Siege 13 (28 page)

Vera helped Lujza with her coat. A flurry of snow burst in through the opened door. The wind was blowing, bending the tops of trees. Lujza seemed delighted to breathe it in, and then she turned to me. “When I leave, Vera will tell you to put on a coat and come out and stand with me until Áurel shows up.” She kissed both of us on the cheeks and stepped out.

By the time I'd gotten my coat and gone out she'd disappeared.

 

That was the last time we saw her. Ten minutes later Aurél caught up to me, circling the block. We went everywhere that night—to her house, the club, all the places Lujza might have been, even some places she would have avoided, before I finally talked Aurél into going to Frigyes's house. But Frigyes was gone—Vera had already called him—out searching.

It was still dark by the time I got home, but it was already morning. Vera opened the door (I'd forgotten to take a key) in her dressing gown, but I could tell she hadn't slept, and
while I stood there stammering, listing the places we'd gone, thinking it was something I needed to do immediately, before coming in, she peered out the door, craning her neck to see over my shoulder, her eyes so wide it was as if she was trying to take in the remaining light.

For the next few days, Vera hoped Lujza would never be found. She hoped her vanishing would be the occasion for more stories. That she'd waltzed off to new adventures. New men. Finer clothes. Riches. The usual dreams. But four days later they fished her out of Lake Ontario. For some reason Lujza was not wearing the clothes she'd worn that last night at our house. She had on a black cocktail dress, some pearls Frigyes had bought, and a large hat, its peacock feathers matted and encased in ice, that she'd tied with string under her chin as if she was afraid the tides would carry it away, the strap of a purse tangled around her thin forearm. There was a letter inside leaving her entire “fortune”—that was the word she used—“to all the esteemed members of the Szécsényi Club of Toronto.” It was written in Hungarian.

 

Holló hired a lawyer to sort out Lujza's effects. It was also Holló, gossipy as ever, who let everyone know what day the lawyer was planning to go to Lujza's to take an inventory. By the time he got there a crowd was waiting on the front steps of the semi-detached house Aurél had put a down payment on in 1963, and Frigyes had paid the rent on ever since. Carefully, the lawyer opened the front door with the key Lujza had folded into her waterlogged will. The lawyer asked everyone to stay back, not to come in. He needed to take an accurate inventory, without anyone tampering with (i.e., stealing) “the
personal effects of the deceased.” For a while everyone did as asked, but gradually one person stepped over the threshold, then made room for someone else, edging in a little further, and soon they were tiptoeing between the twilit rooms, looking at the books and paintings, then touching things, poking around in the roll-top desk in the hall. It wasn't long before they were actively searching.

We were there, too, Vera and I, standing on the front doormat, gazing in as the lawyer came down the stairs and ran around trying to get everyone to keep their hands off Lujza's things, when Anikó suddenly shouted that she'd found something, and everyone stopped what they were doing and gathered around her, forming a circle the lawyer couldn't get through. It was at this point that Vera told me to wait, she'd be back.

Anikó had found a ledger, one of those old-style account books, a black hardcover with silver lettering, tabs along the side. As the crowd formed, Anikó began reading what was written in it, notes that were somewhere between a list and a diary, recording each of the things Frigyes or Aurél had done for Lujza, including place and date and time, and beside these were figures, a code that repeated over and over with only slight variations, consistent for each man but with considerable differences between them. “It's the sex acts she performed for Aurél and Frigyes,” said Anikó. Erzsi took up the book and tilted it, her eyes snapping open, and she said it wasn't code at all but tiny X-rated cartoons. The book went around, everyone took a look, though there was more than one person who didn't see it—people fucking. Eventually Anikó got the book again and paged forward, then lifted her
face in false horror and said, “Look, here, now there are three figures having sex, not just two!” and a dozen hands started grabbing for the ledger.

I can't remember whether it was Aurél or Frigyes who, shouldering past me into the house, ripped the book out of her hands. Vera had phoned them, but they were already on their way, and in five seconds they accomplished what the lawyer had not managed in a half hour, grabbing everyone, women included, by the scruff of the neck and tossing them out.

