she’d grabbed it, glanced inside, and quickly folded the flap back in alarm and wheeled around there was only a little boy, staring up, clutching the coin the Monsignor had given him for passing on the information, proud of finally having something to put in the collection basket.