Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  “So either László is a miracle of science,” Jenő said, “or an imposter.” They were walking through the long grasses at the edge of the lake now. Heléna was scanning the ground for the camping equipment he’d tossed away. Jenő, meanwhile, seemed unconcerned with recovering a thing, or making camp, or nightfall, or the storm that was building. “You’re wrong, Heléna. László is not afraid of me. In fact, if it wasn’t for László I wouldn’t even be a member of this family.”

  Heléna looked at him, then turned in the direction of the wind, which was beginning to carry off their possessions, the tent ballooning like a parachute, dragging off one of the sleeping bags snarled in its strings, disappearing over the lake. God only knew where Jenő had thrown the map, much less the compass, the food, and Heléna moved along in a panic, picking up bits and pieces as the ground grew wetter and light faded from the sky, Jenő tagging along as if they had all the time in the world.

  He was also talking more than she’d ever heard him talk. Except for the obsession with László, Jenő had always been quiet, saying only the minimum of what needed to be said and adding nothing else, even when the family tried to bring up exceptions and contradictions to the iron-clad rules and opinions whereby he operated.

  But that night he was having a hard time focusing on what was in front of them, on her futile effort to recover the things he’d tossed away, not even keeping his eye on where the two of them were going so they could find their way back. He was lost in recounting the things that had befallen him during the siege. Jenő said he remembered nothing of his life from before, only that he was sixteen, there was blood on his head, and that whatever had hit him had bounced off and hit him again, a number of times, on the shoulders, the chest, the front of his legs. It almost scraped the clothes right off his body. But he found more clothing, food too, though he didn’t remember doing that either, only that what he needed was somehow always there, and when it wasn’t, when it seemed he’d finally come to the end of his bewildered wandering in the midst of shells and flame and strafing and men in various uniforms shouting languages into his face, when he’d finally sat down to finish his last loaf of bread, a man’s kindly face appeared in front of him (though Jenő wasn’t even sure if he remembered this, or if it was just something he’d come to remember through the repetition of the family story about how Boldizsár had found him).

  Boldizsár had offered Jenő shelter in a language it would take the boy years to comprehend, and knelt down, stripped off his shirt, and ripped it into strips he wound around the boy’s fractured skull, taking him to where the rest of the family were hiding.

  The wind was whipping around them now, and Jenő reached down and plucked up a bag of trail mix strained out of the air by a bush, offering some to Heléna before taking a handful himself.

  Jenő never did figure out where he’d come from, but the Kálmán family, once they saw how little he remembered, never asked again, behaving as though he’d always belonged to the family. When he went into the streets, desperate to repay them for their generosity, their accepting him, he always felt it was his last chance, if he didn’t return with something he’d find the door to the cellar closed, the family gone, as if his scrounging, his ability to find food and clothing and whatever was needed was the necessary gesture, the offering, that kept them there, awaiting his return. He never went back before he found something, braving any danger if it meant putting his hands on eggs, cheese, rations in the pocket of a fallen soldier. “I have something, I have something, I have something,” he’d whisper to himself, running back to where the Kálmáns were hiding, frightened at the thought of being cast back into the city, which seemed a projection of his memory, as if the world had become the ruins of what was left in his head.

  “It was on the third day of that,” said Jenő, sitting on a rock at the edge of the lake, “that I began to feel as if the things I was finding had been planted there for me.” From then on there was a second presence, but always invisible, on the periphery of things. It seemed to be anticipating his movements, running forward, hanging back, always in advance of where he didn’t yet know he was going to turn, or look, or enter.

  “Listen,” said Heléna carefully. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but we’re going to need to figure out how to get back to the car. Our stuff . . .” She pointed in the direction of the landscape, where ahead of them, stretching low and flat, was the lake, with its grasses and mud. “And it looks like it’s going to rain,” she said, gazing up.

  Jenő looked around and shrugged, continuing the story. As the days wore on, he began to discern a pattern to the way he found things, the presence growing ever stronger, or so he thought, as if once in a while there was a shadow, a movement, the quick withdrawal of a hand, just before he noticed the package or crate that contained what the family needed that day. After a while he realized it was not a force that was making him so lucky in his search, but a person. That’s what it was—a person, looking out for him. He knew it then, and after that his trips into the chaos of Budapest became easier, the city no longer inhospitable, a place where he had to prove himself against impossible odds, but secure, where he could do the most daring things, take incredible risks, because there was someone to catch him when he fell. “I was always brave after that,” said Jenő. It was amazing, he told Heléna, what the world was like for the brave, how confidence carried you through situations that swallowed others alive, as if the belief that you would not only survive but prosper was enough to make reality conform.

  “That’s why I think it was László,” he said. László was the only person Jenő had ever met who was braver than he was, unafraid, secure in his fate, unwilling to change who he was and what he did regardless of circumstance. It was László who made sure Jenő was found by Boldizsár. László who planted every bit of food, every article of clothing, every drop of water Jenő found. László who set it up so Jenő would never have to recover his memory, that he’d be taken in by the family, that he would have a future of such respect and admiration he would never be driven to search too hard in the darkness behind him. And this was why, Jenő believed, László convinced the family to play along in denying that they were related, so his kid brother would never learn the circumstances—horrific as they were—that preceded the day Boldiszár found him, and that included the story of what really happened to Mária, their mother.

