by Tamas Dobozy
Of course we never met up that night. We didn’t even try. Aunt Rose was checked out by the time I got back to the hotel, just as I’d predicted. “She left you this,” the concierge said, pushing over a tiny package I knew, even then, would contain two queens, one black, one white, that I would hold up to the light in my hotel room, tracing the intricacies of their design. There was a receipt inside from a local shop, where I would go and return them the next day, walking along with the box under my arm thinking of all the shop owners all those years ago facing their useless chess sets, seeing in them what Aunt Rose must have seen in my father—that fragmented beauty terrifying in its uselessness, in its demand that you protect and preserve it even while it offers you nothing of itself.
When I got to the store I stopped outside, holding the box. I lifted out the two queens again and peered into the box, pushing the cotton wadding aside with a finger as if I might find something else. There was nothing, of course, and never had been, only two queens desperate for the affections of an absent king, trying to conjure him into existence, and losing each other along the way.
The Encirclement
T SOME POINT during the lecture Sándor would get up, point a finger at Professor Teleki, and accuse him of lying—and Teleki would gasp and sputter and grow red in the face and the audience would love it. But it wasn’t an act, and Teleki had approached Sándor many times—either personally or through his agent—to ask him what his problem was. He even offered him money, which Sándor accepted only to break his promise and show up at the lectures again—to the point where audiences started expecting him, as if Teleki’s presence was secondary, playing the straight man to this hectoring vindictive blind guy who was the star of the show.
Yes, Sándor was blind. Which only made it more incredible, especially in the early days, that he’d managed to follow Teleki all over North America, from one stop on the lecture circuit to the next. “How the hell can a blind man,” Teleki yelled at his agent, “get around the country so quickly?” Nonetheless, Teleki could see it: Sándor in a dark overcoat, black glasses not flashing in the sunshine so much as absorbing it, his cane tip-tapping along the pavement through all kinds of landscape—deserts, mountains, prairies—and weather—squalls, blizzards, heat waves—aimed directly at the place where Teleki had scheduled his next appearance. It was like something out of a bad folk tale.
But once Teleki started bribing him the vision changed, and he always pictured Sándor sipping mai tais in the airport lounge before boarding with the first-class ticket Teleki’s hush money had bought him, chatting amiably with businessmen, and flirting, in a blind man sort of way, with the stewardesses, though this was as far from the truth as the first vision had been, as Sándor himself explained.
They sat in the bar of the Seelbach Hilton in Louisville and Sándor, with a casual seriousness that always drove Teleki crazy, told him he hadn’t spent a cent Teleki had given him, that every single trip had been accomplished through the “assistance of strangers.” All he had to do, Sándor said, was step out the door, and instantly there were people there, asking if he was okay, if there was anything they could do to help, if there was something he needed. When Teleki said he found it hard to believe that such spontaneous charity could have gotten him from Toronto to New York, to Montreal, Halifax, Boston, Chicago, Calgary, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Anchorage, in that order, on time for every single one of his lectures, Sándor replied, “You can believe it or not, but that’s exactly what happened.” He’d downloaded Teleki’s itinerary, grabbed his coat and suitcase and cane, and walked out of the door into the care of the first stranger he’d met, and from there, “Well, things just took care of themselves.” Teleki looked at him, then around the Seelbach, wondering if he could get away with strangling him right there.
The point at which Sándor would usually rise from his seat—various people supporting him by the elbows—was when Teleki began to describe the morning of January 18, 1945 in Budapest, the minute he’d stepped off the Chain Bridge, and the order went out to blow it up, along with the Hungarian and German soldiers, the peasants and their wheel-barrows full of ducks, the middle-class children and women and men, suitcases packed, still streaming across it. By then, the bridges were a tangled mass of metal, holes gaping along the causeway, cars stuck in them, on fire, bodies shredded by Soviet artillery tangled in the cables and railings, thousands of people trying to force their way across in advance of the Soviets, trampling and being trampled on, cursing in the near dark, forced over the sides into the icy river, mowed down by fighter planes, Red Army tanks, machine guns, while behind their backs, in that half of Budapest, the siege went on, fighting from street to street, building to building, the whole place ablaze.
