Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

That was late in 1946, the letter from the state informing the Kálmáns that their villa was being “reallocated” to “a more suitable candidate.” In return, they would be given a cowshed in Csepel. The shed had held three cows and could easily fit six people, which meant that only one member of the family would have to sleep outside. And so the family finally left, driven beyond exasperation, beyond fear, beyond even the love of their country. Rumor was they escaped to the west, following their eldest son, who’d left the country six months earlier. In many ways, László was happy to have been part of their forced removal, and he was delighted to think of what it must be like for them out there, wherever they’d gone-not speaking the language, not making any money, not having their degrees and expertise recognized. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, it was helpful to know that in some way they were suffering at least a fraction of what he’d suffered during the siege, at a time when he should have been with them, in Tíbor’s care, being given a new identity and a new life.

But in the end, he had to admit, it was not the Kálmáns he’d been after, not really. It was the villa, the freedom to walk inside, to feel its mass around him.

He never forgot his first time crossing the threshold. There was the falling plaster, the bullet holes still in the walls, the water damage along the ceiling, the bits of furniture and possessions the family had left behind. There was the room where Tíbor Kálmán had died, its door nailed shut, the debris still inside as it had been when the family returned from the siege. But more than this was the feeling László had, walking down the hall, entering the rooms, that he was not yet inside, that he was still searching for a point of entry. “Another step and I will be there,” he told himself, speaking into the emptiness of the home. And with the next movement, he said it again, “Another step and I will be inside.” Eventually, he would exit the villa, stand in the courtyard bewildered, then cross the threshold again, hoping this time to get it right, haunted by how he’d dreamed of the place, hoped for it, imagined being safe inside these rooms, when in reality he was facing bullets and starvation and disease in Budapest. And killing people.

At night, unable to sleep, he would shake off nightmares of the siege by fixing up the place-the water damage, the rotten studs and joists, the plastering, the paint, the careful work of reconstructing the villa-as if by restoring the building to what it was it might finally open up to him, truly open, and he’d step inside to the life he should have had.

After the third week, he ripped off the boards covering the door to the room where Tíbor died, and a day or two later, steeling himself, went inside, staring at the mounds of rubble, the debris strewn along the floor. The Kálmán family had already exhumed and buried the bodies, touching the rubble only as much as was needed to pull it apart. After that, the family kept the door nailed shut, László had thought, because they couldn’t bear to face the site where Tíbor and Ildikó died, but as he began to clear away the rubble, he discovered why they’d really left it as it was, for once the bricks and plaster and shattered beams and bits of glass were swept aside, he found the hole in the floor where Tíbor had kept his workshop, and inside, the stacks of messages he’d received during the war from the resistance, from places as far away as Cologne, and the equipment he’d used to forge identities, along with the lists of names and addresses under which Tíbor had hidden the refugees. László would use these lists to keep himself useful to the state, exposing identities one by one whenever he felt the pressure to demonstrate his loyalty. In return, they let him keep the villa. The villa with its printing press, the one they knew nothing about, his escape.

The names would run out regardless of how carefully, how slowly, he delivered them. In fact, if he delivered them too slowly the Soviets would grow impatient, demand that he tell them where he was getting his information, and then, when he refused, they’d come into the villa to find out for themselves, and his last hope would be ended.

So he went looking for someone to help with the press. He met Agi later that year, as the first wave of deportations, imprisonments, and executions took place. Her father and mother had been devoted communists dating back to Béla Kun’s brief dictatorship of Hungary in 1919, and were persecuted in the white terror that followed against Jews and leftists when Admiral Horthy established control over the country for the next twenty-four years. Her father had been both-Jewish and leftist-and more than once it was only the thickness of his skull that kept him from being beaten to death, just as it was his skill with the printing press that kept all three of them alive during the period of anti-Semitic laws, ghettoization, the Holocaust. “If you wear the yellow star they will kill you,” he once told Agi, tossing hers and her mother’s and his into the flames, “and if you do not they will kill you.” He stirred the fire. “So why bother?” But he had done more than just that, drawing up papers for many others-Jews, but also members of the resistance, fellow communists, British soldiers parachuted into the capital, others who needed to escape, for one reason or another, from the powers bearing down on them-whatever he could do to subvert the fascist cause. And therefore, like so many other communists, Agi’s father was arrested after the Soviet occupation on Malinovsky’s orders, not so much for his vocal criticism of the Russian “liberator”-for asking what good it had done them to await liberation when it meant free looting for the Red Army, rape, robbery, extortion, the requisitioning and hoarding of the country’s food for the military while the general population starved, the ransacking of the nation in the way of reparations, mass arrests, murder-but because he wasn’t afraid for his life. They were to be sent to a prison camp-one of the many the Soviets had set up-in Gödöllö, when László stepped in, saying he needed someone adept at “paperwork.” Malinovsky had reported to Moscow that he had captured 110,000 fascists, but as he only had 60,000, the rest had to be made up by dragging people at random from the streets and their homes, and László was put in charge of making these substitutes look legitimate.

Naturally, Agi’s father objected, and so László took him aside, reminding him that the youngest women raped by the Red Army were twelve, and the oldest ninety, which meant that both his wife and daughter were within the normative range; he spoke, too, of the sorts of venereal diseases they could expect, not to mention how long it would last, given that some women were locked up for two weeks “entertaining” as many as thirty soldiers at a time. In the end, Agi’s father agreed, and to soften the blow László made sure they were provided for, keeping his promise even after Agi’s parents, having done the work they were asked to do, were visited one night by the ÁVO and taken away for “unauthorized forgery of government documents,” and László inherited Agi.

He made a nominal attempt to save her parents, trying to get her on his side, to make her believe he wasn’t really an apparatchik, that he was just using the system until he could make his escape. So he made sure she was there when he made inquiries and phone calls, made sure that when they came to the villa for her as well, the agents of the ÁVO knocking on the door, he was there to bar the entrance, listing off his decorations and accomplishments and contacts to make it clear he, and by extension she, was “protected,” though in truth, no one was protected, no matter how high up your friends were, for the most dangerous friend of all was the highest ranking, Stalin himself.