Siege 13. Tamas Dobozy

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СКАЧАТЬ enemy by marching Hungarian men and women in front of them through the streets and forcing them to call out, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, we’re Hungarians, give yourselves up”; though to the west the fighting was still thick, relentless, out there across the Danube, on the Buda side of the city, where the Nazis and Arrow-Cross were holed up on Castle Hill, surrounded, running out of ammunition and food, dreaming of a breakout.

      Of the animals they’d released, a few vultures and eagles remained, circling above the zoo and drifting down lazily to feed on the plentiful carrion in the streets. When they returned to their nests, Sándor would wonder what was more poisonous in their bellies, the flesh of communists or fascists. He would say things like that. They held discussions, long into the night, and József said the fascists were wrong to speak of their beliefs, the society they envisaged, as natural, for no animal was ever interested in war for glory, or compiling lists of atrocities, or mastering the world, or getting rid, en masse, of another species, and that more often than not what animals did was tend only to their immediate needs, and in doing so created a kind of harmony . . . “Harmony?” laughed Sándor. “You sound like a communist!” And he spoke of how a male grizzly will kill the cubs belonging to another male so that the female will mate with him; how he’d once heard about a weasel that came into a yard and killed twenty-five chickens, biting them through the neck, without taking a single one of the corpses to eat; how certain gulls will steal eggs from others, sit on them until they hatch, and then feed the chicks to their own young; how a cat will play with whatever it catches, torturing it slowly to death, all out of amusement. “Does that sound like harmony to you?” he asked József.

      Zamertsev looked a moment at József, who sat there trembling in the creaking chair in the headquarters the Red Army had put up in one of the half-obliterated mansions along Andrássy Boulevard, still dressed in the ragged attendants’ uniform, unwashed these hundred days, his hair matted and filthy, so shrivelled by hunger Zamertsev thought he could see the man’s spine poking through the skin of a belly fallen in on its emptiness. Then Zamertsev came around the desk and grabbed József’s chin roughly in one hand and said, “I’m not interested in what you think I want to hear. Politics. . . .” He glanced at the interpreter, who raised his eyebrows. “I want to protect my . . . the people’s army . . . which means telling me about Sándor, what he did, what I’m dealing with . . .”

      Protect the people’s army. József wanted to laugh. If your soldiers had been kept in check, if they hadn’t come in wanting a safari all their own, we wouldn’t have had to free the animals in the first place. After that, Sándor seemed intent on prowling around the zoo as if he was an animal himself, even though József warned him to stay inside, because there wasn’t a day when one of the carnivores that was still alive didn’t come upon another, the polar bear devouring the wolves, the wolves taking apart the panther, the lion emerging at night. But that’s how it was then: József working hard to conserve himself, to survive, while Sándor had given up on everything—first sleep, then food, then safety—divesting himself of every resource.

      Somehow Sándor had gotten word to the Russians that the lion was living in the tunnels of the subway, and when the other predators were gone—having finally eaten one other, or been shot, or wandered off—then the lion took to eating stray horses. Sándor would point out its victims to József when they went out to gather snow for drinking water, Sándor hobbling along, weakened enough by then to need the help of one of Teleki’s canes, though he still had enough presence of mind to show József how it was teeth not ordnance that had made the gaping holes along the flanks and backs and bellies of the horses. “The lion must be weakened,” said Sándor, clutching himself, “otherwise, it would have dragged the carcass away to where it lives, and eaten the whole thing.”

      “Or maybe it’s too full to bother,” said József, envious of its teeth.

      At night, József would awaken and not even turn toward Sándor’s pallet, because he knew he wasn’t there. Night after night he’d awaken and Sándor would be out. Sleepwalking is what József thought at first, but when he asked about it, Sándor would laugh and say he’d been out “getting horses.” There wasn’t a lot to what Sándor said anymore, though truth to tell József himself was having trouble coming up with anything to say, and of saying it, when he did, in a meaningful way.

      “My soldiers tell me Sándor was meeting with them,” said Zamertsev. “That he was arranging lion hunts in the subway tunnels.”

      “You could fit a herd of horses in there,” nodded József. “But it was very dark. And the soldiers were always drunk. And there were bullets flying all over the place.”

      “It was one way to feed the lion,” said Zamertsev. “You knew about it. Perhaps even helped him?”

      No, József shook his head, and then a second later, he nodded yes, and then stopped, not knowing who or what he’d helped, deciding that it certainly wasn’t Sándor. Zamertsev was wrong to think that Sándor was feeding the lion, for that’s what József had thought at first as well, as if the lion and Sándor were two separate things. But it was better that Zamertsev think this than what József knew to be the truth, the transformation he’d witnessed the day he’d carried Sándor to the subway entrance, one of the few that wasn’t bombed out or buried in rubble or so marked by the lion’s presence that even humans could sense the danger there. He’d pressed his body against the door—it was an old service entrance used by the engineers and subway personnel, wide enough to fit a small car, covered with a corrugated metal door—envisioning that awful metamorphosis.

      As it turned out Zamertsev wasn’t like the other soldiers, so easily led into the same trap. He sent for one of his men and told him to get a map of the old Franz Josef Underground Line, staring silently at József until the blueprints were delivered, at which point he spread them across the desk and began tracing the possible routes into and out of the subway, ignoring entirely the service entrance József had told him about. It was as if Zamertsev knew, József thought, as if he’d discerned the bits of the story he’d left out, and was even now being guided over the map by what József hadn’t told him about that last night, when Sándor had crawled over and whispered to him of the effort of getting horses for the lion, of how weak he’d become, though what József really heard in his voice was a hunger so great it would have swallowed him then and there if Sándor had had the strength, if he felt he could have overpowered his friend. “I can’t do it alone,” Sándor mumbled. “I can’t walk.” When József asked if their friendship no longer meant anything to him, Sándor rubbed the place in his skull where his cheeks had been and said something about “word getting around,” and the soldiers “staying away,” and then paused and smiled that terrible smile, lipless, all teeth. “It’s because I’m your friend that I’m asking you to do this. There is no greater thing a friend could do,” he said, laughing without a trace of happiness.

      József had looked at him then, turning from where he’d been facing the wall, hugging himself as if in consolation for the emptiness of his stomach, for the delirium of this siege without end, the constant fear, the boredom, waiting on the clock, the slow erasure of affection, of the list of things he would not do. “The city is destroyed,” he said, not wanting to do as Sándor asked, not wanting even to address it, for he thought he’d caught another implication in his voice now, one even worse than what the words had at first suggested. “There are people dead and starving,” he continued, “the Soviets are looting, hunting, raping, and you’re worried about a lion. Fuck the lion,” said József, “fuck everything,” and he turned over on his pallet, lifting the layers of plastic sacks and tarpaulin they used for blankets. But Sándor nudged him again, and when József let out an exasperated moan and turned, he saw that his friend was already half transformed, the hair wild around his head and neck, his fingernails much longer than József’s, and dirtier too, packed underneath with the hide and flesh of horses and men and what else, reduced from malnourishment and injury and trauma to crawling around on all fours. “I need you,” СКАЧАТЬ