Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  The problems began three decades later, in 1975, by which point the rest of László’s siblings—István, Adél and Anikó—had also left Hungary for Canada, and settled into low-paying jobs, and raised children who they hoped would do much better than they had. It was Adél, two years younger than László but still fifty-one at the time this all happened, who first caught a glimpse of Mária at the intersection of Yonge and King, where Adél worked as a janitor in an office building. The rule in the family was that Mária wasn’t to be talked about, mainly for Krisztián’s sake, but also for László’s (though both Adél and Anikó sometimes wondered why they’d worked so hard to spare László, since it was Mária, not him, who’d truly suffered). Yet this sighting was so unnerving Adél just had to bring it up—“I saw the strangest thing the other day; I’m sure it was Mária. . .”—at which point István, older than László by a year, yelled out, “This is great cake!” as if he could change the subject. But Adél caught his signal in time and went into a long phony coughing fit that made everyone jump up to help her and forget what she’d just said.

  Adél, who was twenty-one at the time of the siege of Budapest, had seen what happened to women afterwards because she saw what had happened to Mária when she finally turned up, very much alive, six weeks after László and Krisztián left for Canada. She was in the care of Béla Kerepesi, a decorated war hero and communist, who sent word to Boldizsár that the family should come see her, also warning them that her memory had only recently returned, that she was “still fragile, almost broken,” and needed to be treated gently. Boldizsár mulled it over for a few days, then called together István, Adél and Anikó to give them the news, insisting that the rest of the family should not know about this—Mária’s survival—at least not yet, not until they’d gone and seen her and determined the extent of the damage, and under no circumstances should they tell her where László and Krisztián had gone. When they finally had gone to Béla’s place, everyone acted toward Mária as if nothing had happened. It was easier to do this than try to imagine what sort of sympathy such a person might need. In fact, on that day three decades later, when Adél glimpsed Mária buying a hot dog from a vendor at Yonge and King, she saw that her sister-in-law was still wearing the look she’d worn back in 1946—like someone trying to catch a departing train. Immediately Adél stopped what she was doing, wiping dust off plastic ferns in the lobby of the Bingeman Building, and rushed outside and called to her, but Mária only looked around in bewilderment and then rushed on.

  The second person in the family to see Mária was István. He was standing on a subway platform when the doors opened and she brushed by him with a plastic bag full of what looked like apples. István stepped into the car, waited as the doors closed, and then with a shudder realized who he’d just seen. As the subway pulled out of the station, his face was pressed to the glass, and his hands to either side of that, white and bloodless and mashed against the window as his eyes veered crazily from left to right searching the darkened platform for her face.

  Finally, Anikó saw Mária in a Persian carpet store, or, more accurately, she heard her voice. It seemed like every time she peeled back the corner of a carpet to see the one underneath she caught Mária’s low tone, speaking in Hungarian of course, haggling with a vendor over his prices, but when she dropped the carpet in surprise and looked around, there was nobody in the place other than the merchants and the other ladies who had no better way of spending a Thursday than by looking at things they couldn’t afford.

  The truth was, Mária was angry at the fact that the man behind the stall was charging five forints a kilo for what were clearly rotten apples, using the usual trick of displaying the ripe ones up front, but then filling your bag from the half-rotten pile under the counter. After a while, she began to shout and stamp her feet loud enough to scare off the other customers, at which point the vendor decided it wasn’t worth it and gave the five forints back, waving her off with the usual curses about being a whore and her mother being a whore and her grandmother being a whore and all the rest. It was at this moment that Mária felt an inexplicable shame, not because of the vendor’s language—she, like most of the women who frequented the market, was used to that—but because of the odd feeling that someone else, someone who knew her intimately, was watching. She hurried from the covered market, walked along the körut, down toward the Danube, where the breeze coming off the water streamed away the ghost that had suddenly latched onto her. After twenty minutes she felt armoured in the present again, protected not only against the ghost, but against the past, what she called “the other Márias”—the one whose father had died in the First World War and whose mother had died in the second; the one with the torn thighs and face; the one who’d been taken away in a Russian military truck for more of the same but had escaped when they stopped at a checkpoint; the one who’d then wandered the city until she was discovered by Béla, a soldier who nursed her back to health, who provided medicine and doctors and therapists during the long year of her physical recovery, and who, despite having fallen in love with her, delivered news of Mária to the family patriarch, Boldizsár, when her memory returned, and then convinced her to stay with him when it became clear that the Kálmán family was not prepared to deal with the silences and weeping and raging violence, when it became clear that they did not want her. They crowded her, these Márias did, making claims on her body as if it was common property, but there was only room enough for one, and Mária, this Mária, was determined to make it her own. She was the wife of Béla Kerepesi, a decorated war hero, a wonderful man, and a member of Rákosi’s inner circle, one who was spoken about in the Party as “the future of communism in Hungary.”

  But it was the other ghosts that Mária had the most trouble repressing—those people she’d once known, those gone or dead or escaped, especially Krisztián, her son. Unlike the Márias, these ghosts were not there to claim her, but to remind her, with their silences and empty gazes, that despite being ghosts they were more present, more real, than she was—that Mária was empty, that she’d become someone else too completely and too easily to say there had ever been a real Mária to begin with.

