Siege 13 (6 page)

“Listen, Sándor,” he murmured, frightened by what was taking place in his friend's body, the spasms that passed through it as he held him. “You have to pull yourself together,” he said, “the siege won't last forever.” But Sándor was already past the idea of waiting, József knew that, past thinking of what had happened and what was to come. What he really
wanted, what he needed, had nothing to do with József at all, for József was already disappearing for Sándor—disintegrating into the state of war, falling apart with the capital and the zoo, with the death of the animals—and all Sándor needed to realize his own disappearance was this one last act, this final favour. But things weren't like that for József, not yet, for the presence of Sándor was still keeping him intact, as if the strength of their friendship, the history they shared, whatever it was in his character that Sándor loved, could recall József to himself. He looked at Sándor and saw what the war had done to friendship after it had finished with everything else—with sympathy, with intelligence, with self-awareness, with loyalty and affection and love—all those impediments to survival, all those things that got in the way of forgetting who you were. It was for this that József envied Sándor, for Sándor had forgotten him just as he'd forgotten that the soldiers he'd fed to the lion were men, that the bodies the birds fed on where those of women and children, that there was even such a thing as his own life, or anyone else's, and that it might be worth preserving.

When he finally rose up with Sándor that night, carrying him in his arms like a child, József wasn't sure if he could do what Sándor wanted him to do, because he was still clinging to his friend's memory, unwilling to let him go, as he would weeks later, even more so, after the conversation with Zamertsev, after the Soviet hunting party had gone out—sober this time, no horses—carrying flashlights and head-lamps, determined to do it right. He had set out that night in exactly the same way, out the door, moving along, bent with Sándor's weight under arc lights and stuttering street lamps,
dodging patrols that weren't really patrols but an extension of the three days of free looting the commanders had granted their troops.

By then he knew what Sándor needed as much as Sándor did—this is what József would not tell Zamertsev—and when they arrived at the subway entrance and swung open the door and looked inside, József hesitated. And when Sándor, resting his head against his old friend's chest, asked to be put down on the threshold, József laughed and said no, it was fine, they could go in together, it didn't matter. “Please,” said Sándor, jerking limply in József's arms. “You've been better with your grief,” he said, “better able to use it—to help make yourself stronger.” With this, József finally understood what Sándor wanted, and why, and József would remember it as the moment when he finally gave in to the siege, to its terrible logic, to what Sándor hoped to become, what he needed József to witness. He said goodbye before putting Sándor down and closing the door on him. Then there was only the weakness, from carrying his friend across the ravaged city, from using up what little strength was left in closing and slumping against the door, too tired now to pull it open, knowing he would have nightmares in the years to come—nightmares of banging on it, wrenching at the handle, calling out to Sándor—only to wake to the terror of loss, alone in the dark with all he'd been separated from, as if there was no way to figure out where he was, where he began and ended, until he realized what was out of reach. It was Sándor's last gift, to József and the lion both, what he thought they needed to live, as if grief could work that way, though in the end it was only what
he'd
wanted: the death of whatever it was—affection,
friendship, love—that kept him in place, reminding him of what he was and in that way of what he'd seen, when all he wanted by then was the roar and the leap—the moment when he was finally something else.

Sailor's Mouth

T WAS
1957 and the sailor built a plastic boat. Everything on it was transparent—plastic hull, plastic mast, plastic sail—and he lay down in it with a sack of
kifli
and a jug of water and headed south from Budapest, down the Danube, toward the Black Sea.”

“Did he make it?”

“No, he was seen. His boat is in the Museum of Failed Escapes.”

“There's a museum like that?”

“It's in the ninth district. A private collection. One day I'll take you there.”

“How did you get in?”

“I'll tell you later.” Judit shrugged, her skin dark even for a Hungarian, long hair trailing on the pillow like rays from a black sun.

 

Her daughter, Janka, was five years old, with the same black hair. She was standing in the doorway the first night I carried her mother home. It was the tail end of an ordinary flirtation,
Judit pretending she was drunk and her guard was down and she was doing something she didn't do for any man—show him where she lived—while I held her arm saying the streets of the eighth district were no place for a woman in her condition, all giggles and hiccups, fingers fluttering in my face. But it was really Janka I was after, having listened to Judit describe her, the life they led, their home, the food they ate, the kind of places the girl played. When we arrived, there was an old woman holding the door—the grandmother I guessed—hair covered in a lace shawl, standing stooped on the other side of the open door threatening Janka with a beating, no dinner for a week, if she didn't come inside immediately. The old woman was unsurprised when Judit and I stumbled through, little Janka trailing behind grasping after her mother's hand. I put Judit on the couch, mumbling that she'd be okay, that she was just sleepy. The old woman stared at the floor, shaking her head. “I told her never to bring anyone here.”

 

I was supposed to have stayed in Budapest only a day, then gone on to Romania. “You stay as long as it takes,” my wife, Anna, said. We had a child already, seven years old, Miklós, who was as eager as his mother for a brother or sister, it didn't matter, he'd been waiting as long as he could remember, smiling into my face as I said goodbye at the airport, telling him I was going to a place where orphanages were overflowing with children desperate for older brothers. Anna stood there also smiling, stroking the back of Miklós's hair as I spoke to him, once in a while backing up what I said, even jumping in to describe what the little girl would look like—olive eyes, curly hair, dark brown skin—the three of us picking
out names—Juliska, Klára, Mária—as we waited for me to go through security.

