executed—both of them. Then Zoltán turned in the direction he was headed, Györgyi’s cries fading in the distance.
It was the end of December 1944, and that night, running from the makeshift encampment and its marshalling yard, running and running long after the military police had given up, not wanting to risk their own lives by following him east, Zoltán realized it was hopeless, there was a wall of refugees coming at him, and behind it, the Russian guns, already so loud he felt as if they were sounding beside his ears. Budapest was streaming with people fleeing from the suburbs—Rákospalota, Pestszentlőrinc, Soroksár, Mátyásföld—because the Red Army had not only arrived at these places already and taken control, but was advancing on Budapest itself.
So Zoltán became part of the human tide flowing from one death trap to another during the siege, and the things he’d seen would live on, unspoken, beneath everything he was to think and say from that point forward. Civilians used as human shields by the Red Army. Nazis exploding bridges over the Danube while there were still families and soldiers streaming across. Men and women forced to carry ammunition across the frozen river to German soldiers stationed on Margit Island while Soviet bullets and shells and bombs rained around them. He saw child soldiers holding off two dozen Russians by running up and down the stairs of a devastated building, shooting from every window, making them think there were a dozen soldiers trapped inside. Young boys crashing in gliders while attempting to fly in supplies for the fascist armies of Hitler and Szálasi, the fields littered with broken fuselages and wings and pilots contorted in positions that seemed to Zoltán the war’s alphabet—untranslatable into human terms. There was a broken gas main near Vérmező that for days shot flame through every crack and hole in the asphalt—blue, orange, yellow—dancing along the road as if fire alone were capable of celebrating what had become of Budapest.
He’d seen exhausted doctors trying to save patients from a burning hospital, carrying them into the snow only to realize they had nothing—not a blanket, a sheet, even a shirt—to keep them from freezing. He’d come across the most beautiful girl, eighteen or nineteen, in one of the ruined homes filled with those too wounded to go on, staring up, whispering from the mass of bodies, injured, starving, gripped by typhus, and as he leaned in to hear what she wanted to say—“Shoot me, please shoot me”—he noticed that both her legs had been torn away.
All that time Zoltán had been tormented by the idea of Tíbor Kálmán’s villa—it was like the place was imagining him rather than the other way around—it sometimes appeared in place of what he was running from, and Zoltán had to stop himself from leaping into a burning apartment, a metro tunnel, or a garden under shelling, thinking, this is it, finally, I’ve made it.
After a while, Zoltán began to feel protected by the villa, as if the new life it promised was his true life, and the one he was living now only an alias, false, no one real inside it, and therefore anything that happened was not really happening to him. This is what helped Zoltán survive when he was press-ganged, along with a number of other boys and young men fleeing west, into the Vannay Battalion, and ended up doing the very thing he’d hoped to avoid: fighting for the Nazis. He would have liked to remember when it happened, but there were no dates then, the end of December, the beginning of January, sometime during those hundred days of a siege that never did end for him, hauled out of the cellar where he was hiding by Vannay’s men, him and the rest, given a gun and told what the Russians looked like, and from there the black minutes, schoolboy comrades falling around him, Vannay making radio announcements to the Soviets that they would take no prisoners, and the Soviets responding to this as Vannay had hoped, likewise killing every one of them they captured, which Vannay was only too pleased to tell Zoltán and the others, knowing it would make them fight with that much more desperation. Then the breakout attempt of February through Russian lines, German and Hungarian soldiers cut down in the streets as they tried to escape the gutted capital to make it to the forests and then west to where the rest of Hitler’s armies were stationed, running headlong into rockets, tank fire, snipers stationed in buildings along the routes the Soviets knew they would take, drowning in sewers where the water level rose with each body that climbed down the ladder until it was up to their noses, pitch-black, screaming panic. So few of them made it. Three percent, the historians would say. The rest of the soldiers, the thousands, were killed along Széna Square and Lövőház Street and Széll Kálmán Square, piled into doorways, ground up by tanks, swearing, pleading, sobbing, unable to fire off even the last bullet they’d saved for themselves.
But Zoltán was not there. He’d gone over to the other side by then, turning on the boys he was fighting with, aged sixteen and seventeen, shooting them dead as they stared at him dumbstruck, and then saw, over his shoulder, the approaching Russians. He thought he saw a last glimmer of envy in the boys’ eyes, regret at not having thought of it first, before what light there was went out forever, and Zoltán turned, feeling something fade inside him as well, his voice cracking at the edges, soft and unwavering as radio silence. “Death to the fascists,” he shouted, and was rewarded with bits of red ribbon the Russians tied around his arm, and a hat they placed on his head, before sending him back into battle.
It was Zoltán’s decoration as a “war hero” by the Soviets that finally brought him to Tíbor Kálmán’s villa late in 1945, to the place where it seemed all his misfortune and redemption were concentrated, where he might be absolved of guilt for having made it through the siege instead of someone better—anyone at all—someone worthy of survival, like that legless girl in the makeshift infirmary, for he had done what she asked that day, scrounging among the soldiers crammed wounded or dying or dead into that corridor, found a revolver, and embraced her with one arm while with the other he pressed the barrel to her temple. If only he’d gotten to the villa in time, he told himself. If only he’d chosen the one other option he had: death. He knew now that death was preferable to what he’d done to save himself, though it was too late by then, betrayal had become Zoltán’s vocation, and the woman who met him that November day in the doorway of the villa sensed it, with the tired look of someone who has outlasted her interest in life and can’t understand why she’s being provoked by those who insist on living. She introduced herself as Tíbor’s daughter-in-law, Karola, wary enough of Zoltán and his uniform to give only the answer he wanted and not a drop more, keeping her voice to a perfect monotone, without a single nuance he might have fastened onto had he been seeking something other than forgiveness.
“I wish I could help you,” she said. “But Tíbor is dead.”
Zoltán stood there with his military decorations and wondered why he’d come, given that the war was over, and with it his reason for seeking out Tíbor. “He’s dead,” Karola said again. “He was dead when we returned here from Budapest.” She pointed at the hole left by the bomb in the roof above the dining room, covered with a number of tarps inexpertly sewn together. She told him the story in a manner so offhand it was clear she was still in shock: Tíbor Kálmán had lost both hands when a Russian shell landed on the villa. He’d raised his arms to protect his wife, Ildikó, from the collapse of the ceiling, and a beautiful chandelier of Murano glass sheared off both hands at the wrist, though it hardly mattered to Tíbor by then because both he and Ildikó were dead, crushed by the weight of plaster, bricks, and several tons of antique furniture they’d stored in the attic overhead. Karola stood for a moment, as if waiting for Zoltán to respond, and when he didn’t she said, “Anyhow,” and he could see the effort it was costing her to repress a sneer as she scanned the medals on his chest, “you don’t seem to be doing too badly.”
There was something else, something other than scorn, in the way she said this, a quiet acknowledgement of what he’d come for, and at the same time a dismissal of the explanation he wanted so badly to make. “Vannay sent out radio messages to the Soviets,” he whispered, and immediately regretted it, as if even now, in attempting to make amends, he was still looking out for himself. “They weren’t taking any prisoners. I had to make them a sign of good faith,” he said. “I was only eighteen!”
“Why are you telling me this?”
