Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  She should have helped them while they were still in Hungary, Mária thought. She should have used Béla’s connections. But the Kálmáns were so incapable of accepting her charity, so ashamed of dealing with her, that the gifts she provided would only have been further torture to them, especially Boldizsár, the grand patriarch, who’d already lost his wife and would die, just prior to the family’s departure, from the thought that he was too weak to accompany them, defeated by his own anxiety over being defeated. They left the minute he was in the ground, starting out straight from the cemetery. All along, Boldizsár had kept piling on the reasons for why the family should let Béla keep her, why she should be abandoned—playing up his old age, his weakness, his need for sleep and peace and quiet, in order to prepare himself for the trek to the west. In fact, he was the reason she’d agreed to stay with Béla, the sight of Boldizsár as he looked away from her, the failure she reminded him of, his inability to protect a family he felt responsible for. She could shrink him with a glance, as if the sight of Mária’s face stripped him of the beliefs that let him function in the world, and in a rush brought home his helplessness, his dependence on chance, his incapacity to even know his fate, much less influence it. In the end, Mária couldn’t stand how sorry she felt for him.

  Still, there was more she might have done, not just then, but later, once the communists came fully into power. She might have gotten Boldiszár medication for his heart and nerves, and maybe then everyone else would have stayed, because she’d shown Boldizsár the loyalty they’d been unable to show her. She could have left food for them on the doorstep, or had it delivered anonymously. She might have arranged it that they got better jobs. Or asked Béla to stop their harassment at the hands of the ÁVÓ—especially that bastard Zoltán Erdész, who wanted the villa for himself—for their past political allegiances, their Catholicism, their refusal to join the Party. But she’d never done any of this, and most of it was conjecture anyhow, things as they might have been. What she regretted most was that she’d felt too unprotected—from what had happened to her, from the past—and too busy getting that protection to realize that with the loss of the family she’d lost a far more crucial link, for they were her only point of contact with László and Krisztián. At night, as the driver guided Béla and her along streets, or when the two of them strolled down the rakpart, she wondered whether his arm around her waist, or holding her hand, was strong enough to keep her from one day wandering after those ghosts, just to see where they went. But she knew that to let go of Béla was to risk fragmentation, the falling apart of what she’d barely shored together, and which was held in place only because of him, a frame around her disintegration. Béla knew none of this, of course, only that it was possible to fall in love with someone because you could never replace what she lacked, and because of this feel a constant desire to fulfill her.

  “We shall eat here tonight,” he said, taking his hand from Mária’s eyes and leading her past the decaying exterior of a building into rooms of light and wine, walking backwards as he held her hands, allowing her one short glance at where she’d come from.

  The family breathed a sigh of relief late in 1957 when Juliska sent Anikó a letter informing her of Mária’s death, since it meant the lie they’d been telling Krisztián all those years had at last become the truth. Juliska had been caught trying to escape from the country two years prior and was rehabilitated, as best as was possible with someone who’d never been a Party member to begin with, and now shared a three-bedroom flat in Óbuda with three other families. Once in a while one of her letters would be missed by the censors in the post office and make it through to the west.

  She wrote that Mária and Béla had not survived the revolution of 1956. Before the tanks had come rolling in—when it almost looked, miraculously, as if the partisans had succeeded in getting Moscow to capitulate—the two of them had been dragged from their mansion on Andrássy Boulevard and had guns put to their heads, or so the letter went, and reading it Anikó had no reason to doubt it, at least at the time.

  But the night they went over to László’s, she paused in the vestibule while István and Adél took off their coats and boots, and told them that while waiting for the College streetcar she’d seen Mária enter Chez Queux on the arm of a gentleman, and had decided to call out to her just as they reached the door.

