Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I could do better than you.” She laughed. “I could do it easily.”

  “Why then?”

  She waited. “Your wife,” she said. “The way you described her that night on the bridge. She sounds . . .” Judit smiled her widest smile. “She sounds like the one.”

  There was a sailor who built a sea of paper. That’s how I think of Judit now, and how she was in those weeks when we were dealing with consulates, agencies, doctors, even civic politicians, all of them scratching their heads, reaching for paperwork, telling us we were going too fast, that we couldn’t get it done, that it would take up to a year, even longer, for the adoption process—that we’d need more money, there were fees and medical tests and records to be ordered and processed, even a number of “gifts and donations” to be made. And when we weren’t doing that, trying to batter a hole through that bureaucracy, then I was in some park, mainly the Városliget, playing with Janka, trying to get the girl used to me, though I think now it was just the attention she loved, attention from anybody, her mother’s blessing floating along with us wherever we went—the circus, the Vidám Park, the Szécsényi Fürdő, the Gerbeaud—almost like a kind of anticipation, a perfume, some hint of a perfect future. Janka would slip her hand into mine, and smile, and ask question after question about Canada, about lakes, about rivers, about birds, about the Arctic, that would echo in me a long time afterwards. “Yes, your mother will come visit.”

  “What if you were to just take her?” Judit said to me one day. She was drinking even more heavily then, our hours together more and more quiet as if her interest in me was steadily draining away, the two of us leaning into the pillows, uncorking another bottle. Even her stories of sailors grew shorter and shorter, reduced to single sentences spoken at the very end of the night, when I was almost asleep, not sure if she was speaking or it was a dream. “You could take her, and I could write a letter that would let the two of you travel, and then I could work out the legal things afterwards.” Judit tilted her head to one side. “But I would need the money.”

  “How much?” I asked. She shrugged as if she didn’t know. “Twenty-five thousand dollars? That would be enough, wouldn’t it?” I waited. “Thirty thousand?” Judit nodded, and I wrote her a cheque right there, the paper curling on itself like a wave. She cashed it the next morning while I went back to my hotel and, after sitting in front of the phone for what seemed hours, left a message for Anna and Míklós, telling them I was coming home, that Janka was her name.

  But that’s not how it worked out. Janka was standing beside her mother at the airport, crying, holding Judit’s hand, the tiny flower-printed suitcase I’d bought for her sitting on the ground beside them. We were ten or fifteen minutes from boarding, and I nodded at Judit over Janka’s head, saying I’d leave them alone for a moment to say goodbye. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, leaning down to stroke Janka’s hair, pointing at the sign for the men’s room, and then, once I was out of sight, I stood there, back against the tiled wall trying to regulate my breathing, glancing out into the crowd to see if they’d followed. Then I was gone, keeping the passengers between me and Judit, moving fast through security, down along ramps and onto the plane, looking over my shoulder every few steps to make sure Janka wasn’t there, still crying, the little suitcase banging against her legs as she tried to catch up to me. Looking out the airplane window I thought I could see Janka in the terminal, back at the boarding gate, pressed against the glass wondering where I was, what happened to our plane, how long it would take before I came back, or whether her mother was still there on the other side of security or gone home, goodbye forever, the airport suddenly large and exitless and all around her.

  I watched and watched for that little girl standing by the window, craning my neck as the plane reversed, moved onto the runway, took off. I sat there wishing I could go back until we were well over the Arctic, halfway to Canada, and I opened the letter Judit had written—permitting me to take Janka—and turned it this way and that. It was completely blank.

  She’d known I would never take her. She’d known I’d waffle in the last minute, known it from that first night standing over the Danube, stringing me along until she got every last cent. She knew, too, that what I was really paying for was not Janka but my freedom, not just from her and Janka, but from everything that had brought me there, to Budapest, in the first place. That blank letter, which would have stopped me dead at the border, which would have gotten me arrested if I’d tried to take Janka with me, was what I’d really been after all along.

