Last Notes by Tamas Dobozy

Author:Tamas Dobozy [Dobozy, Tamas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-444-4
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2011-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

I remember Krisztina coming to see me the night after the police entered Pál’s apartment. He’d passed away days earlier in the solitude of his home, meaning that his body had begun stinking up the corridor between suites before anyone noticed. “The police came to see me,” she said. “They had a boxful of books and papers. You should have seen this stuff !” She shook her head. I didn’t ask Krisztina what Pál’s writing was about because I already knew, thinking back to those nights when we’d spoken on the telephone, back to the things he’d said, both of us speaking through the fevers of insomnia. “The policeman wanted to launch an investigation, but there didn’t seem to be any collaborators.”

“He didn’t have anyone,” I said, answering a different question. “You know that he made me and my sisters his principal beneficiaries? We don’t want any of that money!” “He didn’t have any money,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” Krisztina replied, pulling out a file prepared by the lawyer for Pál’s estate. “He had it squirrelled away everywhere!” I held the bank books, squinting down the neat columns of deposits, which Pál apparently made on regular dates, times when he’d come begging to me for work, and during which he’d received the money I’d given him (he insisted on being paid in cash) in cupped hands, as if receiving the Eucharist. But where had the rest come from? (Surely, hate literature didn’t sell that well?)

“I’ve spoken to Cili and Gyôngyi. None of us wants the money. There are organizations. Jewish museums. Holocaust education. We could donate it….”

“That would be a good idea,” I said, quietly.

“You’re not …” Krisztina looked out the window. “I mean you wouldn’t contest it if we did that …?”

I turned my eyes to her, stunned. “You think I would mind?” I couldn’t help it, I was shouting. “I knew he hated Jews, but I didn’t know he wrote that—” I waved my hand at her, though she wasn’t holding anything other than the file, “—that garbage!”

“Well.” Krisztina smiled carefully, neither out of amusement nor happiness, but rather in defence of my aggression. “I know you were close to Pál bácsi, and I thought maybe …”

“You think I was sympathetic to that?”

Krisztina looked at the ground. “My father spoke highly of you. I can’t see him doing that unless the person he spoke about was like him…. He and Pál bácsi got along, you know.”

I opened my mouth to yell some more, then closed it, at a loss as to how to justify myself to Krisztina, to explain my devotion to her father, to Pál, to Ottó, without at the same time implicating myself in their insanity. Anyhow, I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t implicated, since the trauma that had warped and ossified their thinking, that had made them brutal and obsessive-compulsive, was also my trauma, though I would have liked to think I was not a fascist, and that Krisztina and her sisters knew it. And

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