Siege 13 (24 page)

For when Teleki had described the last few days in the castle, how Veresváry ordered them to draw up surveillance maps using telescopes taken from the National Archives, plotting the streets in the direction of western Buda, Sándor had nodded in his seat. When Teleki said that rumours of a breakout had been swirling for days, Sándor rose up, but said nothing. Nervously, Teleki had continued, saying the German soldiers, during the Second World War, never surrendered, preferring the death of fighting on, of retreat, rather than captivity, for they'd been told of the horrors and torments of Siberia, as if it was possible to imagine a place where death was salvation.

Teleki was sent to Pfeffer-Wildenbruch with the maps they'd drawn up. At this point in the story, Sándor began rubbing his hands together, waiting for Teleki to repeat what Pfeffer-Wildenbruch had said that day as he took the documents from Teleki's hand, staring right through him as if he wasn't in the room, as if there was only the Obergruppenführer himself, alone with the choices he couldn't make: “If I give the order for a breakout,” he mumbled, “everyone will die.”

It was here that Sándor finally chimed in, mimicking the reply Teleki had supposedly given: “S-s-s-surely not everyone.”

Teleki reached for the volume adjustment on his microphone, continuing on with what Pfeffer-Wildenbruch had said to him: “You'll probably be one of the first to die.”

“I-i-it's a fitting thing, sir—” Sándor interrupted him again.

“I did not say that!” shouted Teleki, turning the volume all the way up.

Someone handed Sándor the bullhorn again. “To face the enemy directly is a fitting thing, Obergruppenführer, sir. Without flinching.”

Suddenly Sándor began to play both roles, turning this way and that to indicate when Pfeffer-Wildenbruch was speaking and when Teleki, the crowd watching raptly, oblivious to the “No, no, no” Teleki was shouting into the microphone.

“Meanwhile,” said Sándor, now in the role of Teleki, “while the men are proving their bravery, we could do
our
duty and escape using the sewers under the castle.”

“Our duty?” Sándor carried off Pfeffer-Wildenbruch's fatigue perfectly.

“I-i-i-it would not be cowardice,” Sándor stuttered, again playing Teleki. “Such words belong to narcissists, those who worry for their reputations, for how history will regard them. No”—Sándor shook his head as Teleki might have—“we must look beyond our egos, our timid wishes for glory. The war effort needs us . . . needs
you
. . . to survive this. You must sacrifice your pride for the greater good.” Then, in a flourish, Sándor removed his glasses, shifting his eyes side to side as Teleki had done so many times behind the lectern. “Obergruppenführer, sir, I've heard the men speaking of a plot on Lieutenant-Colonal Veresváry's life. In the sewers, you will need men you can trust . . . to prove my devotion I will give you the names of the conspirators . . .

“And so,” Sándor now said, returning to himself (or what Teleki was increasingly thinking of as the
role
of himself), “while men died by the thousands in the breakout, our friend here”—he indicated Teleki—“was splashing through the sewers.”

 

The sewers
. Here, Sándor's knowledge was just as extensive. It was called
Ördög-Árok
, “devil's ditch,” a name in keeping with what was to greet them, descending into waters swirling with suitcases, soggy files, fragments of memoranda, whole suits of clothing from which men and women seemed to have dissolved, a wooden statue of the Virgin face down, her hand entwined with the much smaller one of a body trapped in the waters beneath her. They ran into loose bands of SS. They waited below while men tried scaling the rungs of ladders to sewer grates above, poking their heads out, followed by the crack of a sniper's bullet, the body falling back and knocking off all who were clinging to the ladder below it. They entered aqueducts that grew narrower and narrower, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch sending Teleki on ahead (or so Sándor said) into places he could move along crouched over, then only on his hands and knees, and finally on his belly, each pipe he went into smaller than the last, until he was overcome by claustrophobia and panicked, inching backwards on his stomach and chest like some worm reversing itself—only to find that Pfeffer-Wildenbruch and his party had already moved on, leaving him behind. It was at this point that he ran into two soldiers accompanying Hungarian commander Iván Hindy and his wife, who was still wearing the finery she put on every day, as befitted her position, the hems of her
dress drifting out around her as she whispered to the men on either side, trying to keep the mood light, the company agreeable, even as the screams of men rang up and down the sewer. They were holding her by either elbow, but it seemed as if she was holding them, especially the soldier whose arm was in a sling, as if the sound of her voice could keep them going, as if in allowing them to hold her she was lending them strength.