“Tell them how you grabbed two of the children whose parents had died coming across the bridge,” Sándor would yell at him at this point. “Tell them how you held them to your chest, telling the Arrow-Cross officer you couldn’t join the siege effort because your wife had just died. Then tell them how you abandoned those kids in the next street. You tell them that!” Sándor jabbed his cane in Teleki’s direction.
“That never happened!” Teleki would shout back. “I never did that.”
And the audience would hoot and laugh and clap, egging Sándor on.
It was always something different, another part of the story sabotaged. When Teleki got to the part about how he’d gone up to the castle and “volunteered,” as he put it, to join the defence under Lieutenant-Colonel László Veresváry, Sándor stood up—someone had handed him a bullhorn—and did a high-pitched imitation of how Teleki, after abandoning the children, had run into an Arrow-Cross soldier who saw that he was able-bodied, and told him to get up to the castle. “B-b-b-b-but, I’m just looking for fooooood,” whined Sándor. “I-I-I-I left my kids a block over, and I was about to go back for them. My wife, you see, she died when they blew up the bridge . . .” And here Sándor fell into a fit of such flawless mock weeping that many in the audience turned toward Teleki and copied him. “But the soldier forced you up to the castle anyhow, didn’t he?” said Sándor, suddenly serious. “Giving your ass a kick every few feet just to make sure you got there.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Teleki, trying to look cool, “and if you don’t stop interrupting my talks I’m going to have a restraining order put on you.”
But Teleki’s agent advised him against this. How would it look, he asked, if Teleki, the great professor of twentieth-century middle European history, award-winning author of biographies and memoirs, survivor of the siege of Budapest, were suddenly afraid of the rantings of a blind man? Besides, the lawyer had explained, it would only provide more publicity for Sándor, which was the last thing either of them wanted. He finally suggested—and he was surprised that Teleki hadn’t considered this himself—that he get his act together and take on Sándor directly, since he was after all a historian. Or was he?
Teleki looked at him, wondering whether his agent had been to one of his lectures lately. Had he seen what went on up there? Sándor was killing him, and on the very ground where Teleki was supposed to be the authority. On the other hand, looking again at his agent, Teleki realized that maybe he didn’t want him to get rid of Sándor, that maybe—no, probably—his agent was actually happy with the way things were working out, eagerly calculating his percentage from the recent “bump” in ticket sales.
“What I mean,” said the agent, “is find out who this Sándor guy is. Isn’t that something you do? Root around in people’s pasts?”
Teleki had not known how to respond to that. Sándor Veselényi was his name. That’s as far as they’d gotten during their first few meetings. And he couldn’t just walk into the nearest archive and pull out a file by that name and voila there would be everything from the baptismal record to the accident that caused Sándor’s blindness to why he’d decided to make it his life’s work to humiliate Teleki. No, it would take years to do that kind of research, just as i
t had taken years to gather material for each of the biographies and memoirs Teleki had written, to put together the lecture that was now, unfortunately, thrilling audiences more than ever, and which he was contractually locked into.
Not that it wouldn’t have been nice—Teleki was the first to admit—to get up at the lectern and to lay it all out the next time Sándor opened his mouth, flashing the PowerPoint slides of Sándor in his fascist uniform, a member of the Arrow-Cross, or better yet of Father Kun’s murderous band, so unlike the Germans in their rejection of efficiency, in really going out of their way, even to be inconvenienced, as long as it meant slaughtering the Jews just right. And for the coup de grâce, for a nice moral twist at the end of the story, something about how Sándor had been blinded by his own desire to seek and destroy, perhaps a shard of glass from an explosion he’d rigged in one of the buildings in the Budapest ghetto—whole families tied up inside.