  “You’re telling me László was following you around Budapest, predicting where you would look, and, like, dropping off care packages before you got there?”

  Jenő gazed at her, and when she saw the expression on his face, Heléna whistled and turned back to her search, despairing at all the items she saw now, blown by the wind, dancing on the horizon, too far for her to recover. She could imagine how the rest of the story went in Jenő’s head—László somewhere in front, paving the way for his younger brother, setting up everything so that by the time László arrived to wherever he was headed the danger had been dealt with, or brought down to a level he could handle. By the time they got back to the villa, László had already tipped off Boldizsár and the rest, visiting them one night after Jenő had fallen asleep to explain what he was doing, what they must do in return for the way he’d kept them alive—pretend for the rest of their lives that he was the same László as the young man in their family pictures from before the war (God only knew what had really happened to that Lászlo), who’d had a wife called Mária, also featured in the photographs, who was raped and kidnapped by the Red Army. So when they arrived at Mátyásföld everyone but Jenő was ready to receive László among them, as easy with his presence as if they’d known him forever, the lost son miraculously returned to them after horrific trauma.

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Heléna, stopping her search, wondering how long they’d survive in the night. “You and László look nothing alike.”

  “Really? What about our noses? Don’t you think they look the same? And his chin? He almost has a cleft th
ere, which, if he did, would make him look more like me.”

  Heléna watched him, and what she saw was a longing so powerful it had transformed reality. It made Jenő more powerful than the world, for he truly believed there was always someone looking after him. It was as redemptive a craziness as she would ever witness, and for a long time Heléna stood in awe of it.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to last out here,” she said, edging closer to Jenő.

  “We’ll last,” he laughed, putting an arm around her, and in the same motion yelling “Hello” to László, who it turned out had changed his mind, and was even now marching across the grasses toward them, his backpack full of food and shelter, a map and compass gripped tightly in his hand.

  Rosewood Queens

  ’LL NEVER KNOW what Aunt Rose liked better: finding the pieces she was searching for, or the looks on the faces of the dealers when she said she didn’t want to buy the whole set.

  “Excuse me?” they’d ask, eyes flickering as if they were having a seizure.

  “You heard me,” she’d reply. “All I want are the kings” (or the rooks, or the queens, or the bishops, or whatever she was after that day).

  Most of the time, the dealers just laughed. “Lady, you buy it all or you buy none of it.” And she’d laugh too as if they were old friends and reply, “All right,” and pull out her wallet and pay for the whole set. Then she’d open the chessboard and lift out two kings, holding them to the light saying, “Look at that, Mariska—the famous Templar rosewood,” and we’d examine them for a while before she sighed, put them in her bag, and turned to leave.

  “Hey lady,” the dealers would shout, “what about the rest?”

  She always gave them a wicked grin. “I only wanted these,” she’d say. “You can throw the rest in the garbage.”

  I’ll never forget their expressions then, it was the saddest thing, those old men in their dusty stores filled with stuff they’d found at estate sales and flea markets and container auctions, men who knew the value of the forgotten treasures of the world, and whose pride and self-esteem rested in their expertise. They were devastated—you didn’t do that, take something that rare, that fine, and just toss it—staring at the remains of the set, useless now but too beautiful to throw away, knowing it would sit on their shelves forever, lifted down every six months by a collector who’d whistle, “Wow, Templar rosewood! Too bad it’s incomplete,” and look at the dealer with a mixture of accusation and pity.

  “Have a nice day,” she’d say, and waltz us out of there.

  This was thirty-five years ago, when the woman my father told me to call “Aunt Rose” lived across from us on Michigan Avenue in Kitchener in one of those neighbourhoods still there in the hundreds, crumbling brick houses built cheap by the government for soldiers returned from the war. They were tiny, only two bedrooms, though in the past they’d housed families of five or six. My father, Miklós Berényi, known locally as “Mike,” worked at the vinyl factory down the road, making “skin,” as the men referred to it, that went into car seats and handbags and cheap furniture, before a fire in the early 1990s destroyed the plant and put him on early retirement and disability because of what the burning fumes did to his lungs, wheezing another six years, carting around a portable oxygen tank, dying. My mother had left years earlier—“Did us the favour of taking off,” as my father described it—when I was too young to have any memory of her other than those created by the few photographs she left, kept in an album on the shelf above my father’s bed, which would have been a place of importance except it was always covered in dust, untouched except once in a while by me.

  In the photographs she always seemed to be staring at my father as if waiting for an explanation. It was a look I’d come to share, and which I’d also see on Aunt Rose, as if all three of the women in my father’s life wanted the story of his ecstasies and silences, of the way he danced and joked and sang, then sat with us at dinner, lost in some private nightmare he’d as suddenly sink into as come out of, interrupting the conversation that had been going on for an hour to ask what we were talking about, who was involved, what the details were, and we, exasperated, would have to tell it all over again.

