Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  Her story was inside it—the whole story—including snapshots of the boys she’d helped kill when she’d turned on the Vannay Battalion—all written out in the form of an accusation. Later that day, in the room where she was staying, Flóri let the letter and photographs slide from the bed, remembering what it had been like inside that building, trapped with the Red Army all around—she was only sixteen years old, and the three boys were fourteen, seventeen, and eighteen—firing weapons they were already experts at reloading. There had been some German soldiers in there to begin with, all three injured, two of them dying the first day after crawling over to lean against the doorways. Why the doorways she couldn’t say. The third one lived for three more days, sitting there demanding water, and reminding them, as often as possible, about the number of Soviet soldiers outside, the sorts of weapons they had, what those weapons could do to a human body. But most of all he kept repeating how they were going to die. “It’s what we all deserve,” he laughed, holding his hand over the gash in his stomach. Even worse were the horses the Germans had brought in there, up the staircase to the third floor, so starved they had barely enough energy to kick holes in the walls, to tear with their teeth at each other and anyone else who approached, before the soldiers outside managed to kill one with a rocket, and the other two with a single bullet each. “I brought them in case we needed to escape,” the third soldier laughed. “So we could get on them and ride away.” The stink of corpses was unbearable. But in the early days, when their stomachs were still big enough to feel hunger, they ignored the smell and searched up and down the horse carcasses, observing the thin line that separated meat already gone sour, rotting, poisoned, from meat they could keep down, carving it out and tossing it into the fire and then swallowing the blackened lumps hot as coal. Then it was back to scrambling across the heaps of masonry and concrete, iron rods and fallen chandeliers, releasing a volley of shots from one window, then another, then up or down a flight of stairs, passing another member of the battalion who was doing the same thing but in the opposite direction, the stairwell ringing with the voice of the German soldier sapping what frantic energy they still had, “You’re going to die. You’re all going to die.” Within days they’d stopped jumping over the bodies in the doorways, the horses in the salon, first stepping on them carefully, then running across, until they had to stop looking at what was beneath their feet, making the way so clotted and slippery.

  She never would remember if it was Gyuri or Gerő who found the manhole in the cellar, calling them down to help lift off the cover. Descend down that iron ladder, and then what? she’d thought. Only to come up somewhere else in the city, places just as bad or worse, the siege dragging into its fiftieth day, whole blocks so pulverized by ordnance and fire your feet stumbled on rooftops fallen into the street, trying to figure out where a corner had been, an avenue, the place you’d once lived. Down that ladder and then what? Gerő was in the middle of asking who was going to go first when the body floated by. The body of a woman, naked, face down. Her fingers entwined with the fingers of another hand, smaller, attached to a corpse trapped somewhere in the water beneath her, drifting this way and that, turned away from the air, from what was happening in the world above. Then Flóri heard gunfire, shouts in Russian, closer to them than ever before.

  She would always try to forget what happened next—turning from the boys while ripping off her Vannay insignias, running to open the door for the Soviet soldiers before anyone could stop her, watching as members of the Red Army charged through, gunning down Gyuri and Gerő and János. Afterwards, as the soldiers looked Flóri over, her back to the wall, hands empty and raised above her head, she mumbled incoherently in Hungarian and the little Russian she knew about how she was Jewish, how her parents had been members of the communist faction of the Independence Front, how she’d been captured by Vannay’s men, made their prisoner. She said she’d been waiting for days to be liberated by the Red Army. As it turned out, the soldiers didn’t really care about what she was saying, except for the part about how the boys had “treated” her while she’d been their prisoner—making her demonstrate this part of her alleged captivity over and over again that afternoon—and she was to cling to the story even when it was obvious no one cared, that it was only her present usefulness the Party was interested in.

  Now she picked up the pictures and looked at the faces. Did Szent-Mihály carry bits and pieces of their expressions as well? She looked at them closely, and tried to remember a time when it would have been difficult to turn on these faces—on any faces—to betray them. And then she wondered how Szent-Mihály had found out about what had happened, reading through the letter again, carefully examining the photographs, turning them over to read the dates on the back—Gerő Tolscvay (February 12, 1947), Gyuri Kelemen (February 12, 1947), János Szabó (February 12, 1947).

  1947. They should have been dead for two years by then.

  Flóri stared at the pictures again, flipping them back and forth, reaching for the bottle of pálinka, noticing how little the boys had aged and yet how much, comparing them with the faces she remembered from the moment the Soviets trained their guns on them. Then, taking up the bottle, Flóri was out of the room, out into the frigid winter without shoes or a coat or any knowledge of how to retrace her steps, holding the letter and pictures and turning this way and that on the streets, as if randomness itself, the loss of maps, was the only way of getting near Szent-Mihály, as if what she needed was to forget how much she wanted to find him—how much her happiness depended on it.

