Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  I’m speaking of the last time Aurél and Frigyes ever helped me do anything. This was 1965, seven years after Lujza’s arrival and six years after she took up with the two men. We were putting in a new fence. It was careful work involving string stretched around the perimeter of my yard giving the precise heights and angles of the posts, holes dug to exact depth, specific consistencies of cement, poles covered in layers of tar—enough work to have us arguing and taking tools from each other’s hands and sweating in the heat after only ten minutes.

  I was standing by one of the holes we’d dug, holding up a post, when it started.

  Frigyes wanted to give Aurél the rest of the beer he’d been drinking because Aurél had long ago finished his and was visibly sweating in the August heat. He accepted it from Frigyes, took a long swallow, and said, “It’s warm as piss. You give me this beer, but it’s disgusting.” He took another long swallow, finishing what was left. “It’s always the same with you, isn’t it?”

  Frigyes frowned, then brightened in that way of his. “Just a minute. I’ll get you another, a cold one,” he said. He looked over at me. “You want one, too?”

  I could feel it coming. I’d seen it often enough by now. So I let the post rest against the edge of the hole and said I’d go get us the beers instead.

  “That would be better, because then—” Aurél said.

  “No, no,” Frigyes interrupted him, and turned to me. “You’ve worked hard, you’re sweating like a dog, let me get them.”

  Aurél stepped in front of me, poking his finger into Frigyes’s chest. “You always do this. You get mad at me when I don’t come to you for favours—‘Why didn’t you bring the car to me to fix?’ ‘Why didn’t you get me to help with the roof?’ ‘Why are you making wine with that guy and not me?’—but then when I do come to you, you fuck it all up! You don’t do it properly, or you give it to someone else to do, or you’re late or don’t show up! Even this, going to get me a beer, you’re going to fuck that up, too.” He jerked his thumb at me. “Let Bence bring us the beer,” he said.

  Frigyes looked at Aurél. “What did I screw up? Was it the truck? Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have come over and fixed it again.”

  “You did come over to fix it!” shouted Aurél. “But that’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?” Frigyes asked, just as loud.

  “The sour cream,” said Aurél. It was voiced in such a way that there was no doubt Frigyes knew what he was talking about, that all of us knew what he was talking about, and Aurél just stood there in silence, as if he didn’t need to elaborate, as if Frigyes’s memory of the grievances he’d caused was equal to Aurél’s own, stretching back right to 1959 when they’d both bought flowers for Lujza at the same time and she’d accepted them both, stepping between them when they started to argue, saying, “If you fight over me I’ll throw all the flowers out, and both of you with them.”

  “The sour cream?” Frigyes looked at me, then at Aurél. “What sour cream?”

  “When you came over to fix the truck you went into the kitchen and you ate all the sour cream. You know exactly what I’m talking about!”

  “So I ate the sour cream,” Frigyes said.

  Aurél made his hands into fists. “You’re always doing that!” he howled. “You do these things all the time, these”—he shook his fists—“these millions of things, in my home—my home, do you understand?—and they—” he took a step toward Frigyes “—they add up!”

  “So I’ll buy you sour cream next time I come over,” replied Frigyes, not backing down.

  “Fuck. The. Fucking. Sour. Cream.” Aurél yelled each word, wanting to make sure we heard the sentence clearly, and then he swept all of Frigyes’s tools off the workbench into a wheelbarrow full of fresh concrete. I jumped back, as some of the tools were still connected to extension cords running to an outlet off the side of the house. Frigyes just stared at the tools while Aurél stormed off to his truck, started it up, and sped away.

  Most of the tools were ruined. But we managed to clean off the rest. It took over an hour, and by the time we were finished I had no desire to go back to putting up fence posts. The whole time Frigyes had been whistling away and smiling.

  By the time we’d finished, Vera had brought out beer, and Frigyes turned to her and asked if she knew of a place nearby where he could pick up a container of sour cream.

