Siege 13 (34 page)

I must have sat for three hours reading and re-reading those letters, as mystified by them as I had been with the Banks book. It was only then, in those late hours, that I realized what Aces had been doing all this time, starting from his earliest days, underneath my bed, dreaming through his tears.

He had not gone home after his expulsion from the U.S. After Jancsi Bácsi had bailed him out and sent money for a
ticket, the old man went down to the bus depot to wait for the Greyhound, watching as the last passenger left, climbing the steps to scan the empty rows of seats, only to be told by the driver that a young man and woman had gotten off in Richmond, at the first stop after the border. From Richmond the two of them had made their way to Toronto, then disappeared again after I showed up and Aces knew I'd once again interfere with his life, taking from him what he wanted in another of my selfish attempts at help.

What did he want? It wasn't until I went back to Vancouver that I was able to make myself certain of it. But I needed to. I drove to Jancsi and Annabella's house in West Vancouver, stepping through the gates, up the steps, wondering what there was for Aces to come home to.

Jancsi Bácsi met me at the door. “Quite the marathon coming up those steps, isn't it?” he said, laughing. “God, I'll never forget that race, how slow you were. Everyone's done, you're still slogging through the mud. Nothing has changed for you, has it?” He winked at me as if he was the keeper of my secret humiliations, there to remind me just in case I forgot. But for some reason I felt sorry for him now, standing there, both of us knowing what our meeting was about—his abandonment of and by Aces—and I tried not to show how pathetic it was, this memory from over thirty-five years ago, that it was all he had on me, the best he could come up with.

“Where's Annabella Néni?” I asked.

“New York.” He shrugged. I nodded, but he didn't wait for me to add anything, because his confident smile flickered and faded as he came to the only question that mattered, the one he'd been waiting to ask: “You saw Imi?” With the way
he said it, so quiet, I realized how hard it must have been for him to face that empty bus, to have confronted once again the one failure that made all his successes look like nothing. I nodded, not giving him anything else. “How's he doing?” he pressed. “This woman he's with, is she . . . ?”

“I don't know,” I replied. “I guess that's what I'm here to figure out.” Jancsi looked around, not sure what I was after. “Did you ever get mail from Aces when he was away?”

The old man shrugged. “Sometimes. I knew he needed money, so I'd send him some. He never asked for it.” Jancsi said this with real regret, though I wasn't sure if it was because his son no longer turned to him in moments of need, or because his independence left Jancsi alone on one more battlefield. “When the money arrived he'd send back a postcard. Nothing on it.”

“Did you keep them?”

Jancsi nodded. “They're upstairs.”

Aces' room was exactly as I remembered: small, spare, remarkable only for the number of books on the shelves, and the four pictures on the wall above the desk, all from the siege of Budapest, early 1945, pictures of haggard men and women wandering bombed-out streets, dead horses half buried in rubble, planes crashed into buildings. “I'd forgotten these,” I said to Jancsi.

“The siege. When Imi was young he was always asking me about it,” the old man said. “He loved those stories. All of us stuck in that cellar—me and my brothers and sisters, mother, father, aunts, uncles—all there together with no way out. It was the most terrifying time of my life, but Imi wanted me to tell the story over and over.” It sounded as if Jancsi
would have liked to tell the story one more time. “Here they are,” he said, fetching the postcards off the desk.

I went through them, front and back, in about twenty seconds. The backs were easy, since there was nothing on them other than a few stamps and Jancsi Bácsi's address. They were about as complete a rejection of his father as it was possible to make, not only because he refused to acknowledge the money Jancsi sent, but because of the images of the small towns—the dozens of unknown places—where Aces was dreaming into being the only family he'd ever known, the only one in which he'd ever felt welcome.

I could see him in those tiny archives, sometimes only a room in a basement filled with bursting file cabinets, an old computer beside stacks of papers slowly being entered into a database, the sorts of places where it was not uncommon to come upon something startling—a clipping, a reference, a local history no one had heard about. I could see Aces waiting for the librarian to disappear, then reaching into his jacket and pulling out a photograph or forged letter, crumpled and stained to look authentic, and sticking it into one of the cabinets. It was a secret infiltration, a mythology slowly built up in these tiny rooms where oversight was lax, but from which the stuff he planted could filter into the larger system, archives in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., in a process Aces sped up by requesting the documents he'd planted the next time he came through town, forcing them into existence, the librarians always laughing, saying, “We have nothing like that,” but promising to look into it, and then, days later, they'd call or write, their voices always apologetic, filled with awe, “It turns out that we do have something on a Hungarian
émigré who lived hereabouts and killed himself back in '72.” And before you knew it a scholar like Christine Banks, hungry for a new research field, would trace the information back to Smuteye, Hot Coffee, wherever, and publish a book that made it all official.

I gave the postcards back to Jancsi. “It's my fault, too,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

I was thinking of Jancsi and Annabella, my mother and father, and of Anna and me—all the people who had abused Aces' trust either by abandoning him, or taking him from his family under the guise of hospitality, or exploiting his obsession for criminal purposes. But worse than all of this was that Aces no longer cared about our motives, past or present, didn't care about who was real or fake, only that they stick with the program, as Anna seemed to be doing, maintaining his illusions as long as he kept up his end in their drug deals. It was all he needed us for now, and if we didn't comply he was finished with us as easily and totally as the closing of a file or dossier in the secret archive that was his only real family, his only real home.

