Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  Before I go further, I suppose I should provide another context for the telling of the tale. Mostly, I heard this story in the summertime, when my grandfather would awaken from his winter depressions and start talking again, and take me into the back garden of the Budapest apartment building where we lived. He’d sit on a folding chair under an elderflower tree, with me squatting at his feet, and repeat the long, elaborate narrative in between swilling five to six bottles of beer. Meanwhile, my grandmother would come up behind him and inject little bits of commentary alongside his narrative—lines of marginalia. For instance, when he described his return from the Andrássy ut prison—his wasted body, his bare and bleeding feet, his shaved head—she would say, “You were as fat and pampered as a pig for slaughter.” When he recalled how he’d talked and talked, feeding the Nazis long strings of misinformation, she’d turn and say, “You gave them everything they wanted, and so they gave you clean carpet slippers and roast turkey and all the potatoes you could stuff into your gullet.” And when he repeated, for the two hundredth time, how he had beaten the most skilled interrogator in the history of Hungary, she would turn away, shaking her head: “You became his best friend.”

  My grandmother’s problem, of course, was that she had no story—only a commentary. Without my grandfather and his tales she could say nothing. And I suspect that her unwillingness to go beyond these snide comments, to fully articulate the extent of grandfather’s guilt, even after all the condemnation heaped on him between 1945 and 1990—when he was briefly imprisoned again in a gulag, denied proper status under the Soviet regime, barred from employment and party membership—was partly because he had consistently maintained his innocence and partly because she wanted to believe in what he said, wanted to feel that all those years of sacrifice—when she worked triple time just to keep the family going—hadn’t been wasted on a traitor.

  My grandfather, meanwhile, had, from the time I was old enough to understand a sentence, my undivided attention. It was only later, after that incident in the doctor’s office, that cracks started to appear in his story, and my grandmother’s lament changed from a background noise into something integral to the tale, leaving me with the same kind of doubts that must have followed Mennyászky home after his long sessions in the torture chamber.

  It went like this. My grandfather maintained that the SS had been tailing him for days—ever since his last meeting with the Resistance (to which the Nazis had been tipped off by an informant)—before they finally apprehended him in the butcher shop (conversely, my grandmother held that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that the Nazis got lucky). Realizing that they were taking him to the Andrássy ut prison, and that they would try to get from him everything he knew, my grandfather decided on a unique strategy: instead of heroically holding out, maintaining a resolute silence through the beatings and electrocutions and fingernail removals, and instead of just giving them everything they wanted right up front, he decided to give them more information than they could handle.

  I can just see Mennyászky getting out of bed that April morning, waiting until the last possible second to pop out from under the covers, jump in the shower, slurp down his coffee, thinking all the while that it would be another routine day of torture. Instead, he was to face the biggest babbler of his life.

  Their first meeting was meant to occur in silence. This was Men-nyászky’s standard introduction: enter the room with a cohort of five blackshirts, sit across the table from the prisoner, stare at him for six or seven hours, and then get up and walk out. There would follow a night of such terror—the prisoner feeling the interrogator’s eyes on him even in the dark—and of such apprehension for the next day, that sometimes Mennyászky’s job would be over by sunrise. But my grandfather, the minute Mennyászky sank into his seat across the table, said, “Hello. My real name is Sándor Balázs. Here are the names of some of my associates in the Hungarian Resistance: Gyôrffy Pál, Kovács Ferenc, Horváth Géza, and Mester Anikó. I would also like to present you with a series of addresses. Please listen carefully, and note the following …”

  He hadn’t even given Mennyászky a chance to engage the glare.

  And so my grandfather let it go, all of it, inventing endless reams of information, spreading it around, hour upon hour, inexhaustibly. Mennyászky sat there impassive; he’d seen this before, seen these raconteurs come in, not so much scared of the torture as happy to finally have an audience who had to listen to them, pathologically grateful for the presence of the interrogator. Meanwhile, the stenographer sat on the other side of the wall, behind all those holes drilled for sound, feverishly typing on a roll of paper, converting that confessional stream into marks on a page, something for the men back at intelligence to scratch their heads over.

  And scratch their heads they did. By the end of that first day, my grandfather had broken all previous records for torture-room confessions, and by a huge margin, a record all the more notable for the fact that not one single torture implement had come into play, not even a threat. That day—where nobody in the room apart from my grandfather, who stopped only to moisten his throat, had uttered a word—produced an unprecedented one hundred pages of information.

  Mennyászky was incredulous. While he’d never witnessed such a volume of material, he’d faced (or thought he had) many prisoners of this type. In fact, he was so dismissive he didn’t even bother to review the material my grandfather had provided, simply packing up as usual at five o’clock and heading out, regarding the evening as a less than satisfactory start toward getting the true confession.

