Siege 13 (10 page)

At night, unable to sleep, he would shake off nightmares of the siege by fixing up the place—the water damage, the rotten studs and joists, the plastering, the paint, the careful work of reconstructing the villa—as if by restoring the building to what it had once been it might finally open up to him, truly open, and he'd step inside to the life he should have had.

After the third week, he ripped off the boards covering the door to the room where Tíbor died, and a day or two later, steeling himself, went inside, staring at the mounds of rubble, the debris strewn along the floor. The Kálmán family had already exhumed and buried the bodies, touching the rubble only as much as was needed to pull it apart. After that, the family kept the door nailed shut, Zoltán had thought, because they couldn't bear to face the site where Tíbor and Ildikó died, but as he began to clear away the rubble, he discovered why they'd really left it as it was, for once the bricks and plaster and shattered beams and bits of glass were swept aside, he found the hole in the floor where Tíbor had kept his workshop, and inside, the stacks of messages he'd received during the war from the resistance, from places as far away as Cologne, and the equipment he'd used to forge identities, along with the lists of names and addresses under which Tíbor had hidden the refugees. Zoltán would use these lists to keep himself useful to the state, exposing identities one by one whenever he felt the pressure to demonstrate his loyalty. In return, they let him keep the villa. The villa with its printing press, the one they knew nothing about, his escape.

The names would run out regardless of how carefully, how slowly, he delivered them. In fact, if he delivered them too slowly the Soviets would grow impatient, demand that
he tell them where he was getting his information, and then, when he refused, they'd come into the villa to find out for themselves, and his last hope would be ended.

He went looking for someone to help with the press. He met Ági later that year, as the first wave of deportations, imprisonments, and executions took place. Her father and mother had been devoted communists dating back to Béla Kun's brief dictatorship of Hungary in 1919, and were persecuted in the white terror that followed against Jews and leftists when Admiral Horthy established control over the country for the next twenty-four years. Her father had been both—Jewish and leftist—and more than once it was only the thickness of his skull that kept him from being beaten to death, just as it was his skill with the printing press that kept all three of them alive during the period of anti-Semitic laws, ghettoization, the Holocaust. “If you wear the yellow star they will kill you,” he once told Ági, tossing hers and her mother's and his into the flames, “and if you do not they will kill you.” He stirred the fire. “So why bother?” But he had done more than just that, drawing up papers for many others—Jews, but also members of the resistance, fellow communists, British soldiers parachuted into the capital, others who needed to escape, for one reason or another, from the powers bearing down on them—whatever he could do to subvert the fascist cause. As a result, Ági's father, like so many other communists, was arrested after the Soviet occupation on Malinovsky's orders, not so much for his vocal criticism of the Russian “liberator”—for asking what good it had done them to await liberation when it meant free looting for the Red Army, rape, robbery, extortion, the requisitioning and
hoarding of the country's food for the military while the general population starved, the ransacking of the nation in the way of reparations, mass arrests, murder—but because he wasn't afraid for his life. They were to be sent to a prison camp, one of the many the Soviets had set up, in Gödöll
ő
, when Zoltán stepped in, saying he needed someone adept at “paperwork.” Malinovsky had reported to Moscow that he had captured 110,000 fascists, but as he only had 60,000, the rest had to be made up by dragging people at random from the streets and their homes, and Zoltán was put in charge of making these substitutes look legitimate.

Naturally, Ági's father objected, and so Zoltán took him aside, reminding him that the youngest women raped by the Red Army were 12, and the oldest 90, which meant that both his wife and daughter were within the normative range; he spoke, too, of the sorts of venereal diseases they could expect, not to mention how long it would last, given that some women were locked up for two weeks “entertaining” as many as thirty soldiers at a time. In the end, Ági's father agreed, and to soften the blow Zoltán made sure they were provided for, keeping his promise even after Ági's parents, having done the work they were asked to do, were visited one night by the ÁVÓ and taken away for “unauthorized forgery of government documents,” and Zoltán inherited Ági.

