Siege 13 (30 page)

 

It seemed to take a lot longer to get to the hospital than it did to get lost. Other than that, Flóri retained no memory of it. Was she found, or had the Monsignor taken her there? There were policemen, then the usual calls through the usual channels,
and then long nights of questions, a revolving door of men who came and went with their stock phrases and ideological tilts of the head. “It's not normal that someone gets away from us,” they said, sitting by her bed. Not officially, she thought, though in a second amended this to, not normally, and then amended that, spoken aloud, to, “He hasn't gotten away.” The interlocutors (as they called themselves, though they were really interrogators) looked at her then, and she frowned back, returning the expression of revolutionary seriousness they wanted rather than the bourgeois delight she felt, and was increasingly feeling, at what Szent-Mihály had told her. “I know where to find him.”

She didn't, of course. But they didn't know that, their doubts tempered by her record of rooting out reactionary forces. So upon her release they gave her two days to come up with him—two days, not enough time for her to disappear as well. Flóri went home from the hospital and threw out every bottle—empty, half drunk, totally full—tossing them one by one into the garbage chute in the main corridor, and listening to them shatter as they rebounded off the tin walls on the way down. Then Flóri packed a suitcase, prepared her maps, her free train passes, everything she would need, and then she slept. Upon getting up, she made a phone call, listing off the names—Ger
ő
Tolscvay, Gyuri Kelemen, János Szabó—and the approximate ages, ignoring anyone who was too young or too old, and then collected those addresses that seemed to fit the men she was looking for. As she walked out she looked at the calendar, noting that it was Friday, which meant she had until Sunday to find the priest or follow him into hiding, and reflected then that this didn't at all seem
coincidental, as if the Monsignor had known how much time they'd give her, how much time she would have to make contact with the three boys she needed to find, to pry from them the secret of their escape and vanishing, and then to use it herself.

But the feeling of lightness she had that morning—as if she'd been freed of her fatalism, the sense she'd had, carried for years, that where she'd ended up, the things she was doing, were as inevitable as her betrayal of the boys—this was not to last. Because within a day Flóri was seeing strange faces peering at her from doorways, men called Ger
ő
Tolscvay and Gyuri Kelemen and János Szabó for whom there was no spark of recognition in seeing her. None of them looked anything like the faces she remembered, or the ones in the photographs Szent-Mihály had given her and which she'd lost staggering through the town that snowy day, so that by Saturday afternoon Flóri turned into one of the tiny bars on the outskirts of Miskolc and began ordering one shot of cherry
pálinka
after another, staring up at the roof as if by following the cracks she might find a hole in tomorrow, Sunday, when she'd agreed to be waiting in her room at the appointed hour with the information on how to get to the Monsignor and his chronicle. She was still following those cracks, now multiplied with the double vision of drunkenness, when the bartender gently said it was time to go and she slid off the seat onto the floor, continuing to gaze up as if at constellations, trying to read something in the glitter of the lamp hanging from the ceiling. They ended up looking at her insignias carefully, and then pretending to hold her with the greatest dignity, by the elbows, while escorting her out—though what they really
did was simply lift her off the floor and dump her outside.

Then came the long night, Flóri sitting on the bed awake, too lost to go in search of more to drink, or to do anything other than resist sleep, shaking her head every time it came over her. Then came the morning, so clear she knew there'd be no forgetting it, the slow onset of the shakes, the fears magnified by whatever it was the alcohol did to her brain, synapses firing and misfiring, the sudden shudders of an ever-worse imagining. When there was a knock on the door she crawled under the sheets to get away from it.

It was Szent-Mihály who lifted them off her, peering down and asking how good it had felt, over the last weeks, thinking that the boys and women and men she'd helped kill in one way or another were all still alive. The priest stared at her with eyes so tired, his face more crumpled than she remembered it.

