by Tamas Dobozy
And when I tried tracking down Mennyászky, I came up against emptiness. He was shipped off to a gulag after the war ended, and survived, later becoming rehabilitated and rejoining society as a “useful but quiet comrade” in a mining enterprise outside Miskolc. He never again put his peculiar talent to use, as if he’d finally achieved the ordinariness that had been his calling card. The few relatives and neighbours still willing to speak of Mennyászky confirmed that a kind of stillness had settled over him, that he would frequently be seen walking to or from work, or just out for the day, along the fences and gardens bordering the streets, his eyes always averted from passersby and staring straight at the ground, minutely inspecting everything that passed beneath his feet, as might a man who’s just discovered a hole in his pocket, or lost some heirloom or letter, something without which he finds it impossible to stand still, to sit at a table and eat, or to sleep. I like to think of Mennyászky still worrying over the Hungarian Resistance, whether or not it had actually existed. Though probably he was just lost, unable to figure out how he’d gotten so turned around in history in so short a time.
And after a while I just stopped thinking about it. No, that’s too easy a description. What happened is that my thinking shifted, away from the intangibles swirling around my grandfather, to what I could be sure of, to what there was some agreement upon, my grandmother and what she’d endured: the triple shifts, the shaming and ostracizing of her family, the humiliating efforts to regain some standing in society, sucking up to various low-level party members so that her children and grandchildren could get jobs, or even, maybe, entry to a university. Here was something reliable, not because there was documentation to prove it, or fingerprints, or any of that standard evidence, but because she was willing to stand behind it, willing to take both the blame and praise for whatever happened—to offer no excuses. And that willingness, finally, is what I’ve come to understand as history.
Though I must say that I still wake up some nights with the events of 1944 playing in my head in all their ambiguity. At times I am tempted to think of my grandfather as a murderer, at times as a saviour. Mostly, though, I just think of my grandmother, that woman who was willing to sacrifice her life to an illusion the old man needed, no matter how the solitude weighed upon her, no matter how many people told her to abandon him, to take a new name, to start over. This was her act of resistance, and it was, in a way, no less heroic than anything dreamed up in the underground. And on such nights I will get up from bed and go to the bathroom for a glass of water, or to take a piss, or to shower the sweat from my body.
Then, I’ll sit for a while in front of the mirror, thinking of those terrible afternoons under the elderflower tree in the garden, when all the world was a story I could readily believe. And I’ll wonder what is worse: taking the stand that is history, that is a willingness to say you’ve done wrong and that maybe there is no way to make amends; or, being so afraid of what’s back there, waiting behind you in the dark, that you cut yourself loose from all history to see how long you can survive in the thin air, kicked free into a lightness that is also ghostliness, where you have no bearings, no relation to what’s gone or going on, and where everything you encounter passes through you like a wind in the chambers of the heart.
I’ll sit weighing this thought for a while, and then I’ll go back to bed.
Dead Letters
MY FIRST IMPULSE was to warn Oscar that he might get arrested. My second, of course, was to see some of the stuff he was selling. And Oscar reached for his mail sack from where he sat sipping beer in the sunshine of my back deck, and pulled out a bunch of postcards held together with elastics. But before handing them over he stopped and asked, “You’re not Christian, are you?”
Naturally I lied, telling him my father had been a hardcore socialist, and my mother descended from a long line of what were once called freethinkers. This caused Oscar to pause for a minute, look at me as if I were a dolt, and then shrug and hand over the package of postcards.
I slipped the elastics off and started quickly flipping through them, gradually slowing as I went from one postcard to the next until stopping at number twelve, which showed Christ, arms akimbo, dangling painfully from a crucifix. It was a standard pose except that some guy had pasted a picture of his own face over Christ’s, and that this face, obviously cut from a snapshot, was licking an ice cream cone. I flipped back and wondered how I could have missed it: the same face pasted onto each of the fourteen postcards. Instead of Veronica wiping Jesus’s face, you had her pressing a veil to the face of a man who was sucking on a beer bottle. Instead of the Roman legionnaire bringing a rod down on Christ’s back, he was beating someone wearing a straw fedora. Instead of the usual limp and drained and gape-mouthed Christ in the figure of the Pietà, you had a man smiling around an enormous cigar. “These are the Stations of the Cross,” I said, trying to hide my surprise.
