Siege 13 (14 page)

They taught each other to sleep, realizing together what it required, how they could work all day doing the sorts of
things they did, throwing all of that work, the beauty and truth and bravery of it, down the toilet, then meet at night, whenever Cérna was away—off to Moscow, Krakow, Berlin, Bucharest, as politics required—tossing their guilt aside as easily as their clothes, and falling afterwards into a darkness so deep it was empty even of dreams.

Holló smiled at me. “You're surprised by this? That I would be with a woman instead of a . . . what is it your girlfriend and mother say about my tastes? Instead of a boy?” He drummed his fingers on the table, then got up and retrieved a book and opened it in front of me, paging through old black-and-white photographs of the infamous communists of the 1950s until he came to Ábel Cérna.

“He was not a man to be crossed,” Holló said. Then he gestured toward his own face. “This stuff here, all this”—he pointed at his eyes and cheeks and lips—“it was Adriána's idea.”

She always felt they were being watched—afraid of an extra presence in the storerooms where they met; of the way Cérna rolled over and looked at her at night; of signs that someone else was going through her papers. It was in this way, Holló said, that his real work as a censor began, because as the days and weeks and months went by she made it harder and harder for them to get together. She stopped walking by his desk, calling him into her office, meeting him in the hallways. The only way to communicate became the books themselves, the ones he and his co-workers sent forward to be suppressed, and which she approved or disapproved in keeping with the policies of the time. “I came to think of the recommendations I sent to her as a kind of love letter,”
Holló said. “It was one way to ignore what I was actually doing.” He looked now for the most exquisite books, those he knew would enter circulation through underground channels, with their lines of flawless prose, poetry that gave him goosebumps, the best of the best, and every single one he condemned without fail, sending them forward knowing it would give her pleasure to go through them, vouching for his decisions, thinking of him while doing it, almost like an aphrodisiac. “It was our substitute for sex,” he smiled, “between meetings.” It wasn't long before Holló realized his quota of censored books was increasing, that he was always in the office early, trying to get to the new stuff, to take the best from it, before anyone else.

“Of course, you tell yourself things,” he continued, “stories to redeem your betrayals.” At night, after work, early in the morning, he'd think of the writers who'd written these books, the hours they'd spent, the excitement and inspiration, and it felt to him like the only fitting tribute to her, the only thing those books could now realize, as if the beauty that was their aim was Adriána herself, for if they were going to be destroyed, and they were whether Holló did it or someone else, then at least they should go to that, the very thing they'd tried to accomplish and which their destruction would testify to—a love outside the ideology hemming them in, as if one secret could hide inside another, buried deep, the loss of these books covering up something else the regime had missed.

In time, it became their code. His objections to this or that book involved highlighting certain passages, circling words, putting X's through entire pages, and she noted it
all—descriptions of lovers' quarrels and trysts, partings and reconciliations, triangulating the chapters, sequencing the page numbers to figure out the time and place he wanted to meet, sending them back to Holló if it wasn't going to work out, if Cérna would be in town, if there was a meeting she had to attend, asking him to “reconsider” the implications of his report, especially the bits on the ideological significance of Váci Street and H
ő
sök Tér, and, in particular, pages four and fifty-six. After a bit of back and forth the date, time, and place would be set, and on the right night or afternoon or morning Adriána would be there, dressed in an ankle-length overcoat, a top hat, a briefcase, and Holló in a subdued dress, grey cotton, no designs, a belted coat, shielding his face with some hat or umbrella she'd left for him the last time.

Holló stopped in the middle of his story and looked at me and laughed. “The disguises were her idea. She thought we'd be less noticeable. But I wasn't so sure. . .” His voice trailed off. “I think she was more interested in exposing me to . . . various options than she was in avoiding the police.” He looked into my face, saw the questions there, and smiled. “You want to know what she was. A lesbian? A man disguised as a woman who liked to disguise herself as a man?” He laughed. “I have no idea. I'd never met anyone like her, and probably never will again.”

