Siege 13 (25 page)

“You went blind,” whispered Teleki into the microphone. “You went blind.”

“I'm talking about you!”

“No you're not,” said Teleki, and he pushed back the lectern and walked off the raised platform and up the auditorium steps to where Sándor was standing, who drew back as Teleki approached. “This story you've been telling is your own, Sándor.”

“It's yours!” Sándor shouted. “You know it's yours!”

Then Teleki, in the most inspired performance of his career, threw his arms around the blind man whispering, “It's okay, it's okay, it's okay,” just loud enough to be picked up by the microphone pinned to his lapel.

 

He had tightened his hold until Sándor stopped struggling, and all the while he'd continued to whisper soothingly of how this was Sándor's public confession, how he could not have described the things he'd described unless he'd seen them, or known the things he knew unless he'd been there. He said he knew Sándor could still see, and that what had darkened his eyes was not physical in nature, but moral. Sándor had shouted and hollered and tried to fight him off, but Teleki merely continued to hold him, and the audience had inclined their heads, finally, in sympathy, as if they'd never for a second thought of Sándor as anything other than a refugee from himself, using Teleki's lectures to disclose his conscience in the only way he could—obliquely, by projecting his guilt and
shame onto someone else. They even clapped when Teleki finally let go of the exhausted, defeated Sándor and taking him by the hand led him from the hall, down the steps, out the back exit off the wings of the stage, where the blind man flung Teleki's hand away, told him he should be ashamed of himself, and stormed off as fast as the tentative tapping of his cane would allow, tripping over the first curb he came to. Teleki smiled.

And he'd continued smiling late into the night, wrapped in his robe in the hotel, drinking the champagne his agent had sent up along with a note of apology Teleki never read, already knowing what it said. He gazed out over the city and wondered what Sándor might be doing in it now, who he was with, where he was headed. For that was Sándor's way, Teleki had realized, incapable of functioning, of getting from one place to the next, unless there was someone, preferably a crowd, to help him, as if his blindness was a way of restoring people to some sense of community, as if by helping him they were ultimately helping themselves, as if there was another map of the world, not of nations and cities but intersections of need, of what draws us together.

Sándor's world
, Teleki thought.
His
. And he wondered for a moment what it was like—all those people working together—having long ago learned to count on nobody and nothing, groping his way all alone through the darkest of places.

The Society of Friends

UJZA GALAMBOS
was the lover of both Frigyes and Aurél, but her death solved nothing, the two men continued to fight over her until the end of their lives. For instance, Frigyes would lend Aurél an outboard motor, which Aurél never returned, though he complained about it, telling Frigyes it was without a doubt the shittiest piece of equipment he'd ever attached to the back of his boat, sputtering so bad it felt like he was sitting on “a goddamn earthquake,” sending up blue clouds so noxious there was “no point,” he said, “in even thinking you're anywhere outdoors,” and guzzling so much gas it was a wonder he hadn't run dry the first time he used it, stranded in the middle of some lake rowing half the night just to get home.

Frigyes took back his gift, repaired it, and returned it to Aurél, who yelled at him that it still wasn't working right. “You give me this motor, you say it's fixed,” Aurél shouted, standing in Frigyes's driveway holding the piece of equipment as if he wanted to throw it in his face, “but then I have
to buy new spark plugs for it. Why can't you ever just do something properly?”

Frigyes smiled. “Perhaps you would allow me to take you out to dinner as a way of apologizing.” It was just the sort of gesture—so sweet, so kind—that drove Aurél crazy.

But Aurél wasn't listening. He was gazing up at the bedroom window where Lujza was looking down on them, a sheet draped around her shoulders, smiling and waving. Frigyes followed his friend's gaze, then waved at Lujza too, and when she blew both of them kisses the two men glared at each other, though what they were really doing was angling their faces just so, trying to catch more of that windblown affection than the other guy.

