THE MIRACLES OF SAINT MARX by Tamas Dobozy
One of the weirder people to surface during the era of Hungarian communism (and it was a time of much weirdness) was a priest by the name of Monsignor Jozsef Szent-Mihaly. There were a number of rumors concerning the man – that he was a fugitive in disguise; that he was a governmental agent rooting out antirevolutionary groups; that he was somebody who just really, really wanted to be a priest – but none was more fantastical than the one about the book he was writing.
The title of the manuscript (according to rumor) was “A Chronicle of the Miracles of Communism,” and it contained stories of such impossibility that people couldn’t stop recounting them – from Nyirábrány right across to Sopron. Naturally, this “chronicle” was a serious concern for the communist authority, for Marx had spent the better part of his life arguing that there were no such thing as miracles – that we, and only we, made up our fate. And our fate, in fact, was to realize exactly this: that the collective was all and the individual nothing – never mind what the capitalists and Christians said – and that it was the job of the state to help everyone remember this (with brutal force if necessary) because without it there would never be a better world.
But the stories were so interesting!
For instance, there was the story of Vasily Baazova, one of those unfortunate men in the gulags who were designated as “cows” by their fellow prisoners. These cows would be approached, told that an escape was being planned, and invited along. Then, once the prisoners had made their getaway and were out on the barren landscape with nothing but snow and ice for hundreds of miles, these cows would be killed and eaten by the other prisoners, who obviously hadn’t had the chance to pack sandwiches for the trip. The search parties sent out from the gulags would find their corpses drained of blood and cut open, their kidneys gone – since blood and kidneys are the only parts of the human body you can eat raw, and since lighting a fire to cook the rest would have given away the escapees’ location. But in this case Vasily somehow managed to fend off the attempt on his life and get away, living for six weeks on the frozen steppes (which was five weeks longer than the other prisoners lived), drinking melted snow and eating pages from Das Kapital, which he’d only brought along as fire-starter. When the patrols finally caught him, they couldn’t believe it, so he offered them a few pages that after a bit of argument they agreed to try, only to find that it was really quite good, with a taste somewhere between kotleti and bitochki.
Then there was the one about Ivan Baryatinsky, who was kicked out of the party for refusing to accede to the will of the state, and afterwards spent the next three decades wandering the streets of Moscow with placards strapped to his chest announcing how Lenin, and then Stalin, had failed to practice Marxism. Miraculously, he was not only left in peace to do this, but his situation always elicited sympathy from those he met, who defied the authorities by feeding and clothing him. Stranger yet, anyone who came into contact with Baryatinsky couldn’t help but continuing to extend this sympathy to others, so that wherever Baryatinsky went there was a sudden flowering of human fellowship, like a trail of roses left by a saint.
There was the story of Beryx Baboescu, the mechanical engineer charged with coming to grips with “the Roma problem” in Romania, which meant getting them to give up their itinerant ways and settle down and begin laboring like everyone else for the state. Baboescu’s solution, in a visionary moment, was to create the blueprints for what he called “The Mobile Town of the Proletariat,” houses and stores and factories, an entire village in fact, mounted on stilt legs, powered by enormous batteries and cogwheels, that would follow the Roma wherever they went, so relentless in its pursuit that it would wear them out, forcing them to accept defeat and settle down. Shortly after presenting his plan to the Soviet Council, Baboescu was taken somewhere “for his own good,” but almost immediately there were sightings of his mobile town all over the Romanian countryside – reports and photographs of forests mown down by their passage, large depressions where the stilt legs had left their imprint in sand, stone, asphalt. Even worse, it was reported that the Roma, instead of being harassed by “Baboescuville,” ended up realizing – after fleeing in terror for some months – that it was exactly the sort of place they were looking for, the sort of place where you could settle down but still get in a bit of sightseeing. And so they ended up moving in, taking up residence, traveling the country in a little utopia that was so much closer to what Marx had envisioned that everyone else in Romania wished they lived there too. It became such a source of shame to the communists – whose towns and cities could never live up to comparisons – that it was all they could do to threaten and imprison and execute anyone who mentioned it.
But the story that was to occupy agent Flori Nándorffy of the Hungarian secret police – otherwise known as AVÓ – was the one about the “Nándorffy Network,” though to start with her job was simply to find the priest (if he even existed), and his fellow counter-revolutionaries (if they even existed), and stop these subversive stories once and for all.
