Siege 13 (12 page)

Dinner after dinner Éva and I stuffed ourselves with that awful food. The more we ate the more we disagreed with Ílona. When we stopped eating, or started on something that was actually good, it was a relief. Mainly we were just having a laugh at Ílona's expense, who sat amazed at how much
tökf
ő
zelék
I could snort back when last time I hadn't touched it at all. But there was something else as well, something not so funny, and there were times I saw the realization in Éva too, that for all our coded mockery it was our own powerlessness we were putting on display, eating what we didn't want to eat, swallowing it down, when what we really wanted was to tell Ílona how terrible her dinners were—the cooking, the company, the conversation—though we were too scared to.

We had so few privileges already. I wasn't allowed in the house after 9:00
P.M.
Éva was supposed to be home by 10:00 even on weekends. We were permitted, if I had to come over,
to sit in the TV room, or in the kitchen and on the porch, but I wasn't allowed within ten feet of her bedroom.

Not that it stopped us. Éva regularly slipped out at night, and snuck back in late. We spent a lot of time in an old tree fort her father had built high in a maple in the back garden. We drank. We did drugs. We had sex. I'm sure Ílona knew about it, but it was the appearance of authority that mattered to her. It was an obsession, Éva told me, since the death of her father twelve years ago, and with it the loss of prestige their family once held in the community, since as a lawyer he'd handled legal matters for the Szécsényi Club, including the mess left by Bodo. Ílona had never forgiven her husband for dying so young, and for leaving her with a sizable life insurance but no way to maintain her dominance over the club, and by extension the community, other than force of will. She'd been trying to stop the erosion of her influence ever since, though it was impossible, and bit by bit it faded, first with the transfer of legal matters to another lawyer, effectively cutting off Ílona's access to insider information; then with her failure to get elected for a fifth term to the executive, probably because she'd gotten so loud since her husband's death nobody could stand her; and third with the scandal involving Holló, which left Ílona a marginal figure, forced to hold court at her own dinner table rather than the club, where she'd once been fawned on and appealed to by every up-and-coming émigré.

So, as long as this “boyfriend” business didn't get too flagrant, Ílona was as happy as Éva not to fight about it, especially since that might lead to people overhearing what they were fighting
about
.

As for Éva and me, we were lazy. She was in her last year of high school, and the thought of leaving home to live with me, or, more absurdly, on her own, was ridiculous. She would have had to get a full-time job, figure out how to cook, do laundry, pay bills, all the stuff her upper-middle-class upbringing had not prepared her for, and, besides, as far as she was concerned things weren't all that bad the way they were. Her mother was a pain, but it rarely stopped us from doing as we pleased.

If anything, I was the problem, bitching about a situation I didn't lift a finger to change, because despite my complaints about Ílona, or how Éva and I could never have sex at my place because of roommates, or the pain of fucking in the back of my car or her stupid tree fort, and despite the times I tried to convince her that getting a place of our own would be best for both of us, the truth is I was safe, and I knew it. Éva couldn't make a move, and so I could take the high road as much as I liked, and in the meantime have it both ways—partying with the roommates when she wasn't there, and professing my desire to be with her, and only her, whenever she came around, which was pretty much as often as I
wanted
her around. Looking back, I spent more time worrying about my thesis than my relationship.

 

3.

 

My days and nights were consumed with my thesis—what to write about, how the research was opening up possibilities rather than reducing them, and, worst of all, the deadline looming closer and closer.

Short of actually giving me a topic, Holló tried to help. He loaned me his desk in the club's library. It was huge, made of oak. He even cleared out several drawers, so that every day I'd at least have the thrill of squaring my notes, recapping my pens, stacking the books and journals I was looking at, and putting them away for tomorrow, as if his office was my own.

