The Encirclement

The point at which Sándor would usually rise from his seat – various people supporting him by the elbows – was when Teleki began to describe the morning of January 18, 1945 in Budapest, the minute he’d stepped off the Chain Bridge, and the order went out to blow it up, along with the Hungarian and German soldiers, the peasants and their wheelbarrows full of ducks, the middle-class children and women and men, suitcases packed, still streaming across it. By then, the bridges were a tangled mass of metal, holes gaping along the causeway, cars stuck in them, on fire, bodies shredded by Soviet artillery and tangled in the cables and railings, thousands of people trying to force their way across in advance of the Soviets, trampling and being trampled on, cursing in the near dark, forced over the sides into the icy river, mowed down by fighter planes, Red Army tanks, machine guns, while behind their backs, in that half of Budapest, the siege went on, fighting from street to street, building to building, the whole place ablaze.

‘Tell them how you grabbed two of the children whose parents had died coming across the bridge,’ Sándor would yell at him at this point. ‘Tell them how you held them to your chest, telling the Arrow Cross officer you couldn’t join the siege effort because your wife had just died. And then tell them how you abandoned those kids in the next street. You tell them that!’ Sándor jabbed his cane in Teleki’s direction.

‘That never happened!’ Teleki would shout back. ‘I never did that.’

And the audience would hoot and laugh and clap, egging Sándor on.

It was always something different, another aspect of the story sabotaged. When Teleki got to the part about how he’d gone up to the castle and ‘volunteered’, as he put it, to join the defence under Lieutenant-Colonel László Veresváry, Sándor stood up – someone had handed him a bullhorn – and did a high-pitched imitation of how Teleki, after abandoning the children, had run into an Arrow Cross soldier who saw that he was able-bodied and told him to get up to the castle. ‘B-b-b-b-but, I’m just looking for fooooood,’ whined Sándor. ‘I-I-I-I left my kids a block over and I was about to go back for them. My wife, you see, she died when they blew up the bridge…’ And here Sándor fell into a fit of such flawless mock weeping that many in the audience turned towards Teleki and copied him. ‘But the soldier forced you up to the castle anyhow, didn’t he?’ said Sándor, suddenly serious. ‘Giving your ass a kick every few feet just to make sure you got there.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Teleki, trying to look cool. ‘And if you don’t stop interrupting my talks I’m going to have a restraining order put on you.’

But Teleki’s agent advised him against this. How would it look, he asked, if Teleki, the great professor of twentieth-century Middle European history, award-winning author of biographies and memoirs, survivor of the siege of Budapest, were suddenly afraid of the rantings of a blind man? Besides, as the agent had explained, it would only provide more publicity for Sándor, which was the last thing either of them wanted. He finally suggested – and he was surprised that Teleki hadn’t considered this himself – that he get his act together and take on Sándor directly, since he was after all a historian. Or was he?

Teleki looked at him, wondering whether his agent had been to one of his lectures lately. Had he seen what went on up there? Sándor was killing him, and on the very ground where Teleki was supposed to be the authority. On the other hand, looking again at his agent, Teleki realized that maybe he didn’t want him to get rid of Sándor, that maybe – no, probably – his agent was actually happy with the way things were working out, eagerly calculating his percentage from the recent ‘bump’ in ticket sales.

‘What I mean,’ said the agent, ‘is find out who this Sándor guy is. Isn’t that something you do? Root around in people’s pasts?’