The last thing I saw, before Vera and I left as well, was the two men sitting on the couch with the ledger between them. They were running their fingers over it as if they might erase the dirty fingerprints of all those intruders, as if they could make the record of their relationship with Lujza pristine again. But looking closer I saw that Frigyes was nodding, and Aurél was hissing at him, his finger moving faster and faster in pointing out this or that, as if the more Frigyes agreed with him the less proof Aurél felt he had. Vera and I walked down the street and got into our car in silence. She'd seen what Aurél and Frigyes were doing too, and as the car traveled west we felt our togetherness as if we were separated by a hair, which was nothing compared to the miles of concrete those two men had put between themselves, and putting it there cemented their relationship forever. Lujza had been right after all, she was just the medium, a crushed telephone, through which they communicated their love for each other. All the way home I had them in front of me, Frigyes and Aurél, pointing to the ledger and arguing over which of them had loved Lujza the best.

The Miracles of Saint Marx

NE OF THE WEIRDER PEOPLE
to surface during the era of Hungarian communism (and it was a time of much weirdness) was a priest by the name of Monsignor József Szent-Mihály. There were a number of rumours concerning the man—that he was a fugitive in disguise; that he was a government agent rooting out anti-revolutionary groups; that he was somebody who just really, really wanted to be a priest—but none was more fantastical than the one about the book he was writing.

The title of the manuscript (according to rumour) was “A Chronicle of the Miracles of Communism,” and it contained stories of such impossibility that people couldn't stop recounting them—from Nyírábrány right across to Sopron. Naturally, this chronicle was a serious concern for the communist authority, for Marx had spent the better part of his life arguing that there were no such things as miracles—that we, and only we, made up our fate. And our fate, in fact, was to realize exactly this: that the collective was all and the individual nothing—never mind what the capitalists and Christians
said—and that it was the job of the state to help everyone remember this (with brutal force if necessary) because without it there would never be a better world.

But the stories were so interesting!

For instance, there was the story of Vasily Baazova, one of those unfortunate men in the gulags who were designated as “cows” by their fellow prisoners. These cows would be approached, told that an escape was being planned, and invited along. Then, once the prisoners had made their getaway and were out on the barren landscape with nothing but snow and ice for hundreds of miles, these cows would be killed and eaten by the other prisoners, who obviously hadn't had the chance to pack sandwiches for the trip. The search parties sent out from the gulags would find their corpses drained of blood and cut open, their kidneys gone—since blood and kidneys are the only parts of the human body you can eat raw, and since lighting a fire to cook the rest would have given away the escapees' location. In this case, however, Vasily somehow managed to fend off the attempt on his life and get away, living for six weeks on the frozen steppes (which was five weeks longer than the other prisoners lived), drinking melted snow and eating pages from
Das Kapital
, which he'd only brought along as fire starter. When the patrols finally caught him, they couldn't believe it, so he offered them a few pages, and after a bit of argument they agreed to try them, only to find that Marx's writing was actually quite good, with a taste somewhere between
kotleti
and
bitochki
.

Then there was the one about Ivan Baryatinsky, who was kicked out of the Party for refusing to accede to the will of the state, and afterwards spent the next three decades wandering
the streets of Moscow with placards strapped to his chest announcing how Lenin, and then Stalin, had failed to practise Marxism. Miraculously, he was not only left in peace to do this, but his situation always elicited sympathy from those he met, who defied the authorities by feeding and clothing him. Stranger yet, anyone who came into contact with Baryatinsky couldn't help but continue to extend this sympathy to others, so that wherever Baryatinsky went there was a sudden flowering of human fellowship, like a trail of roses left by a saint.

