Siege 13 (22 page)

He never showed. The grease congealed around the roast. Aunt Rose finished the bottle and opened another. I did my dishes, then watched TV, and finally went to bed.

I wasn't asleep long, maybe a couple of hours, when I heard the crash.

They were downstairs. She was yelling. I snuck down the back stairs and peeked from around the banister. My father was standing in front of Aunt Rose, who was on the couch, one hand in her pocket. My father looked angry, wearing his work clothes, which were dirtier than normal, staring at her hard. “It was overtime. I can't afford to say no to overtime. You know that.”

“Mike . . .” She glanced at the telephone, but then changed her mind about what she wanted to say next. “It's not the money!” she hissed. “It's not just a dance once in a while, or someone to babysit your daughter, or a fuck, or your endless unchanging no surprises idea of security.” She made the last comment as if it was a revelation to her as well,
as if she'd just realized it, since for a long time it had been yet another thing that attracted her to my father.

“You don't know a thing about my security,” he yelled. And he swept his hand along one of the shelves of the room, scattering chess pieces across the floor. He stood there as if he had no idea what he'd done, as if the action came first and the idea of it afterward. The chess pieces were everywhere, like tripwires.

Aunt Rose did not get up. My father stood there, trapped among the chess pieces, not daring to move. “Do you even know what your daughter does?” she asked.

“You don't get to ask me that,” he said. “She's
my
daughter.”

The way he said it, “my,” made Aunt Rose wince. “She
might
have been mine, too,” Aunt Rose whispered. Her hand came out of her pocket gripping something.

My father never noticed. He was looking at his hands too, inspecting the knuckles. “If it's what I think it is. If it's
who
I think it is . . .”

“Then what?” she said. “Find him, find all of them, and kill them?”

My father looked at her. He was helpless, shaking with rage at his impotence, but with something else as well, the desire to find a way out when there was none.

“It would be so much easier to do that,” she said. “Dance instead of talk, fight instead of figure out, labour instead of work. Passion is always easier, isn't it, Mike?” Her voice was quiet now. She rubbed the back of a hand against her forehead. “But that's all there ever is, just passion, laughter and
rage and intensity and whatever it is in your mind that takes you from me in the middle of the afternoon, during a conversation, that makes you sit in the bathroom hissing at people, who knows how long dead, threatening them—”

“She's not your daughter,” my father interrupted her. “She's just a deal we made that went on longer than it should have.”

“You think this . . .”Aunt Rose closed her eyes. She waved her clenched fist at the room. “There was no deal, Mike,” she said.

He shrugged. “I told you about Hungary.”

“No, Mike.” She got up and went to him, chess pieces crunching underfoot, and took him by the hand. “Did you forget what happened that night? You couldn't get out a single sentence.” She held his hand. “You never told me about Hungary.”

My father looked away. He was scared. “Quiet,” he said, “you'll wake her.”

“Oh, fuck you, Mike.”

“That's right.” He smiled, and it was horrible because although his words were hostile he was ranting like a man being led down a corridor toward something he'd rather not face. “Fuck me. That's what we've been doing these years. And that's all it's ever going to be. You will never be my wife, and she will never be your daughter. Never!” It was the most hurtful thing he could have said, but I do not think he was trying to hurt Aunt Rose, not really. He was just terrified of where she'd gotten to, trespassing on his isolation from where he'd always hoped to keep her, the careful dance of the last fourteen years all gone to waste, when he would have
happily gone on that way with her—dancing—forever.

“You're right,” she said, and her voice had gone quiet too, but soft in a way my father's was not, without the hardness that puts edges around a whisper. “If I could have had you I'd have gladly taken the rest,” she murmured, opening her fist on a tiny velvet box, from which she took a ring and placed it on my father's finger. He stood there, shocked, unable to move his hand out of hers. She kissed him then, as soft as her voice had been. “Goodbye, Mike,” she said, and she turned and brushed past me on the stairs.

My father stood there, staring after her, staring at me.

“Goodbye,” he finally said, and I could not tell which of us he was talking to, but he motioned to me, and as we left I heard Aunt Rose run down the stairs as if she wanted to say something else. I never heard what it was.

She was gone in a week. I remember going back to the house, standing outside as the movers arrived. But she wasn't there. I watched as they carted out the bits of my old bedroom, and as I stopped myself from rushing up the steps to make them put it all back I finally understood what had happened in those pawnshops over the years, the pieces Aunt Rose left because as beautiful as they were they weren't the one thing she loved the best.

 

I did not stick around for long after that either, five months. Then I was gone, too, not with Lancaster, but on my own. They were not easy, those first years, though things grew easier afterwards, once I figured out all I had not been able, or permitted, to figure out when I still lived on Michigan Avenue. I even got to Hungary, though that was decades
later, after my father had died, lungs rotted out, indifferent to my occasional visits home, as if in leaving I too had died and this phantom who came back once in a while to visit was not the girl he'd help raise but an intruder into that place he'd drifted to, one that must have looked like peace to everyone else, no more yelling or rages or wild nights. But peace was not where he was at then, or at least not peace in the usual sense, just an indifference so profound nothing mattered at all, not even me. He rarely spoke, simple requests only: “Pass the salt”; “Don't forget to put gas in the car”; “Sure, I'll see you next time”—nothing about where I was going, who I was with, what my life consisted of. I was young then, and I didn't want to deal with parents anymore, nor any of the people I'd left behind on Michigan Avenue, coming and going as quickly, quietly, and as rarely as possible.