“She sounds a lot like you,” I said.

“Hm,” he said, nodding his head. “That's funny, because she showed me I didn't have to be
like
anything. I didn't have to be . . . consistent.” Holló frowned then. He seemed at a loss for the right language with which to describe Adriána and exactly what he'd felt, or still felt, for her—I'd never seen
him searching for words before—and after a while Holló gave up and went back to his story.

Adriána looked at him in the dress and smirked. “You are the ugliest woman I've ever seen.” He smiled, agreeing. But he wasn't so sure. There was something in the disguise that freed Holló to move as he'd always wanted to, before his father had quietly battered him into adopting that set to his shoulders, that stride, that way of turning from others coming at you that was not really turning at all.

Adriána and Holló varied the hours they met. They varied the code. Figuring out what they were trying to say with their lists of banned books, their forms and reports, became complicated, a cross-referencing of paragraphs and circled words and page numbers. They were scared but obsessed, and there were times, Holló confessed, when he'd forget, for hours at a time, how to decipher it, and a panic would come over him and he'd have to force himself not to go ask Adriána what it all meant.

Or Adriána would not show up, and he'd sit there wondering how he'd gotten it wrong, what he'd missed. “It was all trust,” Holló told me. “I
had
to believe she wanted to meet me, but for whatever reason couldn't. Either way—whether she came or not—she still loved me.”

It was Adriána who showed him how to apply makeup properly. How to create shadows in his face. How to compensate for bad lighting. What to wear under clouds, in sunshine, when it was snowing. “For her, of course, the disguise was easy,” he said, laughing. “A briefcase, an overcoat, a hat, and a suit with a red carnation in the lapel.” It was their fun, in whatever hotel room, vacant flat, or empty
office she found for them, something to do other than rail against the system, giggling as Adriána applied this or that cosmetic, showing him how it was done, what effect it would have, and how to get it on and off quickly, without a trace, and of course where to go buy it, the best stuff, usually through some black-market dealer who had a pipeline, God knows how, to the west. By the end of it, he said, after just two years, he could change his face in seconds, from aggressive to soft, from angry to sad, from beautiful to hideous, depending on what was needed, and with that skill he acquired even more freedom, as if going out dressed as a woman was no longer what it had been, a way of hiding, but a kind of release, even exposure, as if he was no longer bound by the fears, the rules of behaviour, even the creed of the person he'd been. Holló began to go out that way on nights when he and Adriána weren't meeting, when it was just him, and in the mornings when he got home it was almost an effort to take off the makeup, always this feeling of duress.

It wasn't long before Holló noticed others like him. He wasn't speaking about the obvious cases, he said, the men and women everyone's seen in their ill-fitting dresses and jeans, too-broad shoulders, too-narrow waists, walking down the street knowing all eyes are on them, and fitting into that too, those gazes, like an agonizing suit of clothes. No, the ones that attracted him were the beautiful, he said, who radiated the freedom he'd also begun to feel in the midst of the grey housing projects, the sooty and bullet-riddled fronts of Budapest's apartments. “Those were the ones that attracted me,” he said. Everything about them seemed so perfect, the care with which they made up their faces, the perfect tailoring of
their clothes, the exact match of colours, even their movements, like actors who'd long ago mastered every nuance of character to the point where none of it seemed choreographed or scripted. Nobody else he knew looked as free as that. He followed them to where they went.

“They were guerrilla establishments,” he said. “Spring up. Close down just as fast.” Bars. Tiny dance halls. Apartments where for one night you were nowhere in the eastern bloc. There were people there from every part of society—proletariat, civil servants, athletes, even a few Party officials—as if they'd managed for one night to achieve a utopian levelling, the dreamed-of equality, that was enforced everywhere else with fists and disappearances and guns and prisons. “You might have picked
that
to write your thesis on,” he said to me, “if it had occurred to you.” I looked up from the page, saw him frowning, and for one second thought this was a reproach for what I
had
decided to write on, though when he spoke next I realized this was not it at all, Holló wasn't interested in me in the slightest. He was frowning at his memories. Mountains of flowers at a bacchanal paid for by misappropriated Party money. Bordellos secreted away in hunting estates once owned by the aristocracy. Male and female escorts kept in pearls by some of the top officials. He seemed so enraptured by what he was telling me that I found myself wondering if I was listening to something that was more dream than reality, if maybe the days and nights of living alone at the club hadn't turned his memories golden.