Insofar as Flori was concerned, she was famous too, though to a much lesser degree. Back in 1945, at the end of the second world war and the siege of Budapest, she’d infiltrated the so‑called Vannay Battalion, a combat unit put together by László Vannay, a right-wing fanatic who decided to support the Nazis even when all was lost, rounding up a bunch of old men and boys – none of whom had proper combat training – and sending them out against the Red Army. It was suicide of course, and when Vannay ran out of old men and kids, then he’d get more by raiding the cellars where civilians were hiding, enlisting those who could fight by showing them his pistol and offering them a choice between two deaths – one immediate, one probably later. As the official records had it, she’d disguised herself as a boy, infiltrated the battalion, and dispatched a number of its more “dedicated” agents, contributing in her small way to the eventual defeat of the Nazis and the Arrow-Cross Party, and winning for herself a number of commendations and decorations and a plum job assisting with the Soviet spread of terror once the war went cold. It was in this capacity that she was assigned to Szent-Mihaly. It was, as comrade Zabrovsky put it with a wink, the sort of “tactical betrayal” she “excelled at.” And Flori agreed, for it was exactly this reputation that had kept her alive, useful to the state, though not alive and well, for she had been drinking for years by then, quick nips during the day, and entire bottles by night.
She couldn’t remember when the rumors of the Monsignor and his Chronicle first began, and this was itself a problem as she started out, winding her way through the reports, vague reminiscences from men and women and even children who said they’d seen the book, even held it in their hands, or spoken to people who’d done so, or heard its contents read or recited (even, she discovered, in the way of bedtime stories) – for without a point of origin she could not measure their distance from the truth. Mainly, she found herself in the usual bars and outlying villages, broken down places, filled with people the Soviet had always prided itself on helping, but for whom their arrival – preceded as it was by bullets and fire, by soldiers killing and dying, by cities in flames – had only been another event in the ongoing cycle of deprivation. She tried to look the part, and she needed to, because everyone was suspect now, you couldn’t count on your unimportance, your expendability, to save you, not in a time when people were imprisoned and sent to work camps and executed to maintain the sense of arbitrariness, that anyone at any time could be picked up without a reason, as if the state’s caprice could keep consciences clean. And so these people could no longer sit around complaining about the local councils or the soldiers or the politicians as they once had about the emperor, the nobles, the bourgeoisie. She infiltrated them by appealing to their sense of wonder – speaking of things so distant from reality they seemed to have no bearing on the state around them – so that when they told her what she needed to hear they had no idea of the magnitude of their offense. And she made sure they saw how drunk she was, slurring her words and gazing around in disorientation, so that they could also believe she was in the midst of a black out, an episode she wouldn’t remember – that she was, in fact, one of them.
But the drunkenness was real. And looking back, the memory of those times would appear to Flori not as a series of dates – discreet occasions – but as one long moment, a smear of occurrence, filled with faces any one of which she could have picked out, accused, had imprisoned, making up the reasons, the evidence, as she went along, even after the fact. It was how she’d been working for the last two or three years, an agent of arbitrariness herself, bent on folding the world into her personal chaos.
“Yes, I’ve heard of the book,” the man told her, fingering his collar. “I’ve heard of you, too.” She looked at him surprised, but he was already on his feet, moving into the mass of people crazy in the bar – because it was already two in the morning now, those hours after closing time when drink opened onto hallucinations, transgression of law, of not only what was permitted but what was conceivable. And some were dancing, alone or in pairs or in groups of four or more, including one man doing a soft shoe under that soggy part of the roof where the rain came in – and by the time Flori heard the man’s voice again she was sitting on a toilet watching the dirty water inch up around her shoes.
“The Vannay Battalion,” she heard. A whisper. Flori shook her head, unsure if it came from the stall to the left or right, or whether it didn’t come, as it had done so many times before, from somewhere inside her skull. And as quickly as that, out came the rest: “You were hiding in the cellar during the siege. It was your parents who cut your hair, thinking that if you looked like a boy you might escape the fate of so many women then – the Red Army coming in, sore, tired, traumatized beyond morality – and the free looting they were granted by their commanders didn’t only extend to pockets and suitcases and wristwatches, did it? But Vannay came along first, forced you to join up, and he did something to your parents then that made sure you would never tell him who you really were. But you revealed yourself in the end, didn’t you?”
By this point Flori was already up, drunkenly and unsuccessfully yanking on her pants, stumbling out the door, ripping open those on the stalls beside her, first left, then right, then gazing overhead, then running her eyes along the floor. He was nowhere, not a footprint or a strand of toilet paper or a running tap to mark that he’d ever been there.