As Sándor's story went—and it was a compelling story, Teleki had to admit, so much so that even
he
wanted to hear how it would end—Teleki was reluctant to accept Hindy's order to bring up the rear of their little party. When Hindy, seeing his reluctance, suggested that he could take up the front then, Teleki again demurred. “Well, where would you like to be?” Teleki said he would prefer to stay in the middle, alongside Mrs. Hindy, and everyone laughed, their echoes bouncing off the walls and water until he realized they'd stopped caring, that he was trapped in a group of people tripping along cheerily to capture, trial, execution. “M-m-m-maybe we should try another few of the sewer grates,” he said, pointing up, waiting for a break in the laughter. “Would you prefer to go first or second?” Hindy asked, and when Teleki said second they laughed all over again—except for Mrs. Hindy, who reached forward (Sándor reproducing her movement for the benefit of the audience), and tenderly stroked Teleki's cheek.

It was decided that the uninjured soldier would go first, since he was the heaviest and needed two men to lift him within reach of the first rung of the ladder. He would see whether there were snipers present, and draw their fire away
from the manhole, hopefully without getting his head blown off. Next would come Teleki, whom the commander could boost up alone, and who'd then help, from above, with the delicate job of heaving up the injured soldier, as well as the voluminous Mrs. Hindy, and finally Hindy himself.

The soldier nodded, taking a long swig from a bottle of Napolean brandy he said he'd found floating in the sewer, then stepped onto the hands held out to him and reached up for the ladder, crawling up it quickly and pushing open the grate.
Click
. There was the sound of a firing pin hitting a dud cartridge. Looking up, they saw the soldier staring directly into the barrel of a Soviet gun, though in the next second he'd thrust the bottle of brandy into the Russian's face, rolled quickly out of the hole, and ran, the Soviet soldier giving his head a shake, and then chasing after him. Within seconds, Hindy was holding out his hands for Teleki, who looked at them, placed his foot tentatively into the knitted fingers, then boosted himself up, only to have Hindy remove his hands the instant he'd grabbed the rung, leaving him dangling there, too weak to pull himself up and too afraid to fall back into the sewer, from which there would be no second chance at escape. Hindy and the injured soldier were laughing again, but not Mrs. Hindy, who was telling them to stop and trying to reach up, to help him, only to be met by Teleki's gaze, desperate and pitiless, as he placed his boot squarely in the middle of her upturned face and pushed off, feeling her nose crack under the sole. Then he was up the ladder, rung over rung, and out the manhole and running, while they called after him to help pull them out.

Sándor stopped, intending to continue, but the audience had begun booing in Teleki's direction, the sound growing louder and louder until he left the stage.

 

Strangely, Teleki slept very well that night. There was something about surrender that was incredibly calming, as if the loss of desire could compensate for defeat. But by the middle of the next day he was squirming again, for his agent was sitting across the table from him in the café sliding across one article, feature, and editorial after another, all of them reporting on the “creative sabotage” of his lectures. In keeping with Teleki's recent luck, the writers devoted far more space to Sándor than to him, mainly because none of them had been able to dig up a single thing about his nemesis. They were fascinated by this blind man tapping his way out of nowhere to deliver his long apocalyptic monologues, setting the record straight and exposing the liars. In these articles Sándor was a moral force, and Teleki a con man.

“There's one here that speculates on whether you guys are working together,” said the agent, pushing across a copy of the
New York Times
. Teleki glanced at it for a second and then quietly told his agent he was quitting.

“Quitting!” the agent responded. “You can't quit!”

“I think I just need to disappear for a while,” said Teleki. “Once this dies down we can talk about what to do next.”

“We? There is no
we
,” the agent told him. “Not if you quit!”

Teleki looked at him, and in an instant realized what had happened. “You've been talking to Sándor, haven't you? What, you're representing both of us?”