But Teleki had no information on Sándor—only on himself. He’d get up there with his black-and-white slides, his laser pointer, his tongue tripping up, bogged down, boxed in by English, a language so clunky compared to Hungarian, and try to tighten up his story even further, to make himself appear even more authentic, only to have Sándor hobble in on the arms of two businessmen, a mother of three, four old men in outdated suits, and two guys sporting Mohawks. His entourage was growing.
Teleki spoke on, trying to keep his voice from going falsetto. He focused on the crowd—the usual assemblage of academics, writers, journalists, immigrants, students, amateur historians, senior citizens—and pointed to the picture of himself in the uniform of Veresváry’s garrison, expected to keep the Soviets from capturing Buda castle, where the SS and Arrow-Cross commanders were wringing their hands in the middle of the siege, encircled entirely by the Red Army, trying to figure out what to do. At night, young men, really just boys, would try to fly in supplies by glider, Soviet artillery shooting them out of the sky. Teleki struck a solemn tone when he told the crowd that the place they were supposed to land—Vérmező—could be translated as “Blood Meadow.”
When Sándor stayed silent, Teleki grew braver, and he told them of what it was like in the final days of the siege, the desperate order of the castle with its German and Hungarian armies, the soldiers too frightened of punishment—usually a bullet in the head—to voice what was on their minds: why SS Obergruppenführer Pfeffer-Wildenbruch hadn’t gotten them the hell out of Budapest, why they were clearly sitting around waiting to be slaughtered. Worse still was being under the command of Veresváry, whose soldiers were men like Teleki—refugees or criminals or labourers pressed into service—for whom Veresváry was always willing to spare a bit of whipping from the riding crop he carried around, brandishing it over his head as he strode along the trenches they’d dug and were defending, as if the Soviet bullets whizzing around him were so many mosquitoes. Veresváry would sentence men to death for cowardice, then commute the sentence, then brutalize them so badly over the next several days—screaming and kicking at them while the fusillade continued, a horizontal rain of bullets and mortars—that the men would eventually stand in the trench, ostensibly to take better aim at the enemy, though from the way their guns hung in their hands it was little more than suicide. They stood there until half their faces suddenly vanished in a splatter, or their backs bloomed open, red and purple and bone. This seemed to satisfy Veresváry, who praised them as they fell, pointing to how they slumped, knees buckling, heads thrown back, and said to the rest, “There was a soldier, you chickenshits. There was a soldier!” as if the definition of soldier was impossible without the past tense.
“Was that why you came up with the plan to do away with him? To undermine and to betray and to murder your commander?” asked Sándor, standing up.
“You must be thinking of someone else, Sándor.”
“Sure you did. You went from soldier to soldier and then, when you had them onside, you turned around and betrayed them to Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, telling him you’d heard whispers that there would be a mutiny.”
“That’s the biggest lie I’ve ever—”
“Look at the next picture. Look at it.”
The audience turned from Sándor to Teleki, who stood there, mouth agape, the remote control in hand, his finger poised above the button, wondering whether Sándor was bluffing, or whether he’d somehow managed to hijack his PowerPoint, slipping in a different set of slides.
“Let’s see it,” someone in the audience yelled, and everyone laughed.
Teleki hit the button and there they were: all those arrested on charges of treason, five battered men with rotting clothes and unshaven faces standing against the blackened walls of the castle district, loosely grouped together, as if they were not yet accused and looking to slink off before it happened. It was the picture as Teleki remembered it, in exactly the place where it always appeared.
“There you are. You’re standing just to the left of Pfeffer-Wildenbruch. That’s you right there, you dirty stinking fink! You sold out all your comrades!”
Teleki turned, squinting at the photograph, noting with eye-opening surprise that the guy there did resemble, in a way, what he might have looked like fifty years ago, after seventy or so days of siege—malnourished, frightened to death, desperate.
The audience applauded.
“The guy can see photographs!” said Teleki to his agent. “He’s a complete fraud!”