He made a nominal attempt to save her parents, trying to get her on his side, to make her believe he wasn't really an apparatchik, that he was just using the system until he could make his escape. So he made sure she was there when he made inquiries and phone calls, made sure that when they came to the villa for her as well, agents of the ÁVÓ knocking on the
door, he was there to bar the entrance, listing off his decorations and accomplishments and contacts to make it clear he, and by extension she, was “protected,” though in truth, no one was protected, no matter how high up your friends were, for the most dangerous friend of all was the highest ranking, Stalin himself.

It was an act of bravery, maybe the only act of bravery he'd ever performed, though it was only due to his hope that Ági would fix the printing press hidden beneath the villa. He knew that she could repair and operate the press with her eyes closed, the old man had said as much, boasting that she'd been more than his little helper. When her father was called away on business, she'd run the whole show.

Ági was silent through it all, absolutely quiet, the look in her eyes exactly the same as Karola's had been, too hard for a girl of nineteen—still lithe, a little boyish—meeting his gaze with one in every way its equal. The war had made them old. He saw it in the way her eyes left him isolated, a lesson on shouldering what he'd done alone rather than lessening the burden by passing it on, by turning it into a secret she had to share.

It always seemed to be winter, down in the hole, Ági squatting above the trap door peering at him, listening to the clack and whir as Zoltán tried, without expertise or success, to start up Tíbor's old machinery, the presses and lamps and generators. Nothing worked. All that happened was the clashing of parts, the tearing and spewing and grinding of paper, the flickering of lamps. The generator hummed dangerously, and charged every metal object around it so badly Zoltán was continuously cursing the jolts and shocks.

Ági would leave his dinner at the edge of the trap door, listening for a moment and then hammering it with the heel of her shoe, making him jump in the midst of whatever repairs he was attempting, so that he would lose his grip on the screw or wire or flashlight and have to scramble after it in the dark. Zoltán sometimes felt she was transforming the villa by her presence. The smell of her cooking in the kitchen. The bedroom filled with the rustle of her turning in sleep. The shaded gallery, with its columns and ivy, unbearable for him because the only time a smile ever played across Ági's face was when she stepped out onto it and took in the smells of the garden and sunshine she and half the country had dreamed about in cellars and shelters during the siege, when all they had was the sound of bombs, the slow fog of plaster shaken from the walls and ceiling and floor with every explosion.

Instead of helping him, Ági reminded Zoltán, day after day, of the terrible things he'd done. She made love to him without flinching, without motion, the daughter of a man he'd killed, a woman unlawfully his, stolen, forced against her will, as if nurturing his hopelessness, his self-hate, his absent courage.

When he grew frustrated with the work he'd sit with her in one of the ruined rooms, Ági staring at the floor, not at all there. “What would you have done?” he asked, as if having told her about the press, his plan to create a new identity, to get away before scrutiny of his activities became too intense, he was now free to tell her everything, all of what that scrutiny might uncover. “What other choice was there?”

She stared at the hatch he'd left open, or the slow work of renovation he'd begun, trying to re-plaster the walls, to
repair the hole in the ceiling, to paint over a half decade of water stains, her silence refusing him the one thing he most wanted: to hear someone, anyone, say that they too would have done what he did. But all he heard was the villa, rain on its roof, the ticking of radiators and plumbing, the wind playing on the windows, as if it was telling him it took a special person to do what he'd done, to have shot those boys. “No one but you could have done that,” the villa said.

At other times he would remind her of those he'd assisted—the legless girl in the infirmary, Ági herself—and ask her to help him square this against the other things he'd done—to her parents, to the two boys. “How is it that I could do any good at all?” he asked. “Maybe I haven't gone so far. Maybe there's still something of me left,” he said, waiting for her to speak, the villa answering instead.