In the days that followed, Flori kept her flat cap down over her eyes, moving between the homes of people she’d seen in the bar, not many of whom (like her) remembered what they’d been doing that night, at those hours, never mind the person whose face she described. But Flori had some of them arrested anyhow, and so they opened up with all sorts of information, none of it useful or true – talking and talking just to say something, to avoid the admission of guilt that came with keeping silent.
How could he have known what happened back then? There were no real records, no photographs, no eyewitnesses, nothing. And while there was suspicion among the members of the party as to the extent of her “infiltration” of the Vannay Battalion, that suspicion was more the standard relationship between people, especially in the party, than anything derived from evidence. Yet he knew.
At nights she stayed up looking at his photograph, wondering how a man could change so much in seven years. At first, she thought his face looked weathered, stripped away, disfigured to the point of being less than it was, but as the days went on and she moved along the track of stories and possible sightings she thought back to how it had looked in the bar that night and changed her mind. The face was less than it was only because it had been added to – as if he was wearing bits and pieces of the faces of others, as if he’d carried away with him a trace of those he’d met, others like him, on the periphery of a state that wasn’t supposed to have a periphery, that was supposed to have abolished it – taken what was best in them, but without absorbing it, as if it was possible to give them room, to maintain them as they had been, in that place where he had the most to lose of himself, his appearance. And as Flori thought of this, she realized he’d taken something of her as well, something she was determined to get back, and then to destroy once and for all by destroying him. But by the time she’d realized that it was quite the opposite – that rather than taking something from her he’d given something back – she would know that he’d also passed on the responsibility of testifying to those who were lost, to keeping their memory always before her. The miracles and manifestations and folk tales that surrounded him were only camouflage for the most ordinary of details.
She was at mass the second time they met – or, more accurately, made contact, because once again he was gone before she was aware of him. This was the time – the early 1950s – when Cardinal Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, had been arrested – threatened, starved, refused sleep for days on end, had broken glass forced up his ass, made to sign documents he’d repudiated in a public letter prior to his arrest (saying anything he signed while in the hands of his interrogators would be invalid, the result of “human weakness”) – all because he’d refused to cede churches and schools to the communist minority who’d taken over the country. It was the time when the party sent agents (known as “snitches”) to church to transcribe the sermons of priests for use in show trials afterwards. A time when being Catholic meant you couldn’t be in the party, couldn’t rise in the ranks of the communist aristocracy, couldn’t get a decent job. A time when people often met this way, in churches makeshift or barely standing, according to a schedule that somehow arrived to them, along routes so twisted you couldn’t imagine the landscape it had been carried through. But of course the party knew of them, and so the Monsignor knew Flori would be there, sitting in a pew, not so much recording every word as figuring out what she would say the priest had said, when an envelope was slid over her shoulder by someone in the pew behind her. By the time she’d grabbed it, and glanced inside, and quickly folded the flap back in alarm and wheeled around there was only a little boy there, staring up clutching the coin the Monsignor had given him for passing on the information, proud of finally having something to put in the collection basket.
Her story was inside it – the whole story – including snapshots of the boys she’d killed when she’d turned on the Vannay Battalion – all written out in the form of an accusation. She let the letter and the photographs slide from the bed, remembering what it had been like inside that building – trapped with the Red Army all around – Flori only sixteen years old, and the three boys – aged fourteen, seventeen, and eighteen – firing weapons they were already experts at reloading. There had been some SS in there to begin with, all three injured, two of them dying the first day after crawling over to lean against the doorways. Why the doorways she couldn’t say. The third one lived for three more days, sitting there demanding water, and reminding them, as often as possible, about the number of Soviet soldiers outside, the sorts of weapons they had, what those weapons could do to the human body. But most of all he kept repeating how they were going to die. “It’s what we all deserve,” he laughed, holding his hand over the gash in his stomach. Even worse were the horses the SS had brought in there, up the staircase to the third floor, so starved they had barely enough energy to kick holes in the walls, to tear with their teeth at each other and anyone else who approached, before the soldiers outside managed to kill one with a rocket, and the other two with a single bullet each. “I brought them in case we needed to escape,” the third soldier laughed. “So we could get on them and ride away.” The stink of corpses was insane. But in the early days, when their stomachs were still big enough to feel hunger, they ignored the smell and searched up and down the carcasses, watching for the thin line that separated meat already gone sour, rotting, poisoned from meat they could keep down, carving it out and tossing it into the fire and then swallowing the blackened lumps hot as coal. Then it was back to scrambling across the heaps of fallen masonry and concrete, iron rods and fallen chandeliers, releasing a volley of shots from one window, then another, then up or down a flight of stairs, passing another member of the battalion who was doing what you were doing but in the opposite direction, the stairwell ringing with the voice of the German soldier sapping what frantic energy they still had, “You’re going to die. You’re all going to die.” Within days they’d stopped jumping over the bodies in the doorways, the horses in the salon, first stepping on them carefully, then running across, until they had to stop looking at what was beneath their feet, making the way so clotted and slippery.
