Siege 13 (18 page)

The Dictaphone told the story of László's journey there, the weeks during which he avoided Soviet patrols. They were really just bands of men in uniform wandering aimlessly, firing off shots, taking what they could—watches and sex—threatening, crying, crazy with war. He hid in cellars, ran and dodged, was taken in by women.

The women's names made the biggest impression on the family that night. Heléna translated them from dream-speak into Hungarian—Rózsa, Ibolya, Lilike—as if the siege of Budapest had made allowance for a flower here and there—rose, violet, lily—in a city whose main part was wreckage and fire and bodies.

Rózsa was the first to find him, letting László think he was taking care of her while she restored him from what had happened to Mária, his failure to defend her. Rózsa didn't live anywhere. As she put it, she lived wherever she happened to be. It was a way of staying alive, inhabiting only the place she found herself, calling it home for an hour or afternoon or night and then moving on, never returning to the same spot twice. She had a way of making László feel secure even as they huddled behind half-exploded walls, beneath viaducts, in the shell of a burned-out tank, as if she knew an enchantment for turning ruin into shelter.

The second woman, Ibolya, lived in a furnished apartment that had survived a direct hit, the rest of the apartments
falling down around her place. She and László risked their lives going up and down the swaying staircase that led to her home. Inside there was antique furniture, leather-bound editions of poets, and even plants—vines and leaves and flowers Ibolya tended by taking as little water for herself as was necessary.

The third woman, Lilike, lived in a closet. When she pulled László from in front of the tank he felt as if he'd fallen into a box. It was hot in there, oppressive and dark. For three weeks they sat on a floor so small their legs twined together, so that after the sounds of battle stopped they moved in unison for a while, as if all four legs belonged to both of them, as if they were fused.

From here, László exited Budapest onto the dirt track to Mátyásföld, the ransacked villa, and the bodies of Tíbor and Ildikó, his grandmother and grandfather.

A second after the Dictaphone stopped, Heléna stopped too.

“Those were the things that happened to me after Mária,” said László finally, the room otherwise silent. “It took me so long to find the way home.”

“Now why would you need to recount that in German?” asked Jen
ő
, the only one not in awe of the story.

László replied that he spoke German quite well, demonstrating it right there by quoting from Rilke, and said he'd lived for two years in Vienna after escaping Hungary.

Jen
ő
replied, “I see. So you lived in Vienna, and you learned the language so well—
in two years
—that it's what you prefer to speak in your dreams.”

 

The evening left Jen
ő
confused, as everyone could see. László had dreamed in German, but the dream perfectly fit the story everyone had been telling about him, the siege of Budapest, and Mária. Jen
ő
went home that night, spent a few hours thinking about the impossibility of reconciling the German with the story, and at one in the morning phoned Heléna. He reminded her that he was aware of what Uncle László had done for her over the years, paying the tuition her mother, the widow Anikó, could not afford. But she also owed Jen
ő
. Or had she forgotten the time he'd come over for a visit and discovered that her landlord was jackhammering out part of the foundation? Recognizing the noise, like a crack of thunder, for what it was, he'd hustled Heléna and her cousin Sári out of the building before the place came down, burying the landlord. Had she forgotten that? Had she forgotten how he'd stuck his arm into the mouth of that German shepherd who'd lunged at her during a family camping trip, shoving his arm further and further until it choked and was forced to spit it out? “My chewed-up arm could have been your face!” he said. “Have you forgotten that?”

“It's one in the morning,” she said, not fully awake. “I'm having a hard time remembering anything.”

 

Jen
ő
began pestering her. But growing up the fifth of five children, struggling to overcome her immigrant roots and father's early death, getting a degree in languages and embarking on a career in the diplomatic corps, Heléna had discovered she was tough too.

She'd tease Jen
ő
, saying things like “Well, I may have mistranslated a verb here or there, which would have influenced
the meaning of such-and-such a sentence,” to which Jen
ő
would roll his eyes, reminding her that he spoke German too and there was nothing wrong with her translation.

“Did László or did László not go through all that during the siege of Budapest?” he asked.

“Well,” she replied, “maybe you and I misheard what he was saying, or let a few sentences escape us. After all, he was talking pretty quietly, and in his sleep, too.”

“Come on!” he yelled.

 

“Why is Jen
ő
so obsessed?” Anikó asked Heléna, worried about what might happen to her daughter if she continued to toy with him.

“He's adopted,” Heléna said. “He's adopted and we're one of those families where knowing where you come from and who your ancestors were and the exact nature of your connection with the culture is very important.”

“Did they teach you that in university?” Anikó asked. “In one of those classes on multiculturalism or something?”

“Let's talk about Dad,” replied Heléna. She said it fast, by reflex, and her mother was already turning away in rage and shame as Heléna recalled how her father's surname, Cukor, had been Zuckermandle before his grandfather, like so many Jews at the turn of the century, decided to blend in by changing everything—names, religion, history, even the features of their grandchildren by encouraging their sons and daughters to marry Hungarians.

“You're not Jewish,” said Anikó, visibly shaken. “I've told you many times. To be Jewish it has to come through the mother's line, and I'm pure Hungarian. So even they—
I mean the Jews—wouldn't consider you Jewish.”

“My point exactly,” said Heléna, thinking of what it must be like to be Jen
ő
, watching his children and wife in the yard, all of them connected to mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—to each other—except him. In some way, Heléna decided, Jen
ő
's desire to expose László was not because he wanted him to be lonely as well, but because he wanted them to be alone
together
.

So Heléna decided to do something. She was a diplomat after all, and as she'd written in one of the essays required by the application process, she'd always viewed diplomacy as more than a government job. It was a way of negotiating without the threat of war and violence, creating out of conflicting laws and customs a new story everyone would listen to.

