Siege 13 (13 page)

I had no answer. It wasn't the betrayal of Holló that bothered me. Finding the article felt like something he'd planned, giving him a chance to come clean. No, it was how involuntary that betrayal had been, not only giving in to Ílona's expectations, but also taking pleasure in it, the hot thrill of righteousness, the violent solidarity with everyone at the table. I'd had no control over it.

“They say he likes boys,” Éva said, nodding in the direction of the club. I looked at her. “That's what they say,” she continued. “He goes off to Church Street. Seventeen, eighteen. He pays them.”

“What has that got to do with anything?” I said, spilling over into exasperation.

“You don't have to get mad,” she said. “I'm just telling you what they say.” I looked at her for another second, then back at the club. “You're so naive,” she said. “You don't think a person like that, just because he's so nice to you, and works for the community, you don't think he could do something like that? You don't think people can do good things
and
bad things?”

For a second I had no idea how to respond to her, to that screwy logic so sensible on the surface that its corruption was almost impossible to get at. “No, that's not . . .” I said. “You're missing it.”

“You want a good
buzi
, nice and cultured. You don't want to hear about who he fucks.”

“No,” I yelled, “what I'm saying is you're wrong! There's nothing bad about sleeping with sixteen-year-olds. Or paying for it. How old were you when you first had sex?”

I knew the answer, of course. Éva went silent, and gazed not in the direction of the club but away from it, over the surrounding houses. “My mother's right about him,” she finally said. “You haven't been the same since you started going there. It's all you ever think about.”

“What, you think he's going to convert me?”

Éva shrugged. “I want to go home now,” she said.

 

Holló was not around the next day, but he'd left a key. Within seconds of being inside the library I was already at work, spreading out my notes, opening books, and for the first time I spent the whole day reading and writing, not even stopping for lunch. By the time I left that evening I had the introduction written, and was starting on chapter two, a detailed account of censorship during the Rákosi era. I was onto something important, something that needed to be understood, and the sense of mission temporarily dispelled the remorse I'd felt since Ílona's dinner.

When I got home and tried to call Éva, nobody picked up. I knew she was at home, her aunt Anuska visited every Tuesday, and I thought there was no way she'd rather listen to her than me.

I was getting on my shoes, grabbing my coat, when the phone rang. It was my father. Without any preamble he asked if what Ílona was saying was true, whether Holló had once worked as a censor.

I was less shocked by how quickly the news had spread than by the worry in my father's voice. Hoping to counteract the negative portrait Ílona had drawn, I told him about
Piros
Krónika
, the work Holló had participated in, but also the thesis I was planning, as if the careful argument I'd constructed would in any way impress my father, much less change his opinion. All I got in return was a snort. “We always knew there was something queer about him,” my father said. “Ílona's been trying to get rid of him for years, but nobody had to listen to her until now.” He paused. “Are you sure? Is that journal a good one? Did you find the information anywhere else?” I could hear it in his voice, a reluctance, as if he, and by extension the community, would rather prove Ílona and me wrong—even if they knew we were right—than lose out on Holló's services. At the same time, if Ílona had real evidence, there wasn't a person among them, including my father, who'd stand up to defend him.

“I'm planning to talk to him directly,” I said, though what I felt was not confidence but that ache in the stomach that comes from having started something now spiralling out of control.

 

4.

 

The next day Holló looked as neat as always, though instead of standing in the garden with a watering can, as he normally did in the morning, he was scrubbing spray paint off the door of the club. I could make out the words “
piszkos buzi
”—dirty fag—in faint traces across the wood. But he seemed as happy as ever, wiping his hands on a rag and smiling, his makeup slightly marred by the sweat oozing from his hairline. I'd
called my thesis adviser earlier that morning hoping he'd nix the project, but he'd been so enthusiastic, no doubt because by this point he was expecting me to have given up on it, that he said it was the most interesting project he'd heard of in some time, especially if Holló agreed to the interview, and had “real potential to be published in a scholarly journal,” which would pave my way into graduate school. But the excitement generated by this conversation disappeared the minute I saw Holló.