She never would remember if it was Gyuri or Gero˝ who found the manhole in the cellar, calling them down to help lift off the manhole cover. Descend down that iron ladder, and then what? she’d thought. Only to come up somewhere else in the city, places just as bad or worse, the siege dragging into its fiftieth day, whole blocks so pulverized by ordnance and fire your feet stumbled on rooftops fallen into the street, trying to figure out where a corner had been, an avenue, the place you’d once lived. Down that ladder and then what? And as they stood looking down, Gero˝ in the middle of asking who was going to go first, the body floated by. The body of a woman, naked. Her fingers entwined with the fingers of another hand, smaller, attached to a smaller body trapped somewhere in the water beneath her, drifting this way and that, turned away from the air, from what was happening in the world up there. And when Flori next heard the sound of gunfire, and the shouts in Russian, she realized they’d been going on for a while, closer than what she was used to. Flori would always remember what happened next, the looks on their faces when she was the first one to get her gun out – her, a girl, faster than anyone else. It was the memories after that that would be unclear – ripping off her Vannay insignias and then running to open the door for the Soviet soldiers, mumbling incoherently in Hungarian and the little Russian she knew about how she was Jewish, fleeing the Nazis, her parents being members of the communist faction of the Independence Front, her capture by Vannay’s men, how she befriended them, gained their trust, and then, when their guard was down, in the midst of their escape, grabbing one of their guns. “I would not let them go into the tunnel,” she shouted. “I would not!” As it turned out, the Russians didn’t really care about what she was saying, except for the part about how “friendly” she’d been with the boys – making her demonstrate this skill over and over again that afternoon – though she was to cling to the story even when it was obvious no one cared, that it was only her present usefulness the party was interested in.
Now she picked up the pictures and looked at the faces. Did Szent-Mihaly carry bits and pieces of their expressions as well? She looked at them closely, and tried to remember a time when it would have been difficult to turn on these faces – on any faces – to betray them. And then she wondered how Szent-Mihaly had found out about what had happened, reading through the letter again, carefully examining the photographs, turning them over to read the dates on the back – Gero˝ Tolscvay (February 12, 1947), Gyuri Kelemen (February 12, 1947), János Szabó (February 12, 1947).
1947. They should have been dead for two years by then.
Then Flori was staring at the pictures again, flipping them back and forth, reaching for the bottle of pálinka, noticing how little the boys had aged and yet how much, comparing them with the faces she remembered from the moment she’d trained the gun on them, the way they’d spoken her alias, Laci, once each, and her saying, “I’m not Laci, I’m not Laci, I’m not Laci,” again and again while pulling the trigger. And then, taking up the bottle, Flori was out of the room, out into the frigid winter without shoes or a coat or any knowledge of how to retrace her steps, holding the letter and pictures and turning this way and that on the streets, as if randomness itself, as if the loss of maps, was the only way of getting near Szent-Mihaly, as if what she needed to forget was how much she needed to find him – how much her happiness depended on it.
“What if I told you they were alive? That they’d all survived?” Flori looked up from where she’d eventually fallen down, feeling the weight of something on her chest, the large coat he’d taken off and wrapped around her, snow hanging from eaves overhead, the priest rubbing his hands together as if it was that easy to wash them of everything. “What if I told you they’re alive today only because of what you did – because the Russians left them for dead?” She was shivering under the coat, her mouth stuck together. “What if I told you that everyone you’ve gone after since then, all of them, only survived because you turned them in?” He opened a file and spilled them across the cobblestones under her eyes, faces on faces on faces, all of which she remembered as she remembered the faces of the boys, that look on the other side of goodbye, when the waving’s done and you’ve already given yourself to what is to come. “Mária Ligeti – the sole survivor of a prison train derailment,” he said. “Erzsébet Hauser – if she’d been arrested two days later she would have been charged as part of the White October conspiracy.” He pointed at another picture. “Peter Horvath – turned out, unbeknownst to him, that he was a loyal comrade who’d infiltrated a reactionary network.” The Monsignor smiled. “They were looking for someone to play that role; Peter went along with it.” He laughed, and it sounded to Flori as bright and as warm a thing as she’d ever heard. “I like to call them the Nándorffy Network.” He patted her once more. “You’re in my book: Flori the miracle worker.” He rose. “Look them up if you don’t believe me.”
