Siege 13 (11 page)

“What's wrong with you?” he asked. “You think they'll leave you alone when they come for me? You think you'll be spared?”

“They . . .” she began. “
They
have never left me alone.” And she stepped back inside and quietly closed the door.

Zoltán was still standing in front of the villa minutes later, still there, silent, unable to step off the threshold, almost as if he was waiting for her to invite him back in, as if, after all this time, all he really wanted was to be welcomed into the place—as if it had never been about an alias at all.

Zoltán lingered, unable to turn decisively toward Székesfehérvár, moving along the sidewalk and glancing back, retracing five or six steps, eyes resting on the villa, long after Ági had opened the windows, brought the record player out onto the gallery, and poured herself what remained of the
pálinka
. He stood there, half hidden behind a willow, barely making out the melody of the
sláger
, watching her tilt the
glass to her lips. She had the run of the place now, he realized, and he wondered if she'd known it would come to this, that for him the worst memory of all would be Ági accepted into the villa, as if his removal was all that Tíbor Kálmán's home needed to be complete, all it had needed to be finally restored.

The Beautician

F ALL
the old dissidents at the Szécsényi Club, Árpád Holló wore the most makeup. From far away it was unnoticeable, he looked great, all
fin de siècle
elegance with pomaded hair and well-cut suits, a fresh rose in his buttonhole. But step up close, two or three feet away, and you'd see it—his face would blur for a second then snap back into focus in thick oils—and you'd wonder how deep you had to go, pushing a finger through all that mascara and rouge and foundation, before you hit a chin or a cheekbone, or if you'd hit anything at all.

It was the spring of 1993 when I betrayed him. I was twenty-one, working on my honours thesis in Central European Studies, and dating Ílona's stunning daughter, Éva, whom I still think of once in a while, walking up the street to the house I was renting with friends—her loose summer dresses, her sharp smile, her hair hennaed and waving in the breeze. She'd bend down and kiss me and we'd sit on the
steps and talk about what I'd found at the Szécsényi Club library the night before.

My deadline was looming. I'd wasted the previous fall partying instead of coming up with a thesis topic. I wanted to write something about the Cold War, especially the 1950s, the terrifying Rákosi period, but every time I went to the library it seemed that everything important had been done, and even much of the unimportant stuff. Christmas came and went. I was granted an extension, then another, and finally my committee said they needed a complete paper by May if I planned to graduate that semester, which I needed to do if I was to have any hope of following Éva to Hungary, which is where her mother planned to send her, for at least a year, after her graduation from high school. I was stuck, the days slipping away, when my father suggested I speak with Holló.

When I told him Holló made me uncomfortable, my father laughed. “Of course he does. That's been his strategy for the last forty years.” We were standing in the backyard of the house in Toronto where I'd grown up, and which I'd left four years ago upon starting university, a move my parents happily agreed to, since it meant they wouldn't be awakened by me coming home drunk at four in the morning, or have to watch me hanging out with friends instead of studying, or overhear Éva and me having sex in the bedroom. “He never talks about it,” my father said, “but supposedly he fell in love with the wife of Ábel Cérna. That name doesn't mean anything to you,” he continued. “But everyone of my generation knows it. Cérna was part of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, and then high up in the Ministry of Culture. He was in charge of censorship.”
My father paused, as if he was still hurting from this, and I remembered the times he'd recite from memory the verses of Ady, Arány János, Kosztolányi, and others. “Anyhow,” he sighed, “when Cérna found out you can imagine the trouble Holló was in. It was then that he started wearing the makeup, pretending to be a homosexual. That's how he got out from under it.”

My father didn't need to say what he said next, because I'd seen enough of it myself, the way some of his friends never really got over what they'd gone through back then, the way their survival strategies lingered across the years, even became amplified, long after they'd left Hungary and no longer needed them. There was more than one family acquaintance still hiding jewellery in cans buried under the back lawn and floorboards in expectation of the next economic collapse; who studiously avoided voting for fear of being tracked down as politically suspect when the next totalitarian regime came to power; who still denied her Jewish ethnicity since it was only that denial that had saved her during the war. But Holló and the makeup were more extreme than any of these, and my father's easy acceptance of this was disturbing as well, since it too was a form of denial.

Of course, it was easy to understand why my father, and the others who frequented the Szécsényi Club, tolerated what they would otherwise have considered Holló's perversity. The previous “caretaker” of the Szécsényi Club, Rázsoly Bodo, had been notorious for running the place into the ground, smoking terrible cigars, lecherously requesting that daughters and wives help out in the kitchen, and drinking himself to death on the
pálinka
one of the club's members,
Frigyes Bácsi, brewed in a homemade still and supplied in vast quantities. Nobody wanted to go back to
that
.

Holló took over after Bodo died. He did every job: night watchman, groundskeeper, carpenter, accountant, even chef every Saturday night at the weekly banquets and on special occasions such as the anniversary of the 1956 revolution. He accomplished a lot with very little, keeping the gardens blooming, the pond clean, the roof watertight, the bricks repointed, the furniture and appliances in good order, making the meanest
cigángy pecsenye
this side of Sopron, and most importantly stocking the cellar with the best stuff from Eger, Tokaj, and the Balaton, all without asking for more than a modest salary and a room. The club's membership was very well taken care of.

