Last Notes Read online

  Copyright © 2006, 2011 by Tamas Dobozy

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  First published in Canada in 2005 by Harper Perennial

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-444-4

  For all my second homes:

  Éva Cserei

  Gigi and Ildi Galter

  Bea and Laci Korányi

  Kati Csizér

  Bandi Dobozy

  And in memory:

  Gábor Galter (1909-2004)

  Endre Dobozy (1899-1946)

  Piroska Dobozy (1910-1962)

  Contents

  Into the Ring

  Philip’s Killer Hat

  Tales of Hungarian Resistance

  Dead Letters

  Radio Blik

  Four Uncles

  The Laughing Cat

  The Inert Landscapes of Gyôrgy Ferenc

  The Man Who Came Out of the Corner of My Eye

  Last Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Into the Ring

  MY WIFE AND I are watching that scene in Snatch where Brad Pitt, after being battered to no effect by some enormous boxer, finally steps to the side as his opponent charges and cracks him one on the jaw, sending him down to the floor and into a head-brace for the remainder of the movie. My wife turns to me at this point and says, somewhat incredulously, “They don’t expect us, I mean seriously, to believe that a little guy like Brad could take out a bruiser that size with only one punch?”

  This is something of a challenge to me—for I am a “little guy”— so I tell her about Floyd Nolan, a sort-of friend I had in high school who one drunken night smoked Lenny Robinson, a towering scrum-prop, with an uppercut that knocked him out for three minutes. “Floyd was only five foot nine,” I say, “and maybe one hundred and sixty pounds, while Lenny was something like six foot four and well over two twenty.” The trick was that Floyd knew how to hit, having trained as a youngster with some guy whose first name nobody ever figured out, but who was called “Bum” Bourdieu, and who ran a boxing clinic for elementary school kids in the basement of the United Church every Sunday afternoon after Bible class.

  “Okay, I’ll prove it to you again. Get the gloves,” she says.

  And here we go.

  My wife—whose name is Smolinka Kafelnikov (mine is William Foresmith)—is anything but a “little guy.” And I suspect the reason she’s so bothered by the scene in Snatch, and my anecdote about Floyd and Lenny, is because she identifies with the bruisers of the world, and thinks it’s obscene the way they always end up on the mat, KO’d by some pretty-boy who in real life can’t take two steps out of Hollywood without this squad of massive bodyguards. “They’re selling the myth of the little man,” she says. “As if all you need to get anywhere in this world is a little bit of spunk and the right expertise. If that’s so, then how come these stars are always surrounded by guys built like brick shithouses? How come they’re never surrounded by a bunch of Jackie Chans?” My wife believes that everyone, especially the pretty-boys, knows that 250 pounds of muscle is a lot harder to get through than 170, and Ali beating Foreman back in 1974 just proves the rule— because it was an upset, because the sportscasters were amazed that the smaller, weaker Muhammad managed to pull off the victory. But this, and any other historical counter-example I might bring up, is just an opportunity for Smolinka to prove how right she is—with her fists.

  We haven’t put on the gloves in maybe six months, not since the business went under, and it seems a shame to spoil our evenly tied record at this late a date (actually, as she’s quick to point out, the record is not so evenly tied, since, yes, we’ve each got a total of twenty-five victories, but only eight of mine are knockouts, the rest points, while a full twenty of hers ended with me toppling to the floor—twice with a concussion).

  Today she doesn’t even wait for me to get the gloves on, but rabbit punches me in the back of the head as I’m trying to get my hands into them. She always was a cheater. And a ref baiter. Smolinka was one of those girls who outperformed the boys. She was a long- and high-jumper, a sprinter, a marathon ace, a swimmer, a soccer player, and a home-run hitter—one of those all-around athletes who’s actually been careful to keep up her high school muscle tone. Of course, she was never very good at anything that required finesse, at pitching or tennis or target shooting—and that’s where I sometimes have an edge on her in the ring, moving side to side, up and down, showing her that power means nothing if you can’t make it connect.