  It turns out there is a Museum of Failed Escapes, and that it is, as Judit said, in the ninth district. I went there once, many years after that day on the plane with the blank letter. It had been a private collection during the eighties, nineties, and early oughts, opening to the public in 2007, after its owner, András Fabiani, died and bequeathed the property to the city. During the time it was private, entry had been limited to a tiny circle of collectors, politicians, VIPs (and, I supposed, certain exotic dancers) favoured by Fabiani, who was one of those very well connected members of the communist elite who’d profited beyond imagining when the iron curtain came down and left him and his comrades well positioned to sell state property, hand out foreign contracts, and pocket most of the money. The museum was an obsession.

  Despite being public, you still needed an appointment to get in. An older man met me and the other visitors at the door. His name was Mihály, forty-five or so, incredibly well dressed, and led us from room to room in the converted apartment that was a disquieting mix of vernacular architecture and supermodern minimalism. There were three floors to the museum, each one devoted to a different medium of escape, “land,” “water,” and “air.” After the tour, when the other visitors left, I asked Mihály if it would be okay for me to go back to level two, where I marvelled at how accurate Judit had been, because it was exactly as she’d said—all the different ways her sailors had tried to escape. Mihály accompanied me as I looked at the plastic boat, the hand-drawn map of the “seas of Hungary” (code for the lakes and rivers that crossed various borders to the west), a vial filled with the tears of the sailor who tried to cry himself to sea (the inscription said they were gathered from a failed escapee who’d been sentenced to ten years in the notorious Csillag Prison), the car outfitted with the ridiculous wheels meant to paddle along the Tisza, and a hundred other things.

  There was a video on the wall showing an old guy in a sailor’s suit, his toothless mouth moving endlessly, underneath it a speaker quietly playing back his words—about constellations, trade winds, shifting tides. “There was a sailor who tried to . . ?” I looked at Mihály for help.

  “To talk himself to sea. To make his mouth a sail. As if his words were so much wind.” The attendant looked serious for a minute, then smiled, and broke into a small laugh.

  “Did you by any chance ever know a woman by the name of Judit?”

  Mihály looked at me strangely. His face coloured. He shook his head. Then he changed the subject. “I worked for Fabiani a long time. He entrusted this place to me. He had nothing to do with exotic dancers . . .” Mihály paused, started over. “This is what I call ‘a poetic museum,’ as I said when we were upstairs.” He gave me a look that said I should have been listening more carefully during the tour. “Technically, not everything in here, not every piece, was part of an actual escape,” he continued. “Some were.” He nodded at the plastic sailboat. “But others were escapes of a different kind . . . It was Fabiani who found all these, and who believed they belonged together. These are escapes as he defined them.” Mihály paused again, waiting for me to say something. “The collection,” he finished, “says more about his notion of escape than anything else.”

  I looked at the video screen, listening to the old sailor’s quiet disquisition on longitude and latitude and how the Soviet agents, if they followed you far enough, would become lost at sea, because Marx only ever wrote about people on l
and.

  “A woman,” I finally said, “once told me about this place. Stories about these things . . .” I laughed. “Part of me thought I might find something of her here.” I waited. “This was a long time ago. When this place was still closed to the general public.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said, sensing my disappointment. “Was she, were you . . ?”

  “I was married then,” I said, not sure if this was an appropriate answer.

  “Children?” he asked.

  “A boy. Miklós.” I smiled. “He’s with cousins right now. Didn’t seem all that interested in coming here.” I shrugged and laughed, glancing at Mihály, who seemed to relax a bit. “He’s liking Budapest,” I continued, “it’s his first time.” I wanted to add something about Anna here, to tell him that Miklós’s mother was Hungarian too, and how jealous she’d been that our son was going to Budapest instead of her, and how she’d kissed him the morning I came to pick him up, and then kissed me, too, on the cheek, before going back inside to János, their daughter Mária, and that whole other life she’d come to after the divorce. And I’d taken Miklós’s hand and walked off into mine.

