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
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 Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944–1945
The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived
The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins
The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto
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