  And these days, what with her being eight months pregnant, it’s easier than ever to outmanoeuvre Smolinka. On the other hand, she does have a hell of a lot more weight behind each fist, meaning that if I get distracted, or duck to the wrong side just once, and she connects, I might find myself steering straight for the mat, guided by that constellation of stars known only to victims of concussion and whiplash. So it’s bob and weave, bob and weave, while she pants and grunts and curses her reduced lung capacity. I bounce out of the corners and try sticking to the edges of the ring, where there’s less light, where it’s harder for her to tell the difference between my shadow and me. Naturally, I’m as handicapped as she is, since the only place I should be hitting her is between the forehead and the neck, while she’s got me from the belly up.

  I was never much of a talent at sports. Oh sure, I was average. I played on the teams and got my share of assists and goals. I suppose the best you could say was that I was reliable, a good seventh or eighth pick, not somebody who’d make a difference to winning or losing, but who could provide just the right kind of backup so that the star forwards would have a chance to shine. And so I was a little more leery than Smolinka when the marriage counsellor suggested boxing as a kind of coping mechanism for two people trapped in a failing relationship.

  But it worked. For years we’d been trying to get pregnant. We went to fertility clinics and impregnation conferences and psychic procreation workshops and even to some guy who recommended winding a certain kind of sea kelp around my dick during intercourse. Nothing worked. And Smolinka was so upset, I think, because her body, or what she wanted to do with it, had never been an obstacle before. Suddenly it was as if the laws of physics had bitten her on the ass, awakening her to the fact that there were limits to what she could attain. So she had plenty of rage to channel into jabs and uppercuts and haymakers. Plenty.

  We were sitting in the kitchen the day we discovered that our inability to bear children was “negatively impacting” our marriage. Smolinka was making smoothies, I remember, with bananas, milk, blueberries, and apple, and I was leafing through some obscure nineteenth-century manual (yes, we were that desperate) on the merits of Dr. Kolfass’s “East Indies remedy for the barren marriage,” whose recipe involved various kinds of dung beetles, when I just slammed the
book shut and said, “You know, maybe we should adopt.” That’s when Smolinka whipped around, ripped the blender lid off and doused me with smoothie. “Oh, sure,” she yelled, “that’s just like you, isn’t it? Encounter one tiny problem and then, wham, just give up without trying.” I sat there with banana and blueberries dripping off my head, thinking to myself, without trying? Here I was, poring over a recipe developed by some snake-oil salesman, and thinking seriously, seriously, about giving it a go, after having spent months and years and thousands of dollars on medical procedures and hypnotists and all manner of touchy-feely therapy, and she’s accusing me of not trying? “Listen, I know this has been hard for you, Smolinka; it’s been hard for me, too. But, you know, you can’t walk on water, for Christ’s sake, and if we can’t have kids we just can’t have kids!”

  “That’s the problem with you, William—you just don’t have an athlete’s attitude! You just don’t have the will to win! I don’t know if I can be married to someone like that.”

  Well, she was right about one thing.

  And the marriage counsellor went on at some length about my “attitude” before he decided that we needed to get into the ring.

  Smolinka circles around me now, her every step working to force me into a corner, to cut off my room to manoeuvre, but I’m still ducking the punches, moving away under her arms as they swing into empty air above my head. She hasn’t learned to compensate for the huge weight that’s developed around her waist over the last few months, and each shot sends her off balance, though not so off that I can connect with more than a light tap to the side of her head. I weave out, surprised at how much boxing strategy she’s retained, though I can feel a certain amount of it coming back as well. It’s just that I’m sweating, and she’s not even breathing hard—not even with the pregnancy.

  We started off taking lessons, on the counsellor’s recommendation. Smolinka, as I said, was a natural, picking up the moves and rhythms almost effortlessly, while I usually had to put in an extra day of practice—often on the sly—just to stay on the learning curve. This went on for months, and the marriage did seem to improve, at least in the sense that we were both too tired to go at one another, especially late into the night as we’d been used to doing.