Once in a while someone would make a comment. Ílona did, early on, one of those insults that's meant to put someone in his place at the same time as it shows everyone how superior you are. She called him “Árpád Néni,” the same as calling him “Mrs. Holló” in English. It happened at one of the Saturday night banquets while he was going from table to table asking everyone how the food was. “The food is very nice,
Árpád Néni
.” Holló stood back from her, narrowed his eyes, and next Saturday there was no banquet, the doors to the club were closed but unlocked, so that anyone could wander in and watch Holló quietly mopping the floors and dusting tables and shrugging when they asked why dinner had been cancelled. The week after that there was no banquet either. The club executive didn't know what to do. Péter Varga, a six foot four, two hundred and forty pound guy who was the honorary bouncer at the club, tossing out drunks when they
got too rowdy or lecherous, suggested threatening Holló, but this was quickly dismissed, since the risk of losing Holló forever was too great. They thought of giving him a raise, but Holló would know it was a payoff, and he was too proud for that. So finally a delegation was sent to Ílona's house, the executive having agreed that she'd either apologize to Holló or they'd rescind her membership, and Ílona, being Queen Ílona, never apologizing to anyone ever, used to getting her way in all things, swore on her dead husband's grave she'd
never
apologize. The next Saturday the club was once again humming with voices and laughter and people licking their lips with the food and drink Holló provided, when Ílona showed up demanding to be let in. But Varga barred her way, calling Holló, who came over and then looked around as if he were at a complete loss to find a place for her, everyone meanwhile singing and cheering, so happy to be back at the banquet they were oblivious to Ílona standing there, wanting in. It was the only community that mattered to her, these émigrés, where she not only knew every social code but had authored many of them. After ten minutes with Varga blocking her, and realizing how expendable, how invisible, she was, Ílona was forced to say, “Sorry.” Holló inclined his head as if he couldn't hear. Ílona said it louder. Then louder again in a shout that made the whole room stop. When she said it next, almost at a whisper, “I'm sorry for what I said,” Holló turned, pointed to an empty chair that seemed to appear out of nowhere, and Ílona took her place trying to rise above the shame.

She continued coming to the club, but never spoke to Holló again.

 

2.

 

With me it was not so easy. I was seeing her daughter, so we
had
to talk. But that's all it was—the barest acknowledgement. Once a week I had to go over for dinner, where she'd ask pointed questions of the other guests—Did they know that Munkácsy's paintings were growing darker and darker with time because of the bitumen he used on the canvasses? Did they know Budapest had the first metro in continental Europe? Did they know that the reason Catholic churches ring the bell at noon is to commemorate János Hunyadi's defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Nándorfehérvár in 1456?—the standard trivia of Hungarian nationalism, except that in searching the faces around the dinner table she always left me out. Whenever I spoke, she interrupted me. If Éva mentioned my studies, Ílona would say, “Yes, he's working very diligently to learn about the world,” and wink at the other guests.

Across the table Éva would take a huge bite out of something her mother had made, food we both hated—
káposzta f
ő
zelék
,
kapór leves
,
lecsó
—staring at me, sitting there chewing, forcing it down. It was her way of swallowing what I had to swallow, of showing sympathy. Ílona would look at her and frown, “Please don't eat like that,
szívem
,” then sigh and launch into her usual tirade, mainly for my benefit, about how she could hardly wait for Éva to graduate so she could be sent back to Hungary where they'd teach her how to behave like a lady, and where they'd find her an
appropriate
husband.

This was a frequent ritual (though it hadn't happened in my case because my parents didn't have the money): sending
kids back to Hungary once their schooling was done to spend some intensive time with the language, people, and culture. But the real reason was to find suitable husbands or wives they'd hopefully settle with over there (now that communism was over)—replenishing the nation and atoning for their parents' sin of emigration—or, if necessary, returning to Toronto, where the kids would be Canadian by citizenship but in every other way as Hungarian as if they'd just stepped off a plane. It was, I suppose, what every embattled ethnicity does, though the point I'm trying to make is that I
was
Hungarian, so Ílona needn't have worried about Éva and me, if it ever came to that, which meant her threat of sending her daughter away had nothing to do with protecting the grandchildren's gene pool from defilement by non-Hungarians—
only from me
.

Ílona would mention Éva's impending trip, and her eyes would slide in my direction, then back to the guests, and I'd suddenly ask for another helping of
kapór leves
, my signal to Éva that as bad as the food was it wasn't as bad as listening to this. Ílona would sigh, as I knew she would, and tell the guests that
kapór leves
had already been served, and it was a sign of breeding, by which she meant the lack thereof, not to realize you couldn't go back to the first course once you'd moved on to the second. But I'd keep holding out my plate anyhow, then fake disappointment and return it quietly to its place, Éva turning red with the effort of holding in her laughter.

“There was a certain behaviour you used to be able to count on,” Ílona would continue, “at least from people of a
certain class
. But emigration has ruined all that. They don't know anything now, despite all those classes at university.”
Éva slurped from her wine with each word Ílona spoke, declaring our alliance with a lack of manners that was at once an attack on her mother's values and a confirmation of the very thing Ílona was complaining about.

I could have been a Rhodes Scholar, winner of the Booker Prize, recipient of a Guggenheim, but none of it would have mattered as much to Ílona as membership in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her allegiances, her values, everything was still perceived as if it was 1940s Hungary. In fact, I would have been surprised if she even knew what a Guggenheim was. But more than any of this, it was the fact that my father had worked for the city of Toronto in road construction that really damned me. “He's not bad,” I overheard her say one night to a guest, “for someone whose father is a labourer.”