It was an amazing library. There was stuff in there—books and newspapers and magazines and pamphlets—you couldn't get anywhere outside of Hungary, stuff Holló brought with him from “the bad old communist days,” or had smuggled out by “friends” when travel restrictions became looser in the 1970s and '80s, or even obtained recently from disbanded archives, estate sales, and private donations. Some of it was so rare I wondered how he'd gotten hold of it, and even just scanning the documents, without knowing exactly what they contained, I had the feeling they were more precious than most of the Hungarian holdings at the university library.

For this reason, Holló didn't allow anyone to take materials home. They had to stay at the club, he said, as if it were a real archive, though of course everyone was free to look at them, and he even granted me the special privilege of staying long into the night, after he'd gone to sleep. That's how much he trusted me. His care for that library went beyond what I'd seen at the university, a delicacy when he touched the pages, a sense of sacredness, as if Holló would have given his life to protect what was filed there, or, more importantly, our access to it.

It was this perception—as wrong as it was—that led to all the trouble.

It was already the third week in April when I came upon the journal
Piros Krónika
in a pile of recently arrived material. From what I could tell it was an in-house publication, set up by Hungary's Ministry of Culture to celebrate itself, inspire its workers, and even, in a way, reward them, showing that their efforts did not go unnoticed. Old and beat-up, its cover half-torn off, and dated 1951, the pages were so fragile I held my breath going through them, worried that a sneeze or cough would send the whole thing up in a puff of rotten paper and airborne ink. The sun was shining, and I paused for a minute before turning to the table of contents to gaze out the windows in what was once the attic of the old house, the only room large enough to serve as a library, with shelves and filing cabinets running floor to ceiling all the way around the walls, the air conditioning humming at exactly twenty degrees Celsius, the humidity hovering somewhere around forty percent, looking out over the trees and fields and hills of the back garden. Then I turned back to the journal and saw it: “The Ministry of Culture: Guardians of the Soviet Against Reactionary Propaganda,” by some apparatchik called Miko Tóth.

I finally had my topic. At the time, young as I was, I thought it was the library itself that inspired me, sitting there day after day with those rare papers, aware more than ever of the importance of information, of access to it, as if there was a heroism in what Holló had done, smuggling it out, arranging for more, and beyond that the chore of taking care of it, making sure nothing disappeared, as if even shelving and cataloguing could be acts of war against an enemy whose power
resided in limiting what we knew, and, with that, what we could think, imagine, and feel.

Their names were there—Holló, Cérna, Adriána—along with many others in a caption under a photo taken at the ministry, their faces as dour and anonymous as every other photo of the era. I sat there for two hours and read every sentence, some of them twice because of my sub-par Hungarian, taking pages of notes. When Holló showed up at five saying I'd have to leave early because he had a wedding banquet to set up, I was so entranced by the ideas I was generating for my thesis that I didn't even try to hide the article when he walked in. In fact, it took me a second to recognize who I was talking to.

Not that Holló was interested in my work in the slightest. After saying what he needed to say he turned and left, busy with preparations.

I sat there another fifteen minutes, wondering what to do. Would Holló miss the journal if I snuck out with it? Would he look through my papers? Would he even care that I'd discovered his secret, or was it so long ago now that it didn't matter to him? In the end, I left everything there. For all I knew Holló had already registered the arrival of
Piros Krónika
and, knowing his meticulousness, its absence would only have alerted him to its importance, whereas if I stacked it with my books he wouldn't think twice. As for my notes and papers, he never looked at them, I knew this for a fact, since they were always exactly as I'd left them the night before, my pens sitting on top of the pile. I decided it would be better to hide what I was doing in plain sight.

But I told Éva his secret. “He was a censor,” I said, whispering in a darkness lit only by the cherry on the end of the joint we were smoking, weaving its orange glow in the air as we passed it back and forth. Evá's face, her reactions, were hidden. She was absolutely silent. “I can use the sources in his library, then interview him, if he'll let me. My profs will love it. They're really into that now—getting real testimony from people who were actually there. I'll have to fill out an ethics clearance form . . .”