  “I wanted to see if you were right,” Anikó said, turning to Adél. “I mean if Juliska got it wrong,” she continued in a hoarse whisper. “And Mária turned! She saw me well enough, but then the gentleman she was with—he was so young and handsome he looked like Béla!—called to her. The look she gave me! As if I was hardly worth noticing. As if I was a beggar on the street. Then,” she hissed, “the doorman opened the door for them. Both of them! He treated Mária as if she was as alive as you or I.”

  “She’s kept her looks, hasn’t she?” asked Adél.

  “Have you two gone insane?” murmured István. “We’re at László’s!”

  “It’s hard to feel happy for her,” continued Adél, looking at her hands, lined with years of handling mop handles and cleanser. “Getting to eat in places like that.”

  “Are you coming inside or what?” asked László, coming out of the kitchen to greet them, holding aloft an uncorked bottle of Egri Bikavér.

  It was the imploring figure of Anikó that Mária continued to see as Béla poured the wine and lifted his glass to the light and tilted it this way and that, pointing out how it coated the glass, how it flowed back. Mária was thinking she would have liked to invite Anikó inside the restaurant, that there was something in the pitiful way she’d stood holding her purse, hunched over with what looked like osteoporosis, as if her skeleton had had enough of holding up her body and decided to curl up and go to sleep inside her flesh. Life had not been kind to Anikó, and so why shouldn’t Mária be kind to her, just this once, never mind that the old woman (she thought of her that way, though there was a time when they’d been the same age) was not dressed for Chez Queux? Béla, meanwhile, had stopped watching the splash and play of wine, set his glass aside, and followed Mária’s look out the window, wondering what he could say that would complete her sense of loss, make her stop looking beyond him for what was missing.

  After all, 1956 was still two years away, and Béla could not have known it, but they’d pack an incredible amount of life into the twenty-four months before they died, always appearing in public as the Party advised them to do, in solemn grey, clothing tailored from the finest materials but always made to look nondescript, so that no one would guess how well they were really living. In the next few weeks, it was in fact their clothing that would consume Mária’s attention. He would come upon her frantically going through the closet as if there was something in there that would make her stand out even less than she already did, a disguise to throw off the pursuit of ghosts.

  For they were pursuing her more than ever now. There wasn’t a day Mária didn’t turn a corner and find herself face to face with Anikó or István or Adél, their faces no longer betraying fear or aversion, but envy and lust. More often than not they would try to approach her, no longer content to remain on the periphery, as if they’d decided that Mária wasn’t empty after all but full enough to fulfill everyone.

  Anikó was the worst, the neediest, and more than once she called out, “Mária, it’s me, Anikó, remember me? Your sister-in-law. You look very fine in that overcoat. And what’s that beautiful perfume you’re wearing?”

  At other times, the three ghosts appeared together, as if they were attempting to set themselves up in front of and behind her, cutting off all avenues of escape. But Mária knew that she would always be able to get by István, with his overwhelming guilt, since he always gave way in the last second, allowing her to jump into a car or bus or a restaurant too fine for them to follow her inside. He was the weak link, though even he attempted to get her favour, once offering a bouquet of red carnations, the official flower of Party bosses and apparatchi
ks, adorning every one of their corsages and buttonholes.

  “What do you want?” she once asked Adél. “How can I possibly help you?”

  Adél stood there, finally put on the spot, stopped in seeking what she wanted by the fact that it had been offered to her. She hadn’t considered how ashamed she’d be to ask for all the things Mária had—the clothes, the food, the luxuries—all the things Adél believed Mária could provide for them. But now, the only thing Adél could say was “You should never forget your family; especially when they’re in need.” And almost as soon as the words were spoken she looked up, afraid that clouds would close in, that buildings would shake, that the ground would open up. By the time the dizziness passed, and she wanted to beg forgiveness, Mária was gone, having fled, tears and all, down one of the streets of the fourteenth district, collapsing after an hour, sitting on the sidewalk and speaking to no one in particular about all the things that had been in her power to do for the Kálmán family in 1947. The things she hadn’t done.

