by Tamas Dobozy
“I have a message from Aces,” I said. “It’s really important.”
She looked at me as if I was crazy. “What the hell does he want?”
“It’s right here,” I said, reaching into a pocket, then another, hoping it didn’t look rehearsed, and finally coming out with a piece of paper. I cleared my throat, noting how the hostility in her eyes had been replaced with apprehension. “‘Dear Katie,’” I started. “‘I hope you don’t mind me sending my cousin like this, but I know you’re probably afraid to see me given the condition I’m in, and because of what happened. I want you to know that I’m grateful that you gave me the chance to defend your honour. We haven’t been going out very long—well, I’d call what we’re doing ‘going out’ anyhow—but I think my actions at the dance made it clear how much I love you. I have sent my cousin to deliver this message because I wanted you to know as soon as possible that I will never stop loving you no matter what, and the minute I’m well enough I’m going to finish the job I started on Saturday night, and when that’s done, when Jerry and Judson have hauled their broken bones over to your place to apologize, then you and I can finally get married.’” At this point I pulled out the wedding band that had belonged to my mother’s father—a beautiful orange-gold ring that looked like a twist of tiny flowers and leaves—and knelt in front of her, trying to look awkward, and said, “Will you marry my cousin Aces?”
Katie looked at me in horror. “You guys are totally fucked!” she said.
“He’s not sure, however,” I continued, “that he can wait until the wedding night to consummate the marriage.”
Within three days Katie was gone. I heard she’d quit her job suddenly and gone to live with an aunt in Halifax, where she was planning on attending university that fall. Aces was heartbroken, but he was safe, and that was all that mattered to me.
Once I found out that Aces was in Toronto I called and said I really wanted to see him and Anna. Aces faltered on the other end, saying it was really a long drive, maybe I should reconsider the cost of gas, the lunch I’d have to stop for along the way, the endless traffic on highway 401. He didn’t want me to come, which of course only made me all the more interested.
I was not surprised when Anna Kovács met me at the door wearing the sort of long, low-cut dress you’d see in movies about 1950s cocktail parties. From the moment she opened her mouth, it was obvious she was from California, and from the moment Aces entered, the way she looked at him, it was obvious she had as little interest in loving him as Katie had.
“She’s the great-granddaughter of Elke Gábor,” Aces said after we’d sat down to the dinner he’d made (barbecued steak, plus salad), pointing at Anna with his knife. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “There I am, sitting in my place in L.A. (I had a great apartment there for a while, man), when I get a call from this librarian, saying Billy . . . well, one of my associates, had gone into the L.A. Public Library and mentioned that I was doing research on Hungarian assassins, and since it’s her research obsession, too, she was actually calling me to see if I could help her.” Aces grinned, and Anna leaned over and kissed him. “Things just took off from there,” he laughed.
“Aces needs someone to help find those little libraries he goes to, don’t you, honey?” Anna turned to me and smiled one of those smiles where it was clear she knew I didn’t like her, and instead of expecting me to smile in return was looking for something else, a wince, a series of blinks, some sign of the wound she’d gouged into me by the way she turned her lips. “At first I thought I was crazy getting involved with Aces, with the kind of work he does, but it’s exciting.”
“My people really liked the idea,” Aces said. “They’d give Anna directions to the places we were supposed to go, and all I had to do was drive. It was a legal thing, they said. If the two of us only knew half the plan each, it would make it easier for the lawyers if we got caught.”
“You aren’t by any chance related to an art historian by the name of Christine Banks?” I asked Anna, and then, without waiting for an answer, said, “What year did you guys meet?”
“June 2007,” she said. Two years before the Banks book was published.
“How are you doing?” Aces asked, changing the subject as if he knew exactly where my questions were headed, and wanted to stop before we got there.
“I’m a prof.” I laughed. “Every day is the same.”
“Already looking forward to retirement?” Anna said, smiling that smile again.
“Absolutely,” I replied.
There was a long silence. “Well . . .” Aces began, rubbing the tops of his thighs.
“Tell me about your great-grandmother,” I said to Anna.
“Just a minute,” she answered, and left the room.
Aces looked like he was finally going to give me that beating I was afraid of as a child, but he just shrugged. “They caught me in Nevada,” he said. “I never saw it coming. We get out of the car in some parking lot. Anna disappears into the Ramada, says she’s got to go to the bathroom. It’s night.” He raised his hands over his head to suggest the dazzle of Las Vegas. “And suddenly there’s cops everywhere. Guns. Padded vests. Face shields. The works. I’m down on the ground, a boot pressing on the back of my head.” He lowered his hands and shrugged. I knew the rest of the story. He’d been thrown in jail, then, through some finagling by his father, got transferred to a kind of holding tank, really a halfway house for illegal immigrants and foreign nationals who’d committed crimes the police thought were more annoying than significant, too much trouble to prosecute, and then Jancsi Bácsi’s lawyer convinced the police that Aces was too stupid to have been the brains behind all those drugs in the trunk of the car, and eventually Aces was kicked in the ass back over the border and told that under no circumstances would he ever be allowed back into the U.S.
