Siege 13
By Tamas Dobozy
Thomas Allen & Son, 339 pp., $22.95
In The Atlas of B. Görbe, the first of the stories in this collection, Hungarian-born writer Benedek Görbe, now living in New York, is talking to the voice of the story. The topic of the 9-11 attacks comes up.
"Görbe grunted and shifted in 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.'"
But no one really forgot the Siege of Budapest, those horrible weeks at the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945 when the advancing Soviet troops encircled and laid siege to Buda and Pest, the twin cities straddling the Danube River. It was the fiercest urban battle of the Second World War, destroying much of the city and killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians.
It was an impossibly nightmarish time, but many Hungarians, weary of the tyranny of the German Nazis and their cohorts, the Hungarian Arrow-Cross fascists, began to look forward to liberation by the Red Army.
But it was simply a change of tyrants, and when the war ended, the violence of war was replaced by the grey miseries of communist rule.
As author Tamas Dobozy writes of one of his characters:
"He was one of the many waiting for rescue at the end of the siege, desperate for the arrival of the Red Army, not realizing there would be no end to the ruin, they'd been turned into its agents, harnessed to it, dragging its wreckage into the next half century."
The Siege of Budapest is the thread that ties together these 13 stories set in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. The characters are haunted by what happened in the siege and under communist rule.
Don't look for overt heroism - there was nothing noble or thrilling about the siege and what followed. The communists exploited and magnified the worst of human nature, turning people against each other, destroying people's ability to trust.
For many, survival wasn't a triumph, but a kind of defeat, because of what they had to do, what they had to become, whom they had to betray, what they had to say, just to stay alive and out of prison.
Even in Canada, decades after the war, long after the collapse of communism, the emigrés carry those dark secrets with them, and the scars are felt into the second and third generations.
Despite the grimness of the backdrop, dark comedy is to be found in these tales. Dobozy is a masterful storyteller, weaving complex, mysterious plots that pull you in, make you want to solve the riddles.
Born in Nanaimo, raised in Powell River and educated at the University of Victoria, Concordia University and the University of B.C., Dobozy now teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.
Siege 13 has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award as well as the Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize.
Reviewer David Bly is the editorial writer for the Times Colonist.