The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto

ÁRIA DIDN'T DIE
in the siege of Budapest. No, she suffered the fate of so many women—
millions of women
, according to historians—who were raped by the Red Army during their “liberation” of eastern and central Europe. For the survivors of this ordeal—women and girls and grandmothers and sisters and any other kind of female the troops could get their hands on—there was a second ordeal once the first was over, and that was the look of shame and disgust in the eyes of the men—husbands, lovers, sons, nephews—who'd been powerless to help them, and for whom the women remained a continual reminder of how they'd failed. Of course, there was also the look of those men who
had
tried to do something, but this was even more haunting, for some of them had their brains bashed out with the butt ends of rifles, or were shot five or six times, or received so much in the way of injury that the look they gave you afterwards was, for the women, like gazing into a mirror.

Mária's husband, László, never did find out where the soldiers took her after they'd finished doing what they did,
holding him down while they did it in such a way that he had the best view in the house, screaming and struggling so fiercely they finally had to knock him over the head. He returned to consciousness, Mária was gone, and no matter how he searched for her afterwards, paying visits to the Allied Control Commission offices, looking through lists of the wounded, the arrested, the dead, even wandering the neighbourhood where it happened and questioning every tenant or soldier or policeman he came upon, hopeful for just one witness, László got nothing but the same blank stare so many others received in the search for missing women after the war—all those families who eventually found peace by pretending that their wives or mothers or daughters had really died, burying them in proper ceremonies, their caskets and urns empty of bodies and ash; or that they were still alive, somewhere out there, emigrated to the west, enjoying happiness and prosperity; or that they'd never existed at all, removing their photos from walls and scrapbooks and family albums and tossing them into the fire. As the weeks and then months ticked by, László came to realize that what he feared the most was not Mária's disappearance but her return, that he would somehow have to find the words that would both console and still let him continue on beside her. So what László finally did, after a year had gone by, was mutter something to his father, Boldizsár—whose health was failing by then—about it being 1946 and the country in ruins and the Soviets not making any plans to leave, and the next day he gathered up his and Mária's son, Krisztián, and headed west, intending to write of his whereabouts to the family once he knew what it was. When he finally settled
in Canada, he told everyone that Mária had died from the wounds inflicted upon her by the soldiers, and hoped he was right. As for Krisztián, then aged two, László waited a decade and then simply said, “Your mother died in the war,” and let the kid's lack of memories do the rest.

 

The problems began three decades later, in 1975, by which point the rest of László's siblings—István, Adél and Anikó—had also left Hungary for Canada, and settled into low-paying jobs, and raised children who they hoped would do much better than they had. It was Adél, two years younger than László but still fifty-one at the time this all happened, who first caught a glimpse of Mária at the intersection of Yonge and King, where Adél worked as a janitor in an office building. The rule in the family was that Mária wasn't to be talked about, mainly for Krisztián's sake, but also for László's (though both Adél and Anikó sometimes wondered why they'd worked so hard to spare László, since it was Mária, not him, who'd truly suffered). Yet this sighting was so unnerving Adél just had to bring it up—“I saw the strangest thing the other day; I'm sure it was Mária. . .”—at which point István, older than László by a year, yelled out, “This is great cake!” as if he could change the subject. But Adél caught his signal in time and went into a long phony coughing fit that made everyone jump up to help her and forget what she'd just said.

Adél, who was twenty-one at the time of the siege of Budapest, had seen what happened to women afterwards because she saw what had happened to Mária when she finally turned up, very much alive, six weeks after László and Krisztián left for Canada. She was in the care of Béla Kerepesi, a decorated
war hero and communist, who sent word to Boldizsár that the family should come see her, also warning them that her memory had only recently returned, that she was “still fragile, almost broken,” and needed to be treated gently. Boldizsár mulled it over for a few days, then called together István, Adél and Anikó to give them the news, insisting that the rest of the family should not know about this—Mária's survival—at least not yet, not until they'd gone and seen her and determined the extent of the damage, and under no circumstances should they tell her where László and Krisztián had gone. When they finally had gone to Béla's place, everyone acted toward Mária as if nothing had happened. It was easier to do this than try to imagine what sort of sympathy such a person might need. In fact, on that day three decades later, when Adél glimpsed Mária buying a hot dog from a vendor at Yonge and King, she saw that her sister-in-law was still wearing the look she'd worn back in 1946—like someone trying to catch a departing train. Immediately Adél stopped what she was doing, wiping dust off plastic ferns in the lobby of the Bingeman Building, and rushed outside and called to her, but Mária only looked around in bewilderment and then rushed on.

 

The second person in the family to see Mária was István. He was standing on a subway platform when the doors opened and she brushed by him with a plastic bag full of what looked like apples. István stepped into the car, waited as the doors closed, and then with a shudder realized who he'd just seen. As the subway pulled out of the station, his face was pressed to the glass, and his hands to either side of that, white and bloodless and mashed against the window as his eyes veered
crazily from left to right searching the darkened platform for her face.

Finally, Anikó saw Mária in a Persian carpet store, or, more accurately, she heard her voice. It seemed like every time she peeled back the corner of a carpet to see the one underneath she caught Mária's low tone, speaking in Hungarian of course, haggling with a vendor over his prices, but when she dropped the carpet in surprise and looked around, there was nobody in the place other than the merchants and the other ladies who had no better way of spending a Thursday than by looking at things they couldn't afford.