She invited the two men on a camping trip where she hoped they'd work out a history acceptable to them both. Jen
ő
agreed, thinking he'd brush Heléna aside once they were there and begin the slow psychological torture of László that would end in him revealing the story Jen
ő
had always wanted to hear.

But László was suspicious. “Why do you want us to go camping?”

“It would be a good way for you and Jen
ő
to work out your differences.”

“I don't have any differences,” he said. “The differences belong to Jen
ő
.”

No matter how she described the beauty of the hike, or of the campsite she'd chosen, he refused. “Camping! Where did you ever come up with such an idea?”

“Our family has always gone camping!”

“Yes, the family
together
. Years ago when I was a lot younger, and you and Krisztián were kids!”

 

Heléna ended up camping with Jen
ő
alone. She didn't tell him about László's refusal until they were on the side of a mountain, thirty miles from the nearest road.

Once the tent was set up, the fire started, Jen
ő
asked when László was going to arrive, and Heléna had to tell him that, well, actually, he wasn't. Jen
ő
had a fit then. He started shouting about how cowardly László was—even as he knew it wasn't true—how László was always one step ahead, how he kept tricking Jen
ő
, and that he would like once,
just once
, to finally get the jump on him. Then he kicked over the fire, pulled up the tent, and scattered their sleeping bags and cookware and food everywhere. Heléna let him do it because it was better he vent on the equipment than on her.

“He was too ashamed to come,” she said.

“Ashamed?” said Jen
ő
, stopping in the middle of twirling the axe, which he was planning on hurling into a lake a hundred feet away.

“And scared,” she continued.

“Scared?” He lowered the axe.

Heléna then went over the history as she knew it. She let Jen
ő
know just how much of an impression he'd made on her, on the younger cousins who'd grown up on stories of the things he'd done, hoping to make him understand that it connected them more strongly than any blood relation. She spoke of how Jen
ő
had single-handedly saved the family during the siege of Budapest, especially after Boldizsár grew too weak to accompany him, how he left the family in the
cellar to go out alone, returning bruised and cut and beat up, but always with enough food and water for the next day. She spoke of the way István, Adél, and Anikó described the trek back to Mátyásföld, Jen
ő
scouting ahead, and dealing with what he found, before returning to lead the family on. She spoke of how after days of scurrying, and evading what even Jen
ő
couldn't overcome, they arrived at the villa, only to find László alone there, sitting in a dark, rubble-strewn room, his hands still dirty from burying Tíbor and Ildikó in the yard.

“László is afraid of all the things you did for the family that he couldn't do.”

No, Jen
ő
shook his head and looked at her sadly. That wasn't what happened at all. “Mária and László had already gone out by the time Boldizsár brought me back to the cellar that day,” he said, “so I didn't know what he looked like. In fact, I only heard about their story, the rape, afterwards, once we were back in Mátyásföld, as if the whole family had agreed on this giant lie. But I'll tell you this: the person we met in the villa did not at all resemble the László I would later see in family photographs from before the war. That is, before Boldizsár got rid of the photographs, telling us he didn't want Krisztián to be reminded of the mother he'd lost, since Mária was in most of those photographs too. Of course that was probably a different Mária as well.” The siblings tried to convince Jen
ő
that László's experiences in the siege had had a catastrophic effect on him physically, that they'd altered his appearance, but Jen
ő
refused to believe that anything, no matter how traumatic, could change a person's hair from brown to blond, or straighten his nose, or make him grow a foot in height.

“So either László is a miracle of science,” Jen
ő
said, “or an imposter.” They were walking through the long grasses at the edge of the lake now. Heléna was scanning the ground for the camping equipment he'd tossed away. Jen
ő
, meanwhile, seemed unconcerned with recovering a thing, or making camp, or nightfall, or the storm that was building. “You're wrong, Heléna. László is not afraid of me. In fact, if it wasn't for László I wouldn't even be a member of this family.”

Heléna looked at him, then turned in the direction of the wind, which was beginning to carry off their possessions, the tent ballooning like a parachute, dragging off one of the sleeping bags snarled in its strings, disappearing over the lake. God only knew where Jen
ő
had thrown the map, much less the compass, the food, and Heléna moved along in a panic, picking up bits and pieces as the ground grew wetter and light faded from the sky, Jen
ő
tagging along as if they had all the time in the world.

He was also talking more than she'd ever heard him talk. Except for the obsession with László, Jen
ő
had always been quiet, saying only the minimum of what needed to be said and adding nothing else, even when the family tried to bring up exceptions and contradictions to the iron-clad rules and opinions whereby he operated.

But that night he was having a hard time focusing on what was in front of them, on her futile effort to recover the things he'd tossed away, not even keeping his eye on where the two of them were going so they could find their way back. He was lost in recounting the things that had befallen him during the siege. Jen
ő
said he remembered nothing of his life from before, only that he was sixteen, there was blood on his head,
and that whatever had hit him had bounced off and hit him again, a number of times, on the shoulders, the chest, the front of his legs. It almost scraped the clothes right off his body. But he found more clothing, food too, though he didn't remember doing that either, only that what he needed was somehow always there, and when it wasn't, when it seemed he'd finally come to the end of his bewildered wandering in the midst of shells and flame and strafing and men in various uniforms shouting languages into his face, when he'd finally sat down to finish his last loaf of bread, a man's kindly face appeared in front of him (though Jen
ő
wasn't even sure if he remembered this, or if it was just something he'd
come to remember
through the repetition of the family story about how Boldizsár had found him).