Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  After arriving in Canada Aurél became a game warden, and for the rest of his life would go out hunting regularly—for grouse and duck, but also deer and bear when the season was in, not to mention fly-fishing—and everyone cozied up to him, hoping to get his secrets, the best places to find game, methods of tracking, how to properly train a vizsla, the sorts of flies he was tying. They wanted his advice, and if you poured him enough wine, and if Lujza encouraged him to help the people who hated her, he just might have given it, maybe even invited you along.

  Frigyes was a bootlegger. It’s what he’d always been, in Hungary and Canada, famous for the pálinka he brewed in some secret still he always hinted at but no one apart from Aurél had ever seen. It had medicinal properties, or so it was said, helping to cure arthritis, asthma, impotence, as long as you made sure to drink at least one shot, but preferably more, every single day. For Lujza, Frigyes even made a special batch of pálinka, the few who’d tasted it said it was less like a drink than heaven itself distilled into a bottle. To the last day of her life, Lujza swore it was what kept her young, carrying it around in a silver flask Aurél had given her—an heirloom that had belonged to his father and grandfather and great-grandfather and still bore the family crest—and which he insisted had magical properties that transformed Frigyes’s “rotgut” into the miraculous potion Lujza was almost constantly sipping. Of course you could never tell with Lujza if she was being honest in calling Frigyes’s pálinka still “the fountain of eternal youth,” or heavily ironic, since more than once she told my wife, Vera, that the secret to her appearance was “a combination of avoiding work as much as possible and pickling myself with alcohol.”

  If the problem with Aurél was his lack of generosity, the problem with Frigyes was his chaos. He was notoriously undependable, no one knew when they’d get their delivery of brandy, if it would show up on Friday or Saturday as promised, or even in time for the baptism, wedding, dinner, or whatever the event was. But when Frigyes did arrive it was always with a laugh and more than you’d ordered or he was willing to accept payment for—double the number of jars, some of the very best quality (with the exception of the stuff he made only for Lujza).

  It was Lujza’s arrival in Toronto, in 1958, that made everything that was good in the two men’s relationship—Aurél’s intensity, Frigyes’s impulsiveness—turn into everything that was bad. It was then that Frigyes began telling everyone what a great woodsman Aurél was, singing his praises up and down like some herald in those old etchings of King Mátyás’s royal hunting parties; it was then that Aurél started criticizing Frigyes, and no longer in a funny way, saying the only reason he was such “an agent of anarchy” was so that people would be even more thankful when he finally showed up, providing his little extras like some great benefactor.

  As for Lujza, nobody could really place her, which was unusual, since almost everyone who came to Toronto in those days came because they knew someone—a family member, an in-law, a classmate from school—who’d come before, and who was there waiting when they arrived, offering a place to stay, help getting around, contacts for jobs, introductions at the Szécsényi Club. She arrived with nothing, knowing nobody, no father or brother or husband. In those days she had exactly two suits of good clothes, none of the finery the men would later bankroll, and her hands were chapped and worn and fidgety, her hair carefully combed and pinned back but not styled, her face already developing the kinds of wrinkles it would take weekly spa treatments and plenty of Frigyes’s pálinka to arrest and then erase. Throughout her time in Toronto, Lujza made no attempt to correct the rumours that grew up around her.

  In the first year she sat for hours with Árpád Holló, who ran the Szécsényi Club, dressed in one of those two outfits that would have looked refined on the streets of Budapest—high heels, tight skirts, complicated blouses—but in Toronto just looked trashy. (Later, with the money the two men lavished on her, she adopted the style of 1950s and early 1960s European film stars, such as Corinne Marchand in Cleo from 5 to 7, or Anouk Aimée in 8½.) Nobody knew what Holló and she talked about, but they talked, laughing quietly, pouring brandy into their coffees, and once in a while Holló would nod in the direction of someone entering the club and whisper a word or two into Lujza’s ear. It was understood, early on, that she was looking for a man, that was the first rumour, but if anyone ever mentioned it in Lujza’s presence, she’d turn to them and say, “Actually, I’m looking for more than a man,” as if one just wasn’t enough.

