Siege 13 (17 page)

Holló was waiting for me when I arrived. He entered the front hall as soon as I stepped across the threshold, a large box in his arms.

He was not smiling, he did not say hello, but he didn't look unhappy either. He was just neutral, standing with the box as if he was hoping I'd relieve him of it so he could get on with the day.

He held it out, arms fully extended, and I stood there, unable to take it. He thrust it at me again. “It's what you came for,” he said, and his face was terrifying, all that makeup blurring my vision, only this time it wasn't coming back together, it was sliding apart in an ooze of pigment and oil and powder.

“I gave you a lot of chances to get out of this,” Holló finally said, though it seemed to me, oddly, like an apology.

“I know,” I said, confused.

But the moment I took the box and held its weight, Holló's face resolved itself, losing any sign of weakness or passivity, as if he'd known all along it would come to this, the troubles of the last few weeks, confirming some impression he'd formed on human nature long ago. His nonchalance, his easy acceptance, these weren't because he thought he could count on anyone's loyalty, mine or that of the people in the club, or even on the smooth course of Ílona's malice, but because my betrayal, the herd mentality of the membership,
the dark egotism of Ílona, was exactly the world as he knew it. For him it had been inevitable, all our actions beyond our control, and he'd prepared carefully for it.

I can't remember whether I was angrier with Holló for misleading me, or with myself for feeling so relieved, holding that box, at having the choice taken away.

“Don't you ever feel bad about what you did?” I asked. “Not even for a second?”

Holló shrugged. “Ask yourself, how many books have you reread in your life? I'll bet you're always looking for the next one, aren't you? Just like the rest of us.” He waited for my response, but there was none. “The great thing about writing,” he whispered, “about art, is that you can always make more of it. It's not like I destroyed the recipe for antibiotics.”

“It's not just the books,” I said, stunned by the coldness of his answer. “People put their whole lives into their art. It's not just paper, film, whatever you want to call it, you were destroying!”

“Anyone,” he said, stepping toward me, “who mistakes life for a book, who thinks his life ends when his works end, is an idiot. Not one word of it will last,
not one
. And the moment is everything. I learned that very clearly back there.”

There were so many responses to this I couldn't make a sound. Instead, I shifted the box to one hand, unable to stop looking at him.

“But this one I did for you, not me,” Holló continued. “You don't understand the sacrifice now, what I've given up, what's been lost here, and not just by me, but you will later.”

He spoke as if he'd taken a terrible risk, as if one day I'd realize the danger he'd faced so I could learn the lesson he'd
wanted to teach, that one day I'd come around to thanking him for freeing me from Éva, and Éva from me, for she had been secondary all along—to my thesis, to my relationship with Holló, to my need to prove myself to her mother—though I'd only appreciate the salvation long after, when it became clear Éva would not return from Hungary and I would not follow her there, when Ílona's vendetta was dismissed for the lack of proof only I, with my research and thesis, could have provided. It may have been an imperfect peace at the Szécsényi Club, but it was still peace, and it depended on nobody
having to know
, nobody being irrefutably confronted with, who and what Holló was. For Holló it meant survival itself, and that's exactly what he was, what he'd always been—a survivor—and I finally understood that our responsibility to others sometimes requires us to bury knowledge, even destroy it, though we've been told, over and over, that there's nothing worse.

But I wasn't thinking of that then, only of what I'd lost, Éva and my thesis and my father's respect, and I turned with the box and left Holló and walked in the direction of my parked car, down Harbord Street. After a block I peeled back the flaps and spilled it, the ash of books and pamphlets and the memoir and my essay, all of it irreplaceable, poured out onto the sidewalk.

Days of Orphans and Strangers

EN
Ő
KÁLMÁN
was a tough guy. He could move an oak desk or filing cabinet or armoire without bothering to unpack what was inside. He had a temper as well, and his voice could blow a door off its hinges whether he was yelling in English or Hungarian or even German, which was a language Jen
ő
spoke fluently, though try as he might he had no memory of how and when he'd learned it. He'd flown back to Hungary once, in 1960, without a passport, evaded the communist guards at the border, went to his stepsister's place, beat the crap out of the brother-in-law who'd in turn been beating her, stopping only when the brother-in-law promised never to harm her again, and then returned to Canada carrying a suitcase full of
cseresznye pálinka
off the plane.

But László was not scared of Jen
ő
, and he made a point of showing how unafraid he was by laughing and saying “you're cracked” whenever Jen
ő
claimed that László was not who he said he was, which Jen
ő
did quite often. “The only reason you're so obsessed with who and what I am,” László would
say in front of the family, “is because you're adopted, and you want to pull everyone else down to your level.”

Jen
ő
's last name was not really Kálmán, nor did he know what his last name was. He'd been adopted, or “found” as his stepbrother István put it, during the siege of Budapest, when István's father, Boldizsár, went out scrounging for food and came upon the teenage boy sitting against a wall holding a giant loaf of bread and a sack of yellow peppers. Boldizsár took Jen
ő
back to the family, holed up in a cellar trying to avoid the explosions and fires, and discovery by the fascists and Soviets, both of whom were using civilians as shields during their fire-fights. From then on they'd always had enough to eat, Jen
ő
heading out every morning and returning with all the food they needed. When something was required, he got it.

