Siege 13. Tamas Dobozy

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СКАЧАТЬ the adoption course, sitting beside other desperate couples, listening to lectures on cultural sensitivity, answering awkward questions about our sex life, swearing that we never touched drugs. We’d gotten our certificate, endured the routine visit of the social worker, who slept in our guest room and concluded his assessment by saying Anna and I had a “very strong bond of friendship,” which means he knew we’d lied on the sex question.

      But there was no baby. More than one agency told us we were too particular, wanting a girl, preferably no older than three (though we were willing to go as high as six) from that part of Hungary called Erdély—“Transylvania” in English—ceded to Romania in 1919 by the Treaty of Trianon. This was Anna’s obsession, inherited from her beloved father, an old man when I knew him, hair poking from his ears, ceiling lights bringing out the veins in his head, which he shaved with electric clippers every morning. He was always sitting in the kitchen in that awful house in North Ward, old calendars clinging to the wall with their maps of Hungary from before 1919, and then, inside that territory, the tiny Hungary of today marked with a red border. Her father was one of those angry nostalgics—Trianon this, Trianon that; “kis Magyarország nem ország, nagy Magyarország mennyország”; fondly recalling how much lost territory Hitler had returned between the wars—gnashing his teeth at the two million ethnic Hungarians stranded in Erdély, how they were being “culturally cleansed,” not allowed to publish in their own language, schools closed, whole villages uprooted and forcibly assimilated to the south, politicians such as Ceaus¸escu dreaming of their disappearance, barely restrained from the genocide they would have preferred—why wait three generations if you didn’t have to?—when there’d be no one left to testify that the place had never been Romanian. Meanwhile the Hungarians kept hanging on—to their language, their culture, their identity—ninety years running.

      Anna’s father had lived through the siege of Budapest, the subject his rants on Erdély inevitably came around to, grumbling how the Hungarians had no choice at all, between the Nazis on one side and the Soviets on the other, and at least Hitler offered to give back territory the country had lost—“Over fifty percent of our nation taken away”; “No country lost as much as Hungary did and we’d even opposed going to war!”; “the French hated us, that’s the reason for Trianon, prejudice pure and simple.” It was as if his vision of the siege—soldier after soldier, death after death, his own memories of being stuck in Budapest, hungry and thirsty and terrified, that parade of fatal images—spun off the inked signatures of Trianon. He and his country had endured the siege—endured what came before, and what came after—because of Trianon. Nothing could dissuade him. I heard it every time I went there, and its naiveté, its absence of even a respectable hint of fatalism, as if you really should be able to expect justice in this world, made me crazy, and, worse, reminded me of my father, who’d wanted no part of that flailing impotence and the military solution it craved—the happy days of Hitler’s Reich. My father had just wanted to forget, sitting in Toronto’s Szécsényi Club drinking pálinka and playing tarok, happy his son had married a Hungarian girl and that his grandchildren would one day speak Hungarian. That was enough for him.

      But it wasn’t enough for Anna’s father, and it wasn’t enough for her. She wanted an orphaned girl—first because it was so hard for Hungarians in Erdély already, and second because girls were subhuman in Hungarian culture (this was Anna’s refinement on her father’s beliefs, one he would never have agreed with). An orphaned girl didn’t have a chance. It was an act of “cultural rescue,” that’s what Anna said to the caseworker when he told us there were plenty of Romani kids, kids with AIDS, even some Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, and of course whole battalions of Romanian kids filling the orphanages in Bucharest to overflowing. “The Hungarians in Transylvania look after their own,” he said to us. “If you want a Hungarian girl there’s tons in Hungary.” But Anna shook her head. And when the agency did find us one, there was always some problem—a form we hadn’t filled out, a glitch in the paperwork, another hidden processing fee—and after that another wait from six to eight months, by which point the child was gone. Either that or we made it to the finish line, received the file—the family records, the medical reports, the photographs—and Anna took them to our doctor, who held them in the light and said, “Hm, see these shadows under the left ear, those bumps, that could be something.” He tilted the pictures. “Or it could be nothing.” Anna would come home and brood over Scotch and soda, and after a few days request more information, which the agency could never obtain, and finally she’d turn down the adoption. Then I’d lie in bed at night listening as Anna talked in her sleep, apologizing to the child, begging forgiveness, smashing her fists so hard against her face I had to wake and then hold her while she cried. Finally, we decided I should go to Romania, that maybe I could do in person what we’d failed to do through bureaucracy.

      “In the Museum of Failed Escapes there are sails made out of tinfoil,” I can still hear Judit saying, her voice slurred, on the verge of laughter. Her drunkenness, I would realize, was more an affectation than reality, all part of the act, and that any day of the week she could have drunk me under the table. “They are perfect mirrors,” she continued. The sailor set them afloat one day on the Sea of Hungary when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and they sparkled so that a man could swim unseen from one shore to the next, because the snipers were blinded by the glittering armada.

      “The Sea of Hungary? There’s no Sea of Hungary!”

      “There is. There are many. You don’t know anything about this country.”

      “Where are they?”

      “There’s a map of it in the museum. One day I’ll show it to you.”

      There are certain retreats you make—retreats that seem to come naturally—when your marriage is spent. I saw it with some clarity in Budapest, sitting up at night, Judit asleep in bed beside me, thinking back to that moment when things were at their worst, six or seven years ago, Miklós was two or three, staring out a window then as I was staring out of one now, dreaming of what it would be like to get the whole thing over with—the arguments, the divorce, splitting up our stuff, arranging custody, and then, after that, starting all over, the initial freedom, the loneliness, followed by another relationship, followed by a marriage that would more than likely end just as this one had. The problem in the sequence, no matter how I arranged it, was me. For years now I’d been doing more and more as Anna asked—keeping an eye out for dirty laundry; for meals I could make; chores around the house; driving Miklós here and there; sitting on the veranda with her at night drinking and talking, trying to be pleasant—a hundred minor obligations and pleasures, the careful work of putting your needs to one side to make sure that everything goes well, and then collecting your rewards: a child’s laugh, your wife smiling thank you, your neighbour visiting with extra strawberries from the garden. It’s perfect enough on the surface, but that’s all it is, containing less and less of yourself, of what you really want, until one day you realize that the only life that matters, the only place you exist, is on the inside, a world you no longer mention, filled with wants so unrealizable there’s no point in even talking about them, whole continents of desire taken off the map, excised but ever-present even as your wife and child talk to you and you pretend to listen.

      This, I suppose, is why on one lonely business trip I ended up leafing through the Yellow Pages looking at the ads for escort services. It seemed ideal, the intentions were absolutely clear—sex on one side, money on the other—and none of the stuff people who had affairs, and I knew a few of them, had to deal with: running a second relationship involving as many compromises as the first, the fear of exposure, the snowballing of desire into demands: “I want us to take a trip together!” “I want you to leave your wife!” “If we’re to continue together we have to do it honestly and in the open!” And so these people, most of them men, would be forced to choose between a home life that was, except for the occasional irrepressible urge, the one they wanted, and a life that had no basis except for those urges. Who needed that kind of stress? As far as relationships went, my marriage was as good as I was likely to get, and beyond СКАЧАТЬ