  It was Béla who found her. He asked the driver to take him everywhere, and so he had, through the twisting alleys of districts seven, eight, nine; across the körut; and into district fourteen, where they found Mária crumpled into a ball under an art nouveau building, huddled there wondering why the February wind was no longer able to sweep everything behind her. Gathering her into his arms, Béla realized that the need to banish what Mária had been seeking was no longer a question of how much he wanted her to want him, but a question of keeping her alive. So for the next several days he listened to what she said in her sleep, in the fevers that overtook her sometimes for hours, and whose hallucinations played vividly across her face. Her intonation varied so much it sounded less like a monologue than a roomful of souls. Had Béla been even slightly religious, anything other than the atheist he was, he might even have thought there were ghosts massing inside her, that she was channelling voices from the other side.

  Chief among these was István, who finally lost his temper with Anikó and Adél and their belief that Mária’s death had been misreported, that she’d somehow immigrated to Canada and was among them. Their envy of her good life, and attempts to speak with her, to flatter her, to curry favour, sickened him, even after he’d agreed to help. “She wants us to leave her alone,” he told them. “She’s made that very clear!”

  “I don’t know how she did it,” replied Anikó. “She never had any more on the ball than any of us, but she came over here and got rich, and we came over here and we are lucky to have a roof over our heads!”

  “C’mon,” István said. “Heléna’s in university. Krisztián’s a professor. Maybe we didn’t do so well, but our children have a future.”

  “What about us?” yelled Adél. “What about our future?”

  “What makes you think you deserve one?” howled István. “What makes you think any of us deserve one?”

  The next day Anikó and Adél were back on the street, dressed in the best dresses they’d managed to find inside a box of clothing they’d long ago given up on wearing, dresses they cut along the seams and resewed to fit. Because this time there would be no fooling around with Mária—they were bringing Krisztián. They showed up at his office at the University of Toronto and put on the elderly aunt act, telling him they were out for a walk and decided to see where he worked, and wondered whether or not he was interested in treating them to lunch on his big university professor’s salary. They chose Chez Queux, and marched him along, pretending to hold onto his elbows for support.

  When they arrived they saw that a table had been reserved for them, and for Mária too, who was over by the window wearing a dress of the whitest silk, with the usual handsome man leaning across and holding her hand and placing a dossier between them.

  After the waiter brought them to their table, Adél and Anikó turned to Krisztián and asked if he’d like to meet his mother, both their eyes swinging in the direction of the couple. Béla meanwhile had had enough of the voices and names issuing from Mária for the last two weeks, of watching her being torn apart, and decided that the only way to dispel them would be to find out what had happened to each and every one, her lost and absent relatives, even if it meant finding out, once and for all, that what Mária was missing would be missing forever, and that, because of this, he would only ever be what she loved second best.

  “I searched everywhere,” he whispered consolingly, taking her face in his hands in the hope that his touch would make her eyes return from the distance she’d been staring into, tears streaming down her cheeks and along her jawbone and dripping off her chin. But she would not focus on him, and finally he had to stand, and pull the pictures from the file, and get between her and the gaze she was directing across the room at a young man and a couple of old ladies. “They didn’t make it,” he said. “None of them.” She finally looked at him in panic. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There were a lot of people who didn’t get across.” He wanted to say more but didn’t know what, and instead he shifted his feet, holding the pictures he no longer knew what to do with, wondering for the first time if Mária’s visions were not so much guilt but a way of wondering what life might have been like if she’d left, gone west instead of staying with him, spinning fantasies of the next forty-five years of the Kálmán family’s existence.