  When László stepped through the door, Adél and István and Anikó would stop talking about how they’d seen her. They would stop talking altogether, as if they had nothing to talk about at all, and had been eagerly awaiting his arrival, the conversation-bringer. Naturally, László would be disconcerted by this, not being an especially talkative guy, and would wrack his brains for something with which to break the silence.

  This often took the form of his retirement, since László was frightened by the time it had opened up for him, releasing odd impulses kept in check by the work he’d done for the last twenty-five years—collecting garbage for the city—impulses he hadn’t even known were there. Now, it was all he could do to keep from drinking, from eating himself to death, all he could do to keep from looking at the magazines on the top rack in the corner store. Where had these appetites come from?

  Of course, he never told any of this to his brother and sisters, who wouldn’t have understood. Instead, he asked them what hobbies he should pursue. But there was something odd—something suppressed—in their responses. For instance, he mentioned bowling, something he’d done as a teenager, heading down to the outdoor alleys with their hand-carved pins, the balls you had to hurl as hard as possible to make them go up the curved wall at the end and roll back along the trough. But when he mentioned that he was considering signing up at a place at Spadina and Eglinton that had a seniors’ discount, István looked at Adél and back again. “Spadina and Eglinton . . .” he began, “subway stop there . . . uh, not a great place for an old man to be going to alone. I mean, it’s, well . . . you never know who you might run into.”

  László looked at him. He was used to István’s halting manner, but this explanation was so cautious it was nonsensical.

  The other thing László thought of doing was enrolling in a cooking course,
something he’d only learned to do marginally well after leaving Hungary and having to raise Krisztián by himself. “There’s that place near where you work,” he said to Adél, “that college. They have an adult cooking course Krisztián’s been telling me about.”

  “You cooked very well for Krisztián while he was growing up,” replied Adél frantically, “and it’s terribly ungrateful of him, after all that, to tell you to take a cooking course. If he has some bitterness over your cooking, why doesn’t he just come out and say it?” she continued, glancing quickly from László to Anikó and back again.

  László couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “And the other thing you don’t want to do,” added Anikó without even waiting for László’s next idea, “is to shop for Persian carpets. There’s no way they’re going to match with the décor in your apartment.”

  László didn’t stick around after that, scratching his head, grabbing his jacket, and heading into the city, despite the combined efforts of István and Adél and Anikó to make him go straight home, or, better yet, if he was serious about needing a hobby, selling his place in Toronto and relocating, say, to Kitchener or Kingston or Guelph, where István had heard there was really good fly-fishing. “Ever thought about doing more fly-fishing?” István said, to which László didn’t even bother replying, except to shake his head and say, “Maybe you need a hobby—all three of you.”

  Anikó was convinced that the ghost of Mária was seeking out László in order to exact revenge. “How do you know she’s not looking for us?” István asked, angry that Anikó had never for a second thought of herself as sharing in László’s guilt. “Remember how we let Béla take her off our hands? We did nothing to help her. We never even told her we were planning on following László!”

  “I don’t remember that. “

  “We did,” answered Adél. “You wanted it kept from her more than any of us. You said she couldn’t travel in the condition she was in. That’s what you said.”

  “I was trying to protect the family! What do you think would have happened if she’d had one of her hysterical fits at the border?”

  “You said we should listen to Béla and let him take care of her.”

  “That was Father’s idea.”

  “Your and Father’s idea! And you were the one who talked Mária into it.”

  “That’s a lie! I remember she laughed and cried every time I visited her in Béla’s apartment. You wouldn’t believe the craziness. I visited her more than anyone else. It was the two of you who said there was no point in inviting her to come back to Mátyásföld because we were all leaving anyway.”

  “Béla was a communist by then, and so was Mária! They could have given us away!” shouted Anikó, thrusting her face in front of Adél’s.

  “We left her no one to turn to but Béla,” whispered István.

  After his sisters left, István sat in his chair and dreamed of the technology he might have had back then—Hungary in the mid-1940s—Polaroid cameras and photocopiers and tape recorders, so that he could have kept all the images and letters and conversations from that time not as they were remembered, but as they actually were. Because only he, of the three, would admit that they were guilty, that they had, each in his or her way—and however helpful or benign their motives now appeared—contributed to the distancing of Mária from the rest of the family—the slight, polite resistance they’d put up when Béla, sensing how there was no place for her at Mátyásföld, offered to keep Mária indefinitely; the regular bits of money put aside so that Anikó could go visit her with the food and clothing Mária no longer needed; the false admiration they showed on hearing that Béla was a rising star in the Communist Party; the pretence Boldizsár devised, and that they agreed upon, telling Mária that László and Krisztián had simply disappeared one day in 1946, whether they fled to the west or were arrested no one could say, so that she would stay with Béla knowing he had the best chance of finding them. The old man was hysterical when it came to Mária, forcing the three of them to swear on a Bible that they’d keep her whereabouts a secret from the rest of the family, “from László and Krisztián and Jenő and Angyalka and Cornél and Tívadar and Margó and . . .” On and on he went, listing every relation near and far, as if the information would only be safe if the three of them heard and agreed to every single name, leaving not one crack, not one solitary leak, in the conspiracy—which, of course, was impossible. “If any of them find out,” Boldizsár said, “they might tell László and he’ll be tortured the rest of his life out there in Canada, with no way to get back, no way to get her out. Or someone will want to bring Mária with us across the border, and you know we can’t risk that with the condition she’s in. Or they’ll want us to stay because of her, and that’s suicide with the way the ÁVÓ is coming after us, with the way that bastard, our good friend, Comrade Zoltán Erdész, is persecuting the family. We have to forget about her, there’s no other way.”