Oscar shrugged and turned and sipped his drink, the noon sunshine glancing off the buttons and epaulets of his mail-carrier’s uniform. I was drinking coffee, because for me it was still morning, while Oscar, who regularly woke at 3 a.m. to get out and deliver the mail, was well into what he called his “darkness at noon,” which meant that, for him, night began the instant the last letter had been delivered. His bedtime was only five hours away.
I turned over the postcards and noted they had all been written by someone called Robert, and were all addressed to someone called Roger, and that they were, without exception, filled with the usual drivel you find on postcards: “Jerusalem is lovely this time of year;” “Hey, I think I’m really getting to appreciate Jewish food;” “Man, you ought to see the women around here;” etc.
“How much do you get for this stuff?” I asked Oscar. He shrugged and swigged on his beer and said it depended entirely on his contact, who would spread the word among the collectors and then get back to him with a number of offers. Then Oscar would either accept one of these offers or tell his contact they were all too low, hoping to start a bidding war. I looked through the postcards again and wondered who would pay money for this sick stuff. Oscar responded by saying that this “stuff” rarely went for big money because most dead-letter collectors preferred unopened mail and packages, since it was the thrill of the unknown that made them “fetish objects.”
“You’re telling me there’s people out there who will pay money to open other people’s mail?” I handed the postcards back to Oscar, who replaced the elastic bands and dropped them back into his mail sack. He grabbed another beer out of the cooler I kept on my back deck and said it wasn’t opening up other people’s mail that provided the thrill, but opening letters that no longer had owners, that couldn’t be delivered at all because the sender and addressee were no longer locatable. Letters that were stalled in the space between delivery and return. The collectors’ interest wasn’t so much voyeurism, peering into someone else’s life, as impersonation, taking on that life, becoming the person the letters were sent to.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s so great about that?”
“Well,” said Oscar, “that’s what makes it a fetish, right? I mean, if it was normal behaviour then you probably would have heard about it by now.” It was hard to argue with this, though it didn’t make things any clearer.”It’s like saving someone from extinction,” said Oscar. “You keep their information alive.” I shrugged my shoulders, and he waved his hand at me. “Forget it,” he said.
Eventually, Oscar did go to jail, for ten months, and I narrowly escaped being called in as a material witness and being charged as an accessory, after Oscar confessed. What did end up happening, though, was that I was fired from my job as mail-sorter technician at Canada Post. And my unemployment insurance ran out a few weeks before Oscar got out of jail.
I had visited him once, just long enough to tell him I wasn’t too impressed with his friendship. He replied to this by ignoring me and going on at length about how jail was pretty cushy, with a bunch of pool tables, a tenni
s court, and an arts and crafts centre. Nonetheless, Oscar said, despite these “perks,” he couldn’t shake the nightmares he was having, that prisons were really no different from the dead-letter office in the postal warehouse, all those stacks and stacks of misdirected mail sitting there gathering dust, waiting for the statute of limitations to expire so they could become the property of the state, which meant, for most of them, immediate incineration. “What am I going to do when I get out?” Oscar asked. “All I’ve ever done is carry mail.” I hung up the phone in disgust after reminding Oscar that I had far more right to be asking that question of him than he had to be asking it of me.
My mother, of course, had her explanation. After I recounted the story, including the part about looking at the postcards, she peppered me with questions: Had I “lingered” over the postcards? Had I laughed? Had I made even a token attempt to remove the blasphemous pasted-over pictures of the guy’s face from that of “our Lord”? Had I, even for one second, considered doing the “right thing” and turning over Oscar to the “proper authorities”? Had I thought back over the postcards in the days since and perhaps been “tempted” to smile, or laugh, or, God forbid, play such a “blasphemous joke” myself?