  By the time we started sparring, Smolinka and I were both a little obsessed. I was reading boxing history, tons of it, and poring over videotapes of matches, from the earliest to the latest, which you could order by the crate from a place called Boxingenthusiasts.com. Smolinka, on the other hand, was just going at the bag, night after night, working on that hard, incredible, killer punch that only needed to connect once. So while I was getting “scientific,” she was getting deadly. There were no quote marks around anything that woman did.

  The very first time we stepped into the ring she gave me my first concussion. They tell you you see stars, and since the invention of the comics this has become the cliché of the big hit, that or birds swirling around your head, but the iconography is dead on, and I went off into deep space that first time, drifting farther and farther toward the mat as time slowed to molasses and I sank in it, knowing that there was no way I could move fast enough to stop what was happening—despite the slow motion of everything else around me. They used smelling salts to bring me back.

  After that I got smart, and she only gave me one more concussion. I even got to love boxing, although studying the moves of the pros, and making sure my technique never fell into a pattern Smolinka could predict, was as much a survival tactic as a passion.

  This went on for a year, things moving along just fine, except for those nights when I pulled off a victory or, worse, actually managed to knock her out (which I could only do via the “rope-a-dope” tactic, preserving my innards and face while Smolinka, impatient as ever, bounced shots off my forearms and fists until she was nearly falling over with fatigue, at which point I’d step in and clock her one with a short, stiff punch). On nights like that we wouldn’t really talk much, Smolinka turning up the radio really loud on the car ride home.

  As the boxing took over our lives we stopped talking about kids. By now, we’d converted part of the basement into an okay-sized workout area and built an extension off the back carport to house the ring we’d bought as a joint Christmas present. It was as if we were channelling all our grievances into the sport, with the effect that we had something constructive to talk about, a hobby we could work at together, and which left us, as I said, too tired from the workouts, or too focused on the next bout, to really have room for anything else.

  That’s when we made a mistake.

  At present, my mistake is not having tied double knots in my laces. And while I’m looking down and wondering how I’m going to tie them without taking off my gloves or, more important, dropping my guard, Smolinka raises my chin with a startling uppercut. My head snaps back and blackness floods my vision. She hammers three punches into my rib cage and I fall against the rope, breathing heavy. And when I try and twist on the ropes, I step on the lace and go farther off balance, so that she smacks me on either ear, one two, one two, a couple of times. The automatic bell rings just as she’s winding up, and I fall to my knees, narrowly escaping a knockout. “My shoelaces became untied,” I say. She shrugs, bouncing around the ring to her corner, leaving me in a squat, marvelling at how muscular her legs are, without a trace of cellulite, even with an eight-month fetus on the make. And I wonder why I’m calling it a “fetus” all of sudden, depersonalizing it, when it’s always just been the “baby.” Why this sudden rage, just when I thought I’d put all those feelings behind me? I crawl to my corner, pull off my gloves, and tie my shoelace, wiping blood from my nose onto a towel hanging from the corner.

  The problem was that the boxing, instead of decreasing Smolinka’s anger toward me, only seemed to fuel it. Oh sure, we didn’t argue anymore, and I didn’t find myself covered in smoothie or red wine or dishwashing water, but she had this ever-increasing intensity, this obsessive, terrible desire to win at all costs—that so-called killer instinct that separates the champion from the dilettante. I think it all came to a head one day when I accidentally walked in on her in the training room and she had a life-size portrait of a man’s head taped to the punching bag and was staring it in the eyes, screaming out “kill, kill, kill,” and then pounding and pounding it into shreds with her bare fists. I tried calling the counsellor for advice, but we’d stopped paying him months ago and he wouldn’t respond to any of my questions—bitter, I guess, because his idea had worked so well. There was just this long silence on the other end, until I said, “Okay, well I guess you haven’t got any help for me.” “Yes, thank you, goodbye,” he replied.