When he grew angry with her silence, he threatened to stop protecting her from the ÁVÓ. Ági never raised her eyes from the floor, and he would shout that they were both going to die there, in the villa, and then he'd go back down the hatch, kicking and beating the useless machinery. “If only you would help me!” he yelled up through the trap door, letting it out before he could stop the words. “We could use this machine.” But it was pointless. For years now, his job had been destroying names, not creating them.

 

In March of 1947 Zoltán finally ran out of names—all but one. He'd done what he could, he told Ági. At first, he'd only handed in the aliases Tíbor had given to communists, to those, Zoltán knew, who were even now active in the Party, and who'd enjoyed their fill of atrocity, and now it was their
turn. When these were used up, Zoltán had moved down the list to those he knew were missing, or sick, or single. The very last names he'd handed in belonged to men who had families—wives, children, next of kin. And when those were gone—identified, questioned, arrested—when there was only the last, the one he'd picked out in advance, an address in Székesfehérvár, someone guiltier than most, susceptible to blackmail, with the means necessary to help Zoltán hide away, then he turned to Ági.

“If we're going to get away, you're going to have to help me.” She made no reply. He turned, putting his hands against their bedroom wall. “I've been waiting,” he said. “I thought there might be time, that if I was patient, the names would last longer than the Soviets. We could make this place mine, or ours, whatever.” He took his hands from the wall. “But they aren't leaving this country. They aren't
ever
leaving this country. You wait and see! And there are no names left!”

She watched him pace back and forth, giving her a precise account of who was asking questions about him, what departments were interested, whose hands had delivered and traded memos on how he happened to know so much, on where he'd gotten the information that led to so many arrests. “The only thing that would have been worse,” he hissed, “is if I'd given them no names at all.”

He moved to the bed and grabbed one of her wrists. “If only I could fix the equipment Tíbor left,” he said. “It would at least give me, give us, a chance to get away.”

She looked at him as if she had no idea who he was.

“What's wrong with you?” he shouted. He yanked Ági off the bed then, and she stumbled after him, rounding the
corner to the room where Tíbor and Ildikó had died, and down the ladder to the workshop.

He grabbed a list of names from a bench he'd built, thrusting it in her face. “Read it!” he said to her. “Read the names!”

She tried to look away.

“I got it from the ministry,” he said, holding it up to her face, his other hand still gripping her wrist, “the names of the confirmed dead. I thought I could use it to make an alias. They'd never be looking for someone who has already died.”

Giving in, Ági took the paper from his hand, her eyes moving side to side along one of the only records that still testified, name by name, to a whole society taken out of existence so that this new one could come into being. This is how she found it.

“Leo Kocsis,” Ági whispered.

“Yes,” he said, “exactly. How eager are you to join him? Because that's exactly what's going to happen, your name and my name, right here”—he poked a finger at the list—“if you don't get us out.”

She let the paper fall. Leo Kocsis. Her father.

 

Zoltán would never remember whether Ági agreed with a “Yes” or a nod, or whether she agreed at all, only that she moved forward. In that moment he had the premonition he always had, an instinct for how betrayal might benefit him, the same instinct that had made him show Ági her father's name, knowing it was the only way to break what had formed between them. Ági worked without stopping, and was not finished before the evening of the next day. There was so
much to do, so many papers, copying everything Zoltán brought to her, every sheet, without speaking.

When it was done, days later, and Zoltán was standing in the doorway, his bags packed, it occurred to him that she had not prepared an alias for her own escape, and he quietly asked if she wasn't coming along.

She stared at him.

“I'm going to Székesfehérvár,” he whispered, needing to say something, to cover up this moment, this need for an apology. “I'm going to stay there for a little while.” He rubbed his head. “There's still someone . . . I might get help.”

Ági said nothing, only stood there in the doorway as if she had no intention of ever leaving Tíbor Kálmán's villa.