“Mother,” I replied, staring at the floor, “I’ve just lost my job. Please tell me, what on earth have the postcards to do with that?” She shook her head and started interrogating me about when I’d last gone to church; and whether I still did my “minimum duty” in attending and receiving communion at Easter Sunday mass; and, moreover, what kind of relationship I had, exactly, with that “good for nothing pervert,” Oscar. “Relationship? Mother, we’re friends. We were friends.” But this did not satisfy her, and she kept poking the long fingers of her inquiry into me, rooting around in my conscience the way a surgeon pulls aside the membranes and organs of a patient undergoing exploratory surgery, hoping to find that big lump of cancer she just knew was there. This had been her primary occupation since my father died and I moved out, the two events that had come to define her moral universe—though she pretended her perspective was all Saint Augustine.
“Why is it, Mother,” I asked, “that when something good happens to me you say it’s the work of providence, but when something bad happens it’s always my fault? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe the good things are due to me, and maybe the bad things are God’s fault.”
“That is exactly the sort of thing your father would have said,” she replied, the expression on her face more like an upside-down smile than a real frown, a displeasure that made her happy.
Naturally, my father did not attend mass. I remember heading out the door with my mother on Sunday mornings and looking back at him standing there in our kitchen, the only time he would ever wear an apron, holding a giant spatula up in the air and yelling out—more for the benefit of my mother, though he always pretended to be speaking to me—his standard “excuse” for not accompanying us to church: “Hey, little buddy, someone’s got to stay home and cook breakfast!” I could hear him laughing at this joke every single week, the sound carrying until the bells of Saint Patrick’s came into hearing.
But when we got home from church—after what seemed to my child’s ears a repetitious sermon; followed by that lining up for a wafer so unappetizing my mother had to keep reminding me of the medallions I’d get just to keep me interested in first holy communion; followed by the chit-chat she indulged in once mass was over—after all that, we’d get home and there would be Father standing in front of an enormous spread of sausages and waffles and eggs and peameal bacon and hash browns and fruit salad and freshly squeezed orange juice, all the things I’d been salivating after throughout mass.
I’d run into the kitchen, slip off my tie and the itchy, tight, polyester suit jacket my mother had bought, and jump up beside my plate, thinking that if I was the first one to put my hands together for grace I’d also be the first one to take them apart and grab a knife and fork.
After grace, which my father would watch with a bemused detachment, we’d dig in, Father spearing massive oily sausages, heaping his plate with mounds of hash browns he drowned in ketchup, surreptitiously stealing bits of strawberry from the fruit salad (a practice he called “highgrading,” and which he vociferously condemned when anyone else did it). And the whole time he ate and dumped food on our plates, he would be turning to my mother with every spoonful, every lifting of the fork, every return to the stove for more, and begging her to pardon his “gluttony,” until his joy at being able to provide us with such a feast overcame her (it had long overcome me) and she would break into a grin, and finally laugh. In the end, my mother would simply shake her head and giggle, “Henry, you’re such an idiot.” And then the seriousness of my father’s face would also break, and he’d smile back at her in such a way that I would realize, seemingly for the first time every Sunday, that he was not at all competing with her, or with the church, for my affection, but was just trying to celebrate our time together.
But since he was dead by the time I lost my job at Canada Post, it was my mother who agreed to “help out.” Unfortunately, this meant I had to move back in with her, which meant living with her rules—that revolving schedule of obscure prayers and masses set down during the Middle Ages, which, if faithfully observed in a state free of mortal sin, guaranteed all kinds of graces, indulgences, and divine favours after death—a quicker trip to Heaven, in other words. (Naturally, I could never understand the point of all this if you were living free of mortal sin anyhow.)
These household rules made it pretty hard to look for a job, but every time I pointed this out to my mother, she said I would have to make “sacrifices,” and maybe cut an hour or two out of my sleep in order to look through all the want ads, prep my resumes and cover letters, and check the university and college calendars that offered retraining opportunities. During that time I began to see that we—Oscar and I—were both in jail, each in his own way.
