by Tamas Dobozy
Days of Orphans and Strangers
ENŐ KÁLMÁN was a tough guy. He could move an oak desk or filing cabinet or armoire without bothering to unpack what was inside. He had a temper as well, and his voice could blow a door off its hinges whether he was yelling in English or Hungarian or even German, which was a language Jenő spoke fluently, though try as he might he had no memory of how and when he’d learned it. He’d flown back to Hungary once, in 1960, without a passport, evaded the communist guards at the border, went to his stepsister’s place, beat the crap out of the brother-in-law who’d in turn been beating her, stopping only when the brother-in-law promised never to harm her again, and then returned to Canada carrying a suitcase full of cseresznye pálinka off the plane.
But László was not scared of Jenő, and he made a point of showing how unafraid he was by laughing and saying “you’re cracked” whenever Jenő claimed that László was not who he said he was, which Jenő did quite often. “The only reason you’re so obsessed with who and what I am,” László would say in front of the family, “is because you’re adopted, and you want to pull everyone else down to your level.”
Jenő’s last name was not really Kálmán, nor did he know what his last name was. He’d been adopted, or “found” as his stepbrother István put it, during the siege of Budapest, when István’s father, Boldizsár, went out scrounging for food and came upon the teenage boy sitting against a wall holding a giant loaf of bread and a sack of yellow peppers. Boldizsár took Jenő back to the family, holed up in a cellar trying to avoid the explosions and fires, and discovery by the fascists and Soviets, both of whom were using civilians as shields during their fire-fights. From then on they’d always had enough to eat, Jenő heading out every morning and returning with all the food they needed. When something was required, he got it.
Jenő couldn’t overcome László because in his own way László was just as tough as he was—not so much physically as on the inside. His poker face, his stoic fortitude, his ability to laugh in the most anxious of circumstances, resulted from the fact that he’d watched his wife, Mária, get raped by members of the Red Army during the siege. As the Red Army came closer and closer to where the family was hiding, László and Mária went out to find a new place for them all, and it was this that caused the tragedy, for there was no one else to come to Mária’s aid while the soldiers held László down and forced him to witness the whole horrific thing. From that point on nothing and nobody ever struck László as fearsome again—not even Jenő.
But Jenő disputed the rape story, and he was the only person in the family who would have dared. He was the one who’d disembarked from the boat that brought them to Canada and decided that New Brunswick was not the place to be, told them to wait on the dock, and returned an hour later with a bundle of train tickets to Toronto. Jenő said László had not only not been married to Mária, but Mária had not even been Mária. She was a German woman with whom László had escaped from Germany—their mother, in fact—meaning that László was not László either, but a German boy who took on the name and then invented the story of being married to Mária in order to hide what really happened to her, and this only to confuse the hell out of Jenő. This meant that he, Jenő, and László were actually brothers. As for Krisztián, the son of László and Mária, who’d been only a few months old at the end of the war when his mother was supposedly raped and abducted and killed, and only a year and a half old when he came west with his father, he was obviously someone else’s baby that László had agreed to raise. What Jenő couldn’t figure out was why the family was so intent on hiding these facts, why his stepsiblings—István, Adél and Anikó—were colluding with László in keeping up his story.
The rest of the family cringed but didn’t say a thing, though sometimes they spoke amongst themselves wondering if it would be best to agree with Jenő, except that he would know they were doing it from the sound of fear in their voices. So they remained silent, and Jenő said, “Ah, you’re useless,” and stormed out the door, only to return at the next family gathering and spout his accusations all over again.
László didn’t speak often, but when he did he’d point out that Jenő was so interested in the story of Mária—so obsessed with it—only because it was something from László’s past that exerted more power over him, and the rest of the family, than Jenő did. “You don’t like coming up against something stronger than you are,” he said, smiling with such fury even Jenő thought twice about what kind of comeback to make.
“I’ve heard you speak German in your sleep,” he finally said.
“Never!” shouted László.