  “What if I told you they were alive? That they’d all survived?” Flóri looked up from where she’d eventually fallen down, feeling the weight of something on her chest, the large coat he’d taken off and wrapped around her, snow hanging from eaves overhead, the priest rubbing his hands together as if it was that easy to wash them of everything. “What if I told you they’re alive today only because of what you did—because the Russians left them for dead after becoming distracted by you and what you . . . offered them—that they were only wounded, unconscious?” She was shivering under the coat, her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. “What if I told you that everyone you’ve gone after since then, all of them, only survived because you turned them in?” He opened a file and held the photographs before her eyes, face after face after face, all of which she remembered as she remembered the faces of the boys, that look on the other side of goodbye, when the waving’s done and you’ve given yourself over to what’s coming. “Mária Ligeti—the sole survivor of a prison train derailment,” he said. “Erzsébet Hauser—if she’d been arrested two days later she would have been charged as part of the White October conspiracy.” He pointed at another picture. “Péter Horváth—turned out, unbeknownst to him, that he was a loyal comrade who’d infiltrated a reactionary network.” The Monsignor smiled. “They were looking for someone to play that role; Péter went along with it.” He laughed, and it sounded to Flóri as bright and as warm a thing as she’d ever heard. “I like to call them the Nándorffy Network.” He patted her once more. “You’re in my book: Flóri the miracle worker.” He rose. “Look them up if you don’t believe me.”

  It seemed to take a lot longer to get to the hospital than it did to get lost. Other than that, Flóri retained no memory of it. Was she found, or had the Monsignor taken her there? There were policemen, then the usual calls through the usual channels, and then long nights of questions, a revolving door of men who came and went with their stock phrases and ideological tilts of the head. “It’s not normal that someone gets away from us,” they said, sitting by her bed. Not officially, she thought, though in a second amended this to, not normally, and then amended that, spoken aloud, to, “He hasn’t gotten away.” The interlocutors (as they called themselves, though they were really interrogators) looked at her then, and she frowned back, returning the expression of revolutionary seriousness they wanted rather than the bourgeois delight she felt, and was increasingly feeling, at what Szen
t-Mihály had told her. “I know where to find him.”

  She didn’t, of course. But they didn’t know that, their doubts tempered by her record of rooting out reactionary forces. So upon her release they gave her two days to come up with him—two days, not enough time for her to disappear as well. Flóri went home from the hospital and threw out every bottle—empty, half drunk, totally full—tossing them one by one into the garbage chute in the main corridor, and listening to them shatter as they rebounded off the tin walls on the way down. Then Flóri packed a suitcase, prepared her maps, her free train passes, everything she would need, and then she slept. Upon getting up, she made a phone call, listing off the names—Gerő Tolscvay, Gyuri Kelemen, János Szabó—and the approximate ages, ignoring anyone who was too young or too old, and then collected those addresses that seemed to fit the men she was looking for. As she walked out she looked at the calendar, noting that it was Friday, which meant she had until Sunday to find the priest or follow him into hiding, and reflected then that this didn’t at all seem coincidental, as if the Monsignor had known how much time they’d give her, how much time she would have to make contact with the three boys she needed to find, to pry from them the secret of their escape and vanishing, and then to use it herself.

  But the feeling of lightness she had that morning—as if she’d been freed of her fatalism, the sense she’d had, carried for years, that where she’d ended up, the things she was doing, were as inevitable as her betrayal of the boys—this was not to last. Because within a day Flóri was seeing strange faces peering at her from doorways, men called Gerő Tolscvay and Gyuri Kelemen and János Szabó for whom there was no spark of recognition in seeing her. None of them looked anything like the faces she remembered, or the ones in the photographs Szent-Mihály had given her and which she’d lost staggering through the town that snowy day, so that by Saturday afternoon Flóri turned into one of the tiny bars on the outskirts of Miskolc and began ordering one shot of cherry pálinka after another, staring up at the roof as if by following the cracks she might find a hole in tomorrow, Sunday, when she’d agreed to be waiting in her room at the appointed hour with the information on how to get to the Monsignor and his chronicle. She was still following those cracks, now multiplied with the double vision of drunkenness, when the bartender gently said it was time to go and she slid off the seat onto the floor, continuing to gaze up as if at constellations, trying to read something in the glitter of the lamp hanging from the ceiling. They ended up looking at her insignias carefully, and then pretending to hold her with the greatest dignity, by the elbows, while escorting her out—though what they really did was simply lift her off the floor and dump her outside.

  Then came the long night, Flóri sitting on the bed awake, too lost to go in search of more to drink, or to do anything other than resist sleep, shaking her head every time it came over her. Then came the morning, so clear she knew there’d be no forgetting it, the slow onset of the shakes, the fears magnified by whatever it was the alcohol did to her brain, synapses firing and misfiring, the sudden shudders of an ever-worse imagining. When there was a knock on the door she crawled under the sheets to get away from it.