“I need to talk to you,” I said, glancing again at the graffiti.

“I know,” he replied, and opening the door he extended his hand for me to go in ahead of him.

I must have sat in the library for over half an hour before Holló joined me, carrying a tray loaded with tea, pastries, chocolate, and a vase of flowers. I was amazed at how he was able to keep his composure, continue with his usual style, given what was going on. While he was clattering in the kitchen I'd gone into the desk and pulled out my notes and reread them, finally turning to a blank page and staring at it, wondering if I really had it in me to go through with the interview, much less ask if he was willing to do one, or whether it was just a question now of apologizing, gathering my things, and then finding some way to undo the damage I'd caused.

But Holló wasn't interested in what
I
wanted.

He set the tray on the table between us, then stood there, prodding me to pour tea, pick out a pastry, and it wasn't until I'd done this that he sat and poured tea for himself.

“Probably you've heard a little of this story, maybe from your father.” He smiled, cracks springing up in the makeup on his face. “Her name was Adriána,” he said. “She was my
immediate superior at the ministry run by her husband, Cérna.” He paused. “It was an unusual situation.”

Holló looked at me, and for the first time that morning he darkened. “Aren't you going to pick up your pen?” he asked, leaning forward. “It's very important that you get this right,” he said. “It's the only way you're going to be able to tell everyone what really happened. If they're going to judge me, it's important they do so to the full extent of my crimes.” I reached over, fumbling. “Pick up the pen,” he said, with real impatience now, and I finally did, after brushing crumbs from my hands. “Good,” Holló smiled. “There's a lot . . .” His smile faded. “I have a lot to atone for.”

He continued. It went on all afternoon. I didn't speak more than five or six words the whole time, only a yes or no when he offered more tea, telling him to go on when he suggested I take a break, or grunting a bit when I shook the writer's cramp from my hand.

He'd drifted into the job after the siege, in which both his parents died, a young man of twenty, effeminate, fastidious, no university education or connections, a target of ridicule during the Horthy regime, almost executed for being homosexual by the Arrow-Cross during the winter of 1945. The truth is, Holló told me, he did not yet think of himself that way, in fact he never would, rejecting all categories. “I prefer to think of myself as a sexual adventurer,” he said, winking at me and then continuing with the story. Before the war, he'd only been uncertain, confused, not even aware of what the categories were, living in expectation of women because that's what he'd been told to expect. Then, with 1939, everything changed, that moment in history introduced him to
something else, the terror and intrigue of policemen and soldiers who seemed to recognize him in some way he had yet to recognize himself. Finally there was the siege. “Everything fell apart,” Holló said. “The world was finally and fully shattered.” His eyes were bright as he described it. “What the soldiers were fighting for was the exclusive right to pull it back together again—for whose vision of reality would prevail. But for me it was something else. It was such a short time, a hundred days or so, but I saw how much energy, how much violence, was required to maintain anything—systems, structures, truths—and how sooner or later something came along to smash it all to pieces.” The siege had made it impossible to maintain anything—a politic, a community, an identity. “One day we were subhuman—homosexuals, Jews, communists, gypsies—fit only for execution, and the next we were liberated, the proletariat, the people of the future. But the real lesson in all of this,” said Holló, smiling, “is that if we were only what they made us, then at bottom we were really nothing.” He laughed with what sounded like joy. “And if that was true then maybe, if I was smart enough, I could take that power for myself—free to change, to invent myself, to not have to conform to
anything
.” He stopped, seeing in my face a skepticism, though he was so lost in memory he thought I was questioning how quickly he'd grasped the “lesson” of the siege, when what I was really thinking was that it wasn't a lesson at all, only a symptom of what he'd gone through and how it had warped his thinking. “Well,” said Holló after a while, “it started in the siege but it wasn't until I met Adriána that it all became clear.”

