Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  But Holló wasn’t interested in what I wanted.

  He set the tray on the table between us, then stood there, prodding me to pour tea, pick out a pastry, and it wasn’t until I’d done this that he sat and poured tea for himself.

  “Probably you’ve heard a little of this story, maybe from your father.” He smiled, cracks springing up in the makeup on his face. “Her name was Adriána,” he said. “She was my immediate superior at the ministry run by her husband, Cérna.” He paused. “It was an unusual situation.”

  Holló looked at me, and for the first time that morning he darkened. “Aren’t you going to pick up your pen?” he asked, leaning forward. “It’s very important that you get this right,” he said. “It’s the only way you’re going to be able to tell everyone what really happened. If they’re going to judge me, it’s important they do so to the full extent of my crimes.” I reached over, fumbling. “Pick up the pen,” he said, with real impatience now, and I finally did, after brushing crumbs from my hands. “Good,” Holló smiled. “There’s a lot . . .” His smile faded. “I have a lot to atone for.”

  He continued. It went on all afternoon. I didn’t speak more than five or six words the whole time, only a yes or no when he offered more tea, telling him to go on when he suggested I take a break, or grunting a bit when I shook the writer’s cramp from my hand.

  He’d drifted into the job after the siege, in which both his parents died, a young man of twenty, effeminate, fastidious, no university education or connections, a target of ridicule during the Horthy regime, almost executed for being homosexual by the Arrow-Cross during the winter of 1945. The truth is, Holló told me, he did not yet think of himself that way, in fact he never would, rejecting all categories. “I prefer to think of myself as a sexual adventurer,” he said, winking at me and then continuing with the story. Before the war, he’d only been uncertain, confused, not even aware of what the categories were, living in expectation of women because that’s what he’d been told to expect. Then, with 1939, everything changed, that moment in history introduced him to something else, the terror and intrigue of policemen and soldiers who seemed to recognize him in some way he had yet to recognize himself. Finally there was the siege. “Everything fell apart,” Holló said. “The world was finally and fully shattered.” His eyes were bright as he described it. “What the soldiers were fighting for was the exclusive right to pull it back together again—for whose vision of reality would prevail. But for me it was something else. It was such a short time, a hundred days or so, but I saw how much energy, how much violence, was required to maintain anything—systems, structures, truths—and how sooner or later something came along to smash it all to pieces.” The siege had made it impossible to maintain anything—a politic, a community, an identity. “One day we were subhuman—homosexuals, Jews, communists, gypsies—fit only for execution, and the next we were liberated, the proletariat, the people of the future. But the real lesson in all of this,” said Holló, smiling, “is that if we were only what they made us, then at bottom we were really nothing.” He laughed with what sounded like joy. “And if that was true then maybe, if I was smart enough, I could take that power for myself—free to change, to invent myself, to not have to conform to anything.” He stopped, seeing in my face a skepticism, though he was so lost in memory he thought I was questioning how quickly he’d grasped the “lesson” of the siege, when what I was really thinking was that it wasn’t a lesson at all, only a symptom of what he’d gone through and how it had warped his thinking. “Well,” said Holló after a while, “it started in the siege but it wasn’t until I met Adriána that it all became clear.”

  He welcomed the security promised by membership in the Communist Party, and the relatively anonymous work for the Ministry of Culture. He was one of the many waiting for rescue at the end of the siege, desperate for the arrival of the Red Army, not realizing there would be no end to ruin, they’d been turned into its agents, harnessed to it, dragging its wreckage into the next half century.

  For Holló it was the work of reading. He got to do a lot of that when he was censoring books. The primary target of his work was literature, especially the work of poets, who were heroes in Hungarian society, though there were plenty of novels, plays, and films to ban as well, along with memoirs, science fiction, children’s stories, anything you could think of. “I had latitude,” Holló said. “I could exercise my own responsibilities as a proletariat toward reactionary and formalist thinking.”