“I liked living in America,” Aces said. “It was easy to get guns.” He shrugged. “It was also easy to get arrested. They have more police than I’ve ever seen.” He tilted his head and gazed at the ceiling, and I noticed a new tattoo, a series of tiny devils rising up his neck to his left ear, their tails linked like the little plastic monkeys we played with as children.
Anna returned, slapped an envelope down on the table, and took a drag on her cigarette, wincing as the smoke went in her eyes. Reaching inside, I took out a photograph as old as the pictures Aces had shown me so many years ago, and then, in the real shock of the night, realized it was another photo of Elke Gábor. It was unmistakable. I glanced at Anna, still staring at me, and was unsure if her squint was because of the smoke or something more pitiless.
“I got that from my grandmother,” she said. Whatever the truth was, I knew she hadn’t gotten it from Aces, because I still had the original picture in my possession.
“Tell me about your great-grandmother.”
And she did, for the rest of the evening—the Okhrana, the poisons, Оmpaвumелеŭ— filling in the details according to Aces’ original version, but also adding personal bits—the children Gábor had, how they were spirited out of Russia just in time for the revolution but too late for Elke herself to get out, their emigration from Hungary during the Kun dictatorship. It was all there, wonderfully imagined, and the feeling that she was telling the truth followed me west along highway 401, into Kitchener, and right to my door, where with the turning of a key it vanished. Who was Anna Kovács? What did she want with my cousin?
I started working on a plan, but nothing came of it, because the next time I called Aces, only two days later, an automated message told me the number had been disconnected, and when I called information to get his new number there was nothing. I even drove to Toronto and went back to the apartment but the place was empty, cleaned out, the landlord already showing it to another couple. Naturally, he had no idea where Aces had gone, and he handed me three letters that had arrived for my cousin, saying he was hoping someone would get in touch so he could pass them on.
They were three notices fro
m three different archives, all of them in such tiny towns I’d never heard of them—Smuteye, Alabama; Hot Coffee, Mississippi; Why Not, North Carolina—all saying that they’d made a mistake with his request, that upon “further digging,” an “uncatalogued file” had turned up “pertinent to [his] request for information on Gyula Hegedus,” and though the contents were “too precious to send by mail” they’d be happy to “photocopy the contents upon receipt of a fee payable to the Why Not Public Library.”
I must have sat for three hours reading and re-reading those letters, as mystified by them as I had been with the Banks book. It was only then, in those late hours, that I realized what Aces had been doing all this time, starting from his earliest days, underneath my bed, dreaming through his tears.
He had not gone home after his expulsion from the U.S. After Jancsi Bácsi had bailed him out and sent money for a ticket, the old man went down to the bus depot to wait for the Greyhound, watching as the last passenger left, climbing the steps to scan the empty rows of seats, only to be told by the driver that a young man and woman had gotten off in Richmond, at the first stop after the border. From Richmond the two of them had made their way to Toronto, then disappeared again after I showed up and Aces knew I’d once again interfere with his life, taking from him what he wanted in another of my selfish attempts at help.
What did he want? It wasn’t until I went back to Vancouver that I was able to make myself certain of it. But I needed to. I drove to Jancsi and Annabella’s house in West Vancouver, stepping through the gates, up the steps, wondering what there was for Aces to come home to.
Jancsi Bácsi met me at the door. “Quite the marathon coming up those steps, isn’t it?” he said, laughing. “God, I’ll never forget that race, how slow you were. Everyone’s done, you’re still slogging through the mud. Nothing has changed for you, has it?” He winked at me as if he was the keeper of my secret humiliations, there to remind me just in case I forgot. But for some reason I felt sorry for him now, standing there, both of us knowing what our meeting was about—his abandonment of and by Aces—and I tried not to show how pathetic it was, this memory from over thirty-five years ago, that it was all he had on me, the best he could come up with.
“Where’s Annabella Néni?” I asked.
“New York.” He shrugged. I nodded, but he didn’t wait for me to add anything, because his confident smile flickered and faded as he came to the only question that mattered, the one he’d been waiting to ask: “You saw Imi?” With the way he said it, so quiet, I realized how hard it must have been for him to face that empty bus, to have confronted once again the one failure that made all his successes look like nothing. I nodded, not giving him anything else. “How’s he doing?” he pressed. “This woman he’s with, is she . . . ?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess that’s what I’m here to figure out.” Jancsi looked around, not sure what I was after. “Did you ever get mail from Aces when he was away?”
The old man shrugged. “Sometimes. I knew he needed money, so I’d send him some. He never asked for it.” Jancsi said this with real regret, though I wasn’t sure if it was because his son no longer turned to him in moments of need, or because his independence left Jancsi alone on one more battlefield. “When the money arrived he’d send back a postcard. Nothing on it.”
“Did you keep them?”
Jancsi nodded. “They’re upstairs.”
Aces’ room was exactly as I remembered: small, spare, remarkable only for the number of books on the shelves, and the four pictures on the wall above the desk, all from the siege of Budapest, early 1945, pictures of haggard men and women wandering bombed-out streets, dead horses half buried in rubble, planes crashed into buildings. “I’d forgotten these,” I said to Jancsi.