“Yes, you do,” Jenő shouted back. He pulled from his pocket a Dictaphone and waved it in front of the family gathered at the dining room table. “Since none of you have anything to say on the subject,” he said, “I suppose you won’t mind listening to this?”
They’d been speaking in Hungarian, but when Jenő hit the play button (despite the objections stuttered by László) what emerged—in between the snores, the tossing and turning, the sound of Jenő crawling along the floor to get as close to László as possible—was pure German interspersed with sounds of panic—groans, hollers, mewling—from whatever memories László’s dreams were regurgitating.
“That’s not me!” shouted László, standing up from the table in a great rattling of glasses and plates and cutlery.
“It is you!” shouted Jenő. “I’ve been telling everyone you speak German in your sleep for years!” Every time they went camping or hunting or stayed overnight somewhere, Jenő heard it, but László and everyone always said he was crazy. So Jenő decided to buy a Dictaphone. Now, he described how László exhausted himself on their last hunting trip for moose, tramping miles in search of the biggest antlers long after everyone had quit. By evening he could barely hold the shots of pálinka they put into his hand, and soon fell asleep. Later, Jenő was awakened by Krisztián crawling into his tent to complain how he couldn’t sleep beside his father’s shouting and pleading. “I’d heard you do it a thousand times,” said Jenő, pointing at László, “and I was going to make sure everyone else finally heard it too.”
He nodded at the Dictaphone, and for a second more the family listened to the sentences running beneath the tape hiss. “I know what you’re saying,” Jenő said. “My German’s just as good as yours. But just to be fair maybe someone else here, Heléna, should translate it and prove to everyone that’s really German you’re speaking, like it was your native language. Once we’ve settled that then maybe you can answer some questions about Mária and what really happened during the siege.”
The family turned to Heléna, the daughter of Anikó. She began, slow and halting, to translate the words coming out of the speakers, at least as far as her Bachelor of Arts in German Language and Literature allowed. She spoke of the siege of Budapest, what it was like to have been there. She sounded dreamy and vague, skipping a difficult word or verb tense here and there, channelling a message across the most tenuous of connections. The beginning of the story was the most garbled, as if László had been so traumatized by what he’d seen, by what happened to Mária, that he was lost in the language needed to express it. But gradually the story became clearer. Heléna spoke of László’s disorientation, not knowing where the soldiers had taken Mariá when they were finished with her, or how to get back to the cellar where his family and infant son were hiding. She spoke of his decision to strike out in the direction of Mátyásföld, a suburb to the east of Budapest now churned to mud and broken brick, bombed homes, populations hiding or scattered or dead, overrun by the Red Army. That’s where home was, the ancestral seat of the Kálmán family, a sprawling villa surrounded by orchards.
The Dictaphone told the story of László’s journey there, the weeks during which he avoided Soviet patrols. They were really just bands of men in uniform wandering aimlessly, firing off shots, taking what they could—watches and sex—threatening, crying, crazy with war. He hid in cellars,
ran and dodged, was taken in by women.
The women’s names made the biggest impression on the family that night. Heléna translated them from dream-speak into Hungarian—Rózsa, Ibolya, Lilike—as if the siege of Budapest had made allowance for a flower here and there—rose, violet, lily—in a city whose main part was wreckage and fire and bodies.
Rózsa was the first to find him, letting László think he was taking care of her while she restored him from what had happened to Mária, his failure to defend her. Rózsa didn’t live anywhere. As she put it, she lived wherever she happened to be. It was a way of staying alive, inhabiting only the place she found herself, calling it home for an hour or afternoon or night and then moving on, never returning to the same spot twice. She had a way of making László feel secure even as they huddled behind half-exploded walls, beneath viaducts, in the shell of a burned-out tank, as if she knew an enchantment for turning ruin into shelter.