  “Safeway. Two blocks that way,” she said.

  As he pulled away I took off my cap and used it to wipe the sweat off my head. “I wish those two would just argue about what they’re really arguing about.”

  “They love Lujza too much for that,” she said, gazing after Frigyes’s departing truck. “The last thing they want is to make a big public scene, and cause more trouble for her.” She waited for my response, but when I said nothing she turned and went back into the house.

  She was wrong, I knew it, but I had no proof.

  Despite the arguments the two men had, everyone knew Lujza was under their protection. Whenever one or the other of them turned up at a dance or wedding or picnic, Lujza was usually there with him, and people kept quiet and pretended they were an old couple, and after they left brought out the knives and tore holes in Lujza’s reputation.

  This protection was the only thing Aurél and Frigyes did in mutual agreement, though the truth was that even here they were competing. It was maybe their greatest competition. If one of them was coming to an event with her, the other would stay away. It was a system Lujza devised, letting them think they were saving her from shame or awkwardness, when really she was just managing their violence, which otherwise would have ended in murder.

  I was eavesdropping again, as Lujza described her strategy to Vera in that tired way she had. “I told them in no uncertain terms that I have one absolute rule: no violence, ever. One broken tooth or black eye or dislocated shoulder—even the rumour of them—and I’ll be gone from this place as quietly as I arrived. They know how fast I can disappear.”

  “Did they listen?” Vera said.

  “Of course not!” said Lujza. “So I left for a whole month. Don’t you remember?”

  Vera waited a minute, thinking. “Was this . . . was this in the summer of 1962?”

  “August,” said Lujza.

  I remembered that month, too, always the worst in Toronto, the heat and humidity settling around your neck like a hot anchor. Word went around that Lujza had mysteriously vanished. In the weeks that followed we’d see Aurél and Frigyes sitting quietly in the cool of the club’s bar, their heads bowed over the table as if they were less men than photographs blending in with the half-light and grimy stools, cold bottles between them. It looked like they were looking after each other again. Nobody knew what was going on, but before we’d figured it out it was September, Lujza was back, and the two men were stalking each other like before.

  “The stories you people tell about me,” Lujza said. “I’m not sure Aurél and Frigyes don’t in some part believe them.”

  “I don’t tell stories,” Vera said.

  “You do!” yelled Lujza, slamming her hand down on the table.

  “I don’t,” said Vera quietly, “not anymore.”

  “I don’t know,” said Lujza after a while, her voice breaking. “Maybe Aurél and Frigyes just worry about me. Do you think so?”

  I never heard Vera’s reply. It was too quiet.

  Shortly after this, Aurél learned to tango. Lujza loved the dance, and she was an expert, and Frigyes knew it as well. In fact, Frigyes said he was the one who’d taught it to Aurél, to which Aurél replied that he’d learned the dance despite Frigyes’s half-assed instruction, though it was probably the memory of who his teacher had been that gave Aurél’s moves such fury, tossing his head and puffing out his chest in arrogance, as if trying to prove that anyone who danced this well couldn’t possibly have learned it from Frigyes. Lujza won every dance competition the club ever put on, with one man or the other, since they refused to dance wit
h anyone else (except, of course, with each other).

  A year after that, Frigyes learned to hunt and fish, because Lujza mentioned how nice it was that Aurél kept stocking her freezer with “tasty game.” He went on and on to anyone who’d listen about how great a teacher Aurél had been, though whenever he heard about this Aurél just snarled and told the story of how Frigyes had lost one of his best fishing rods by accidentally throwing it into the river during a cast. “It was an old Remington bamboo-cane rod. Irreplaceable. He bought me a Bowline instead. Well that’s no fucking good!”

  They cultivated themselves ferociously. Both men had to become familiar with the latest in French and Italian fashion, sitting in their respective homes scratching their heads over magazines picked up at a specialty newsstand, and then outdoing one another with orders for this or that blouse or dress or shoes from New York, Milan, Paris.

