Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy Page A

have a chance. It was an act of “cultural rescue,” that’s what Anna said to the caseworker when he told us there were plenty of Romani kids, kids with AIDS, even some Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, and of course whole battalions of Romanian kids filling the orphanages in Bucharest to overflowing. “The Hungarians in Transylvania look after their own,” he said to us. “If you want a Hungarian girl there’s tons in Hungary.” But Anna shook her head. And when the agency did find us one, there was always some problem—a form we hadn’t filled out, a glitch in the paperwork, another hidden processing fee—andafter that another wait from six to eight months, by which point the child was gone. Either that or we made it to the finish line, received the file—the family records, the medical reports, the photographs—and Anna took them to our doctor, who held them in the light and said, “Hm, see these shadows under the left ear, those bumps, that could be something.” He tilted the pictures. “Or it could be nothing.” Anna would come home and brood over Scotch and soda, and after a few days request more information, which the agency could never obtain, and finally she’d turn down the adoption. Then I’d lie in bed at night listening as Anna talked in her sleep, apologizing to the child, begging forgiveness, smashing her fists so hard against her face I had to wake and then hold her while she cried. Finally, we decided I should go to Romania, that maybe I could do in person what we’d failed to do through bureaucracy.
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    â€œIn the Museum of Failed Escapes there are sails made out of tinfoil,” I can still hear Judit saying, her voice slurred, on the verge of laughter. Her drunkenness, I would realize, was more an affectation than reality, all part of the act, and that any day of the week she could have drunk me under the table. “They are perfect mirrors,” she continued. The sailor set them afloat one day on the Sea of Hungary when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and they sparkled so that a man could swim unseen from one shore to the next, because the snipers were blinded by the glittering armada.
    â€œThe Sea of Hungary? There’s no Sea of Hungary!”
    â€œThere is. There are many. You don’t know anything about this country.”
    â€œWhere are they?”
    â€œThere’s a map of it in the museum. One day I’ll show it to you.”
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    There are certain retreats you make—retreats that seem to come naturally—when your marriage is spent. I saw it with some clarity in Budapest, sitting up at night, Judit asleep in bed beside me, thinking back to that moment when things were at their worst, six or seven years ago, Miklós was two or three, staring out a window then as I was staring out of one now, dreaming of what it would be like to get the whole thing over with—the arguments, the divorce, splitting up our stuff, arranging custody, and then, after that, starting all over, the initial freedom, the loneliness, followed by another relationship, followed by a marriage that would more than likely end just as this one had. The problem in the sequence, no matter how I arranged it, was me. For years now I’d been doing more and more as Anna asked—keeping an eye out for dirty laundry; for meals I could make; chores around the house; driving Miklós here and there; sitting on the veranda with her at night drinking and talking, trying to be pleasant—a hundred minor obligations and pleasures, the careful work of putting your needs to one side to make sure that everything goes well, and then collecting your rewards: a child’s laugh, your wife smiling thank you, your neighbour visiting with extra strawberries from the garden. It’s perfect enough on the surface, but that’s all it is, containing less and less of yourself, of what you really want, until one day you