  But before I could figure out how to phrase it, or even if it was worth phrasing, Mihály remembered something. “Did you ever hear about the sailor who tried to come back?”

  “She never mentioned him,” I said.

  “Her,” he said, guiding me to a glass case mounted on the wall behind which were large pieces of paper that appeared blank. Mihály told me to look closely at them, and I did, noticing how worn the paper was, as if it had been rubbed over and over with a wetted fingertip until there were only the faintest of lines, traces of red, blue, green. “She thought it was just a question of erasing the maps,” he said, “and she’d find herself once more in that place from which she’d started out. I mean when she’d started,” he corrected himself, “before she’d discovered anything of the world.” He came close to the glass to look at it with me. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “It is,” I replied. And it was, like some transcript of dreams, written days later, when all you remember is the faintest of traces, a world already gone before it registered. But there was no surprise there, looking at it, only gratitude for what Judit had given me and what a woman like her, trapped in that life, would never be allowed—that hopefulness her sailors felt in their moment of escape, when home was still everywhere, glimmering out there, and where every mistake, every wayward decision, was for a moment erased.

  The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived

  ÍBOR KÁLMÁN. Tíbor Kálmán’s villa.” That’s what Györgyi told Zoltán the night they went AWOL from the camp, the two of them huddled in the barracks amidst the other conscripts, boys like them, but asleep, some as young as sixteen, called on in the last hours of the war in a futile effort to salvage a regime already fallen, a country and people already defeated. “We need to get to Mátyásföld,” Györgyi said, “that’s where the villa is. Tíbor Kálmán will give us papers.” But Györgyi didn’t make it far, only to the end of the barracks, to the loose board and through the fence, frantically trying to keep up with Zoltán, who always seemed to run faster, to climb better, to see in the dark. Zoltán was already waiting on the other side of the ditch, hidden in the thicket, when the guard shouted, when they heard the first crack of bullets being fired, Györgyi screaming where he’d fallen, “My leg! I’ve been shot! Zoli, help me,” and Zoltán looked back at his friend for a second, calculating the odds of getting to him in time, the two of them managing to elude the guards, limping along at whatever speed Györgyi’s leg would allow. They’d be caught, charged with desertion, executed—both of them. Then Zoltán turned in the direction he was headed, Györgyi’s cries fading in the distance.

  It was the end of December 1944, and that night, running from the makeshift encampment and its marshalling yard, running and running long after the military police had given up, not wanting to risk their own lives by following him east, Zoltán realized it was hopeless, there was a wall of refugees coming at him, and behind it, the Russian guns, already so loud he felt as if they were sounding beside his ears. Budapest was streaming with people fleeing from the suburbs—Rákospalota, Pestszentlőrinc, Soroksár, Mátyásföld—because the Red Army had not only arrived at these places already and taken control, but was advancing on Budapest itself.

  So Zoltán became part of the human tide flowing from one death trap to another during the siege, and the things he’d seen would live on, unspoken, beneath everything he was to think and say from that point forward. Civilians used as human shields by the Red Army. Nazis exploding bridges over the Danube while there were still families and soldiers streaming across. Men and women forced to carry ammunition across the frozen river to German soldiers stationed on Margit Island while Soviet bullets and shells and bombs rained around them. He saw child soldiers holding off two dozen Russians by running up and down the stairs of a devastated building, shooting from every window, making them think there were a dozen soldiers trapped inside. Young boys crashing in gliders while attempting to fly in supplies for the fascist armies of Hitler and Szálasi, the fields littered with broken fuselages and wings and pilots contorted in positions that seemed to Zoltán the war’s alphabet—untranslatable into human terms. There was a broken gas main near Vérmező that for days shot flame through every crack and hole in the asphalt—blue, orange, yellow—dancing along the road as if fire alone were capable of celebrating what had become of Budapest.