  “He didn’t make it?” she asked, reaching for the picture of Krisztián as if he was there, as if she might with a curled finger again caress his face, even as she knew that what she was seeing, for the first time since Béla had found her huddled in the street, was not a ghost but an image. “I wanted so much to know he was alive,” she said, “to know he had a happy life.” Béla nodded, and said “Yes,” and then slowly put the photographs back into the dossier as the curtains blew in through the window and what ghosts there were withdrew forever. Because Adél and Anikó had withdrawn, frantically apologizing—“She was there! A second ago! We saw her!”—trying to keep up to Krisztián as he stormed out of Chez Queux and away from them, wondering if either of his aunts had any idea how often he’d sat in bed as a boy, how often he still did, haunted by what wasn’t there—the memory of a face, a touch, the voice you most wanted to hear—as if absence could live on in you like a ghost.

  The Homemade Doomsday Machine

  OBBY WANTED to build a device that would end human civilization. It had to have a fuse.

  He was nine years old when Otto Kovács visited us with his prototype, which I still have, sitting in front of me on the kitchen table. Bobby himself—that Bobby—is long gone.

  Before Kovács there were trips to the wrecking yard, the letters Bobby sent—to the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor (requesting “mail order isotopes”), ComDev (asking, just for the sake of theory, if you could build a guidance system that was lit with a match), the New Mexico Allied Atomic Project (wondering how things were going in the “capacity-for-destruction department”), and the Federal Mining Research Institute (querying how deep an explosion would have to be in order to “trigger massive tectonic cataclysm”)—and the books, articles, blueprints, diagrams, whatever you want, that he bought, ordered, or borrowed from the library, stacked on his desk, the shelves in the kitchen, the floor by the toilet, everywhere.

  I can’t tell you how many times I drove to the Toews Wrecking Yard, along Wellington, left on Grand, Bobby popping out of the car to run up the steps of the dirty trailer where Vic the proprietor kept his “head office.” Vic would look up from the latest issue of Playboy and smile at Bobby (only six years old at the time) and say, “I just got an old Ford Pinto—a doomsday machine if ever there was one,” and then lock up the office and show Bobby and me around.

  It always made me nervous, watching Bobby climb into those wrecks—torn metal everywhere, burns along the interior, the smell of gas—not that he ever asked for permission. He’d crawl through a shattered windshield while Vic and I tore stuff off the outside or grabbed at fallen bits of motor underneath, bringing whatever it was to Bobby for inspection.
That day, Vic managed to pry off a door. “This would be good for shielding,” he said.

  Bobby looked at it. “It needs to be made out of lead.”

  “Of course!” Vic said. “I know that!” He winked at me over the top of Bobby’s head.

  “Victor,” said Bobby. “Cars are never made out of lead. First of all, it’s a very heavy metal, and would therefore suck gas like no one’s business. Second of all, it’s incredibly pliable, which means if you ever got into an accident you could basically kiss your ass goodbye. Now, I know Pintos are notoriously dangerous cars, what with the whole bursting into flame thing, but I doubt very highly that Ford would be so stupid as to build them out of lead.” Bobby paused to let his words sink into Vic’s head. “At the same time, I must admit there’s a certain poetry in using one’s imagination and simply pretending that such a door would provide adequate shielding. But make no mistake, Victor, poetry, no matter how poetic, is not going to be worth jack when the doomsday machine goes off and fries everyone within a globular radius of 24,901.55 miles.”

  Vic stared at Bobby for a minute, mesmerized. Then, when my son went back to looking through the yard, he looked at me. “Fuck, I love your kid,” he said.

  That didn’t last long, a year or two at the most. Bobby was quick to figure out that our basement assemblages, stuff I welded together with a hand-held torch, were all fantasy, and that going to Vic’s wrecking yard to look for parts was, in his words, “like looking for the Manhattan Project at the bottom of an outhouse.” So, while Bobby understood rationally, he had emotional trouble with the fact that you couldn’t build sci-fi machines out of household detritus, and that maybe he should turn his attention, like other boys his age, to soccer or hockey or baseball. He was quite good at sports, maddeningly good in fact, where he could score and pass and make plays even while none of it interested him a bit, and it showed, on his face, in his body language, the way he shrugged and turned away from the play even as the puck or ball he’d hit went into the net or out of the park.