  They grew flowers. You’d see them at opposite ends of the local garden centre loading up their pickup trucks with fertilizer. Both their gardens failed, but Lujza always came to see Vera with a bouquet of the thin, colourless flowers the two men left on her doorstep.

  The only time Lujza allowed them to appear together was at the monthly bridge tournaments at the club, to which she’d always come alone. Lujza loved the lockout convention when playing bridge. Frigyes tried to master it, but every time he did, Aurél countered with the Neapolitan white cat double response. When Frigyes, trying to make him happy, also took up the Neapolitan white cat double response, then Aurél switched to the salamander double, and beat him every time, which made Frigyes laugh and Aurél furious. Lujza, meanwhile, clung to the lockout convention, which in the end neither man managed to play in a way that pleased her.

  It went on year after year, the men playing out their violence indirectly, though they felt free to threaten or do worse to anyone who slandered Lujza.

  What happened with Erzsi’s roof was just one of a million reprisals. It happened all the time. Tíbor Hajdu disappeared during a fishing trip with Aurél. They found him forty-eight hours later huddled by a tiny campfire off some forgotten logging road, covered in mud and mosquito bites, claiming Aurél abandoned him after he’d made a crack about Lujza selling herself for a loaf of bread during the siege of Budapest, which meant, of course, that Aurél was the only one who could find him, patiently tracking Hajdu along the forests and swamps he’d run through in his frenzy to find the way home. Despite it all, Tíbor and Aurél did go fishing again—Aurél’s expertise was just too good to refuse—though Tíbor never again mentioned Lujza.

  Anikó Horvát’s car burst into flame one day while idling at the corner of Commercial and Broadway. No one could prove a thing, but some said Frigyes had been seen around her place one night after Anikó—who was in love with Aurél—had announced she was a much better woman than “that whore Lujza,” and to prove it was challenging her to a year-long courting war over Aurél, with the winner being the one who got him to marry her. It was understood that Lujza was already the winner before the competition began, and that Frigyes sabotaged the car because he didn’t want to risk losing her in marriage to Aurél.

  I wonder if they didn’t collaborate on some of these. Because when they weren’t with Lujza they were together, Aurél and Frigyes, hanging out at their homes or the rifle range or a lake or the club, Frigyes constant in his gifts and favours, Aurél constant in his acceptance and criticism. Most people thought they kept after each other out of mistrust, a need for surveillance, keeping tabs, making sure neither one did anything that would give him an edge in Lujza’s affections.

  Everyone said she was stringing them along, she’d created a perfect system. But I knew it wasn’t true. In fact, Lujza had gone too far, she was trapped, she couldn’t choose, because to choose one man would have been to kill the other. They had her as much as she had them.

  But this devil’s bargain was the symptom, not the cause, of what killed Lujza. She died in 1975, February 23, after visiting Vera for the last time.

  She looked awful that night. Her makeup and clothes had been put on in a rush, her face a smear of lotions and powders and jellies, the bits and pieces of her outfit clashing so bad I could see her in the half-dark of the winter afternoon from a full block away. But there was nothing sad in her behaviour that night. She was more full of life than ever, sweeping through the garden gate, kissing me on both cheeks, swaying up the front steps in that way she had, compensating for her drunkenness by moving even more provocatively.

  I followed after her, drawn by the glint of her flask raised in the light above our door, Vera already reaching for her coat.