The next week Frigyes went over to Aurél's and offered to pay for the spark plugs. Aurél told him he'd not only have to pay for the spark plugs but also the time it had taken to go buy them. When Frigyes asked how much, Aurél said, “Twenty-five dollars an hour. That's how much I'm worth. It took me four hours to get them out, go to the store, find new ones, pay, come back, put them in.” He held out his hand. Frigyes smiled, dipped into his wallet, and pulled out a hundred dollars. “These are all twos and ones!” Aurél yelled. “Don't you have anything bigger?”

“It's all I've got. Let me make it up to you. I'll mow your lawn.”

“Last time you mowed my lawn you left big clumps of grass everywhere!”

“Then I'll fix the transmission on your truck.”

“Last time you did that I had to go out and buy new
transmission fluid! There isn't a mechanic in the world who'd make his customer do that!”

Frigyes smirked, deciding not to mention that no mechanic in the world would have done all those repairs for free.

 

Frigyes and Aurél were friends of mine, DPs like me, escaped from Hungary in 1956. We spent a lot of time together at the Szécsényi Club in Toronto, especially in the early days, playing
tarok
, bowling in the wooden lanes out back, trying to tell the most hilarious joke, the two of them always fiercely competitive with each other, though in those days it was part of the camaraderie, the fun, no hard feelings. I still have pictures of them, kept in a shoebox—Aurél and Frigyes drinking Metaxa at a picnic table; Aurél and Frigyes standing in front of some trout they'd caught; Aurél and Frigyes dressed as shepherds on the
puszta
—old colour photographs now faded to a golden haze, as if to commemorate how inseparable they'd been, long before Lujza arrived, long after her death. In those last years they became an old bickering couple eating at one of Toronto's two Hungarian restaurants, everyone would see them there, Frigyes treating them to appetizers, sometimes several main courses, wine, to which Aurél would respond, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Well, that was pricey. It cost five times what I normally spend at a restaurant, if we'd gone to the place
I
recommended. So I guess you owe me four more dinners.” After all, he hadn't
asked
Frigyes to take him somewhere so expensive. It was the sort of insane logic, a complete lack of gratitude, that would have caused most people's brains to melt, though the truth is it
was a torment tailormade for Frigyes, who rolled his eyes and shook his head and then smiled that sickly smile and treated his friend to four more dinners.

 

After arriving in Canada Aurél became a game warden, and for the rest of his life would go out hunting regularly—for grouse and duck, but also deer and bear when the season was in, not to mention fly-fishing—and everyone cozied up to him, hoping to get his secrets, the best places to find game, methods of tracking, how to properly train a
vizsla
, the sorts of flies he was tying. They wanted his advice, and if you poured him enough wine, and if Lujza encouraged him to help the people who hated her, he just might have given it, maybe even invited you along.

Frigyes was a bootlegger. It's what he'd always been, in Hungary and Canada, famous for the
pálinka
he brewed in some secret still he always hinted at but no one apart from Aurél had ever seen. It had medicinal properties, or so it was said, helping to cure arthritis, asthma, impotence, as long as you made sure to drink at least one shot, but preferably more, every single day. For Lujza, Frigyes even made a special batch of
pálinka
, the few who'd tasted it said it was less like a drink than heaven itself distilled into a bottle. To the last day of her life, Lujza swore it was what kept her young, carrying it around in a silver flask Aurél had given her—an heirloom that had belonged to his father and grandfather and great-grandfather and still bore the family crest—and which he insisted had magical properties that transformed Frigyes's “rotgut” into the miraculous potion Lujza was almost constantly sipping. Of course you could never tell with Lujza if
she was being honest in calling Frigyes's
pálinka
still “the fountain of eternal youth,” or heavily ironic, since more than once she told my wife, Vera, that the secret to her appearance was “a combination of avoiding work as much as possible and pickling myself with alcohol.”

If the problem with Aurél was his lack of generosity, the problem with Frigyes was his chaos. He was notoriously undependable, no one knew when they'd get their delivery of brandy, if it would show up on Friday or Saturday as promised, or even in time for the baptism, wedding, dinner, or whatever the event was. But when Frigyes
did
arrive it was always with a laugh and more than you'd ordered or he was willing to accept payment for—double the number of jars, some of the very best quality (with the exception of the stuff he made only for Lujza).