  When I asked my father if he missed my mother, he always said, “Why anyone who’s been married once would ever want to be married again is a total mystery to me.”

  It was one of the many things he didn’t speak about. No matter how I pressed, even when I was older and confronted him head-on, saying it was important, I needed to hear about the past, my father either muttered that I should drop it, or started making up stories he knew were too ridiculous to believe, or grabbed me around the waist and said it was a time to dance a paso doble. His response always depended on his mood, manic sometimes, but more and more depressed and withdrawn as he grew older. Either way, I never got the truth. His parents had died during the siege of Budapest, that’s all he said, and he’d come to Canada at sixteen, an orphan, having lied to immigration officials about his age, and worked at whatever he could—painting houses, road construction, tobacco farming, and finally in the vinyl plant because it was a union job and meant stability even though he hated unions.

  It was probably because of his silence that I fell in love with reading, the only way of replacing the information he should have supplied, all those picture books and travel journals and histories on Hungary I checked out of the library, though there wasn’t a lot in English, picturing what my life might have been like had my father stayed there, the two of us in that dirty beautiful capital, strolling the bridges across the Danube, lost in the war-torn corridors of the ninth district, sitting in the faded elegance of the New York Kávéház.

  My love of reading was encouraged by Aunt Rose. She worked at the University of Waterloo in the art history department, and had moved into a house on our block when she was starting out like so many other junior professors who had fashionable sympathies with the working class (whatever that is), before tenure and promotion took them to more affluent neighbourhoods—Mary Ellen, Westmount, Beech-wood—places with quiet streets, where every year the city sent a suction truck to clean up the fallen leaves, where you didn’t have to worry about what your kid would meet with at school. Unlike them, Aunt Rose never left. She loved Michigan Avenue, though Michigan Avenue didn’t always love her, especially the wives of the men she danced and drank and played pool with at the local bar, Henry’s, who gossiped about her for the decade and a half she lived there, not so much because she was loose or anything, since Aunt Rose, at least during the years I’m talking about, only slept with my father, but because she was “slumming,” picking her way through the community as if it was a hobby, drawn to those with the worst stories, physical scars, damaged beyond repair by poverty or hard work, sitting with them sipping bar Scotch and listening.

  Aunt Rose started seeing my father the winter I turned five.

  The first time she came to our house she was carrying a tape recorder, one of those black boxes with the white and red buttons. My father disappeared with her into the kitchen, where they spoke quietly for a while, sitting at the table wringing out a bottle of wine, my father not speaking so much as nervously coughing into the microphone after each of her questions. It was too low for me to hear though I’d crept as close as possible, desperate for information, something to explain the pictures in the book on the shelf above his bed, photographs not only of my mother, but distant places—Nyíregyháza, Debrecen, Budapest—and men dressed as soldiers, priests, magistrates, women young and old sitting in some eastern European orchard shelling peas, or in front of a church in their finery, or seated on a horse-drawn carriage, the entire history of who he was and where he’d come from and by extension me. Later on, when I was older, he’d tell me a few names, or point out who was an aunt or grandmother or nephew, sometimes even lapse into the longest most boring genealogical explanation, but not a word about how the faces and times and places all hung together. “It’s just history,” he’d say. �
�Dead stories.”

  About half an hour into the interview, Aunt Rose leaned over and kissed my father. It was as if she’d put something into his mouth and he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to spit it out or swallow it whole. “I won’t do this!” he yelled, jumping up from the table. “I can’t!” He rose and stormed out. Aunt Rose stared at the tape recorder a minute, and turning caught sight of me. She came over, smiled, touched my cheeks, and followed my father out the door. They were out there on the sidewalk a long time. I was crouched on the threshold watching, dark figures under the street light at the end of the driveway, steam bursting from their mouths, and then my father stopped in the middle of what he was saying, shook his head, and came back and gathered me in his arms and put me to bed.

  Later that night, I snuck out of my bed and crept down the hall to my father’s room, as I always did, since he slept too soundly to ever come to me, whether it was a glass of water I needed or protection from a nightmare. I climbed up on his bed in the complete dark, feeling around on the comforter, searching for some trace of him or a clue to where he’d gone. I started crying, softly at first, but it grew until Aunt Rose rushed in and found me in the middle of the bed, curled up, hysterical. She took me in her arms, though I was demanding my father, and soothed me with whispers and carried me back to my room, lying down beside me. I never found out where she’d come from, or why it had taken so long for someone to get to me, and why that someone wasn’t my father, but when the light came up the next morning she was still there, snoring lightly, reeking of whiskey. It felt right somehow, her presence there, as if the punishment of sharing that sliver of mattress all night, the hangover and bad sleep, was the price she paid for entering my life. After that, when I woke at night, she was the one I started to call for, the one I knew would come.