“Why didn’t you say anything at the lecture?”
“I did! But nobody could hear me! They were too busy applauding!”
His agent shrugged. “Maybe he saw the photograph before he went blind. Maybe somebody described it to him.”
“Come off it,” Teleki said.
“So how come he knows so much about you, then?”
“He doesn’t know anything about me! All that stuff . . . he’s lying!”
The agent looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“What? You believe him now, too?”
“The only thing I believe in is sales,” replied the agent, recovering quickly. “And sales are excellent,” he said. “How would you feel about playing in bigger venues?”
“I’m not ‘playing’! I’m trying to inform people, to teach them something!”
What Teleki noticed next was that Sándor’s entourage seemed to be growing, as if the people who helped him were no longer dropping him off at the lectures and going their way, but sticking around, as if something in Sándor’s words, the depth of his conviction, had brought them into contact with a higher cause, a belief system. Great, thought Teleki, just what I need: Sándor becoming a guru.
In addition, it seemed as though Sándor was now doing almost as much talking as Teleki was—bellowing on, jabbing the cane in Teleki’s direction, the group of people immediately around him more vociferous in their approval than the rest. By the end of the night, Teleki noted that he’d spoken only three minutes more than Sándor.
But it was not just this that made Teleki decide, then and there, after twelve fingers of Scotch on the balcony of his hotel room, to pack it in, but also what Sándor had said. For the first time since the beginning of their conflict he was seriously doubting whether he knew more about the siege than the blind man, or whether, in fact, his very first guess had been right after all, and that Sándor, far from being a disabled person, was some spirit of vengeance, one of those mythic figures who were blind not because they couldn’t see but because they were distracted from the material world by a deeper insight, by being able to peer into places no one else could see. Of course, remembering how he’d watched Sándor walk into pillars, or trip over seats, Teleki laughed and dismissed the thought, though it always came back, forcing him up from sleep, the extent of Sándor’s information, the way he could retrieve things from the abyss of the past.
For when Teleki had described the last few days in the castle, how Veresváry ordered them to draw up surveillance maps using telescopes taken from the National Archives, plotting the streets in
the direction of western Buda, Sándor had nodded in his seat. When Teleki said that rumours of a breakout had been swirling for days, Sándor rose up, but said nothing. Nervously, Teleki had continued, saying the German soldiers, during the Second World War, never surrendered, preferring the death of fighting on, of retreat, rather than captivity, for they’d been told of the horrors and torments of Siberia, as if it was possible to imagine a place where death was salvation.
Teleki was sent to Pfeffer-Wildenbruch with the maps they’d drawn up. At this point in the story, Sándor began rubbing his hands together, waiting for Teleki to repeat what Pfeffer-Wildenbruch had said that day as he took the documents from Teleki’s hand, staring right through him as if he wasn’t in the room, as if there was only the Obergruppenführer himself, alone with the choices he couldn’t make: “If I give the order for a breakout,” he mumbled, “everyone will die.”
It was here that Sándor finally chimed in, mimicking the reply Teleki had supposedly given: “S-s-s-surely not everyone.”
Teleki reached for the volume adjustment on his microphone, continuing on with what Pfeffer-Wildenbruch had said to him: “You’ll probably be one of the first to die.”
“I-i-it’s a fitting thing, sir—” Sándor interrupted him again.
“I did not say that!” shouted Teleki, turning the volume all the way up.
Someone handed Sándor the bullhorn again. “To face the enemy directly is a fitting thing, Obergruppenführer, sir. Without flinching.”
Suddenly Sándor began to play both roles, turning this way and that to indicate when Pfeffer-Wildenbruch was speaking and when Teleki, the crowd watching raptly, oblivious to the “No, no, no” Teleki was shouting into the microphone.
“Meanwhile,” said Sándor, now in the role of Teleki, “while the men are proving their bravery, we could do our duty and escape using the sewers under the castle.”