It seemed to take a lot longer to get home than it did to get lost. Was she found, or had the Monsignor turned her in? There were policemen, then the usual calls through the usual channels, and then long nights of questions, a revolving door of men who came and went with their stock phrases and ideological tilts of the head. “It’s not normal that someone gets away from us,” they said. Not officially, she thought, though in a second amended this to, not normally, and then amended that, spoken aloud, to, “He hasn’t gotten away.” The interlocutors (as they called themselves, though they were really interrogators) looked at her then, and she frowned back, returning the expression of revolutionary seriousness they wanted rather than the bourgeois delight she felt, and was increasingly feeling, at what Szent-Mihaly had told her. “I know where to find him.”
She didn’t, of course. But they didn’t know that, their doubts tempered by her record of rooting out reactionary forces. And so they gave her two days to come up with him – two days, not enough time for her to disappear as well. Flori went home that day, throwing out every bottle – empty, half drunk, totally full – tossing them one by one into the garbage chute in the main corridor, and listening to them shatter as they rebounded off the tin walls on the way down. And then Flori packed a suitcase, prepared her maps, her free train passes, everything she would need, and then she slept. Upon getting up, she made a phone call, listing off the names – Gero˝ Tolscvay, Gyuri Kelemen, János Szabó – and the approximate ages, ignoring anyone that was too young or too old, and then collecting those addresses that seemed to fit the men she was looking for. As she walked out she looked at the calendar, noting that it was Friday, which meant she had until Sunday to find the priest or follow him into hiding, and reflected then that this didn’t at all seem coincidental, as if the Monsignor had known how much time they’d give her, how much time she would have to make contact with the three boys she needed to find, to pry from them the secret of their escape and vanishing, and to then use it herself.
But that feeling of lightness she had that morning – as if she’d been freed of her fatalism, the sense she’d had, carried for years, that where she’d ended up, the things she was doing, were as inevitable as her betrayal of the boys, the logic of a flawed character in an equally flawed world – this was not to last. For within a day, Flori was seeing strange faces peering at her from doorways, men called Gero˝ Tolscvay and Gyuri Kelemen and János Szabó for whom there was no spark of recognition in seeing her. None of them looked anything like the faces she remembered so well, or the ones in the photographs Szent-Mihaly had given her and which she’d lost staggering through the town that day, so that by Saturday afternoon Flori turned into one of the tiny bars on the outskirts of Miskolc and began ordering one shot of cherry pálinka after another, staring up at the roof as if by following the cracks she might find a hole in tomorrow, Sunday, when she’d agreed to be waiting in her room at the appointed hour with the information on how to get to the Monsignor and his book. She was still following those cracks, now multiplied with the double-vision of drunkenness, when the bartender gently said it was time to go and she slid off the seat onto the floor, continuing to gaze up as if at constellations, trying to read something in the glitter of the lamp hanging from the ceiling. They ended up looking at her insignias carefully, and then pretending to hold her with the greatest dignity, by the elbows, and escorting her out – though what they really did was simply lift her off the floor and dump her outside.
Then came the long night, Flori sitting on the bed awake, too lost to go in search of more to drink, or to do anything other than work her way through a sleep she refused to give in to, shaking her head every time it came over her. And then the morning, so clear she knew there’d be no forgetting it, the slow onset of the shakes, the fears magnified by whatever it was the alcohol did to her brain, synapses firing and misfiring, the sudden shudders of an ever worse imagining. And when there was a knocking on the door she crawled under the sheets away from it.
It was Szent-Mihaly who lifted them off her, peering down and asking how good it had felt, over the last weeks, thinking that the boys and women and men she’d killed in one way or another were all still alive, the priest staring at her with eyes so tired, his face more crumpled than she remembered it.
