Siege 13 (29 page)

But the drunkenness was real. Looking back, the memory of those times would appear to Flóri not as a series of dates—discreet occasions—but as one long moment, a smear of occurrence, filled with faces any one of which she could have picked out, accused, had imprisoned, making up the reasons and evidence as she went along, even after the fact. It was how she'd been working for the last two or three years, an agent of arbitrariness herself, bent on folding the world into her personal chaos.

“Yes, I've heard of the book,” the man told her, fingering his collar. “I've heard of you, too.” She looked at him, surprised, but he was already on his feet, moving into the mass of people going crazy in the bar—because it was already two in the morning now, those hours after closing time when drink opened onto hallucinations, transgressions of law, of
not only what was permitted but what was conceivable. Some were dancing, alone or in pairs or in groups of four or more, including one man doing a soft shoe under that soggy part of the roof where the rain came in—and by the time Flóri heard the man's voice again she was sitting on a toilet watching the dirty water inch up around her shoes.

“The Vannay Battalion,” she heard. A whisper. Flóri shook her head, unsure if it came from the stall to the left or right, or whether it had come, as it had so many times before, from somewhere inside her skull. And, as quickly as that, out came the rest: “You were hiding in the cellar during the siege. It was your parents who cut your hair, thinking that if you looked like a boy you might escape the fate of so many women then—the Red Army coming in, sore, tired, traumatized beyond morality—and the free looting they were granted by their commanders didn't only extend to pockets and suitcases and wristwatches, did it? But Vannay came along first, forced you to join up, and he did something to your parents that made sure you would never tell him who you really were. But you revealed yourself in the end, didn't you?”

By this point Flóri was already up, drunkenly and unsuccessfully yanking on her pants, stumbling out the door, ripping open the stall beside her, then all the others, gazing overhead, running her eyes along the floor. He was nowhere, not a footprint or a strand of toilet paper or a running tap to mark that he'd ever been there.

 

In the days that followed, Flóri kept her flat cap down over her eyes, moving between the homes of people she'd seen in the bar, not many of whom (like her) remembered what
they'd been doing that night, at those hours, never mind the person whose face she described. But Flóri had some of them arrested anyhow, and so they opened up with all sorts of information, none of it useful or true—talking and talking just to say something, to avoid the admission of guilt that came with keeping silent.

How could he have known what happened to her back then, during the siege? There were no real records, no photographs, no eyewitnesses, nothing. And while there was suspicion among the members of the Party as to the extent of her “infiltration” of the Vannay Battalion, that suspicion was more the standard relationship between people, especially in the Party, than anything derived from evidence. Yet he knew.

At nights she stayed up thinking about his face, sketching it again and again on a pad of paper. At first, she thought his face looked weathered, stripped away, disfigured to the point of being less than what it had once been, as if his skin and bones bore out the wasting that takes place in a person as they become legendary, when identity becomes the property of true believers rather than the self, but as the days went on and she moved along the track of stories and possible sightings she thought back to how he'd looked in the bar that night and changed her mind. The face was less than it was only because it had been added to—as if he was wearing bits and pieces of the faces of others, as if he'd carried away with him a trace of those he met, others like him, on the periphery of a state that wasn't supposed to have a periphery, that was supposed to have abolished it—taken what was best in them, but without absorbing it, as if it was possible to give them room, to maintain them as they had been, in that place
where he had the most to lose himself—his appearance. Flóri realized he'd taken something of her as well—the secret of her time with Vannay—something she was determined to get back, and then to destroy once and for all by destroying him. Except of course that in some way he'd already given it back, for in allowing her to revisit the siege, even if only with him, he'd also allowed her to testify to those she'd betrayed, to speak their memory rather than hide it behind science and ideology and booze—even from herself. The miracles and fantastic stories that surrounded him were only camouflage for what Szent-Mihály really offered, the most ordinary of escapes.

 

She was at mass the second time they met—or, more accurately, made contact, because once again he was gone before she was aware of him. This was the time—the early 1950s—when Cardinal Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, had been arrested—threatened, starved, refused sleep for days on end, had broken glass forced up his ass, made to sign documents he'd repudiated in a public letter prior to his arrest (saying anything he signed while in the hands of his interrogators would be invalid, the result of “human weakness”)—all because he'd refused to cede churches and schools to the communist authority. It was the time when the Party sent agents (known as “snitches”) to mass to transcribe the sermons of priests for use in show trials afterwards. A time when being Catholic meant you couldn't be in the Party, couldn't rise in the ranks of the communist aristocracy, couldn't get a decent job. A time when people often met this way, in churches makeshift or in ill repair, according to
a schedule that somehow arrived to them, along routes so twisted you couldn't imagine the landscape it had been carried through. But of course the Party knew of them, and so the Monsignor knew Flóri would be there, not so much recording every word as figuring out what she would say the priest had said. She was sitting in a pew when someone slid an envelope over her shoulder. By the time she'd grabbed it, glanced inside, and quickly folded the flap back in alarm and wheeled around there was only a little boy, staring up, clutching the coin the Monsignor had given him for passing on the information, proud of finally having something to put in the collection basket.