  It was Szent-Mihály who lifted them off her, peering down and asking how good it had felt, over the last weeks, thinking that the boys and women and men she’d helped kill in one way or another were all still alive. The priest stared at her with eyes so tired, his face more crumpled than she remembered it.

  “There’s no Nándorffy Network, is there?” she said, pushing the hair out of her eyes. “You made it up.” In response, the priest shrugged, so casual it seemed as if the presence or absence of miracles—and of the book that was rumoured to contain them—was a matter of complete indifference to him, though at the same time she detected no cynicism in his manner, rather the sense that the book was not important in the way she’d thought it was—that his project, one he would risk his life for, was conceived along entirely different lines.

  “I must look tawdry to you,” he said, not so much sitting down as dropping into a chair. “Like a common criminal,” he continued, shrugging again.

  “The Church is a criminal organization,” she said, finding comfort not so much in the idea as in the return to a definite position—a script whose beginning and middle and end she knew by heart.

  And here he described for her some of the things he’d seen (though how he’d gotten to see them she could only guess): state dinners where servants walked around the Party members with trays of champagne and caviar, everyone dressed in the best possible clothes, twirling through ballrooms; hunting lodges for members of the inner party where they were attended on by butlers and maids and where they rode out in traditional hunting regalia across land kept from everyone else by barbed wire, shooting their guns and collecting their game like Viennese aristocrats; prostitution rings that catered only to the most refined of Marxist tastes. “But of course,” he continued, “since the money and property for these belong to the state all these people can turn and say, ‘But I have nothing, my pockets are empty, I’m as poor as you’—and meanwhile living like kings.”

  “What those people do, what they’ve done, is not really communism.”

  “We say the same things about bad popes—that what they did wasn’t really Christianity.” He leaned forward. “But wasn’t it Marx himself who said there is only history—only the things that were actually done—to guide our thinking? All the rest”—he fluttered his hands in the air like birds—“real Communism, real Christianity, these are just metaphysics. Daydreams. Bad excuses.”

  “We’ve done some good things.”

  “Most people do,” he said, “here and there.”

  She looked at him, and he laughed, saying, “They’re not so different—the two systems.” He watched her rise from the bed, and reach for the bottle of pálinka. “I’m not really a priest,” he continued, shifting his gaze to the window. “It’s just a way of operating.” He paused. “But you haven’t answered my question. It was nice for you, for a while, thinking differently about yourself?”

  This was when they, the ones Flóri had been expecting, entered the room.

  What Flóri would remember, what she would take away from what followed, was not the surprise of the policemen as they shifted their focus from her to the priest and back again, nor the scrape of quick feet on the floor, the scuffle of bodies, the detaining and slaps and the forced march out the door, nor the grudging respect on the face of Comrade Zabrovsky at how she’d once again managed, in the last second, to turn the tables. Rather, she would remember the shock on Szent-Mihály’s face, and the way it was directed not at the arrival of the ÁVÓ but at her, as if what was unexpected was the fact that she had known they were coming and yet not warned him beforehand. “I thought you’d see what I was telling you,” he said, as they pulled and kicked him from the room. “Remember—I told you to find them! Why would I have done that if . . . ?” He was gone.

  In an instant Zabrovsky was back in the room, commending her with his usual sarcasm: “Excellent work, Comrade Nándorffy. But there is still the matter of the book . . . the so-called ‘chronicle.’ Of course it is the true threat, more than the priest. Reactionary, capitalistic, metaphysical. Where is it?”

  But Flóri was only half listening, for it was here, in realizing how wrong Zabrovsky was, that she finally understood what Szent-Mihály’s purpose had been in telling her to find the three boys. He knew she would fail, and perhaps, in that moment of failure, to find not those three people, nor the rest, all of them long dead, but that place inside herself she’d likewise lost, buried deep, forgotten it even existed—replaced by a cynicism that allowed her to stand there as the police kicked in the door and hauled people like him away. And it had worked, she had felt better in the last few weeks, even as she was being asked question after question, overcome by a feeling of lightness she no longer believed existed, as if it was possible, after all, to think that individual action—laziness, charity, vigil
ance, indifference, greed, envy, love, ambition—even the smallest of gestures, a moment’s shift in attitude, could add up to something else, better or worse.

  “Comrade Nándorffy, need I mention your responsibility to the state?”

  What state? she thought, gazing left and right. This was not about the state, either serving or rising in it, not about churches and soviets and aristocracy and other forms of government, but the place where history was made—in the way you faced everyone else—for it was not miracles Szent-Mihály had been offering, but himself, making people laugh at what they all knew was untrue, returning them from the dream state and its history to the moment they created—the moment in which they lived.

  “Comrade Nándorffy!”

  “The book got away from me,” she finally said. “It’s out there.”