The Encirclement

Teleki had not known how to respond to that. Sándor Veselényi was his name; that’s as far as they’d gotten during their first few meetings. And he couldn’t just walk into the nearest archive and pull out the file with that name and voila, there would be everything from the baptismal record through to the accident that caused his blindness to why he’d decided to make it his life’s work to humiliate Teleki. No, it would take years to do that kind of research, just as it had taken years to gather material for each of the biographies and memoirs Teleki had written, to put together the lecture that was now, unfortunately, thrilling audiences more than ever, and which he was contractually locked into.

Not that it wouldn’t have been nice – Teleki was the first to admit – to get up at the lectern and to lay it all out the next time Sándor opened his mouth, flashing the slides of Sándor in his fascist uniform, a member of the Arrow Cross, or better yet of Father Kun’s murderous band, so unlike the Germans in their rejection of efficiency, in really going out of their way, even to be inconvenienced, as long as it meant slaughtering the Jews just right. And for the coup de grâce, for a nice moral twist at the end of the story, something about how Sándor had been blinded by his own desire to seek and destroy, perhaps a shard of glass from an explosion he’d rigged in one of the buildings in the Budapest ghetto – whole families tied up inside.

But Teleki had no information on Sándor – only on himself. He’d get up there with his black-and-white slides, his laser pointer, his tongue tripping up, bogged down, boxed in by English, a language so clunky compared to his own, and try to tighten up his story even further, to make himself appear even more authentic, only to have Sándor hobble in on the arms of two businessmen, a mother of three, four old men in outdated suits and two guys sporting Mohawks.

Teleki spoke on, trying to keep his voice from going falsetto. He focused on the crowd – the usual assemblage of academics, writers, journalists, immigrants, students, amateur historians, senior citizens – and pointed to the picture of himself in the uniform of Veresváry’s garrison, expected to keep the Soviets from capturing Buda castle, where the SS and Arrow Cross commanders were wringing their hands in the middle of the siege, encircled entirely by the Red Army, trying to figure out what to do. At night, young men, really just boys, would try to fly in supplies by glider, Soviet artillery shooting them out of the sky. Teleki struck a solemn tone when he told the crowd that the place they were supposed to land – Vérmezö – could be translated as ‘Blood Meadow’.

When Sándor stayed silent, Teleki grew braver, and he told them of what it was like in the final days of the siege, the desperate order of the castle with its German and Hungarian armies, the soldiers too frightened of punishment – usually a bullet in the head – to voice what was on their minds: why SS Obergruppenführer Pfeffer-Wildenbruch hadn’t gotten them the hell out of Budapest, why they were clearly sitting around waiting to be slaughtered. Worse still was being under the command of Veresváry, whose soldiers were men like Teleki – refugees or criminals or labourers pressed into service – for whom Veresváry was always willing to spare a bit of whipping from the riding crop he carried around, brandishing it over his head as he strode along the trenches they’d dug and were defending, as if the Soviet bullets whizzing around him were so many mosquitoes. Veresváry would sentence men to death for cowardice, then commute the sentence, then brutalize them so badly over the next several days – screaming and kicking at them while the fusillade continued, a horizontal rain of bullets and mortars – that the men would eventually stand in the trench, ostensibly to take better aim at the enemy, though from the way their guns hung in their hands it was little more than suicide. They stood there until half their faces suddenly vanished in a splatter, or their backs bloomed open, red and purple and bone. This seemed to satisfy Veresváry, who praised them as they fell, pointing to how they slumped, knees buckling, heads thrown back, and said to the rest, ‘There was a soldier, you chickenshits. There was a soldier!’

‘Was that why you came up with the plan to do away with him? To undermine and to betray and to murder your commander?’ asked Sándor, standing up.

‘You must be thinking of someone else, Sándor.’

‘Sure you did. You went from soldier to soldier and then, when you had them on side, you turned around and betrayed them to Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, telling him you’d heard whispers that there would be a mutiny.’

‘That’s the biggest lie I’ve ever…’

‘Look at the next picture. Look at it.’

The audience turned from Sándor to Teleki, who was standing there, mouth agape, the remote control in hand, his finger poised above the button, wondering whether Sándor was bluffing, or whether he’d somehow managed to hijack the projector, slipping in a different set of slides.

‘Let’s see it,’ someone in the audience yelled, and everyone laughed.

Teleki hit the button and there they were: all those arrested on charges of treason, five battered men with rotting clothes and unshaven faces standing against the blackened walls of the castle district, loosely grouped together, as if they were not yet accused and looking to slink off before it happened. It was the picture as Teleki remembered it, in exactly the place where it always appeared.

‘There you are. You’re standing just to the left of Pfeffer-Wildenbruch. That’s you right there, you dirty stinking fink! You sold out all your comrades!’

Teleki turned, squinting at the photograph, noting with eye-opening surprise that the guy there did resemble, in a way, what he might have looked like thirty years ago, after seventy or so days of siege – malnourished, frightened to death, desperate.

The audience applauded.