  When the scandal broke, late in 1959, that Lujza was seeing both Aurél and Frigyes, everyone said Holló had intro- duced them, since they were both regulars at the club. The story went around and around, how that slut, Lujza, just couldn’t get enough, at her age (she must have been thirty-five then), of men, of chocolates and roses and money, of sex, and that by stringing along Aurél and Frigyes she was ruining one of the purest friendships anyone had ever seen, not to mention stealing two of the community’s most eligible bachelors. Lujza responded by putting on extra perfume, swinging her backside a little more when she walked, addressing the husbands of other women by briefly caressing their cheeks, not long enough for the wives to jump in or make a comment, but long enough to make their men blush.

  Lujza’s sluttiness dated far back, that’s what everyone said, from even before she’d left Hungary. She’d always been too free. Some said she’d made her way into the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow-Cross, by sleeping her way up the hierarchy. There was even a picture that went around—I saw it briefly—one of those grainy things cut from a wartime newspaper, of her standing with some politicians and generals and scientists at a gala, all of them in arm bands, resting her head against the shoulder of Otto Kovács, who’d been one of the Nazi physicists trying to build Hitler a “super-weapon.” Lujza responded to this rumour by showing up at the next club banquet dressed in black, there was even some leather in her outfit, and was heard saying to one guest, “You remind me of my old lover, Otto. He was very sweet for someone who was planning to end the world.” She smiled as if reliving a distant memory. “He said he wouldn’t be able to save me, but he’d keep me company until the end.” You could never be quite sure if she was lying or telling the truth, though for me it was all lies, driven by a fury at how stupid the rumours were, how far from what she’d actually lived through and suffered and that had brought her to this place, this community so impoverished in its imagination that she was going to show all of us how character assassination should really be done.

  The rumours always featured the siege of Budapest—how somewhere in the midst of that disaster she’d joined one side, the fascists, then switched over when it became clear the Red Army was going to win. It was said that during those terrible days she’d joined a cell of radical Bolsheviks who preached free love, as a result of which she’d slept with a thousand soldiers, and eventually become the lover of the Hungarian man who took on the name Maxim Zabrovsky and after the war served as a high-ranking officer in the Hungarian secret police, the ÁVÓ. “Oh, those days of ‘free love,’” Lujza would say, her voice husky with nostalgia. “Of course, it worked better for the men than the women. We ended up pregnant; or got beaten up for sleeping with the wrong person, including other women, which the men didn’t like; or farmed out like whores, except of course we didn’t get paid. ‘Do it for the revolution, comrade.’” She snorted. “Have you ever heard anything so idiotic? But we believed it back then, the ‘revolutionary potential of sex,’ all that garbage.” She sighed. “The men did whatever they wanted. They had the time of their lives.”

  Others said that Zabrovsky was just a stop along the way for Lujza, who slept her way so far up the chain that when 1956 rolled around, and it looked for a while like the anti-Soviet revolutionaries would succeed, she left for the west. “Yes, yes,” she said, sitting beside Aurél one night during a dance at the club, “there was a faction among the revolutionaries targeting me because I’d collected the seed of so many Soviet officers I
could breed another Red Army.” She was very drunk when she said this, leaning across the table and weaving in front of us like a charmed snake. Aurél pulled her back and glared at everyone, daring us to laugh or say something, and when no one did, he quietly collected her, Lujza was crying by then, and led her gently across the ballroom and out the doors. I can still see him in his tuxedo, Lujza elegant for all her drunkenness, leaning on his arm in her white dress, a gauzy scarf across the small of her back and trailing from where it was wound around her wrists.

  I only ever saw her lose control like that once more, at the end. Normally she seemed supremely confident, secure in her power, ironic but always gracious, never for a moment bothered by the whispers buzzing around her.