  The important thing was that people had to be caught, a lot of them, and he was free to pick his offenders, preferably writers who didn’t belong to the Party, but once in a while a Party member too, just to keep everyone alert. “It was a paranoid time,” he said, and I sensed a sadness in Holló then, something beneath the refinement he cultivated, gazing at the library as though it might vanish any second, that despite the work he’d done he didn’t deserve to be there, in the company of all those books.

  “At first,” he said, “I tried to be careful. I picked out the really bad stuff, the ones I thought weren’t worth keeping, or were offensive, as if I could somehow justify what happened to those books and their writers, telling myself they were unworthy, they had no skill, they didn’t deserve to be published, communism or not.” But it wore him out. Within months Holló was getting up at night haunted by the idea that one of those writers, it didn’t matter which, might have gone on from the trash they were churning out to composing truly lasting work. In the office, he wanted to ask someone, anyone, to second guess his choices, to tell him he was right in thinking that writer X or Y would never amount to anything, but to even ask that, to have considerations beyond the one that mattered—whether a given book reinforced or undermined the revolution—was already to be compromised, an enemy. It was in the middle of this isolation that he began meeting with Adriána in the out-of-the-way places of the ministry—the basement storage lockers, bathrooms closed for repair, boiler rooms.

  “I really don’t know how it started.” Holló paused. “I think it was the excitement of having something in my life other than mere survival. It wasn’t her, not really.” He smoothed the hair on top of his head. “We were young and stupid and I don’t think either of us really knew what we wanted.”

  Adriána was having as much trouble sleeping as he was. For her, Cérna was the problem, another kind of censorship altogether, this man who somehow kept to himself even when they were having sex, so removed from showing what he felt, who he was, what he desired, so totally one with the Party line that he was only ever there as an instance of ideology. It had been different before the war, she told him, when there were so many different kinds of communist, before the Soviets arrived and liquidated those on the left who were too outspoken or brave or committed, and coerced the rest into an undifferentiated mass. “Maybe Cérna always thought the way he thought,” she said, “but I never noticed it because there were always people around who thought differently.”

  Is that why I’m here, Holló had wondered, because I’m different? Had Adriána chosen him as a lover because unlike Cérna he was so totally an outsider in the ministry, a low-level hack, no friends or connections, someone whose comings and goings no one would even notice? Or was it because she sensed something else in him, repressed and abnormal passions, and that he was therefore less likely to arouse suspicion, to be seen as one of her possible lovers?

  Adriána said she’d been watching him for weeks, which Holló understood to mean she’d been looking into him, whatever files there were, making sure he was safe in every way, unallied with anyone more powerful than her husband. “She kissed me first,” he said, though he was already aware that it was coming, the way she sidled up to his desk, stood closer than was necessary when she called him into her office, the way she was always there, smiling, when he rounded a corner, her fingertips brushing his hand as she glided past. “I am alone,” Adriána said that first time, pulling back from his lips, her gaze somewhere between authority an
d exposure, as if she was stepping out of her clothes right there. It was the perfect thing to say, at once a statement of how she spent her days, how she felt, and that she was acting of her own prerogative. “I’m not going to be able to wait this out,” she said, gesturing hopelessly at the building. “This is going to last longer than us.” He’d nodded. She stepped in to kiss him again, and he kissed her back.

  They taught each other to sleep, realizing together what it required, how they could work all day doing the sorts of things they did, throwing all of that work, the beauty and truth and bravery of it, down the toilet, then meet at night, whenever Cérna was away—off to Moscow, Krakow, Berlin, Bucharest, as politics required—tossing their guilt aside as easily as their clothes, and falling afterwards into a darkness so deep it was empty even of dreams.

  Holló smiled at me. “You’re surprised by this? That I would be with a woman instead of a . . . what is it your girlfriend and mother say about my tastes? Instead of a boy?” He drummed his fingers on the table, then got up and retrieved a book and opened it in front of me, paging through old black-and-white photographs of the infamous communists of the 1950s until he came to Ábel Cérna.

