The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (12 page)

The names would run out regardless of how carefully, how slowly, he delivered them. In fact, if he delivered them too slowly the Soviets would grow impatient, demand that he tell them where he was getting his information, and then, when he refused, they’d come into the villa to find out for themselves, and his last hope would be ended.

So he went looking for someone to help with the press. He met Agi later that year, as the first wave of deportations, imprisonments, and executions took place. Her father and mother had been devoted communists dating back to Béla Kun’s brief dictatorship of Hungary in 1919, and were persecuted in the white terror that followed against Jews and leftists when Admiral Horthy established control over the country for the next twenty-four years. Her father had been both—Jewish and leftist—and more than once it was only the thickness of his skull that kept him from being beaten to death, just as it was his skill with the printing press that kept all three of them alive during the period of anti-Semitic laws, ghettoization, the Holocaust. “If you wear the yellow star they will kill you,” he once told Agi, tossing hers and her mother’s and his into the flames, “and if you do not they will kill you.” He stirred the fire. “So why bother?” But he had done more than just that, drawing up papers for many others—Jews, but also members of the resistance, fellow communists, British soldiers parachuted into the capital, others who needed to escape, for one reason or another, from the powers bearing down on them—whatever he could do to subvert the fascist cause. And therefore, like so many other communists, Agi’s father was arrested after the Soviet occupation on Malinovsky’s orders, not so much for his vocal criticism of the Russian “liberator”—for asking what good it had done them to await liberation when it meant free looting for the Red Army, rape, robbery, extortion, the requisitioning and
hoarding of the country’s food for the military while the general population starved, the ransacking of the nation in the way of reparations, mass arrests, murder—but because he wasn’t afraid for his life. They were to be sent to a prison camp—one of the many the Soviets had set up—in Gödöllö, when László stepped in, saying he needed someone adept at “paperwork.” Malinovsky had reported to Moscow that he had captured 110,000 fascists, but as he only had 60,000, the rest had to be made up by dragging people at random from the streets and their homes, and László was put in charge of making these substitutes look legitimate.

Naturally, Agi’s father objected, and so László took him aside, reminding him that the youngest women raped by the Red Army were twelve, and the oldest ninety, which meant that both his wife and daughter were within the normative range; he spoke, too, of the sorts of venereal diseases they could expect, not to mention how long it would last, given that some women were locked up for two weeks “entertaining” as many as thirty soldiers at a time. In the end, Agi’s father agreed, and to soften the blow László made sure they were provided for, keeping his promise even after Agi’s parents, having done the work they were asked to do, were visited one night by the ÁVO and taken away for “unauthorized forgery of government documents,” and László inherited Agi.

He made a nominal attempt to save her parents, trying to get her on his side, to make her believe he wasn’t really an apparatchik, that he was just using the system until he could make his escape. So he made sure she was there when he made inquiries and phone calls, made sure that when they came to the villa for her as well, the agents of the ÁVO knocking on the door, he was there to bar the entrance, listing off his decorations and accomplishments and contacts to make it clear he, and by extension she, was “protected,” though in truth, no one was protected, no matter how high up your friends were, for the most dangerous friend of all was the highest ranking, Stalin himself.

It was an act of bravery, maybe the only act of bravery he’d ever
performed, though it was only due to his hope that Agi would fix the printing press hidden beneath the villa. He knew that she could fix and operate the press with her eyes closed, the old man had said as much, boasting that she’d been more than his little helper. When her father was called away on business, she’d run the whole show.

Agi was silent through it all, absolutely quiet, the look in her eyes exactly the same as Karola’s had been, too hard for a girl of nineteen—still lithe, a little boyish—meeting his gaze with one in every way its equal. The war had made them old. He saw it in the way her eyes left him isolated, a lesson on shouldering what he’d done alone rather than lessening the burden by passing it on, by turning it into a secret she had to share.