  It’s true that she would regularly trash the room when they came to visit—tearing paintings from the wall, throwing glassware, even ripping the bedding into thin strips—and that it took all three of them to hold her down, and that only when Béla came back into the room did she seem neutralized, content, docile. But all of these were still excuses, ways of justifying the family’s abandonment of her. They should have looked after Mária, should have made the sacrifice, instead of being so lazy, so eager to escape Hungary, that they convinced themselves that leaving her was the right thing to do.

  For István knew that her trauma was only part of it. After the war she had a look to her that was terrifying, a hunger for solace so absolute it left you looking for ways to escape. She took to draping her hair over her eyes, whose glitter was not an emanation of light but its disappearance, vacuumed up, coalescing to two sparks before being swallowed. That was part of it, but there was also the family’s inability—especially on the part of Boldizsár, whose dictates were absolute—to admit that in dumping Mária they were compromising their principles. Instead, they used Béla as a convenient excuse, as if it was Mária who wasn’t living up to the things the family believed in—the glories of Austro-Hungarian monarchy, political conservatism, national autonomy. It was she who was consorting with a communist, the enemy, and was thus a disgrace and liability. In any case, István thought now, it was clear she’d seen Hungary’s future better than anyone, and that in the absence of family she’d followed her intuition, surrounding herself with the sort of people who’d look after her, leaving no want unattended, for the next forty-five years.

  It worked out better than anyone (except Mária) could have imagined. Béla would wrap her in furs as he went out at night. The driver would bring the car around, whisking her off in a manner that was all too western, as if the Budapest she inhabited was not the city everyone else lived in, as if she, too, and not just the Kálmán family, had escaped to something better. Mária looked so good, in fact, that when Adél saw her next—as she was coming off a night shift, itchy with the disinfectants she used on toilets—it occurred to her that maybe she was not seeing a ghost at all. Mária looked radiant, what with her furs and jewellery, a face and hands untouched by work or worry.

  Adél went home and phoned István and Anikó, asking them whether it was possible that Mária too had emigrated to Canada, and struck it rich, and was looking far better for the passage of years than anyone had a right to expect. “You’re crazy,” replied István; and Anikó said, “You’ve been putting your nose too close to the disinfectant.”

  Try as she might Adél couldn’t convince them otherwise, even as she pointed out that traditionally ghosts only haunted those who had been responsible for their deaths, or who had caused them the greatest misery while they were alive, rarely appearing to those they hadn’t known. Yet here was Mária holding sidewalk conversations with taxi drivers, and God knew whom else. “No, no, no,” said István. “What we’ve got to figure out is how we’re going to get rid of her, exorcise her f
rom our lives.”

  Mária, for her part, would have liked to do what István, Adél and Anikó did—gone to a Catholic priest, who put them in touch with an exorcist, who in turn said the sighting of a ghost was highly unlikely, and a product of their guilt, and that what they needed was a solid hour each in the confessional. He added that he dealt with devils, and so wasn’t qualified to help with ghosts, even if marrying a communist meant that Mária was most likely visiting them from hell. “Try holy water,” he said. “A crucifix above the door, and one around your necks.” He thought a moment more. “And prayer, of course. As much as you can fit.” The three of them shook their heads and held a long argument about whether it was possible to follow the priest’s advice.

  For Mária, however, there was no such argument, she knew she couldn’t observe any of the rituals. It would compromise Béla to put up a single crucifix, not to mention the risk of visiting a priest to obtain holy water. If the regime ever heard about it—if word reached Rákosi—Béla would be given a one-way ticket to Moscow, and from there who knows? House arrest. Siberian work camps. A starring role in a show trial. No, if she was going to keep the ghosts away it would have to be through some method other than the charms and totems of Christianity.

  But there were so many ghosts! Anyone in her position would have had their hands full just beating back the past, but on top of it to be constantly running into the Kálmán family—to watch Adél in her janitor’s apron staring after her on the street; and István in his dirty overalls on the way to tending the gardens of those who were as wealthy as he’d hoped to be after leaving Hungary; and Anikó in her Westminster Mall uniform as she went from table to table in the food court clearing away the trays and plastic cutlery and greasy plates left by those too lazy to clean up after themselves. Looking at them, Mária was amazed and terrified by her spectral knowledge, the realization that they’d been too frightened of communism to realize that the free market had its own forms of humiliation, of hardscrabble poverty.