  “He was not a man to be crossed,” Holló said. Then he gestured toward his own face. “This stuff here, all this”—he pointed at his eyes and cheeks and lips—“it was Adriána’s idea.”

  She always felt they were being watched—afraid of an extra presence in the storerooms where they met; of the way Cérna rolled over and looked at her at night; of signs that someone else was going through her papers. It was in this way, Holló said, that his real work as a censor began, because as the days and weeks and months went by she made it harder and harder for them to get together. She stopped walking by his desk, calling him into her office, meeting him in the hallways. The only way to communicate became the books themselves, the ones he and his co-workers sent forward to be suppressed, and which she approved or disapproved in keeping with the policies of the time. “I came to think of the recommendations I sent to her as a kind of love letter,” Holló said. “It was one way to ignore what I was actually doing.” He looked now for the most exquisite books, those he knew would enter circulation through underground channels, with their lines of flawless prose, poetry that gave him goosebumps, the best of the best, and every single one he condemned without fail, sending them forward knowing it would give her pleasure to go through them, vouching for his decisions, thinking of him while doing it, almost like an aphrodisiac. “It was our substitute for sex,” he smiled, “between meetings.” It wasn’t long before Holló realized his quota of censored books was increasing, that he was always in the office early, trying to get to the new stuff, to take the best from it, before anyone else.

  “Of course, you tell yourself things,” he continued, “stories to redeem your betrayals.” At night, after work, early in the morning, he’d think of the writers who’d written these books, the hours they’d spent, the excitement and inspiration, and it felt to him like the only fitting tribute to her, the only thing those books could now realize, as if the beauty that was their aim was Adriána herself, for if they were going to be destroyed, and they were whether Holló did it or someone else, then at least they should go to that, the very thing they’d tried to accomplish and which their destruction would testify to—a love outside the ideology hemming them in, as if one secret could hide inside another, buried deep, the loss of these books covering up something else the regime had missed.

  In time, it became their code. His objections to this or that book involved highlighting certain passages, circling words, putting X’s through entire pages, and she noted it all—descriptions of lovers’ quarrels and trysts, partings and reconciliations, triangulating the chapters, sequencing the page numbers to figure out the time and place he wanted to meet, sending them back to Holló if it wasn’t going to work out, if Cérna would be in town, if there was a meeting she had to attend, asking him to “reconsider” the implications of his report, especially the bits on the ideological significance of Váci Street and Hősök Tér, and, in particular, pages four and fifty-six. After a bit of back and forth the date, time, and place would be set, and on the right night or afternoon or morning Adriána would be there, dressed in an ankle-length overcoat, a top hat, a briefcase, and Holló in a subdued dress, grey cotton, no designs, a belted coat, shielding his face with some hat or umbrella she’d left for him the last time.

  Holló stopped in the middle of his story and looked at me and laughed. “The disguises were her idea. She thought we’d be less noticeable. But I wasn’t so sure. . .” His voice trailed off. “I think she was more interested in exposing me to . . . various options than she was in avoiding the police.” He looked into my face, saw the questions there, and smiled. “You want to know what she was. A lesbian? A man disguised as a woman who liked to disguise herself as a man?” He laughed. “I have no idea. I’d never met anyone like her, and probably never will again.”

  “She sounds a lot like you,” I said.

  “Hm,” he said, nodding his head. “That’s funny, because she showed me I didn’t have to be like anything. I didn’t have to be . . . consistent.” Holló frowned then. He seemed at a loss for the right language with which to describe Adriána and exactly what he’d felt, or still felt, for her—I’d never seen him searching for words before—and after a while Holló gave up and went back to his story.