  As far as the rumours went, the women were the worst, since the only thing they loved complaining about more than how bad it was being married to Hungarian men—their tyranny, the way they expected dinner and sex and never lifted a finger with the children, their chronic infidelity while violently insisting on virtue from their wives—was a woman who dared to do all the things they wouldn’t. Looking at her I could imagine why Aurél and Frigyes endured Lujza’s inability to choose between the two of them. She carried an impression of sex wherever she went—homes she entered, streets she was on, whether the occasion was a baptism, first holy communion, or a Christmas party—there she was exuding it, close enough to touch, to taste, but always unattainable. I knew her for over fifteen years and it was always there, it didn’t matter how old she was, she just adjusted, figured out different ways to carry it, varying the hairstyles, the scarves and dresses, that kept her sexy even after what was beautiful about her vanished.

  Vera put it perfectly one day after she noticed me watching Lujza at church, scowling as I tried to deny it: “She doesn’t wear too much perfume, and her clothes are elegant but not revealing,” she said, staring out the windshield. “It’s her freedom. It attracts and repulses you. You want her to be like us—controlled—but you also don’t want that.” Vera waited a second while the wipers swept back and forth. “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s the same with us women. We tell stories to try and tame her, to put her in a box, but the more we tell the more she rises to the challenge, the bigger she seems, as if there’s no limit to her freedom.”

  It was true, Lujza had this liberty in her own body, an intimacy that enveloped you even if all she was doing was introducing herself, smiling hello, shaking your hand. I knew it more than the rest, since Vera was one of the few so intrigued by the rumours that she tried to get close to Lujza, thinking the truth must be even more exotic than the stories, only to end up going beyond that intrigue, as envy turned to sympathy, and becoming her one true friend.

  Lujza carried it right to our house, the black chatter that followed her. She carried it like a mark of honour, clipping along the sidewalk in heels, a colourful scarf wound around her head, dark sunglasses, cigarette between her ruby lips, as if she was worth every bit of attention. “Hello, Bence,” she’d say, strolling through the gate. She was always polite with me, respectful, though I knew she could be otherwise if she chose, there was something fearsome about her even at her friendliest. But there was something else, too, a weariness and solitude, and it made me wonder if what was so frightening about that ferocity was not that it was held back but that it was always taking place, only inside, bursting out once in a while as sarcasm because she knew of no other way to let anyone see it. “Is Vera home?” she’d ask, and if not for the smell of pálinka billowing from her mouth, the question would have been innocent.

  I used to listen to them sometimes, from the basement, or the study, Lujza’s presence making Vera brave, indifferent to where her voice carried.

  “I couldn’t divorce him, Lujza. What would I do? How would I make money?”

  “You’d take his money, of course,” Lujza said. “Though I don’t know why you’d want to do something as stupid as go out on your own.”

  “You’re out on your own! And you’ve got Aurél and Frigyes looking after you.” Vera waited then, as if expecting Lujza to reveal her secret, how she did it, her control over the two men, but she said nothing. “You’re not like us,” Vera said. “We’re invisible compared to you.”

  “Of course you’re invisible,” said Lujza. “You’re invisible because you’ve let yourself be looked at, fully looked at. You should never allow anything but a glimpse.” Her voice quavered as she spoke, as if it was a statement of fact rather than a recommendation, as if she envied Vera her transparency, and what she asked next sounded like a lullaby meant to soothe herself. “Vera, tell me that story, when you knew you were going to give birth to Krisztina.”

  Vera sighed, not hearing her at all, “I don’t know how it could be otherwise.” She began to talk about me in the way she sometimes did—how I’d come home from work and tell her she had no idea what work was, that whenever she needed money she just wrote a cheque and that was that. She told Lujza what she told me—that I was the one with no idea, never having washed the same floor for decades, or spent as little as a week looking after kids, or sacrificed a lifetime to the fluorescent light of grocery stores, the terrifying boredom of doing it over and over, then waking up to do it again. “For Bence,” she said, “there is only one real job, the kind he does at the office, doing things that matter in the world. He makes the money, his money.”