The second woman, Ibolya, lived in a furnished apartment that had survived a direct hit, the rest of the apartments falling down around her place. She and László risked their lives going up and down the swaying staircase that led to her home. Inside there was antique furniture, leather-bound editions of poets, and even plants—vines and leaves and flowers Ibolya tended by taking as little water for herself as was necessary.
The third woman, Lilike, lived in a closet. When she pulled László from in front of the tank he felt as if he’d fallen into a box. It was hot in there, oppressive and dark. For three weeks they sat on a floor so small their legs twined together, so that after the sounds of battle stopped they moved in unison for a while, as if all four legs belonged to both of them, as if they were fused.
From here, László exited Budapest onto the dirt track to Mátyásföld, the ransacked villa, and the bodies of Tíbor and Ildikó, his grandmother and grandfather.
A second after the Dictaphone stopped, Heléna stopped too.
“Those were the things that happened to me after Mária,” said László finally, the room otherwise silent. “It took me so long to find the way home.”
“Now why would you need to recount that in German?” asked Jenő, the only one not in awe of the story.
László replied that he spoke German quite well, demonstrating it right there by quoting from Rilke, and said he’d lived for two years in Vienna after escaping Hungary.
Jenő replied, “I see. So you lived in Vienna, and you learned the language so well—in two years—that it’s what you prefer to speak in your dreams.”
The evening left Jenő confused, as everyone could see. László had dreamed in German, but the dream perfectly fit the story everyone had been telling about him, the siege of Budapest, and Mária. Jenő went home that night, spent a few hours thinking about the impossibility of reconciling the German with the story, and at one in the morning phoned Heléna. He reminded her that he was aware of what Uncle László had done for her over the years, paying the tuition her mother, the widow Anikó, could not afford. But she also owed Jenő. Or had she forgotten the time he’d come over for a visit and discovered that her landlord was jackhammering out part of the foundation? Recognizing the noise, like a crack of thunder, for what it was, he’d hustled Heléna and her cousin Sári out of the building before the place came down, burying the landlord. Had she forgotten that? Had she forgotten how he’d stuck his arm into the mouth of that German shepherd who’d lunged at her during a family camping trip, shoving his arm further and further until it choked and was forced to spit it out? “My chewed-up arm could have been your face!” he said. “Have you forgotten that?”
“It’s one in the morning,” she said, not fully awake. “I’m having a hard time remembering anything.”
Jenő began pestering her. But growing up the fifth of five children, struggling to overcome her immigrant roots and father’s early death, getting a degree in languages and embarking on a career in the diplomatic corps, Heléna had discovered she was tough too.
She’d tease Jenő, saying things like “Well, I may have mistranslated a verb here or there, which would have influenced the meaning of such-and-such a sentence,” to which Jenő would roll his eyes, reminding her that he spoke German too and there was nothing wrong with her translation.
“Did László or did László not go through all that during the siege of Budapest?” he asked.
“Well,” she replied, “maybe you and I misheard what he was saying, or let a few sentences escape us. After all, he was talking pretty quietly, and in his sleep, too.”
“Come on!” he yelled.
“Why is Jenő so obsessed?” Anikó asked Heléna, worried about what might happen to her daughter if she continued to toy with him.
“He’s adopted,” Heléna said. “He’s adopted and we’re one of those families where knowing where you come from and who your ancestors were and the exact nature of your connection with the culture is very important.”
“Did they teach you that in university?” Anikó asked. “In one of those classes on multiculturalism or something?”
“Let’s talk about Dad,” replied Heléna. She said it fast, by reflex, and her mother was already turning away in rage and shame as Heléna recalled how her father’s surname, Cukor, had been Zuckermandle before his grandfather, like so many Jews at the turn of the century, decided to blend in by changing everything—names, religion, history, even the features of their grandchildren by encouraging their sons and daughters to marry Hungarians.
“You’re not Jewish,” said Anikó, visibly shaken. “I’ve told you many times. To be Jewish it has to come through the mother’s line, and I’m pure Hungarian. So even they— I mean the Jews—wouldn’t consider you Jewish.”
