Siege 13 Read online

  ALSO BY TAMAS DOBOZY

  When X Equals Marylou

  Last Notes and Other Stories

  Copyright © 2012 Tamas Dobozy

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dobozy, Tamas, 1969–

  Siege 13 : stories / Tamas Dobozy.

  Issued also in electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77102-204-0

  I. Title. II. Title: Siege thirteen.

  ps8557.o2218s54 2012 c813’.54 c2012-904218-8

  Editor: Janice Zawerbny

  Cover design: Michel Vrana

  Cover image: Allan Kausch

  Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,

  a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,

  390 Steelcase Road East,

  Markham, Ontario l3r 1g2 Canada

  www.thomasallen.ca

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of

  The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last

  year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario

  Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada

  through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  12 13 14 15 16 5 4 3 2 1

  Text printed on a 100% PCW recycled stock

  Printed and bound in Canada

  For two early and outstanding teachers—

  Nancy Hollmann and Robert McCallum—

  who opened all the right doors.

  Both Miss Eckhart and Virgie Rainey were human beings terribly at large, roaming on the face of the earth. And there were others of them—human beings, roaming, like lost beasts.

  —EUDORA WELTY, “June Recital”

  Contents

  The Atlas of B. Görbe

  The Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944–1945

  Sailor’s Mouth

  The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived

  The Beautician

  Days of Orphans and Strangers

  Rosewood Queens

  The Encirclement

  The Society of Friends

  The Miracles of Saint Marx

  The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins

  The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto

  The Homemade Doomsday Machine

  The Atlas of B. Görbe

  E WAS THE SORT OF MAN you’ve seen: big and fat in an overcoat beaded with rain, cigar poking from between his jowls, staring at some vision beyond the neon and noise and commuter frenzy of Times Square.

  That’s how Benedek Görbe looked the last time I saw him. This was May, 2007, shortly before I left Manhattan, where I’d been living with my family for six months on a Fulbright fellowship at NYU. Görbe was an ex-boyfriend of an aunt in Budapest, though he hadn’t lived in or visited Hungary for over forty years. He wrote in Hungarian every day though, along with drawing illustrations, for a series of kids’ books published under the name B. Görbe by a small but quality imprint out of Brooklyn who’d hired a translator and published them in enormous folio-sized hardcovers under the title The Atlas of Dreams. Benjamin and Henry, my two boys, loved the books, with their pictures reminiscent of fin de siècle posters, stories of children climbing ladders into dreams—endless garden cities, drifting minarets, kings shrouded in hyacinths. That was Görbe’s style, not that you’d have known it from the way he looked—with his stubble, pants the size of garbage bags, half-smouldering cigars, his obnoxious way of disagreeing with any opinion that wasn’t his own, and sometimes, after a moment’s reflection, even with that.

  I was drawn to Görbe out of disappointment. The position at NYU had promised “a stimulating artistic environment,” though what it actually gave me was an office in the back of a building where a bunch of important writers were squirrelled away writing, when they were there at all. In the end I wasn’t surprised; that’s what writers did—they worked. But this meant that when I wasn’t writing I was wandering the streets, sometimes alone, sometimes with my wife, Marcy, in a dreamscape very different from the one described by Görbe. Rather than climbing up a ladder, I felt as if I’d climbed down one, into spaces of concrete and brick, asphalt and iron, and because it was winter it was always snowing, then rain, always torrential. I don’t mean to imply that New York was dreary, only that it seemed emptied, an abandoned city, which is odd since there were people everywhere—to the point where I sometimes couldn’t move along the sidewalk—all of them rushing by me as if they knew something I didn’t, as if every street and avenue offered a series of doors only they could open. Because of this, because so much seemed inaccessible, New York made me feel as if I was a kid again, left alone at home for the first time, or in the house of a stranger, on a grey Sunday when there’s nothing to do but search through the closets and cabinets of rooms you’re not supposed to go into, never coming upon anything of interest but always hoping the next jewellry box or armoire or night-stand will redeem the lost afternoon. New York—my New York that winter—was a place of secrets.