  I could hear the clock tick. Neither woman spoke. Finally Lujza hissed something I’ll never forget. “It must be nice,” she said, “to think of this home when you’re away from it—to know there’s such a place that has so much of you, your story, your history.” She waited. “The real story, I mean, not like the ones people invent for me.”

  “I don’t tell stories,” Vera said.

  “You do,” said Lujza. There was no bitterness there, only fact, the momentary return of the flippancy she showed at the club. “Why else invite me over here? It’s okay, Vera, I don’t mind. Your company is useful to me.”

  “Tell me,” said Vera, as if this was the cue, as if she’d been waiting for it all day, as if there was nothing else she’d ever wanted to hear. “Tell me, tell me.”

  I could hear Lujza pouring some of Frigyes’s pálinka into their coffees, but when she spoke her voice was tired. “Last week, Erzsi told Magdi—Holló overheard them and repeated it to me—that I survived the siege of Budapest by whoring around. I’m sure you’ve heard that one before. But you know what Holló did?” Lujza tried to laugh. “He’s such a troublemaker. He told them I’d confessed as much to him. That selling myself is how I looked after my mother and father and brothers and sisters. I got food for them that way, and protection. And they believed him! So you know what I did?” When Vera said nothing, I imagined her shaking her head. “I told Frigyes, and you know what he did?” Again there was nothing from Vera. “He stopped working on Erzsi’s roof. He just stopped. One day. Two days. She kept calling him. He wouldn’t answer. She tried hiring other workmen. They said they’d come, but they never did, Frigyes made sure of that. Remember how it rained last week? Half of Erzsi’s living room got washed away. Then Frigyes came over and fixed what he’d started. He made his point. The next time Erzsi came to the Szécsényi Club, Holló asked if she’d heard about how I’d had sex with a whole regiment of the Red Army, and she told him she didn’t want to talk about it.” Lujza was almost shouting the last part of the story, though there was nothing triumphant in it.

  “She didn’t?” Vera laughed too. This was why she invited Lujza over, the real purpose behind their friendship, Lujza’s enchanted life, the secret of how she’d managed to resist convention and still be happy, how she’d kept that sense of mystery leached from women like Vera by the time they hit forty. I saw it on my wife every night, standing by the sink, hands covered in suds, staring into windows with the night behind them, reflecting Vera back at herself.

  I left them that afternoon, crept down the stairs and out the back door, making sure they didn’t hear. Vera’s vision
of me wasn’t at all accurate. I saw nothing glorious in my work, my life, only the day-to-day grind of trying to minimize humiliation and hide from the knowledge, more insistent every year, of how expendable I was, as quickly replaced as retired, and in the meantime trying to salvage a bit of self-worth to stay afloat on like wreckage. One way to do this was to fight with Vera, and it had nothing to do with the actual terms we used, like weapons—who made the money and who wiped the noses and who mopped the floors and who put in the fence posts—these were just things we said to make ourselves visible, though what they really did, and I knew this without knowing how to stop it, was make us indifferent to each other’s entrapment—bitter, estranged, kept together by a habit of mutual grievance that became the one certainty the two of us would carry into old age. The truth is, I envied Lujza too.

  The ones I didn’t envy were Aurél and Frigyes. In the years before Lujza’s arrival, they’d come over to help make kolbász in my shed, mixing great batches of ground pork with paprika and garlic and pepper and even a little jalapeño (Frigyes’s innovation). They’d come over to make beer, wine. They’d help me put in new windows, drywall, plumbing, concrete. None of us Hungarians hired a contractor—ever—you had to do it by yourself or with help from the community. Often, this meant a lot of fights—all of us men set in our ways of doing things, ordering each other around, shouting as to whose methods were the best—and a lot of resentment over who’d done who more favours, worked harder, not seen sufficient returns. Sometimes I think it would have been better just to hire the contractors.