“My point exactly,” said Heléna, thinking of what it must be like to be Jenő, watching his children and wife in the yard, all of them connected to mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—to each other—except him. In some way, Heléna decided, Jenő’s desire to expose László was not because he wanted him to be lonely as well, but because he wanted them to be alone together.
So Heléna decided to do something. She was a diplomat after all, and as she’d written in one of the essays required by the application process, she’d always viewed diplomacy as more than a government job. It was a way of negotiating without the threat of war and violence, creating out of conflicting laws and customs a new story everyone would listen to.
She invited the two men on a camping trip where she hoped they’d work out a history acceptable to them both. Jenő agreed, thinking he’d brush Heléna aside once they were there and begin the slow psychological torture of László that would end in him revealing the story Jenő had always wanted to hear.
But László was suspicious. “Why do you want us to go camping?”
“It would be a good way for you and Jenő to work out your differences.”
“I don’t have any differences,” he said. “The differences belong to Jenő.”
No matter how she described the beauty of the hike, or of the campsite she’d chosen, he refused. “Camping! Where did you ever come up with such an idea?”
“Our family has always gone camping!”
“Yes, the family together. Years ago when I was a lot younger, and you and Krisztián were kids!”
Heléna ended up camping with Jenő alone. She didn’t tell him about László’s refusal until they were on the side of a mountain, thirty miles from the nearest road.
Once the tent was set up, the fire started, Jenő asked when László was going to arrive, and Heléna had to tell him that, well, actually, he wasn’t. Jenő had a fit then. He started shouting about how cowardly László was—even as he knew it wasn’t true—how László was always one step ahead, how he kept tricking Jenő, and that he would like once, just once, to finally get the jump on him. Then he kicked over the fire, pulled up the tent, and scattered their sleeping bags and cookware and food everywhere. Heléna let him do it because it was better he vent on the equipment t
han on her.
“He was too ashamed to come,” she said.
“Ashamed?” said Jenő, stopping in the middle of twirling the axe, which he was planning on hurling into a lake a hundred feet away.
“And scared,” she continued.
“Scared?” He lowered the axe.
Heléna then went over the history as she knew it. She let Jenő know just how much of an impression he’d made on her, on the younger cousins who’d grown up on stories of the things he’d done, hoping to make him understand that it connected them more strongly than any blood relation. She spoke of how Jenő had single-handedly saved the family during the siege of Budapest, especially after Boldizsár grew too weak to accompany him, how he left the family in the cellar to go out alone, returning bruised and cut and beat up, but always with enough food and water for the next day. She spoke of the way István, Adél, and Anikó described the trek back to Mátyásföld, Jenő scouting ahead, and dealing with what he found, before returning to lead the family on. She spoke of how after days of scurrying, and evading what even Jenő couldn’t overcome, they arrived at the villa, only to find László alone there, sitting in a dark, rubble-strewn room, his hands still dirty from burying Tíbor and Ildikó in the yard.
“László is afraid of all the things you did for the family that he couldn’t do.”
No, Jenő shook his head and looked at her sadly. That wasn’t what happened at all. “Mária and László had already gone out by the time Boldizsár brought me back to the cellar that day,” he said, “so I didn’t know what he looked like. In fact, I only heard about their story, the rape, afterwards, once we were back in Mátyásföld, as if the whole family had agreed on this giant lie. But I’ll tell you this: the person we met in the villa did not at all resemble the László I would later see in family photographs from before the war. That is, before Boldizsár got rid of the photographs, telling us he didn’t want Krisztián to be reminded of the mother he’d lost, since Mária was in most of those photographs too. Of course that was probably a different Mária as well.” The siblings tried to convince Jenő that László’s experiences in the siege had had a catastrophic effect on him physically, that they’d altered his appearance, but Jenő refused to believe that anything, no matter how traumatic, could change a person’s hair from brown to blond, or straighten his nose, or make him grow a foot in height.