  Adriána looked at him in the dress and smirked. “You are the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.” He smiled, agreeing. But he wasn’t so sure. There was something in the disguise that freed Holló to move as he’d always wanted to, before his father had quietly battered him into adopting that set to his shoulders, that stride, that way of turning from others coming at you that was not really turning at all.

  Adriána and Holló varied the hours they met. They varied the code. Figuring out what they were trying to say with their lists of banned books, their forms and reports, became complicated, a cross-referencing of paragraphs and circled words and page numbers. They were scared but obsessed, and there were times, Holló confessed, when he’d forget, for hours at a time, how to decipher it, and a panic would come over him and he’d have to force himself not to go ask Adriána what it all meant.

  Or Adriána would not show up, and he’d sit there wondering how he’d gotten it wrong, what he’d missed. “It was all trust,” Holló told me. “I had to believe she wanted to meet me, but for whatever reason couldn’t. Either way—whether she came or not—she still loved me.”

  It was Adriána who showed him how to apply makeup properly. How to create shadows in his face. How to compensate for bad lighting. What to wear under clouds, in sunshine, when it was snowing. “For her, of course, the disguise was easy,” he said, laughing. “A briefcase, an overcoat, a hat, and a suit with a red carnation in the lapel.” It was their fun, in whatever hotel room, vacant flat, or empty office she found for them, something to do other than rail against the system, giggling as Adriána applied this or that cosmetic, showing him how it was done, what effect it would have, and how to get it on and off quickly, without a trace, and of course where to go buy it, the best stuff, usually through some black-market dealer who had a pipeline, God knows how, to the west. By the end of it, he said, after just two years, he could change his face in seconds, from aggressive to soft, from angry to sad, from beautiful to hideous, depending on what was needed, and with that skill he acquired even more freedom, as if going out dressed as a woman was no longer what it had been, a way of hiding, but a kind of release, even exposure, as if he was no longer bound by the fears, the rules of behaviour, even the creed of the person he’d been. Holló began to go out that way on nights when he and Adriána weren’t meeting, when it was just him, and in the mornings when he got home it was almost an effort to take off the makeup, always this feeling of duress.

  It wasn’t long before Holló noticed others like him. He wasn’t speaking about the obvious cases, he said, the men and wom
en everyone’s seen in their ill-fitting dresses and jeans, too-broad shoulders, too-narrow waists, walking down the street knowing all eyes are on them, and fitting into that too, those gazes, like an agonizing suit of clothes. No, the ones that attracted him were the beautiful, he said, who radiated the freedom he’d also begun to feel in the midst of the grey housing projects, the sooty and bullet-riddled fronts of Budapest’s apartments. “Those were the ones that attracted me,” he said. Everything about them seemed so perfect, the care with which they made up their faces, the perfect tailoring of their clothes, the exact match of colours, even their movements, like actors who’d long ago mastered every nuance of character to the point where none of it seemed choreographed or scripted. Nobody else he knew looked as free as that. He followed them to where they went.

  “They were guerrilla establishments,” he said. “Spring up. Close down just as fast.” Bars. Tiny dance halls. Apartments where for one night you were nowhere in the eastern bloc. There were people there from every part of society—proletariat, civil servants, athletes, even a few Party officials—as if they’d managed for one night to achieve a utopian levelling, the dreamed-of equality, that was enforced everywhere else with fists and disappearances and guns and prisons. “You might have picked that to write your thesis on,” he said to me, “if it had occurred to you.” I looked up from the page, saw him frowning, and for one second thought this was a reproach for what I had decided to write on, though when he spoke next I realized this was not it at all, Holló wasn’t interested in me in the slightest. He was frowning at his memories. Mountains of flowers at a bacchanal paid for by misappropriated Party money. Bordellos secreted away in hunting estates once owned by the aristocracy. Male and female escorts kept in pearls by some of the top officials. He seemed so enraptured by what he was telling me that I found myself wondering if I was listening to something that was more dream than reality, if maybe the days and nights of living alone at the club hadn’t turned his memories golden.