“There's no Nándorffy Network, is there?” she said, pushing the hair out of her eyes. “You made it up.” In response, the priest shrugged, so casual it seemed as if the presence or absence of miracles—and of the book that was rumoured to contain them—was a matter of complete indifference to him, though at the same time she detected no cynicism in his manner, rather the sense that the book was not important in the way she'd thought it was—that his project, one he would risk his life for, was conceived along entirely different lines.

“I must look tawdry to you,” he said, not so much sitting down as dropping into a chair. “Like a common criminal,” he continued, shrugging again.

“The Church is a criminal organization,” she said, finding comfort not so much in the idea as in the return to a definite
position—a script whose beginning and middle and end she knew by heart.

And here he described for her some of the things he'd seen (though how he'd gotten to see them she could only guess): state dinners where servants walked around the Party members with trays of champagne and caviar, everyone dressed in the best possible clothes, twirling through ballrooms; hunting lodges for members of the inner party where they were attended on by butlers and maids and where they rode out in traditional hunting regalia across land kept from everyone else by barbed wire, shooting their guns and collecting their game like Viennese aristocrats; prostitution rings that catered only to the most refined of Marxist tastes. “But of course,” he continued, “since the money and property for these belong to the state all these people can turn and say, ‘But I have nothing, my pockets are empty, I'm as poor as you'—and meanwhile living like kings.”

“What those people do, what they've done, is not really communism.”

“We say the same things about bad popes—that what they did wasn't really Christianity.” He leaned forward. “But wasn't it Marx himself who said there is only history—only the things that
were actually done
—to guide our thinking? All the rest”—he fluttered his hands in the air like birds—“
real
Communism,
real
Christianity, these are just metaphysics. Daydreams. Bad excuses.”

“We've done some good things.”

“Most people do,” he said, “here and there.”

She looked at him, and he laughed, saying, “They're not so different—the two systems.” He watched her rise from
the bed, and reach for the bottle of
pálinka
. “I'm not really a priest,” he continued, shifting his gaze to the window. “It's just a way of operating.” He paused. “But you haven't answered my question. It was nice for you, for a while, thinking differently about yourself?”

This was when they, the ones Flóri had been expecting, entered the room.

 

What Flóri would remember, what she would take away from what followed, was not the surprise of the policemen as they shifted their focus from her to the priest and back again, nor the scrape of quick feet on the floor, the scuffle of bodies, the detaining and slaps and the forced march out the door, nor the grudging respect on the face of Comrade Zabrovsky at how she'd once again managed, in the last second, to turn the tables. Rather, she would remember the shock on Szent-Mihály's face, and the way it was directed not at the arrival of the ÁVÓ but at her, as if what was unexpected was the fact that she had known they were coming and yet not warned him beforehand. “I thought you'd see what I was telling you,” he said, as they pulled and kicked him from the room. “Remember—I told you to find them! Why would I have done that if . . . ?” He was gone.

In an instant Zabrovsky was back in the room, commending her with his usual sarcasm: “Excellent work, Comrade Nándorffy. But there is still the matter of the book . . . the so-called ‘chronicle.' Of course it is the true threat, more than the priest. Reactionary, capitalistic, metaphysical. Where is it?”

But Flóri was only half listening, for it was here, in realizing how wrong Zabrovsky was, that she finally understood
what Szent-Mihály's purpose had been in telling her to find the three boys. He knew she would fail, and perhaps, in that moment of failure, to find not those three people, nor the rest, all of them long dead, but that place inside herself she'd likewise lost, buried deep, forgotten it even existed—replaced by a cynicism that allowed her to stand there as the police kicked in the door and hauled people like him away. And it had worked, she
had
felt better in the last few weeks, even as she was being asked question after question, overcome by a feeling of lightness she no longer believed existed, as if it was possible, after all, to think that individual action—laziness, charity, vigilance, indifference, greed, envy, love, ambition—even the smallest of gestures, a moment's shift in attitude, could add up to something else, better or worse.

“Comrade Nándorffy, need I mention your responsibility to the state?”