  So he was surprised the next day coming in to work. His commanding officer, Hans Liebing, took him aside and said that after Mennyászky had left, another interrogator had taken over, and the confession had continued into the early morning. A double-team of intelligence men had spent the night verifying the information provided by my grandfather and had discovered that there were some “anomalies” amidst the general babble—fragments, innocuous clauses—that had turned out, upon investigation, to be true, including directions to a trapdoor in an apartment in the ninth district that opened on a room filled with communications equipment and reports from the Allies, to a cache of scavenged weapons in an unused tool alcove in the Budapest sewers, and to the home of an eighty-year-old woman, by then deceased, who had a trunk full of materials used to forge identity cards. After these first few discoveries, they dispatched agents to track down each of my grandfather’s “leads,” and reports were still coming in, 99 percent of them negative, but, every other hour or so, there was the discovery of something legitimate.

  Liebing had never had much luck with Mennyászky, largely because he couldn’t figure the man out. He was so ordinary. But on this morning he made himself clear: “Listen, Mennyászky, this guy obviously knows things, but I can’t paralyze this department by verifying and tracking down every lead he gives us; you’ve got to figure out some way to make him leave out what’s made up and give us the truth.”

  And the department was paralyzed. Mennyászky saw it that morning, the bags under the eyes of his co-workers, the guards and agents impatient and fidgety from lack of sleep, the piles of used coffee grounds in the cafeteria garbage cans. All attention had been diverted away from the other political prisoners and focused exclusively on my grandfather.

  Mennyászky had never come up against anything like this. In his experience there were two types: the ones who spewed garbage until the screws were really applied, at which point the truth came screaming out; or the silent individuals who either died prior to revealing anything or became vegetables who’d tell you whatever you wanted to know—in their soft, monotonous way. And he was used to two types of confession—non-fiction and fiction—his job being to force the prisoner from one genre into another. But never, in all the years spent in the torture chamber, had he encountered such hybrid intelligence, this fugue of imagination and fact. Mennyászky could turn a man into a confessor or a corpse, but he had yet to turn an
yone into an editor.

  I still picture him wandering the streets of the gutted capital, one eye out for bombing raids overhead, his hand over his stomach as if there were a piece of shrapnel lodged there, or, perhaps for the first time, a hint of obsession, a need to finally put in some overtime, an inability to get farther than a few blocks from the prison even when the commanding officer ordered him home for a rest.

  According to my grandfather, Mennyászky put an exclusive voucher in on him, meaning that no other interrogator was allowed access. And over the six months of their “relationship”—and they were tireless as lovers in eliciting responses from one another without giving away too much of themselves—Mennyászky tried any number of strategies to get him to speak. For instance, he’d have my grandfather stop after every revelation, try and force him to be silent while he sent out one of his boys to check on it, then applying several minutes of extreme pain to the prisoner if the news turned out to be phony, only then asking the next question—hoping, in this way, to get my grandfather to pare away the inconsistencies, the evasions, the stories, and just speak the truth. The only problem was, of course, that while they were torturing him, my grandfather would howl out a dozen more bits of information—all of which had to be verified, because, once in a while, one of these bits would turn out to be crucial to the Axis cause.

  Then, Mennyászky himself tried becoming an editor, spending long nights poring over the transcripts of the torture sessions, looking for some giveaway, some stylistic tic that would help him differentiate a confession from a lie. But my grandfather’s mode of telling was too mixed, and Mennyászky discovered, with a sour delight, that the man must have read a lot of literature, because there were all manner of forms present, masked by the rushed voice, the near-scream in which the sentences were delivered. He found information on an alleged underground newspaper delivered in a brilliant alliteration. He found whole paragraphs in flawless iambic pentameter, which was not a rhythm that came easily to Hungarian. He found an oration on the modes of sabotage employed by the Resistance delivered in a pastiche of Szálasi’s public address. But there was no consistency to the quality of information, and a bit of truth delivered in literary form one day might be murmured idiomatically the next. It is said that around this time Mennyászky started losing his hair.

  According to my grandfather, this went on for six months, his tongue working a groove into the roof of his mouth with the incessant monologues he delivered, spicing the stories here and there with bits of truth, but revealing nothing—and my grandfather swears to this—truly damaging to the Hungarian Resistance: mainly just locations of supplies the partisans had already been cut off from, by bombing, building collapse, police cordons thrown up by the Arrow Cross; details of hideouts already discovered or destroyed or abandoned; names of the dead or arrested, or those who had switched sides. And none of Mennyászky’s tactics ever succeeded in making him give selective information, or anything truly incriminating.

  And this was pretty much my grandfather’s story, though of course I’ve left out the bits where he would dazzle me by re-enacting, sometimes for hours, the kinds of soliloquies he’d delivered, rapid-fire accounts of places and faces—almost too rich, too ornate, to take in—and which veered from inventories of equipment and food to digressions on ideology and interpartisan rivalries, to anecdotes on bravery and self-sacrifice, like some soap opera whose strands he could pick up at any time, juggling three dozen characters whose relationships with each other and with the enemy seemed to be progressing toward some terrible resolution, but one that was always delayed. At times I would stand in front of the mirror and pretend I was facing Mennyászky and attempt to deliver a similar monologue, but I always stalled after five or six sentences, as if the gap between my imagination and mouth had grown too large for the stories to leap. In the end, I could not put myself in grandfather’s place.