There was the story of Beryx Baboescu, the mechanical engineer charged with coming to grips with “the Romani problem” in Romania, which meant getting them to give up their itinerant ways and settle down and begin labouring like everyone else for the state. Baboescu's solution, in a visionary moment, was to create the blueprints for what he called “The Mobile Town of the Proletariat,” houses and stores and factories, an entire village in fact, mounted on stilt legs, powered by enormous batteries and cogwheels, that would follow the Romani wherever they went, so relentless in its pursuit that it would wear them out, forcing them to accept defeat and settle down. Shortly after presenting his plan to the Soviet Council, Baboescu was taken somewhere “for his own good,” but almost immediately there were sightings of his mobile town all over the Romanian countryside—reports of forests mown down by its passage, large depressions where the stilt legs had left their imprint in sand, stone, asphalt. Even worse, it was reported that the Romani, instead of being harassed by “Baboescuville,” ended up realizing—after fleeing in terror for some months—that it was exactly the sort
of place they were looking for, the sort of place where you could settle down but still get in a bit of sightseeing. And so they ended up moving in, taking up residence, travelling the country in a little utopia that was so much closer to what Marx had envisioned that everyone else in Romania wanted to live there too. It became such a source of shame to the communists—whose towns and cities could never live up to comparisons—that it was all they could do to threaten and imprison and execute anyone who mentioned it.

 

The story that was to occupy agent Flóri Nándorrfy of the Hungarian secret police—otherwise known as the ÁVÓ—was her
own
, the one Szent-Mihály would come to call “the Nándorrfy Network.” At the start, though, her job was simply to find the priest, and his fellow counter-revolutionaries, and stop these subversive stories once and for all.

Insofar as Flóri was concerned, she was famous too, though to a much lesser degree. Back in 1945, at the end of the Second World War and the siege of Budapest, she'd infiltrated the so-called Vannay Battalion, a combat unit put together by László Vannay, a right-wing fanatic who decided to support the Nazis even when all was lost, rounding up a bunch of old men and boys—none of whom had proper combat training—and sending them out against the Red Army. It was suicide of course, and when Vannay ran out of old men and kids, he'd get more by raiding the cellars where civilians were hiding, enlisting those who could fight by showing them his pistol and offering them a choice between two deaths—one immediate, one probably later. As the official records had it, she'd disguised herself as a boy, infiltrated the battalion, and helped
the Red Army dispatch a number of its more “dedicated” agents, contributing in her small way to the eventual defeat of the Nazis and the Arrow-Cross Party, and winning for herself a number of commendations and decorations and a plum job assisting with the Soviet spread of terror once the war went cold. It was in this capacity that she was assigned to Szent-Mihály. It was, as Comrade Maxim Zabrovsky, her superior, put it with a wink, the sort of “tactical betrayal” she “excelled at.” Flóri agreed, for it was exactly this reputation that had kept her alive, useful to the state, though not alive and
well
, for she had been drinking for years by then, quick nips during the day, and entire bottles by night.

 

She couldn't remember when the rumours of the Monsignor and his chronicle first began, and this was itself a problem as she started out, winding her way through the reports, vague reminiscences from men and women and even children who said they'd seen the book, even held it in their hands, or spoken to people who'd done so, or heard its contents read or recited (even, she discovered, in the way of bedtime stories)—for without a point of origin she could not measure their distance from the truth. Mainly, she found herself in the usual bars and outlying villages, broken-down places, filled with people the Soviet had always prided itself on helping, but for whom their arrival—preceded as it was by bullets and fire, by soldiers killing and dying, by cities in flames—had only been another event in the ongoing cycle of deprivation. She tried to look the part, and she needed to, because everyone was suspect now, you couldn't count on your unimportance, your expendability, to save you, not in a time when people were
imprisoned and sent to work camps and executed to maintain a sense of arbitrariness, when anyone at any time could be picked up without a reason, as if the state's caprice could keep consciences clean. These people could no longer sit around complaining about the local councils or the soldiers or the politicians as they once had about the emperor, the nobles, the bourgeoisie. She infiltrated them by appealing to their sense of wonder—speaking of things so distant from reality they seemed to have no bearing on the state—so that when they told her what she needed to hear they had no idea of the magnitude of their offense. She made sure they saw how drunk she was, slurring her words and gazing around in disorientation, so that they could also believe she was in the midst of a blackout, an episode she wouldn't remember—that she was, in fact, one of them.