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 hear 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