  Görbe was the biggest of them all. I called him on advice from my aunt Bea, who gave me his phone number after I complained about how few contacts I was making. She’d dated him, unbelievably enough, back in university in Budapest during the early 1960s. Görbe was an art student then, though he was also taking courses in literature and history and whatever else fired his imagination. He was “quiet and dreamy,” according to my aunt, but also “very handsome.” She compared him to Montgomery Clift. In the end, they only went out for ten months, after which Görbe dumped her for the supposed love of his life, a woman called Zella, who was majoring in psychology and who kept, according to rumour, the dream diary that would inspire Görbe’s writing. Within a year of meeting Zella, Görbe left university without a degree, disappearing from my aunt’s life for five years before resurfacing when his first book was published. My aunt went to the launch, wandering past posters of his illustrations, amazed to see how much Görbe had changed. Gone was the easy smile, that faraway look he sometimes had. There was something frantic about him that day, my aunt said, but he was as handsome as ever, and though he never revealed what the trouble was he seemed happy to have someone from the past to talk to. Görbe was especially bad-tempered when people who hadn’t bought a book came up to him. “I was surprised to see him like that,” she said. “When I knew him in university he was so different. We were hardly adults then, but we were on the edge of it—university degrees, jobs, marriages, children—but whenever I was with him it always felt to me as if we were back in the garden in Mátyásföld, playing hide-and-seek, climbing the downspout to the roof, searching for treasures in the attic.” My aunt paused on the other end of the line. “Well, he’s become an important man, and maybe he could help you. It doesn’t sound like you’re having much luck there.” She paused again, and I could hear her shifting the phone against her face. “The number I have for him is quite old. He used to call me once in a while when he first left Hungary. I always got the feeling he really missed it here, that he didn’t want to go, and he always asked me to describe what the city was like, the changes that had happened. I think it was because of Zella that he went.” I could hea
r her rummaging on the other end of the line. “He hasn’t called me in years.”

  When I finally telephoned Görbe he hesitated on the line, pretending not to remember my aunt, then grew curious when I rejected his suggestion that instead of bothering him I try to meet writers at the Hungarian Cultural Center. “I’m boycotting the place,” I said, explaining how I’d gone three weeks prior to see György Konrád and afterwards spoke with the centre’s director, László somebody or other, about my writing, and he’d faked interest, even enthusiasm, in that way they do so well in New York. This László person had advised me to put together an email with excerpts from my books and reviews, and to send it to him, and he’d get back to me. Hunting down the quotes and composing the email took the better part of a day, but László never responded—not to the email, not to the follow-up, nothing. “With all the time and bother it took, I could have taken my kids to the park,” I said, “or gone to the Met with Marcy—a hundred different things.”

  Görbe laughed. It was like listening to a shout at the end of a long drainpipe. “Defaulting to the wife and kids, huh?” he said. “Listen, I hate the centre too. The programming . . . well, it’s like being inside a mind the size of a walnut. And the women they have working the bar—it would kill them to smile. I never go there anymore.”

  “Uh . . .” I said.

  “You’re petty and embittered, kid,” he shouted into the phone. “Running on despair. Narcissistic. Vindictive. I love it! Listen, you like Jew food?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Your wife and kids, they’re coming too, right?” He chuckled. “Before I help a writer I need to see what his home life is like.”

  It was a strange request, but it didn’t take me long during that dinner at Carnegie’s to see that he loved kids, my kids, and had a way of hitting all the right spots with Marcy’s sense of humour—she was always amused by men who magnified their idiosyncrasies to comic levels—and before I knew it, before I’d even decided if I wanted to be friends with Görbe, she’d invited him to our place for dinner the next weekend. After that, with how much the kids loved him, and his attention to Marcy, we began seeing him regularly.

  All of Görbe’s books feature the same three protagonists: a six-year-old boy named Fritz, a girl the same age named Susanna, and a kindly court jester who’s all of four years old, but whose illogical brain is perfect for figuring out the dream world and so is the wisest of them all. In the early books, the stories are about Fritz and Susanna falling asleep at night only to end up in the same dream. They spend the rest of the adventure trying to escape (with the jester’s help of course). As the books go on and the children’s home lives are revealed—dire poverty, Fritz’s absent mother and sullen father, Susanna’s illness (what in the early twentieth century was called “neurasthenia”), the cruelty of school—Fritz and Susanna decide they don’t want to wake up, they want to stay asleep, and the later stories are haunted by the fear that what separates dream from reality is as thin as tissue, and once it’s torn they’ll never again find their way back to the jester and the endless continents of sleep. The latest book ends with the two children coming upon a strange machine that will keep them there forever—if only they can figure out how to use it.

  That’s the eleventh book in the series. It was published last year after we returned to Kitchener. I remember sitting with Benjamin in Words Worth Books on a snowy January day going through the illustrations and story and coming to the end, where Benjamin lingered, tracing his finger along the illustration of the dream machine, and finally said, “It was different when he read it to us.” I looked at him, wondering what he was talking about, because all I remembered of Görbe’s voice was the volume and rancid tobacco on his breath. It was Benjamin who reminded me that when Görbe read to him—as opposed to when Görbe spoke to me—his tone became quiet, it had a breathlessness to it, as if he too had no idea how the story would end and was as eager as any kid to find out. “You’re right,” I said, remembering those early nights in our apartment, “he did read that way,” my children tucked under each of his beefy arms.