He welcomed the security promised by membership in the Communist Party, and the relatively anonymous work for the Ministry of Culture. He was one of the many waiting for rescue at the end of the siege, desperate for the arrival of the Red Army, not realizing there would be no end to ruin, they'd been turned into its agents, harnessed to it, dragging its wreckage into the next half century.

For Holló it was the work of reading. He got to do a lot of that when he was censoring books. The primary target of his work was literature, especially the work of poets, who were heroes in Hungarian society, though there were plenty of novels, plays, and films to ban as well, along with memoirs, science fiction, children's stories, anything you could think of. “I had latitude,” Holló said. “I could exercise my own responsibilities as a proletariat toward reactionary and formalist thinking.”

The important thing was that people
had to be caught
, a lot of them, and he was free to pick his offenders, preferably writers who didn't belong to the Party, but once in a while a Party member too, just to keep everyone alert. “It was a paranoid time,” he said, and I sensed a sadness in Holló then, something beneath the refinement he cultivated, gazing at the library as though it might vanish any second, that despite the work he'd done he didn't deserve to be there, in the company of all those books.

“At first,” he said, “I tried to be careful. I picked out the really bad stuff, the ones I thought weren't worth keeping, or were offensive, as if I could somehow justify what happened to those books and their writers, telling myself they
were unworthy, they had no skill, they didn't deserve to be published, communism or not.” But it wore him out. Within months Holló was getting up at night haunted by the idea that one of those writers, it didn't matter which, might have gone on from the trash they were churning out to composing truly lasting work. In the office, he wanted to ask someone, anyone, to second guess his choices, to tell him he was right in thinking that writer X or Y would never amount to anything, but to even ask that, to have considerations beyond the one that mattered—whether a given book reinforced or undermined the revolution—was already to be compromised, an enemy. It was in the middle of this isolation that he began meeting with Adriána in the out-of-the-way places of the ministry—the basement storage lockers, bathrooms closed for repair, boiler rooms.

“I really don't know how it started.” Holló paused. “I think it was the excitement of having something in my life other than mere survival. It wasn't her, not really.” He smoothed the hair on top of his head. “We were young and stupid and I don't think either of us really knew what we wanted.”

Adriána was having as much trouble sleeping as he was. For her, Cérna was the problem, another kind of censorship altogether, this man who somehow kept to himself even when they were having sex, so removed from showing what he felt, who he was, what he desired, so totally one with the Party line that he was only ever there as an instance of ideology. It had been different before the war, she told him, when there were so many different
kinds
of communist, before the Soviets arrived and liquidated those on the left who were too outspoken or brave or committed, and coerced the rest into
an undifferentiated mass. “Maybe Cérna always thought the way he thought,” she said, “but I never noticed it because there were always people around who thought differently.”

Is that why I'm here, Holló had wondered, because I'm different? Had Adriána chosen him as a lover because unlike Cérna he was so totally an outsider in the ministry, a low-level hack, no friends or connections, someone whose comings and goings no one would even notice? Or was it because she sensed something else in him, repressed and abnormal passions, and that he was therefore less likely to arouse suspicion, to be seen as one of her possible lovers?

Adriána said she'd been watching him for weeks, which Holló understood to mean she'd been looking
into
him, whatever files there were, making sure he was safe in every way, unallied with anyone more powerful than her husband. “She kissed me first,” he said, though he was already aware that it was coming, the way she sidled up to his desk, stood closer than was necessary when she called him into her office, the way she was always there, smiling, when he rounded a corner, her fingertips brushing his hand as she glided past. “I am alone,” Adriána said that first time, pulling back from his lips, her gaze somewhere between authority and exposure, as if she was stepping out of her clothes right there. It was the perfect thing to say, at once a statement of how she spent her days, how she felt, and that she was acting of her own prerogative. “I'm not going to be able to wait this out,” she said, gesturing hopelessly at the building. “This is going to last longer than us.” He'd nodded. She stepped in to kiss him again, and he kissed her back.