  He’d seen exhausted doctors trying to save patients from a burning hospital, carrying them into the snow only to realize they had nothing—not a blanket, a sheet, even a shirt—to keep them from freezing. He’d come across the most beautiful girl, eighteen or nineteen, in one of the ruined homes filled with those too wounded to go on, staring up, whispering from the mass of bodies, injured, starving, gripped by typhus, and as he leaned in to hear what she wanted to say—“Shoot me, please shoot me”—he noticed that both her legs had been torn away.

  All that time Zoltán had been tormented by the idea of Tíbor Kálmán’s villa—it was like the place was imagining him rather than the other way around—it sometimes appeared in place of what he was running from, and Zoltán had to stop himself from leaping into a burning apartment, a metro tunnel, or a garden under shelling, thinking, this is it, finally, I’ve made it.

  After a while, Zoltán began to feel protected by the villa, as if the new life it promised was his true life, and the one he was living now only an alias, false, no one real inside it, and therefore anything that happened was not really happening to him. This is what helped Zoltán survive when he was press-ganged, along with a number of other boys and young men fleeing west, into the Vannay Battalion, and ended up doing the very thing he’d hoped to avoid: fighting for the Nazis. He would have liked to remember when it happened, but there were no dates then, the end of December, the beginning of January, sometime during those hundred days of a siege that never did end for him, hauled out of the cellar where he was hiding by Vannay’s men, him and the rest, given a gun and told what the Russians looked like, and from there the black minutes, schoolboy comrades falling around him, Vannay making radio announcements to the Soviets that they would take no prisoners, and the Soviets responding to this as Vannay had hoped, likewise killing every one of them they captured, which Vannay was only too pleased to tell Zoltán and the others, knowing it would make them fight with that much more desperation. Then the breakout attempt of February through Russian lines, German and Hungarian soldiers cut down in the streets as they tried to escape the gutted capital to make it to the forests and then west to where the rest of Hitler’s armies were stationed, running headlong into rockets, tank fire, snipers stationed in buildings along the routes the Soviets knew they would take, drowning in sewers where the water level rose with each body that climbed down the ladder until it was up to their noses, pitch-black, screaming panic. So few of them made it. Three p
ercent, the historians would say. The rest of the soldiers, the thousands, were killed along Széna Square and Lövőház Street and Széll Kálmán Square, piled into doorways, ground up by tanks, swearing, pleading, sobbing, unable to fire off even the last bullet they’d saved for themselves.

  But Zoltán was not there. He’d gone over to the other side by then, turning on the boys he was fighting with, aged sixteen and seventeen, shooting them dead as they stared at him dumbstruck, and then saw, over his shoulder, the approaching Russians. He thought he saw a last glimmer of envy in the boys’ eyes, regret at not having thought of it first, before what light there was went out forever, and Zoltán turned, feeling something fade inside him as well, his voice cracking at the edges, soft and unwavering as radio silence. “Death to the fascists,” he shouted, and was rewarded with bits of red ribbon the Russians tied around his arm, and a hat they placed on his head, before sending him back into battle.

  It was Zoltán’s decoration as a “war hero” by the Soviets that finally brought him to Tíbor Kálmán’s villa late in 1945, to the place where it seemed all his misfortune and redemption were concentrated, where he might be absolved of guilt for having made it through the siege instead of someone better—anyone at all—someone worthy of survival, like that legless girl in the makeshift infirmary, for he had done what she asked that day, scrounging among the soldiers crammed wounded or dying or dead into that corridor, found a revolver, and embraced her with one arm while with the other he pressed the barrel to her temple. If only he’d gotten to the villa in time, he told himself. If only he’d chosen the one other option he had: death. He knew now that death was preferable to what he’d done to save himself, though it was too late by then, betrayal had become Zoltán’s vocation, and the woman who met him that November day in the doorway of the villa sensed it, with the tired look of someone who has outlasted her interest in life and can’t understand why she’s being provoked by those who insist on living. She introduced herself as Tíbor’s daughter-in-law, Karola, wary enough of Zoltán and his uniform to give only the answer he wanted and not a drop more, keeping her voice to a perfect monotone, without a single nuance he might have fastened onto had he been seeking something other than forgiveness.