In Hungary I managed to learn a bit of the language, enough to comb through the National Archives and libraries. You see, I had followed in Aunt Rose's footsteps, but only in order to follow my father's. I retraced his life back to a time before Canada, before his transatlantic trip, an orphan of sixteen having seen too much during the siege of Budapest. I found an address on the back of one of his photographs (though the date that accompanied it was from long before the war), an apartment in the seventh district, which later became the Jewish ghetto, and saw pictures of what happened to the people who lived there (had my father been one of them, or had his family left by then?)—emaciated bodies in the streets, frozen to death in rubbled buildings, hanging by their hands, wired to wrought-iron railings on the wrong sides of stairwells. I read the essays and memoirs and journalism.
I learned of the rapes of women by the Red Army, men standing on women's faces while their comrades took turns, girls young as fourteen locked in rooms visited repeatedly, and afterwards the gift of a bayonet slashed from crotch to throat. I read of children forced to walk in front of detachments, their small bodies big enough to absorb the bullets. I read of the camps their parents were sent to, digging holes in Siberia, bodies cut down by malnutrition, frost, sadistic guards chopping off fingers, and, later, when the thaw came, the earth refusing to harbor them, their bodies resurfacing in old coats and jackets, pockets stuffed with faded folded pictures. It was too much, it was enough, and in the end it still wasn't the specifics of what my father had experienced. But I understood why he couldn't talk about it, and why, with all that happened there, with whatever he'd gone through, an entire world lost before he even knew what the world was, he'd struggled to lose even more of it, even the memories, never repeating what he'd experienced for fear it would grow ever more vivid in his mind. I would never be sure if his inability to let go of that meant he couldn't hold onto anything else, or if, in fact, it made him terrified of holding on.

It was the only clue I obtained to Miklós Berényi. I found nothing else except stories, sitting there night after night as fascinated by it as Aunt Rose had been, filling up pages and pages with a history that was also mine, since his remoteness had become my own. This was my “research specialty” now: the passing of trauma from one generation to the next.

I was at a conference, giving a talk on exactly this, when I ran into Aunt Rose again.

She'd aged almost beyond recognition, another of those professors emeritus you see at conferences, full of the ease that comes when the bad work—students, marking, committees, faculty rivalries—is behind you, when at last there's only the work you love: research, writing, and the endless debate.

“Hi, Mariska,” she said, stepping up to the bus stop outside the hotel where I was waiting for the shuttle to take me to the conference. She was peering from under an umbrella, this old lady withered to four feet tall, and it was a minute before her eyes gave her away, still full of that energy, and without thinking I threw my arms around her. She smiled tightly, patting my shoulder. “I've been watching you for a half hour,” she said.

“I didn't even . . .” I started to say something but couldn't finish. There was too much. I pulled the program from my bag. “I haven't looked at the presenters yet, otherwise I . . .”

“You've been doing what I would have done,” she smiled again. “I've never been fond of looking back, either. But your father was better at avoiding the past than either of us. Maybe we should have left him alone about that.”

Her left hand was gripping the umbrella, and I looked at it instinctively and saw the gold ring. She caught the glance and shrugged.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and in the rush to cover up my embarrassment I blurted out my sense of guilt. “I should have visited you. After you moved away. I thought of writing . . . A few times I thought I should try.”

“It's okay,” she said. “You inherited that honestly: leaving, never going back. It's important that some things end.” For a
second I wondered if she was talking about herself as well as my father.

“Well, we're here now.” I tried to laugh. “Do you have plans for dinner?”

She shook her head. “No,” she mumbled. “I won't have plans.”

“So why not meet, then,” I said, taking her hand, “after the conference today?”

“It might be nice,” she said.

The shuttle arrived and I boarded it thinking she was coming too, but when I looked back she was standing outside smiling and nodding at me while the other passengers got on, and soon the shuttle was on its way, and she was still standing there one hand raised, not quite waving, having said all there was to say.

Of course we never met up that night. We didn't even try. Aunt Rose was checked out by the time I got back to the hotel, just as I'd predicted. “She left you this,” the concierge said, pushing over a tiny package I knew, even then, would contain two queens, one black, one white, that I would hold up to the light in my hotel room, tracing the intricacies of their design. There was a receipt inside from a local shop, where I would go and return them the next day, walking along with the box under my arm thinking of all the shop owners all those years ago facing their useless chess sets, seeing in them what Aunt Rose must have seen in my father—that fragmented beauty terrifying in its uselessness, in its demand that you protect and preserve it even while it offers you nothing of itself.

When I got to the store I stopped outside, holding the box. I lifted out the two queens again and peered into the
box, pushing the cotton wadding aside with a finger as if I might find something else. There was nothing, of course, and never had been, only two queens desperate for the affections of an absent king, trying to conjure him into existence, and losing each other along the way.

The Encirclement

T SOME POINT
during the lecture Sándor would get up, point a finger at Professor Teleki, and accuse him of lying—and Teleki would gasp and sputter and grow red in the face and the audience would love it. But it wasn't an act, and Teleki had approached Sándor many times—either personally or through his agent—to ask him what his problem was. He even offered him money, which Sándor accepted only to break his promise and show up at the lectures again—to the point where audiences started expecting him, as if Teleki's presence was secondary, playing the straight man to this hectoring vindictive blind guy who was the star of the show.