“There’s no Nándorffy Network is there?” she said, pushing the hair out of her eyes. “You made all that up.” In response, the priest shrugged, so casual it seemed as if the presence or absence of miracles – and of the book that was rumored to contain them – was a matter of complete indifference for him, though at the same time she detected no cynicism in his manner, rather the sense that the book was not important in the way she’d thought it was – that his project, one he would risk his life for, was conceived along entirely different lines.
“I must look tawdry to you,” he said, not so much sitting down into a chair as dropping into it. “Like a common criminal,” he continued, shrugging again.
“The church is a criminal organization,” she said, finding comfort not so much in the idea as in the return to a definite position – a script whose beginning and middle and ending she knew by heart.
And here he described for her some of the things he’d seen (though how he’d gotten in to see them she could only guess): state dinners where servants walked around the party members with trays of champagne and caviar, everyone dressed in the best possible clothes, twirling through the ballrooms; hunting lodges for members of the inner party where they were attended on by butlers and maids and where they rode out in traditional hunting regalia across land kept from everyone else by barbed wire, shooting their guns and collecting their game like Viennese aristocrats; prostitution rings that catered only to the most refined of Marxist tastes. “But of course,” he continued, “since the money for this comes from the state all of these people can turn and say, ‘But I have nothing, my pockets are empty, I’m as poor as you – and meanwhile living like kings.’ ”
“What those people do, what they’ve done, is not really communism.”
“We say the same things about bad popes – that what they did wasn’t really Christianity,” he leaned forward. “But wasn’t it Marx himself who said there is only history – only the things that were actually done – to guide our thinking? All the rest,” he fluttered his hands in the air like birds, “real communism, real Christianity, these are just metaphysics. Daydreams. Bad excuses.”
“We’ve done some good things.”
“Most people do,” he said, “here and there.”
She looked at him, and he laughed, saying, “They’re not so different – the two systems.” He watched her rise from the bed, and reach for the bottle of pálinka. “I’m not really a priest,” he continued, shifting his gaze to the window. “It’s just a way of operating.” He paused. “But you haven’t answered my question. It was nice for you, for a while, thinking differently about yourself?”
But it was here that they – the ones Flori had been expecting – entered the room.
What Flori would remember, what she would take away from what followed, was not the surprise of the policemen as they shifted their focus from her to the priest and back again, nor the scrape of quick feet on the floor, the scuffle of bodies, the detaining and slaps and the forced march out the door, nor the grudging respect on the face of the comrade Zabrovsky at how she’d once again managed, in the last second, to turn the tables. Rather, she would remember the shock on Szent-Mihaly’s face, and the way it was directed not at the arrival of AVÓ but at her, as if what was unexpected was the fact that she had known they were coming and yet not warned him beforehand. “I thought you’d see what I was telling you,” he said, as they pulled and kicked him from the room. “Remember – I told you to find them! Why would I have done that if . . ?” He was gone.
In an instant Zabrovsky was back in the room, commending her with his usual sarcasm: “Excellent work, comrade Nándorffy. But there is still the matter of the book . . . the so‑called ‘Chronicle.’ Of course it is the true threat, more than the priest. Reactionary, capitalistic, metaphysical. Where is it?”
But Flori was only half listening, for it was here, in realizing how wrong Zabrovsky was, that she finally understood what Szent-Mihaly’s purpose had been in telling her to find the three boys. He knew she would fail, and perhaps, in that moment of failure, to find not those three people, or the rest, all of them long dead but that place inside herself she’d likewise lost, buried deep, forgotten it even existed – replaced by a cynicism that allowed her to stand there as the police kicked in the door and hauled people like him away. And it had worked, she had felt better in the last few weeks, even as she was being asked question after question, overcome by a feeling of lightness she no longer believed existed, as if it was possible, after all, to think that individual action – laziness, charity, vigilance, indifference, greed, envy, love, ambition – even the smallest of gestures, a moment’s shift in attitude, could add up to something else, better or worse.
“Comrade Nándorffy, need I mention your responsibility to the state?”
What state, she thought, gazing left and right. This was not about the state, either serving or rising in it, not about churches and soviets and aristocracy and other forms of government, but the place where history was made – in the way you faced everyone else – for it was not miracles Szent-Mihaly had been offering, but himself, making people laugh at what they all knew was untrue, returning them from the dream-state, and its history, to the moment they created – the moment in which they lived.
“Comrade Nándorffy!”
“The book got away from me,” she finally said. “It’s out there.”
Tamas Dobozy’s second book of short fiction is Last Notes (HarperCollins in Canada, Arcade Publishing in the U.S., 2006).