What state? she thought, gazing left and right. This was not about the state, either serving or rising in it, not about churches and soviets and aristocracy and other forms of government, but the place where history was made—in the way you faced everyone else—for it was not miracles Szent-Mihály had been offering, but himself, making people laugh at what they all knew was untrue, returning them from the dream state and its history to the moment they created—the moment in which they lived.

“Comrade Nándorffy!”

“The book got away from me,” she finally said. “It's out there.”

The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins

Y COUSIN'S NAME
in Hungarian was Imre Ászok, but as “ászok” is Hungarian for “aces” that's how he was known, fighting anyone who called him otherwise.

He'd keep me awake, nights when he stayed at our place, with the most fantastic stories. His father, Jancsi Bácsi, was crazily successful, an importer of high-end European cars (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche), and often away on what he referred to as “business trips,” but which my mother called “parties”—weekends at clients' homes in the Turks and Caicos, Paris, the Swiss Alps, Hong Kong—scenes into which it was best not to bring a three-year-old.

That's how old Aces and I were—I was only three months younger than him—when he began staying over, inching under my bed every night in his sleeping bag thinking he could cry there without being overheard, determined even then to be tougher than everyone else. Later, when he realized that
as long as he was talking he could control his homesickness, he'd invite me to join him, and the two of us would fall asleep face to face in the middle of his last murmur.

I could tell from the frown on my mother's face whenever I asked that Aces was never left with us for a good reason, and that it wasn't for her sister- and brother-in-law, but for Aces himself, that she took him in. His parents were away too much for him to be left with a stranger, she reasoned. Once in a while she'd let something slip, “I'd go visit when Aces was two, and he was wearing this diaper that looked like he'd been in it for days.” Or she'd say something like, “I hope Jancsi is having fun sipping margaritas,” when Aces was caught shoplifting and she had to go speak with the manager at the drugstore; or meet with the teachers who said that while Aces was smart when it came to what interested him (wars, revolutions, assassins), he was incapable of concentrating on anything that didn't (school in general); or take him to rugby practice because, as she said, Aces needed “something in life he was good at too.”

Me, I loved having Aces over. I missed him when he wasn't there, and told my mother so, making up things he'd said—how much he loved her
paprikás
, how our house was as much a home as his own, how we were “brothers.” Whenever I begged to have him back, my mother would always mutter about how Jancsi and Annabella should be grateful for all the “free babysitting” they were getting even as Aces walked through the door holding his little overnight bag, looking bewildered and lost, before my toys and TV and bike rides brought him out of it.

At twelve, thirteen, fourteen we were still underneath that bed, leaving a window open so we could risk cigarettes, drinking from mickeys of rum Aces smuggled over, even smoking the pot he'd started to sell after he was fired from the Stainesly Marina for trying to make a flame-thrower out of a gas pump. By this point his stories amused me, and I had to exercise extreme self-control not to laugh out loud, because Aces still took them as seriously as ever. “Gyula Hegedus,” he'd whisper, moving closer, our faces inches from the bottom of the bed, “learned the secret art of Mongolian judoka from Tsakhiagiin Tömörbaatar, who later worked for Stalin and the NKVD during the Mongolian Great Purge! Tömörbaatar's specialty was killing Buddhist lamas, who were no slouches either when it came to martial arts—so you can imagine the action sequences! But Hegedus left Hungary long before the communists showed up, working for gangsters in New York in the late 1930s. Mostly, he did killings. But he had brains, too. He was the first person to see an opportunity in introducing heroin into the music business.” Aces twisted in the dark to fish a photograph out of his jeans. I looked at it in the dim light, old and crumpled, a black-and-white snapshot of a kind I'd seen a million times—an unsmiling face, slicked-back hair, a white shirt, dark suit, eyes glowering with the intent to murder the photographer—pretty much like any other photo of Hungarian men of that generation. But on the back was a list of the ways Hegedus had killed people, along with two columns, one for the
proven
number of times he'd committed this or that assassination, and one in brackets for the
probable
number: “With garrotte 15 (42)”;
“Gunshot 34 (112)”; “Hand to Hand Combat 2 (93).”