“People assume sex was somehow abolished by the Soviet system,” he said. The way historians wrote it was as if those old wooden men spent all day in the politburo haranguing
and backstabbing each other, then put on their dark overcoats and went home to their stale wives and wiretapped phones and produced a child or two. “But the level of perversity was exquisite,” Holló admitted, “maybe because it was so furtive, so hidden away, so scary.”

I finished my last note on the word “perversity” and waited.

“You were expecting something else?” Holló smiled.

I shrugged. The truth is, it looked like a strategy, as if by losing himself in these fantastical descriptions he might lose me as well, leading me away from his work as a censor, and for a moment I was tempted to say I didn't believe him, that the truth was probably quieter and greyer and more desperate, all those closeted transvestites and cross-dressers and gays and lesbians meeting in dreary communist parks and housing projects and public bathrooms trying hard not to speak their names, to give anyone a good look at their faces, and when there were parties they were probably more like funerals, everyone too tired and afraid for that kind of heightened revelry.

As for Party officials being involved, and misappropriating funds for flowers and champagne, I found that totally unbelievable. He'd made the whole thing too heroic, this group of people blatantly defying political reality, and the terrible price they'd pay if they were discovered. Looking back, of course, it was Holló's final attempt to switch me from the track I was on, to interest me in something else, as if he was counting on me not believing him, on being curious about how things
really
were, and following that toward a different research topic. It was my last chance to leave it alone,
him and Adriána and the makeup and the censorship, but I was too fixated on what I'd discovered to change my thesis now, and he could see it in my silence, my indifference.

He sighed. After another minute, desperate to break the silence, I asked him what happened to Adriána, and Holló glared at me as if he was going to take my head off. But then he spoke.

“It started with sloppiness,” he said. “I think Adriána started sensing an indifference on my part, as if she'd opened a door and I was more interested in seeing what was on the other side than lingering with her on the threshold.” She almost willed it to happen, her fear of losing Holló becoming greater than her fear of being discovered, because that would at least mean they'd been separated artificially, that whatever happened, wherever she went, wherever they put her, she'd at least know the thing with Holló was unfinished, and, in that way, everlasting.

Holló's voice was even now, with none of that rapture of before, as if all that was left was the routine end of another story of illicit love during the Kádár regime.

“She risked meeting me when Cérna was around. She went out without a disguise. She tried to get me to do the same.” Adriána told him she was tired of hiding, of being afraid. She took greater chances at work, throwing herself on him when there were others around, making remarks too easily overheard. She started writing him notes he got rid of by flushing down the toilet, which was suspicious in itself, all that back and forth as if there was some problem with his bladder. It was not just the limits of his loyalty that Adriána was testing, Holló realized, but also of their entrapment, as
if with enough violations, enough flagrant behaviour, she might prove there were no limits.

He got out just before her arrest, walking away from his apartment after a long night of watching shadows in the street from under the curtains. “It was no way to live,” he said. “I just panicked, I guess. I put on my best dress, packed a suitcase with all the makeup I had, and never went back.” They came for Adriána late in the day, November 23, 1955, he still remembered it, and she never returned, though whenever he was in Budapest he went by her place, or where she'd worked, always in disguise of course, hoping to catch a glimpse of some rehabilitated Adriána. But the only person he ever saw was Cérna, looking ever more hollow, ever more in tune with the demands of the time, and after a while there was even a new wife, as if Adriána had never existed at all.