His agent looked out the window, then back at him. “You know how often something like this comes around? A sleeper like this?”

“Tonight's my last show,” said Teleki, rising from the table.

 

It wasn't like Teleki to fulfill a contract—or any other kind of promise for that matter—if he didn't want to, and yet he found himself fighting the impulse to just walk away. Maybe he wanted to prove to Sándor that he wasn't afraid, that he couldn't be so easily chased away, that he could take whatever was thrown at him. But there was a more dangerous realization as well, and all that afternoon he seemed on the verge of confronting it only to get scared and turn away, channelling what he felt into a rage so acute that more than once he was seen talking to himself, having imaginary arguments with Sándor from which he always emerged with the decisive victory. By nightfall though, shortly before he was due onstage, Teleki finally admitted to himself that Sándor's descriptions of the man using two children to get out of military service, or exposed by Pfeffer-Wildenbruch as a totally expendable soldier, or being mocked by Hindy and his men for cowardice, was not without a certain comfort, as if there might be something to gain from having your stories turned inside out, from having the hard moral decision—whether to lie or tell the truth—taken away from you.

And when Teleki finally took the stage that night, standing on the podium, he was no longer the showman of six months ago, when Sándor had first turned up at his lectures, nor even of the day before yesterday, when he'd tried to
defend himself. There was something serious in him now, as if having come to the end of all this, having failed to defend himself, he was beyond loss, free, unconcerned for his reputation.

It was in his eyes, the need to survive, irrespective of honour or glory or anything else, as if he was once again looking at what Sándor had begun to describe, standing to interrupt Teleki five minutes into the lecture: the worst of what happened in the siege, all those men forced to take part in a breakout that should have happened months earlier, and which was now little more than a mass human sacrifice.

He remembered the morning, February 11, when a rumour went round that the radio operators had begun destroying their equipment; remembered the illusions many of the soldiers clung to: that only Romanians were guarding the breakout point, that they'd run the minute they saw the horde of fascist soldiers; that it would be no more than a half-hour march through the empty city to the place where German reinforcements were waiting; that, absurdly, the Russians were no match for the tactical brilliance of the Nazi and Arrow-Cross commanders. Like Sándor, Teleki knew that Veresváry had assembled his men at the Bécsi Gate before the march, that they were hit by a bombardment out of nowhere, their bodies ripped open, dismembered, even before they'd had a chance to set out. He could have followed Sándor word for word in recounting what only a very few men—a mere three percent of the 28,000 who set out that day—could recount seeing, or refuse to recount, crushed as they were by recurring nightmares of that three kilometres
of city, so overwhelming that to begin speaking of it would be to never speak of anything else again. Mortar fire along avenues and boulevards. Flares hanging in the sky overhead. Soldiers screaming in a rush of animal frenzy, all semblance of reason gone as they realized the Soviets were stationed along the route—that they'd prepared for the breakout, that tanks and rockets and snipers were in place to kill every single one of them—now crushed into doorways, stumbling in the dark, crawling over comrades missing arms and legs and begging to be shot—one last mercy for which no one could spare the time—pushed on by those behind them, a river of flesh squeezed out between the buildings bordering Széna and Széll Kálmán Square, into a night kaleidoscopic with shells, tracer bullets, flares,
panzerfausts
, the light at the end of machine guns flashing without pause, a city shattered into ever more impossible configurations—a maze without discernible routes, choices, even the certainty of dead ends.

There was a pause in the auditorium at the end of this. Then Sándor, gathering himself up, began to speak again, his glasses aimed at Teleki. “This is what you saw when you emerged from the sewers. This is what you'd supported—you and the men like you—so eager to champion Horthy when he signed with the Nazis, and then, when he was deposed for wanting to break with them, to shift your support to Hitler's puppet, Szálasi, and the Arrow-Cross. Honour! you said. Bravery! The nation above all! But it was always someone else who paid for this allegiance, wasn't it? Not you. You slithered out of every situation, every duty you so loudly insisted upon, all those high standards and noble
causes you so loudly proclaimed—always the job of someone else. And at the end of all that, in the aftermath, when you saw the breakout, realized what you'd done . . .”