The Encirclement

At some point during the lecture Sándor would get up, point a finger at Professor Teleki and accuse him of lying – and Teleki would gasp and sputter and grow red in the face and the audience would love it. But it wasn’t an act, and Teleki had approached Sándor many times – either personally or through his agent – to ask what his problem was. He even offered him money, which Sándor accepted, only to break his promise and show up at the lectures again – to the point where audiences started expecting him, as if Teleki’s presence was secondary, playing the straight man to this hectoring, vindictive blind guy who was the star of the show.

Yes, Sándor was blind. Which only made it more incredible, especially in the early days, that he’d managed to follow Teleki all over North America, from one stop on the lecture circuit to the next. ‘How the hell can a blind man,’ Teleki yelled at his agent, ‘get around the country so quickly?’ Nonetheless, Teleki could see it: Sándor in a dark overcoat, black glasses not flashing in the sunshine so much as absorbing it, his cane tip-tapping along the pavement through all kinds of landscape – deserts, mountains, prairies – and weather – squalls, blizzards, heatwaves – aimed directly at the place where Teleki had scheduled his next appearance. It was like something out of a bad folktale.

But once Teleki started bribing him the vision changed, and he always pictured Sándor sipping mai tais in the airport lounge before boarding with the first-class ticket Teleki’s hush money had bought him, chatting amiably with businessmen and flirting, in a blind-man sort of way, with the stewardesses, though this was as far from the truth as the first vision had been, as Sándor himself explained.

They sat in the bar of the Seelbach Hilton in Louisville and Sándor, with a casual seriousness that always drove Teleki crazy, told him he hadn’t spent a cent Teleki had given him and that every single trip had been accomplished through the ‘assistance of strangers’. All he had to do, Sándor said, was step out the door and instantly there were people there, asking if he was okay, if there was anything they could do to help, if there was something he needed. When Teleki said he found it hard to believe that such spontaneous charity could have gotten him from Toronto to New York, to Montreal, Halifax, Boston, Chicago, Calgary, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Anchorage, in that order, on time for every single one of his lectures, Sándor replied, ‘You can believe it or not, but that’s exactly what happened.’ He’d found out about Teleki’s itinerary, grabbed his coat and suitcase and cane, and walked out of the door into the care of the first stranger he’d met, and from there, ‘Well, things took care of themselves.’ Teleki looked at him, then around the Seelbach, wondering if he could get away with strangling Sándor right there.