Anna and I had been cleared to adopt years ago, when it became obvious that the magic that had produced Miklós was gone, vanished along with the conversations we'd once had (apart from how our son was doing, how much money we needed for daycare, renovations, bills), and our interest in concerts and art galleries and sex with each other—everything gone except the three or four glasses of wine we drank every night (
that
we could still agree on), though by the time of my departure for Budapest Anna was slipping even in this, and making up for it by criticizing me for drinking too much. Instead of dealing with it, our marriage, we decided, or Anna did, to become political and adopt a child.

We'd gone through the adoption course, sitting beside other desperate couples, listening to lectures on cultural sensitivity, answering awkward questions about our sex life, swearing that we never touched drugs. We'd gotten our certificate, endured the routine visit of the social worker, who slept in our guest room and concluded his assessment by saying Anna and I had a “very strong bond of friendship,” which means he knew we'd lied on the sex question.

But there was no baby. More than one agency told us we were too particular, wanting a girl, preferably no older than three (though we were willing to go as high as six) from that part of Hungary called Erdély—“Transylvania” in English—ceded to Romania in 1919 by the Treaty of Trianon. This was Anna's obsession, inherited from her beloved father, an old man when I knew him, hair poking from his ears, ceiling lights bringing out the veins in his head, which he shaved
with electric clippers every morning. He was always sitting in the kitchen in that awful house in North Ward, old calendars clinging to the wall with their maps of Hungary from before 1919, and then, inside that territory, the tiny Hungary of today marked with a red border. Her father was one of those angry nostalgics—Trianon this, Trianon that;
“kis Magyarország nem ország, nagy Magyarország mennyország”
; fondly recalling how much lost territory Hitler had returned between the wars—gnashing his teeth at the two million ethnic Hungarians stranded in Erdély, how they were being “culturally cleansed,” not allowed to publish in their own language, schools closed, whole villages uprooted and forcibly assimilated to the south, politicians such as Ceaus¸escu dreaming of their disappearance, barely restrained from the genocide they would have preferred—why wait three generations if you didn't have to?—when there'd be no one left to testify that the place had never been Romanian. Meanwhile the Hungarians kept hanging on—to their language, their culture, their identity—ninety years running.

Anna's father had lived through the siege of Budapest, the subject his rants on Erdély inevitably came around to, grumbling how the Hungarians had no choice at all, between the Nazis on one side and the Soviets on the other, and at least Hitler offered to give back territory the country had lost—“Over fifty percent of our nation taken away”; “No country lost as much as Hungary did and we'd even opposed going to war!”; “the French hated us, that's the reason for Trianon, prejudice pure and simple.” It was as if his vision of the siege—soldier after soldier, death after death, his own memories of being stuck in Budapest, hungry and thirsty
and terrified, that parade of fatal images—spun off the inked signatures of Trianon. He and his country had endured the siege—endured what came before, and what came after—because of Trianon. Nothing could dissuade him. I heard it every time I went there, and its naiveté, its absence of even a respectable hint of fatalism, as if you really should be able to expect justice in this world, made me crazy, and, worse, reminded me of my father, who'd wanted no part of that flailing impotence and the military solution it craved—the happy days of Hitler's Reich. My father had just wanted to forget, sitting in Toronto's Szécsényi Club drinking
pálinka
and playing
tarok,
happy his son had married a Hungarian girl and that his grandchildren would one day speak Hungarian. That was enough for him.

But it wasn't enough for Anna's father, and it wasn't enough for her. She wanted an orphaned girl—first because it was so hard for Hungarians in Erdély already, and second because girls were subhuman in Hungarian culture (this was Anna's refinement on her father's beliefs, one he would never have agreed with). An orphaned girl didn't have a chance. It was an act of “cultural rescue,” that's what Anna said to the caseworker when he told us there were plenty of Romani kids, kids with AIDS, even some Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, and of course whole battalions of Romanian kids filling the orphanages in Bucharest to overflowing. “The Hungarians in Transylvania look after their own,” he said to us. “If you want a Hungarian girl there's tons in Hungary.” But Anna shook her head. And when the agency did find us one, there was always some problem—a form we hadn't filled out, a glitch in the paperwork, another hidden processing fee—and
after that another wait from six to eight months, by which point the child was gone. Either that or we made it to the finish line, received the file—the family records, the medical reports, the photographs—and Anna took them to our doctor, who held them in the light and said, “Hm, see these shadows under the left ear, those bumps, that could be something.” He tilted the pictures. “Or it could be nothing.” Anna would come home and brood over Scotch and soda, and after a few days request more information, which the agency could never obtain, and finally she'd turn down the adoption. Then I'd lie in bed at night listening as Anna talked in her sleep, apologizing to the child, begging forgiveness, smashing her fists so hard against her face I had to wake and then hold her while she cried. Finally, we decided I should go to Romania, that maybe I could do in person what we'd failed to do through bureaucracy.

 

“In the Museum of Failed Escapes there are sails made out of tinfoil,” I can still hear Judit saying, her voice slurred, on the verge of laughter. Her drunkenness, I would realize, was more an affectation than reality, all part of the act, and that any day of the week she could have drunk me under the table. “They are perfect mirrors,” she continued. The sailor set them afloat one day on the Sea of Hungary when there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and they sparkled so that a man could swim unseen from one shore to the next, because the snipers were blinded by the glittering armada.