It always seemed to be winter, down in the hole, Agi squatting above the trapdoor peering at him, as if listening to the clack and whir as László tried, without expertise or success, to start up Tíbor’s old machinery, the presses and lamps and generators. Nothing worked. All that happened was the clashing of parts, the tearing and spewing and grinding of paper, the flickering of lamps. The generator hummed dangerously, and charged every metal object around it so badly László was continuously cursing the jolts and shocks.

Agi would leave his dinner at the edge of the trapdoor, listening for a moment and then hammering it with the heel of her shoe, making him jump in the midst of whatever repairs he was attempting so that he would lose his grip on the screw or wire or flashlight and have to scramble after it in the dark. László sometimes felt she was transforming the villa by her presence. The smell of her cooking in the kitchen. The bedroom filled with the rustle of her turning in sleep. The shaded gallery, with its columns and ivy, unbearable for him because the only time a smile ever played across Agi’s face was when she stepped out onto it and took in the smells of the garden and sunshine she and half the country had dreamed about in cellars and shelters during the siege, when
all they had was the sound of bombs, the slow fog of plaster shaken from the walls and ceiling and floor with every explosion.

Instead of helping him, Agi reminded László, day after day, of the terrible things he’d done. She made love to him without flinching, without motion, the daughter of a man he’d killed, a woman unlawfully his, stolen, forced against her will, as if nurturing his hopelessness, his self-hate, his absent courage.

When he grew frustrated with the work he’d sit with her in one of the ruined rooms, Agi staring at the floor, not at all there. “What would you have done?” he asked, as if having told her about the press, his plan to create a new identity, to get away before scrutiny of his activities became too intense, he was now free to tell her
everything
, all of what that scrutiny might uncover. “What other choice was there?”

She stared at the hatch he’d left open, or the slow work of renovation he’d begun, trying to replaster the walls, to repair the hole in the ceiling, to paint over a half decade of water damage, her silence refusing him the one thing he most wanted: to hear someone, anyone, say that they too would have done what he did. But all he heard was the villa, rain on its roof, the ticking of radiators and plumbing, the wind playing on the windows, as if it was telling him it took a special person to do what he’d done, to have shot those boys. “No one but you could have done that,” the villa said.

At other times he would remind her of those he’d assisted—the legless girl in the infirmary, Agi herself—and ask her to help him square this against the other things he’d done—to her parents, to the two boys. “How is it that I could do any good at all?” he asked. “Maybe I haven’t gone so far. Maybe there’s still something of me left,” he said, waiting for her to speak, the villa answering instead.

When he grew angry with her silence, he threatened to stop protecting her from the ÁVO. Agi never raised her eyes from the floor, and he would shout that they were both going to die there, in the villa, and then go back down the hatch, kicking and beating
the useless machinery. “If only you would help me!” he yelled up through the trapdoor, letting it out before he could stop the words. “We could use this machine.” But it was pointless. For years now, his job had been destroying names, not creating them.

In March of 1947 László finally ran out of names—all but one. He’d done what he could, he told Agi. At first, he’d only handed in the aliases Tíbor had given to communists, to those, László knew, who were even now active in the party, and who’d enjoyed their fill of atrocity, and now it was their turn. When these were used up, László had moved down the list to those he knew were missing or sick or single. The very last names he’d handed in belonged to men who had families—wives, children, next of kin. And when those were gone—identified, questioned, arrested—when there was only the last, the one he’d picked out in advance, an address in Székesfehérvár, someone guiltier than most, susceptible to blackmail, with the means necessary to help László hide away, then he turned to Agi.

“If we’re going to get away, you’re going to have to help me.” She made no reply. He turned, putting his hands against their bedroom wall. “I’ve been waiting,” he said. “I thought there might be time, and that if I was patient, the names would last longer than the Soviets. We could make this place mine, or ours, whatever.” He took his hands from the wall. “But they aren’t leaving this country. They aren’t ever leaving this country. You wait and see! And there are no names left!”