  “It’s funny,” said Lujza, sitting at the kitchen table, “just this afternoon I remembered a fairy tale my mother had told me as a child.” She hiccupped slightly and covered her mouth with a gloved hand and shook her head to get the hair out of her eyes. “There was once a young man—that’s how it always started.” She grew serious, thoughtful, suddenly sober. “He owned a hundred beautiful women. Not all at the same time, of course. One by one. When one of these women grew old (because the young man never aged) she’d throw herself graciously on the garbage heap. Well, it wasn’t a garbage heap, though that’s what my mother called it, it was really a hill of bones. She threw herself on it to make room for the next one. The young man also had a young wife. She too was young forever. Her problem was that none of the hundred women were immortal like her, their prettiness didn’t last, so none of them took him away for good. He kept coming home for túrósgombóc and lekvár.” Lujza laughed, pulled out the flask, and poured two drinks, but Vera didn’t touch hers. “So finally the wife sent for me and said I should search for the most beautiful woman in the world.” Lujza smiled, closing her eyes, remembering. “I travelled to so many places, Vera. I saw so many things—some beautiful, some horrible. The stories they tell about me, they’re nothing, they don’t even come close. It took me all this time to realize that the woman I was searching for—it was me! There was no reason to have left in the first place.” She sighed, patting her hair. “I was still sixteen, seventeen, and my mother was still telling that fairy tale. I kept waiting for some woman, out there in the world, to grow old and throw herself on that hill of bones so my father would come home for túrósgombóc.” She took a drink.

  Vera looked at me for help, but I just widened my eyes and shrugged.

  “Lujza,” she said, quietly, “you’re drinking too much. You’re not making any sense.” She carefully pulled Lujza’s cup out of her hand. “Let me call Frigyes or Aurél to take you home.” When Lujza said nothing, staring at the place where the cup had been, Vera got up.

  She left me there with Lujza. There was an awkward silence. I saw Vera’s cup and raised it to my lips and drank it in one gulp, bringing it down to see Lujza glaring at me across the table. “Aurél and Frigyes,” she snorted. “Fuck both those assholes.” She dragged her cup back from where Vera had put it, but didn’t drink. “They don’t love me, neither of them, not for a single minute.” She turned her cup clockwise, counter-clockwise. “Have you ever seen anybody so alone?” She grinned at me. I wasn’t sure who she was talking about. “Aurél is so cheap,” Lujza said, “that he can’t say no to anything, no matter how much he hates taking it. And Frigyes is so insecure he doesn’t exist if he’s not the hero who does everything the best.” Lujza’s face was grey under the glaze of makeup. “I got everything I wanted out of those two, and I never had to scrub a floor, or toss shit-stained underwear into a washing machine, or listen to somebody tell me I had it easy because they brought home the money, so wipe those snotty noses, cook dinner, and spread my legs.” Her laugh then was the most horrible I’ve ever heard. She drained her cup. “Those two—they made me so happy!—they were just darlings!”

  Vera came back saying Aurél had agreed to come. Lujza nodded and rose unsteadily from the table. “I think I’ll wait for him outside.” She looked around the kitchen now like someone in real distress, and wiped the back of her hand
across her forehead. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come over tonight.” When she looked up she was smiling, really smiling. “Thank you, both of you, for listening to me.”

  Vera helped Lujza with her coat. A flurry of snow burst in through the opened door. The wind was blowing, bending the tops of trees. Lujza seemed delighted to breathe it in, and then she turned to me. “When I leave, Vera will tell you to put on a coat and come out and stand with me until Áurel shows up.” She kissed both of us on the cheeks and stepped out.

  By the time I’d gotten my coat and gone out she’d disappeared.

  That was the last time we saw her. Ten minutes later Aurél caught up to me, circling the block. We went everywhere that night—to her house, the club, all the places Lujza might have been, even some places she would have avoided, before I finally talked Aurél into going to Frigyes’s house. But Frigyes was gone—Vera had already called him—out searching.

  It was still dark by the time I got home, but it was already morning. Vera opened the door (I’d forgotten to take a key) in her dressing gown, but I could tell she hadn’t slept, and while I stood there stammering, listing the places we’d gone, thinking it was something I needed to do immediately, before coming in, she peered out the door, craning her neck to see over my shoulder, her eyes so wide it was as if she was trying to take in the remaining light.