Her story was inside it—
the whole story
—including snapshots of the boys she'd helped kill when she'd turned on the Vannay Battalion—all written out in the form of an accusation. Later that day, in the room where she was staying, Flóri let the letter and photographs slide from the bed, remembering what it had been like inside that building, trapped with the Red Army all around—she was only sixteen years old, and the three boys were fourteen, seventeen, and eighteen—firing weapons they were already experts at reloading. There had been some German soldiers in there to begin with, all three injured, two of them dying the first day after crawling over to lean against the doorways. Why the doorways she couldn't say. The third one lived for three more days, sitting there demanding water, and reminding them, as often as possible, about the number of Soviet soldiers outside, the sorts of weapons they had, what those weapons could do to a human body. But most of all he kept repeating how they were going to die. “It's what we all deserve,” he laughed, holding his hand
over the gash in his stomach. Even worse were the horses the Germans had brought in there, up the staircase to the third floor, so starved they had barely enough energy to kick holes in the walls, to tear with their teeth at each other and anyone else who approached, before the soldiers outside managed to kill one with a rocket, and the other two with a single bullet each. “I brought them in case we needed to escape,” the third soldier laughed. “So we could get on them and ride away.” The stink of corpses was unbearable. But in the early days, when their stomachs were still big enough to feel hunger, they ignored the smell and searched up and down the horse carcasses, observing the thin line that separated meat already gone sour, rotting, poisoned, from meat they could keep down, carving it out and tossing it into the fire and then swallowing the blackened lumps hot as coal. Then it was back to scrambling across the heaps of masonry and concrete, iron rods and fallen chandeliers, releasing a volley of shots from one window, then another, then up or down a flight of stairs, passing another member of the battalion who was doing the same thing but in the opposite direction, the stairwell ringing with the voice of the German soldier sapping what frantic energy they still had, “You're going to die. You're all going to die.” Within days they'd stopped jumping over the bodies in the doorways, the horses in the salon, first stepping on them carefully, then running across, until they had to stop looking at what was beneath their feet, making the way so clotted and slippery.

She never would remember if it was Gyuri or Ger
ő
who found the manhole in the cellar, calling them down to help lift off the cover. Descend down that iron ladder, and then
what? she'd thought. Only to come up somewhere else in the city, places just as bad or worse, the siege dragging into its fiftieth day, whole blocks so pulverized by ordnance and fire your feet stumbled on rooftops fallen into the street, trying to figure out where a corner had been, an avenue, the place you'd once lived. Down that ladder and then what? Ger
ő
was in the middle of asking who was going to go first when the body floated by. The body of a woman, naked, face down. Her fingers entwined with the fingers of another hand, smaller, attached to a corpse trapped somewhere in the water beneath her, drifting this way and that, turned away from the air, from what was happening in the world above. Then Flóri heard gunfire, shouts in Russian, closer to them than ever before.

She would always try to forget what happened next—turning from the boys while ripping off her Vannay insignias, running to open the door for the Soviet soldiers before anyone could stop her, watching as members of the Red Army charged through, gunning down Gyuri and Ger
ő
and János. Afterwards, as the soldiers looked Flóri over, her back to the wall, hands empty and raised above her head, she mumbled incoherently in Hungarian and the little Russian she knew about how she was Jewish, how her parents had been members of the communist faction of the Independence Front, how she'd been captured by Vannay's men, made their prisoner. She said she'd been waiting for days to be liberated by the Red Army. As it turned out, the soldiers didn't really care about what she was saying, except for the part about how the boys had “treated” her while she'd been their prisoner—making her demonstrate this part of her alleged captivity over and over again that afternoon—and she was to cling to
the story even when it was obvious no one cared, that it was only her present usefulness the Party was interested in.

Now she picked up the pictures and looked at the faces. Did Szent-Mihály carry bits and pieces of their expressions as well? She looked at them closely, and tried to remember a time when it would have been difficult to turn on these faces—on any faces—to betray them. And then she wondered how Szent-Mihály had found out about what had happened, reading through the letter again, carefully examining the photographs, turning them over to read the dates on the back—Ger
ő
Tolscvay (February 12, 1947), Gyuri Kelemen (February 12, 1947), János Szabó (February 12, 1947).

1947. They should have been dead for two years by then.

Flóri stared at the pictures again, flipping them back and forth, reaching for the bottle of
pálinka
, noticing how little the boys had aged and yet how much, comparing them with the faces she remembered from the moment the Soviets trained their guns on them. Then, taking up the bottle, Flóri was out of the room, out into the frigid winter without shoes or a coat or any knowledge of how to retrace her steps, holding the letter and pictures and turning this way and that on the streets, as if randomness itself, the loss of maps, was the only way of getting near Szent-Mihály, as if what she needed was to forget how much she wanted to find him—how much her happiness depended on it.

 

“What if I told you they were alive? That they'd all survived?” Flóri looked up from where she'd eventually fallen down, feeling the weight of something on her chest, the large coat he'd taken off and wrapped around her, snow hanging from
eaves overhead, the priest rubbing his hands together as if it was that easy to wash them of everything. “What if I told you they're alive today only because of what you did—because the Russians left them for dead after becoming distracted by you and what you . . . offered them—that they were only wounded, unconscious?” She was shivering under the coat, her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. “What if I told you that everyone you've gone after since then, all of them, only survived
because
you turned them in?” He opened a file and held the photographs before her eyes, face after face after face, all of which she remembered as she remembered the faces of the boys, that look on the other side of goodbye, when the waving's done and you've given yourself over to what's coming. “Mária Ligeti—the sole survivor of a prison train derailment,” he said. “Erzsébet Hauser—if she'd been arrested two days later she would have been charged as part of the White October conspiracy.” He pointed at another picture. “Péter Horváth—turned out, unbeknownst to him, that he was a loyal comrade who'd infiltrated a reactionary network.” The Monsignor smiled. “They were looking for someone to play that role; Péter went along with it.” He laughed, and it sounded to Flóri as bright and as warm a thing as she'd ever heard. “I like to call them the Nándorffy Network.” He patted her once more. “You're in my book: Flóri the miracle worker.” He rose. “Look them up if you don't believe me.”