“The siege. When Imi was young he was always asking me about it,” the old man said. “He loved those stories. All of us stuck in that cellar—me and my brothers and sisters, mother, father, aunts, uncles—all there together with no way out. It was the most terrifying time of my life, but Imi wanted me to tell the story over and over.” It sounded as if Jancsi would have liked to tell the story one more time. “Here they are,” he said, fetching the postcards off the desk.
I went through them, front and back, in about twenty seconds. The backs were easy, since there was nothing on them other than a few stamps and Jancsi Bácsi’s address. They were about as complete a rejection of his father as it was possible to make, not only because he refused to acknowledge the money Jancsi sent, but because of the images of the small towns—the dozens of unknown places—where Aces was dreaming into being the only family he’d ever known, the only one in which he’d ever felt welcome.
I could see him in those tiny archives, sometimes only a room in a basement filled with bursting file cabinets, an old computer beside stacks of papers slowly being entered into a database, the sorts of places where it was not uncommon to come upon something startling—a clipping, a reference, a local history no one had heard about. I could see Aces waiting for the librarian to disappear, then reaching into his jacket and pulling out a photograph or forged letter, crumpled and stained to look authentic, and sticking it into one of the cabinets. It was a secret infiltration, a mythology slowly built up in these tiny rooms where oversight was lax, but from which the stuff he planted could filter into the larger system, archives in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., in a process Aces sped up by requesting the documents he’d planted the next time he came through town, forcing them into existence, the librarians always laughing, saying, “We have nothing like that,” but promising to look into it, and then, days later, they’d call or write, their voices always apologetic, filled with awe, “It turns out that we do have something on a Hungarian émigré who lived hereabouts and killed himself back in ’72.” And before you knew it a scholar like Christine Banks, hungry for a new research field, would trace the information back to Smuteye, Hot Coffee, wherever, and publish a book that made it all official.
I gave the postcards back to Jancsi. “It’s my fault, too,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
I was thinking of Jancsi and Annabella, my mother and father, and of Anna and me—all the people who had abused Aces’ trust either by abandoning him, or taking him from his family under the guise of hospitality, or exploiting his obsession for criminal purposes. But worse than all of this was that Aces no longer cared about our motives, past or present, didn’t care about who was real or fake, only that they stick with the program, as Anna seemed to be doing, maintaining his illusions as long as he kept up his end in their drug deals. It was all he needed us for now, and if we didn’t comply he was finished with us as easily and totally as the closing of a file or dossier in the secret archive that was his only real family, his only real home.
The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto
ÁRIA DIDN’T DIE in the siege of Budapest. No, she suffered the fate of so many women—millions of women, according to historians—who were raped by the Red Army during their “liberation” of eastern and central Europe. For the survivors of this ordeal—women and girls and grandmothers and sisters and any other kind of female the troops could get their hands on—there was a second ordeal once the first was over, and that was the look of shame and disgust in the eyes of the men—husbands, lovers, sons, nephews—who’d been powerless to help them, and for whom the women remained a continual reminder of how they’d failed. Of course, there was also the look of those men who had tried to do something, but this was even more haunting, for some of them had their brains bashed out with the butt ends of rifles, or were shot five or six times, or received so much in the way of injury that the look they gave you afterwards was, for the women, like gazing into a mirror.
Mária’s husband, László, never did find out where the soldiers took her after they’d finished doing what they did, holding him down while they did it in such a way that he had the best view in the house, screaming and struggling so fiercely they finally had to kno
ck him over the head. He returned to consciousness, Mária was gone, and no matter how he searched for her afterwards, paying visits to the Allied Control Commission offices, looking through lists of the wounded, the arrested, the dead, even wandering the neighbourhood where it happened and questioning every tenant or soldier or policeman he came upon, hopeful for just one witness, László got nothing but the same blank stare so many others received in the search for missing women after the war—all those families who eventually found peace by pretending that their wives or mothers or daughters had really died, burying them in proper ceremonies, their caskets and urns empty of bodies and ash; or that they were still alive, somewhere out there, emigrated to the west, enjoying happiness and prosperity; or that they’d never existed at all, removing their photos from walls and scrapbooks and family albums and tossing them into the fire. As the weeks and then months ticked by, László came to realize that what he feared the most was not Mária’s disappearance but her return, that he would somehow have to find the words that would both console and still let him continue on beside her. So what László finally did, after a year had gone by, was mutter something to his father, Boldizsár—whose health was failing by then—about it being 1946 and the country in ruins and the Soviets not making any plans to leave, and the next day he gathered up his and Mária’s son, Krisztián, and headed west, intending to write of his whereabouts to the family once he knew what it was. When he finally settled in Canada, he told everyone that Mária had died from the wounds inflicted upon her by the soldiers, and hoped he was right. As for Krisztián, then aged two, László waited a decade and then simply said, “Your mother died in the war,” and let the kid’s lack of memories do the rest.