 

Jen
ő
couldn't overcome László because in his own way László was just as tough as he was—not so much physically as
on the inside
. His poker face, his stoic fortitude, his ability to laugh in the most anxious of circumstances, resulted from the fact that he'd watched his wife, Mária, get raped by members of the Red Army during the siege. As the Red Army came closer and closer to where the family was hiding, László and Mária went out to find a new place for them all, and it was this that caused the tragedy, for there was no one else to come to Mária's aid while the soldiers held László down and forced him to witness the whole horrific thing. From that point on nothing and nobody ever struck László as fearsome again—not even Jen
ő
.

But Jen
ő
disputed the rape story, and he was the only person in the family who would have dared. He was the one
who'd disembarked from the boat that brought them to Canada and decided that New Brunswick was
not
the place to be, told them to wait on the dock, and returned an hour later with a bundle of train tickets to Toronto. Jen
ő
said László had not only
not
been married to Mária, but Mária had not even been Mária. She was a German woman with whom László had escaped from Germany—their
mother
, in fact—meaning that László was not László either, but a German boy who took on the name and then invented the story of being married to Mária in order to hide what really happened to her, and this only to confuse the hell out of Jen
ő
. This meant that he, Jen
ő
, and László were actually brothers. As for Krisztián, the son of László and Mária, who'd been only a few months old at the end of the war when his mother was supposedly raped and abducted and killed, and only a year and a half old when he came west with his father, he was obviously someone else's baby that László had agreed to raise. What Jen
ő
couldn't figure out was why the family was so intent on hiding these facts, why his stepsiblings—István, Adél and Anikó—were colluding with László in keeping up his story.

 

The rest of the family cringed but didn't say a thing, though sometimes they spoke amongst themselves wondering if it would be best to agree with Jen
ő
, except that he would know they were doing it from the sound of fear in their voices. So they remained silent, and Jen
ő
said, “Ah, you're useless,” and stormed out the door, only to return at the next family gathering and spout his accusations all over again.

László didn't speak often, but when he did he'd point out that Jen
ő
was so interested in the story of Mária—so obsessed
with it—only because it was something from László's past that exerted more power over him, and the rest of the family, than Jen
ő
did. “You don't like coming up against something stronger than you are,” he said, smiling with such fury even Jen
ő
thought twice about what kind of comeback to make.

“I've heard you speak German in your sleep,” he finally said.

“Never!” shouted László.

“Yes, you do,” Jen
ő
shouted back. He pulled from his pocket a Dictaphone and waved it in front of the family gathered at the dining room table. “Since none of you have anything to say on the subject,” he said, “I suppose you won't mind listening to this?”

They'd been speaking in Hungarian, but when Jen
ő
hit the play button (despite the objections stuttered by László) what emerged—in between the snores, the tossing and turning, the sound of Jen
ő
crawling along the floor to get as close to László as possible—was pure German interspersed with sounds of panic—groans, hollers, mewling—from whatever memories László's dreams were regurgitating.

“That's not me!” shouted László, standing up from the table in a great rattling of glasses and plates and cutlery.

“It
is
you!” shouted Jen
ő
. “I've been telling everyone you speak German in your sleep for years!” Every time they went camping or hunting or stayed overnight somewhere, Jen
ő
heard it, but László and everyone always said he was crazy. So Jen
ő
decided to buy a Dictaphone. Now, he described how László exhausted himself on their last hunting trip for moose, tramping miles in search of the biggest antlers long after everyone had quit. By evening he could barely hold the
shots of
pálinka
they put into his hand, and soon fell asleep. Later, Jen
ő
was awakened by Krisztián crawling into his tent to complain how he couldn't sleep beside his father's shouting and pleading. “I'd heard you do it a thousand times,” said Jen
ő
, pointing at László, “and I was going to make sure everyone else finally heard it too.”

He nodded at the Dictaphone, and for a second more the family listened to the sentences running beneath the tape hiss. “I know what you're saying,” Jen
ő
said. “My German's just as good as yours. But just to be fair maybe someone else here, Heléna, should translate it and prove to everyone that's really German you're speaking, like it was your native language. Once we've settled that then maybe you can answer some questions about Mária and what really happened during the siege.”

The family turned to Heléna, the daughter of Anikó. She began, slow and halting, to translate the words coming out of the speakers, at least as far as her Bachelor of Arts in German Language and Literature allowed. She spoke of the siege of Budapest, what it was like to have been there. She sounded dreamy and vague, skipping a difficult word or verb tense here and there, channelling a message across the most tenuous of connections. The beginning of the story was the most garbled, as if László had been so traumatized by what he'd seen, by what happened to Mária, that he was lost in the language needed to express it. But gradually the story became clearer. Heléna spoke of László's disorientation, not knowing where the soldiers had taken Mariá when they were finished with her, or how to get back to the cellar where his family and infant son were hiding. She spoke of his decision to strike
out in the direction of Mátyásföld, a suburb to the east of Budapest now churned to mud and broken brick, bombed homes, populations hiding or scattered or dead, overrun by the Red Army. That's where home was, the ancestral seat of the Kálmán family, a sprawling villa surrounded by orchards.