It was Lujza's arrival in Toronto, in 1958, that made everything that was good in the two men's relationship—Aurél's intensity, Frigyes's impulsiveness—turn into everything that was bad. It was then that Frigyes began telling everyone what a great woodsman Aurél was, singing his praises up and down like some herald in those old etchings of King Mátyás's royal hunting parties; it was then that Aurél started criticizing Frigyes, and no longer in a funny way, saying the only reason he was such “an agent of anarchy” was so that people would be even
more
thankful when he finally showed up, providing his little extras like some great benefactor.

As for Lujza, nobody could really place her, which was unusual, since almost everyone who came to Toronto in those days came because they knew
someone
—a family member, an in-law, a classmate from school—who'd come before, and
who was there waiting when they arrived, offering a place to stay, help getting around, contacts for jobs, introductions at the Szécsényi Club. She arrived with nothing, knowing nobody, no father or brother or husband. In those days she had exactly two suits of good clothes, none of the finery the men would later bankroll, and her hands were chapped and worn and fidgety, her hair carefully combed and pinned back but not styled, her face already developing the kinds of wrinkles it would take weekly spa treatments and plenty of Frigyes's
pálinka
to arrest and then erase. Throughout her time in Toronto, Lujza made no attempt to correct the rumours that grew up around her.

In the first year she sat for hours with Árpád Holló, who ran the Szécsényi Club, dressed in one of those two outfits that would have looked refined on the streets of Budapest—high heels, tight skirts, complicated blouses—but in Toronto just looked trashy. (Later, with the money the two men lavished on her, she adopted the style of 1950s and early 1960s European film stars, such as Corinne Marchand in
Cleo from 5 to 7
, or Anouk Aimée in
8½
.) Nobody knew what Holló and she talked about, but they talked, laughing quietly, pouring brandy into their coffees, and once in a while Holló would nod in the direction of someone entering the club and whisper a word or two into Lujza's ear. It was understood, early on, that she was looking for a man, that was the first rumour, but if anyone ever mentioned it in Lujza's presence, she'd turn to them and say, “Actually, I'm looking for
more
than a man,” as if one just wasn't enough.

When the scandal broke, late in 1959, that Lujza was seeing both Aurél
and
Frigyes, everyone said Holló had intro-
duced them, since they were both regulars at the club. The story went around and around, how that slut, Lujza, just couldn't get enough,
at
her age
(she must have been thirty-five then), of men, of chocolates and roses and money, of
sex
, and that by stringing along Aurél and Frigyes she was ruining one of the purest friendships anyone had ever seen, not to mention stealing two of the community's most eligible bachelors. Lujza responded by putting on extra perfume, swinging her backside a little more when she walked, addressing the husbands of other women by briefly caressing their cheeks, not long enough for the wives to jump in or make a comment, but long enough to make their men blush.

Lujza's sluttiness dated far back, that's what everyone said, from even before she'd left Hungary. She'd
always
been too free. Some said she'd made her way into the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow-Cross, by sleeping her way up the hierarchy. There was even a picture that went around—I saw it briefly—one of those grainy things cut from a wartime newspaper, of her standing with some politicians and generals and scientists at a gala, all of them in arm bands, resting her head against the shoulder of Otto Kovács, who'd been one of the Nazi physicists trying to build Hitler a “super-weapon.” Lujza responded to this rumour by showing up at the next club banquet dressed in black, there was even some leather in her outfit, and was heard saying to one guest, “You remind me of my old lover, Otto. He was very sweet for someone who was planning to end the world.” She smiled as if reliving a distant memory. “He said he wouldn't be able to save me, but he'd keep me company until the end.” You could never be quite sure if she was lying or telling the truth, though for me
it was all lies, driven by a fury at how stupid the rumours were, how far from what she'd actually lived through and suffered and that had brought her to this place, this community so impoverished in its imagination that she was going to show all of us how character assassination should really be done.