Éva rolled over, and onto me, kissing my mouth. “Enough about Holló,” she said.

“But it's important,” I replied, moving aside.

“If you're right,” she said, sounding hurt, “what makes you think he's going to
want
to talk with you? Maybe he's going to want to keep it with his other secrets . . .”

“No,” I said, barely listening. “I think he wants me to. It's the whole library, the way he looks after it. You should see how he handles the books and papers, like he wants the information out there.”

“Or something,” she said, getting out of the bed and into her clothes, her movements sudden, angry. But I was too busy thinking about Holló to ask what was wrong, and as Éva left I barely acknowledged her departure, the sentences and paragraphs of my thesis as visible in the dark as the burning end of the joint. I lay there for two hours, long after Éva drove off, thinking of the questions I wanted to ask, how I'd approach Holló, telling him there was nothing to be ashamed of, I wasn't judging what he'd done, in fact I'd have done the same thing, and that this was the whole point of my thesis: the ways in which history is written not by heroes but by the
most ordinary of people, with only their insecurities, their fears, and their desires to lead them on. The institutions of history, I would tell him, not only make up our society but our selves as well, and only the rarest person can see beyond that and act against the world as it's been defined for him. Yes, I was far from 1950s Hungary, but I wanted him to know I'd write as if I was inside it, setting down the words in sympathy with what he'd faced.

The problem was, I told Ílona about my project one night. We were sitting around the dinner table, Ílona once again speaking in a whisper whenever the name of a young man with a background more suitable than mine came up, or displaying her marvellous range of historical trivia at my expense, and, as usual, complaining about the state of Canadian society—its irreversible drift into liberalism, its inability to understand how little it mattered in the world, its embrace of civil rights at the expense of morality. It was at this point, hoping to pre-empt another tirade (or so I thought my motivation was at the time), that I brought up my discovery in
Piros Krónika
.

Ílona stopped talking. She looked at me with amazement, and let me go on. I was so unnerved by this that I ended up chattering faster, louder, and longer than I wanted. I told them about sitting in the library working on my thesis; I told them how strange I'd always found Holló, with his makeup and mannerisms; I told them about the moment I first picked up the journal and knew it was exactly what I was looking for; and I told them what was inside, about the names, the men and women who'd worked as censors, the sheer volume of literature suppressed. In many cases, I said, great works were
lost forever, not to mention the damage to writers, some of whom even committed suicide. I worked myself into a moral outrage I'd never felt before, until I found myself snarling with condemnation, Ílona nodding along. It was only when I'd finished, when she finally spoke again, “I always knew that man—
if you can call him that
,” she snorted, “—was no good,” that I remembered the thesis I'd planned, though by then it was too late, because Ílona and the guests had launched into a long discussion, including personal reminiscences, of those who (unlike them) had fallen in with the Soviet program, who'd used Party membership for social and economic advantage, who'd spouted all that ideology they didn't believe in because they either wanted a step up on those around them, or were afraid not to, or had no loyalty at all to their country. When I left that night Ílona kissed me on both cheeks and seemed sad that I was leaving so early, saying to Éva, “You kids should go have some fun,” and I couldn't look at Éva at all, wanting to get as far away from them as possible.

But I couldn't get away. Éva was delighted at my coup, and the two of us walked to my car, got in, and drove off. At first Éva was laughing, euphoric, fantasizing about all the things we'd be able to do now, as if one minor victory would totally reform Ílona and her attitude. For the first time I felt the difference in our ages, separated by three of the most formative years in my life, and despaired at the thought of having to wait for Éva to catch up. It was at least a half hour before she noticed I was not responding to her, and that I'd driven to the Szécsényi Club, where we idled on the side of the road just off the entrance to the parking lot, watching lights blink on and off in the various rooms as Holló went
about his business. It was only then that Éva asked what was wrong.