  I never spoke to her about that scene in the fitness room, and I don’t think Smolinka saw me spying on her, but even she remarked, once or twice, on how she had this incredible blood-lust whenever we got into the ring, and how afterwards she just felt so good and relaxed and peaceful. “What worries me,” Smolinka said one night, as we were lying in bed (the boxing had done wonders for our sex), “is that one day I’m going to kill you in a match and then I won’t have anyone to celebrate with afterwards.” She laughed, but I think I sensed a recognition there— that the two halves of her were becoming more and more irreconcilable, as if the boxing were driving her in conflicting directions, making her more nurturing at home and more homicidal in the ring, and that I was the emblem of this unappeasable contradiction. And I have to say that it did weird me out, the idea that my home life was so improved only because I had the shit beat out of me every week.

  As with most obsessively pursued hobbies, Smolinka and I would talk non-stop about boxing at parties and dinners and afternoon coffees. At first, everyone was shocked, especially when we’d show up with cuts over our eyes, or tape across the bridges of our noses, wincing when we sat down, or not being able to turn properly to slam the car door—the visible effects of injury and overexertion— but eventually they began to notice that we weren’t arguing anymore, that the “
scenes” Smolinka and I had once staged at friends’ places—such as yelling at each other, throwing dishes, asking the hosts and guests to take sides on an issue—were things of the past. And as old friends heard the rumours and reacquainted themselves with us and began inviting us back to all those parties we’d been barred from, they began to ask how we’d done it—mainly because most of them were experiencing marital problems as well. So we’d tell them about the boxing.

  I don’t know how it happened, but soon enough we were hosting boxing parties for married couples, and shortly thereafter Smolinka began working almost full eight-hour days to keep our fitness room up and running while husbands and wives came from all around to spar and train. We started making money at it; we started hosting tournaments; we found ourselves barely in control of a quickly growing business.

  And for two years it grew, like craziness. Smolinka ran most of the training sessions, the workouts, the marathon “conditioning” workshops, and I tried my best to keep the books in order, to make sure that everyone got a receipt and that our accountant was kept up to speed on the climbing enrolment figures.

  We had fun, too. There were weekly bouts, not only between Smolinka and myself but also other married couples, and afterwards there were beers and dinners and new friends. Smolinka and I were never better than in those twenty-four months, hammering each other in the ring and then, when that was over, passing the peroxide and band-aids back and forth between us, giving each other rubdowns, going for long jogs in the park every Saturday morning, and having sex at least once a day—all of which made our free fall out of boxing heaven that much more devastating. It’s easy to go from bad to worse, but to go from bad to bliss and then back again, that’s the worst.

  Naturally, it was the religious groups. It started with a notice written up in the bulletin handed out every week at the Baptist Church, something about “blood sport,” and “making a mockery of the sanctity of marriage,” or some fundamentalist shit like that. That was fine. Nobody cared what Baptists thought, and, anyhow, they sucked in the ring. Pretty soon the Jehovahs got involved, which was even less of a blip on the radar screen. But once the news of our “violence therapy” reached the moral majority, and the local Roman Catholic and Anglican and United Church ministers jumped on the bandwagon, then we knew we were in for a flood. I think the end came when a supposedly former member of our gym sent an anonymous letter to the paper alleging that we had “encouraged violent confrontation over mediation,” and that our philosophy of “brute force as a temporary solution to issues that really require a more ‘spiritual’ prescription went against all the dictates and messages underlying the Christian institution of marriage.” The fact that we’d never suffered one single defection from our gym pretty much killed this “former member’s” credibility; but my letters pointing this out, as well as elaborating our philosophy (that a “short-term solution” was often the best any marriage could hope for), must have gone straight into the editor’s garbage can, proving Smolinka’s contention that “the status quo has bricks in its gloves, and up its ass, too.”