Siege 13. Tamas Dobozy

didn’t do it justice. And all I can think is: Oh, New York, get over yourself!” He adopted a stage whisper: “What they can’t face, none of them, is its insignificance. People died in an act of war. Wow! How unusual!” He said the last three words so loud I jumped off my seat. “It’s terrible—” he pretended to wipe away tears “—now, can you please give me directions to the Louis Vuitton store?” Görbe snorted, staring back at the bartender. “It passed through them like they were ghosts,” he said. “As it should have.” He nodded. “As it should have.”

      Görbe grunted and shifted on his stool and for a second I thought I saw something there, a break in the front he was putting on. “Listen, I lived through events a million times worse in Hungary—the war, the siege—like a lot of people. It wasn’t one day, it was six years, and, believe me, it didn’t lead to any great spiritual awakening!” He waved his hands in the air. “It happened. It was bad. And afterwards? Well, it will happen again. And in between you forget. You go back to your entertainments and schemes and obsessions and carry on. And that,” he said, “is all there is to say about it.”

      Görbe rose drunkenly from his stool and bowed this way and that to the regulars, who didn’t know whether to applaud or tear him apart.

      His reputation for outrage extended even to the world of children’s literature, which is no easy thing. When Görbe gave readings it wasn’t rare to see a crowd of a hundred or more in attendance, and not the usual moms and dads and kids and teachers, but people you’d never have expected—Brooklyn hipsters, businessmen in blue suits, specialty booksellers with stacks of first editions Görbe would sign and they’d sell at inflated prices (they all had to put a wad of bills on his outstretched palm before he signed anything), and even some skeletal blondes cradling tiny dogs that trembled so bad they looked as if they were going to disintegrate. Each one was crazy about Görbe, many knew him personally, and when they lined up to have books signed he made sure to say something memorable to every one, statements so outrageous I was sure someone would burst into tears, either that or assault him. Instead they only laughed or turned to friends and said, “See! What did I tell you?” and Görbe nodded almost imperceptibly, made a flourish with his pen, and handed back the book. It seemed to me, looking at the lineup, that they loved him, and it was only later, near the end of the night, after I realized I hadn’t seen one person open a book, or overheard a single comment about the writing, that I realized what was beneath it all: a fascination that was all about Görbe’s appearance and character. It was him they were there for. The signings were one of those New York events you went to to prove your coolness. Worst of all, I sensed Görbe not only knew this but encouraged it, as if he spent as much time rehearsing the crazy diatribes and remarks—like some kind of comedy routine—as he did writing the books. This, too, was part of the process.

      During his career Görbe had sold millions of books, gone on innumerable book tours, and the few times he invited me to his apartment in Queens I peeked at some of the royalty cheques on his desk, amazed to think he made that much and still lived in such a hole. There were only two places in the apartment that made it look as if he hadn’t given up on life: the draughtsman’s table where he did his work, spotlessly clean, the various tools neatly organized; and the mantelpiece where photographs of his wife, Zella, sat carefully arranged so each image could be seen in its frame. I looked at the pictures, then around the house again to see if I’d missed anything—an article of clothing, a pair of shoes—that might suggest a woman was also living there. But I saw nothing.

      Görbe came into the room carrying two huge snifters filled with Crimean Cup à la Marmora, his belly brushing the doorframe as he squeezed through with a scraping of shirt buttons. “What’re you looking at?” He stopped when I pointed to the pictures of his wife. “Zella,” Görbe said, adding nothing more, just standing there, drinks in hand. I asked where she was. “Zella is away,” came his quiet response. “In a better place.” This seemed to break him out of his trance and he handed me a drink and changed the subject.

      Whenever Görbe spoke about his work there was a complete absence of the technical or practical aspects of publishing. Just as when he read to my sons, he spoke as if he was a privileged reader rather than the author. He was never sure, he said, where the story was going even as his writing and drawing proceeded, always one step ahead of his conscious intentions. This was the real Görbe, I always thought, not the clown at the bar and readings, but the guy who, when he talked of his work, seemed eased of all the flesh he carried, his need to filter the world through a cigar, his overindulgence with booze and food. The real Görbe grew excited talking of clouds hollowed out by sparrows, of fire escapes woven out of iron roses growing miles into the air, of bricks made of compacted song turned into choruses conducted with wrecking balls. I’d seen him like that with my kids, and guessed that when he went on tours to the tiny libraries of Idaho and Arkansas and Nebraska he was like that too—naive, filled with wonder, released from the persona he climbed into, like some fat suit, every morning in Queens.

      “You like my kids, huh?” I asked one night as we stood on the balcony of the apartment I’d been renting, subsidized by NYU, on the fourteenth floor with a view of the Empire State Building and its coloured lights. But Görbe just sucked his cigar and looked at me as if the question was a trap he wasn’t going to walk into. I scratched the back of my head. “Well, you see, it’s just that I was . . . Well, it’s weird that you’d be so friendly to me just because fifty years ago you dated my aunt. A celebrity like you.”

      Görbe looked at me then as if he wanted to throw me over the balcony. “The reason I’m so friendly,” he growled, “is because you’re such an asshole.”

      I looked at him and tried to laugh.

      “You’re bumping your head on the glass ceiling of your mediocrity. And you’re wide awake to it—why your agent doesn’t return your emails; why the writers at NYU show no interest in you; why New York leaves you cold. Most people can look away from that, dream up excuses—‘Oh, my agent is just busy’; ‘Oh, the writers at NYU are all self-important dickheads’; ‘Oh, New York is so superficial’—but not you, right? You know better than anyone you’re not going to make it, and you can’t hide it from yourself.”

      I think I spluttered. I had no idea how to respond. And then, in a moment I’ll never forget, Görbe reached for my hand. It was the weirdest gesture. I tried to pull back from it, but the touch was so lonely, so childlike, it seemed more for his sake than mine, and when I gave in to it Görbe seemed to shrink, to fall into himself, clinging to me in the Manhattan night with the cavernous streets below, snow drifting past. For some reason I felt the need to say something reassuring to Görbe, to whisper him an apology for the world—“Everything will be fine, you’ll see”—when in fact it should have been him apologizing to me.

      It was partly because of that conversation, but mainly because of my curiosity about Zella, that the next morning I went into the archives at NYU—combing through old copies of the Times, Observer, and even the Post—to piece together Görbe’s story. My aunt said he’d been a prominent children’s author during the communist era, as far as prominence went in those days, and he’d certainly had no trouble, as far as she or any of their mutual acquaintances could say, with the Soviet authority. “In fact,” she admitted, “he helped me out with his connections when I needed it.” As for his books, she said they “were like a utopia.” The children in them wanted to stay inside a dream, to realize a better world, and the communists liked that. “The kids were the proletariat,” she wrote, “at least according to the communist reviewers.” The waking world was the world as it is; and dream was the world as it could be. It was a pretty simple-minded interpretation, like most of them, but it saved Görbe. In other words, he had a good life under the Party—made enough money, had a nice apartment, ate and drank well. So nobody was really sure why he left. “As for his wife,” my aunt’s letter said, “I met her only once. She was just like Görbe except worse—dreamy, childish, never comfortable among adults. In fact, what seemed good in him seemed somehow bad in her. But maybe I was just jealous.”

      There was almost nothing in the archives about Zella. For all the publicity given Görbe—starting with his defection from Hungary,