  When he was done reading to them Görbe would grumble and rub his eyes like someone forced out of bed too early, which was funny because he was never available before one o’clock, and I always guessed (wrongly as it turned out) that mornings were when he did his writing and drawing. Then he’d bite his cigar and look at me and ask if I was up for a “girlie drink,” which was the term he used for the awful cocktails he ordered. I think he discovered most of them in antique bartending manuals—like many children’s authors he was drawn to things discarded or forgotten—concoctions such as Sherry Cobbler, Pisco Punch, New Orleans Zazerac. The bartenders looked at him as if he was totally insane.

  Once we were in the bar—any bar, though mostly we hung out at a tiny place in the East Village called Lotus—anything could happen. Görbe’s mouth was too big. He purposefully said things to outrage people, and most of the customers in the bars knew him on sight. He was a good fighter with fists as well as words—there was a lot of weight behind each punch, he was slow on his feet but able to withstand punishment, and only needed to connect once to knock you down. “You’re right,” he said to me once. “New York is a deserted city.” He looked at the bartender. “You’re a writer so you’ve probably seen it in the Times—that trembling subtext—where the critics complain that writers have failed to properly commemorate the tragic”—he winked at me—“event of six years ago.” He called to the bartender for another Philadelphia Fish-House Punch, then continued: “What they’re really bothered by is that it didn’t have the effect they wanted it to have. Except for a few months of public tears and outrage and the constant refrain by writers trying to prove 9/11 was of enormous significance, the only difference I see is that people around here go shopping even more than they did before.” He raised his voice and looked around the room. “It was significant to the friends and relatives of the deceased, of course, and to everyone else for a little while—a shock to the privileged and entitled who thought such a thing could never happen to them.” He looked back at me. “But go out on the street now,” he said. “Do you see any effect, really, out there? It passed right through them as if they were intangible.” He sipped his drink. “Once in a while someone tries to write something profound about it, and they always fail, and the critics are always angry that they didn’t do it justice. And all I can think is: Oh, New York, get over yourself!” He adopted a stage whisper: “What they can’t face, none of them, is its insignificance. People died in an act of war. Wow! How unusual!” He said the last three words so loud I jumped off my seat. “It’s terrible—” he pretended to wipe away tears “—now, can you please give me directions to the Louis Vuitton store?” Görbe snorted, staring back at the bartender. “It passed through them like they were ghosts,” he said. “As it should have.” He nodded. “As it should have.”

  Görbe grunted and shifted on his stool and for a second I thought I saw something there, a break in the front he was putting on. “Listen, I lived through events a million times worse in Hungary—the war, the siege—like a lot of people. It wasn’t one day, it was six years, and, believe me, it didn’t lead to any great spiritual awakening!” He waved his hands in the air. “It happened. It was bad. And afterwards? Well, it will happen again. And in between you forget. You go back to your entertainments and schemes and obsessions and carry on. And that,” he said, “is all there is to say about it.”

  Görbe rose drunkenly from his stool and bowed this way and that to the regulars, who didn’t know whether to applaud or tear him apart.

  His reputation for outrage extended even to the world of children’s literature, which is no easy thing. When Görbe gave readings it wasn’t rare to see a crowd of a hundred or more in attendance, and not the usual moms and dads and kids and teachers, but people you’d never have expected—Brooklyn hipsters, businessmen in blue suits, specialty booksellers with stacks of first editions Görbe would sign
and they’d sell at inflated prices (they all had to put a wad of bills on his outstretched palm before he signed anything), and even some skeletal blondes cradling tiny dogs that trembled so bad they looked as if they were going to disintegrate. Each one was crazy about Görbe, many knew him personally, and when they lined up to have books signed he made sure to say something memorable to every one, statements so outrageous I was sure someone would burst into tears, either that or assault him. Instead they only laughed or turned to friends and said, “See! What did I tell you?” and Görbe nodded almost imperceptibly, made a flourish with his pen, and handed back the book. It seemed to me, looking at the lineup, that they loved him, and it was only later, near the end of the night, after I realized I hadn’t seen one person open a book, or overheard a single comment about the writing, that I realized what was beneath it all: a fascination that was all about Görbe’s appearance and character. It was him they were there for. The signings were one of those New York events you went to to prove your coolness. Worst of all, I sensed Görbe not only knew this but encouraged it, as if he spent as much time rehearsing the crazy diatribes and remarks—like some kind of comedy routine—as he did writing the books. This, too, was part of the process.

  During his career Görbe had sold millions of books, gone on innumerable book tours, and the few times he invited me to his apartment in Queens I peeked at some of the royalty cheques on his desk, amazed to think he made that much and still lived in such a hole. There were only two places in the apartment that made it look as if he hadn’t given up on life: the draughtsman’s table where he did his work, spotlessly clean, the various tools neatly organized; and the mantelpiece where photographs of his wife, Zella, sat carefully arranged so each image could be seen in its frame. I looked at the pictures, then around the house again to see if I’d missed anything—an article of clothing, a pair of shoes—that might suggest a woman was also living there. But I saw nothing.