She watched him pacing back and forth, giving her a precise account of who was asking questions about him, what departments were interested, whose hands had delivered and traded memos on how he happened to know so much, on where he’d gotten the information that led to so many arrests. “The only thing that would have been worse,” he hissed, “is if I’d given them no names at all.”

He moved to the bed and grabbed one of her wrists. “If only I
could fix the equipment Tíbor left,” he said. “It would at least give me, give us, a chance to get away.”

She looked at him as if she had no idea who he was.

“What’s wrong with you?” he shouted. He yanked Agi out of bed then, and she stumbled after him, rounding the corner to the room where Tíbor and Ildikó had died, and down the ladder to the workshop.

He grabbed a list of names from a bench he’d built, thrusting it in her face. “Read it!” he said to her. “Read the names!”

Lazily, her eyes moved along what was written there.

“I got it from the ministry,” he said, holding it up to her face, his other hand still gripping her wrist, “the names of the confirmed dead. I thought I could use it to make an alias. They’d never be looking for someone who has already died.”

Her eyes moved side to side, along one of the only records that still testified, name by name, to a whole society that was one day taken out of existence so that this one could come into being. And that’s how she came to it.

“Leo Kocsis,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said, “exactly. How eager are you to join him? Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen, your name and my name, right here”—he waved the paper in front of her eyes—“if you don’t get us out.”

She let the paper fall. Leo Kocsis. Her father.

László would never remember whether Agi agreed with a yes or a nod, or whether she agreed at all, only that she moved forward. And he had the premonition he always had, an instinct for how betrayal might benefit him, the same instinct that had made him show Agi her father’s name, knowing it was the only way to break what had formed between them. Agi worked without stopping, and was not finished before the evening of the next day. There was so much to do, so many papers, copying everything László brought to her, every sheet, without speaking.

And when it was done, days later, and László was standing in the doorway, his bags packed, it occurred to him that she had not prepared an alias for her own escape, and he quietly asked if she wasn’t coming along.

She stared at him.

“I’m going to Székesfehérvár,” he whispered, needing to say something, to cover up this moment, this need for an apology. “I’m going to stay there for a little while.” He rubbed his head. “There’s still someone … I might get help.”

Agi said nothing, only stood there in the doorway, as if she had no intention of ever leaving Tíbor Kálmán’s villa.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “You think they’ll leave you alone when they come for me? You think you’ll be spared?”

“They …” she began. “
They
have never left me alone.” And she stepped back inside and quietly closed the door.

László was still standing in front of the villa minutes later, still there, silent, unable to step off the threshold, almost as if he was waiting for her to invite him back in, as if, after all this time, all he really wanted was to be welcomed into the place—as if it had never been about an alias at all.

And even then, László lingered, unable to turn decisively toward Székesfehérvár, moving along the sidewalk and glancing back, retracing five or six steps, eyes resting on Tíbor Kálmán’s villa, long after Agi had opened the windows, brought the record player out onto the gallery, and poured herself what remained of the
pálinka
. He stood there, half hidden behind a willow, barely making out the melody of the
sláger
, watching her tilt the glass to her lips. She had the run of the place now, he realized, and he wondered if she’d known it would come to this, that for him the worst memory of all would be Agi accepted into the villa, as if his removal was all that Tíbor Kálmán’s home needed to be complete, all it had needed to be finally restored.

O
n board the
Caledonia Star
, sailing through the Beagle Channel and past the city of Ushuaia on the way to Antarctica, Maud’s husband says to her, “Those lights will probably be the last we’ll see for a while.”

Mountains rise stark and desolate on both sides of the channel; already there does not look to be room for people. Above, the evening sky, a sleety gray, shifts to show a little patch of the lightest blue. Standing on deck next to her husband, Maud takes it for a good omen—the ship will not founder, they will not get seasick, they will survive the journey, their marriage more or less still intact.