By the time Oscar got out of jail and discovered where I’d been living, I was pretty much crazy, and thinking of just packing my suitcase and stepping out of Mother’s place whether I had money or not, trusting in luck to provide me with another home. In fact, I was so depressed I was actually happy to see Oscar.
“So what the hell are you going to do?” he said, poking his head into my mother’s fridge and drawing back in alarm. “I mean, you can’t live here, can you?” He shut the door quickly and walked over to where I was sitting at the kitchen table. He was doing something weird with his hands, not wringing them but holding them out slightly in front of himself, opening and closing the fingers.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. He said nothing, just stood there scratching the back of his head, an action that seemed less the result of an itch than a desire to do something with his hands. He said he had some ideas, but didn’t elaborate on what those might be, and on his way out reached into his jacket for an envelope, writing a phone number on the outside where I could reach him if I wanted. Then he added, “Oh, yeah, the stuff in the envelope’s for you. If you really are thinking of leaving your mother’s place, then those would probably help make any decision final. On both your and your mom’s part.” He winked at me and stepped into the street, and that was the last time I ever saw him, moving along the sidewalk against the wind, his hands thrust so far into the front pockets of his jeans that it looked as if the pants were intent on crawling up his body and he was intent on pushing them down. Two months later, I heard he’d broken into the dead-letter office with a pair of bolt cutters but had been caught by a security guard in the midst of making his getaway, pushing a shopping cart heaped with various undeliverables, and that sometime during this pursuit he’d come to a hill, jumped into the shopping cart, and was thereby stopped, quite suddenly and fully, by a wall at the bottom. After a brief hospitalization, Oscar went back to jail.
I went up to my room with those postcards and took them out of the envelope, running my fingers along t
he edges of the pasted-over faces. I put them back into the envelope and tried to slip it between the mattresses of my bed, then under the newspaper at the bottom of my sock drawer, then into the vase above my television (no cable), but finally settled for wrapping the envelope in plastic, attaching a thread to one corner, and then, after several tries, lodging it in the rain gutter above my bedroom window. I let the thread hang imperceptibly along the stucco wall, within easy reach.
I have to admit there was something talismanic about those postcards. Whenever my mother’s sanctimoniousness got to be too much, I’d lock the door to my room, reach for the string, and pull down the envelope.
My mother, for her part, suspected that because I was locking my door I was doing something bad, and she started making pornography references after a week or so, though never in direct reference to me. It was always general stuff related to the degradation and exploitation of women. (And when had she ever—during the twenty-three years I’d listened to her rant about how society would be a lot better if women stayed at home and devoted themselves to turning kids into worthwhile human beings—shown any sympathy for the interests of women?) Or it was pronouncements culled from various other religions (which she would have as soon seen eradicated) about how masturbation “depletes” a person, how Hinduism encouraged men to engage in sex but not to have orgasms in order to amplify and retain their “vital energies.” (“Not that I’m encouraging anyone to become a Hindu,” my mother said, “or not to have orgasms when having sex, since orgasms, after all, produce babies, which are wonderful in the eyes of God. All I’m saying is that one shouldn’t masturbate.”) She never did, however, go so far as to search my room, or, if she did, never left any sign of having done so.
Days trickled by. I spent a lot of time wandering in my mother’s ornamented home, so filled with framed paintings and biblical verses that the red and golds of medieval and Byzantine art seemed to vanish into themselves, as if the sameness of the themes and motifs didn’t so much transport as trap you. After a few weeks they were so pervasive they became as undifferentiated as a coat of white paint, so that I found myself wondering whether my mother had done this on purpose as a way of punishing herself, turning her home into a place of confinement, her art into a source of deprivation. My response was to run to my bedroom and get the postcards from the roof. Looking them over I smiled at the thought of what my mother would do if she caught me with them, the expression on her face identical to the one she’d wear whenever we came home from mass to find my father whistling some Bud Powell tune while loading the table with Sunday’s feast.