  But eventually, as I grew older and more aware, it was my grandmother’s commentary that commanded my attention. At times, she suggested that the SS arrested my grandfather only because he happened to be in a shop frequented by Horthy’s top brass (who, by the time of the Arrow Cross, were being rounded up and charged with sedition). So maybe somebody had told him about the butcher’s, and he’d chosen to go on the wrong day. Maybe it was an accident.

  You see, my grandfather had worked for the Horthy administration before and during the war—as had my father—and my grandmother suspected, in line with official reports later released by the Soviets, that grandfather had betrayed his fellow partisans, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky and General Kiss, in return for certain “domestic comforts.” So, my father’s murder, and my mother’s disappearance, along with the liquidation of the other leaders of the Committee of Liberation, might very well have been a result of information leaked by my grandfather—making his willingness to raise me as much an act of guilt as an act of love.

  My grandfather, of course, denied all accusations. He swore he never had anything to do with the Committee, never mind plotting to betray them, and that all his activities were restricted to the Hungarian Resistance (a group, if it existed at all, so nebulous, so careful not to leave a document or witness, that I’ve yet to find anything to verify it). There were other times, however, when my grandfather’s story shimmered with subtext—a faint light beneath a troubled, and troubling, surface of water—a hint, a bare suggestion, that maybe he’d invented the Resistance altogether, either to leave Mennyászky one failure in an otherwise spotless record, or to give himself enough subject matter for a six-month-long confession, or—and this is the most noble of his suggestions—for the sake of the Committee of Liberation itself, to throw the Nazis off the trail of an organization that had recruited both his daughter and son-in-law. But he never came out and said it.

  And so the man I wanted to track down all those years, when I still craved certainty, was Mennyászky. He was the only one who could tell me whether my grandfather had spent those six months in agony, giving false witness, or whether he’d spent that time as a pampered guest of the SS—all that fine wine and dining—in return for an ever-increasing list of names, including those of my parents.

  I think the moment when my grandmother’s voice emerged from the background and became a central part of my consciousness took place on that fall afternoon when I accompanied my grandfather to the hospital. I was twelve.

  We waited a considerable time, as always, in the worn front room of the St. John’s Infirmary, watching patients shuffle back and forth in striped pyjamas—inmates in yet another institution. After a bit, a nurse came out and ushered us into a small room with a bed, a cupboard, and jars of medical implements. A few minutes later the specialist, a small man whose body looked far older than his eyes, and who seemed to be constantly jerking forward, as if to throw off something clinging to his back, entered the room. He began by taking my grandfather’s blood pressure, making notes, palpating his veins, testing the reflexes below each knee.

  It was when the doctor asked my grandfather to open his mouth and say “ah” that he recognized him. And here he stopped. Then he pulled his head back and spat directly into my grandfather’s face.

  I can barely remember what happened next—so shocked was I by the treatment given a man for whom I had nothing but respect—but it involved a torrent of abuse from the doctor, who’d remembered my grandfather from recent newspaper articles, and who, it turned out, had suffered under the Arrow Cross, either by being put into a ghetto, or sent to a concentration camp, or implicated in some anti-Nazi plot and tortured. “You are a coward, and a traitor not only to your country but your family. And you are not worth the five minutes I have just wasted on you.” The doctor spat on him once again before walking out.

  Somehow we made it home, though I remember that both of us were in such a daze we could hardly figure out which buses to board, which streetcar to transfer to, and that my grandfather, who’d just looked at the floor the whole time the doctor went at him, still had the spit, shining,
on his cheeks. My grandmother, who greeted us at the door, immediately sensed that something was wrong, and she pulled us apart, sending me to my room where I lay on the bed, stared at the picture of my parents on the wall over the headboard, and finally started to register what my grandmother had been saying, under her breath, all these years. My grandfather was a liar. A storyteller.

  Nonetheless, she tried to soften the trauma, taking me aside the next morning and saying that a lot of people had mixed-up ideas about my grandfather, and that I shouldn’t take them seriously, since nobody, not even she, really knew what had gone on at the Andrássy ut prison. But by then I was all suspicion, and couldn’t figure out whose innocence she was protecting—my grandfather’s or mine.

  And for several years, almost two decades in fact, I did everything I could to find out what really happened. I had several confrontations with my grandfather, who held fast to his story, and which ultimately soured our relationship, with me angry at him for holding out, and him unable to understand why, after being urged to confess the truth, and having confessed it, he was never left in peace. I enrolled in university, studying political science and history; I did graduate work in the West; I was granted access to certain select releases from the KGB archives. None of this helped clarify that period in my grandfather’s life.