Siege 13 (38 page)

She never forgave him for that. It wasn't so much that he made our divorce so easy, so
possible
, but that he'd known what was best better than she did, he'd had more wisdom, been
brave where she'd been weak, been kinder and more forgiving than either of us, taking the worst of the divorce on himself, making us co-operate, continuing to exercise love while Rebecca and I were free to finally hate one another—and so she invented the Asperger's to explain it away, to turn Bobby's greatness into a failing, a lack of control, rather than something willed. Me, I was just happy to have her out of the house.

It's no surprise, all things considered, that I got full custody. Rebecca disappeared into her happier life—off on business trips to trade shows, conferences, sales meetings, whatever it is they do in the world of smartphones—and had Bobby over on the occasional weekend when she was at home and unable to avoid having him around. Bobby always went along dutifully, saying, “As distasteful as she might find these sleepovers, Mom will one day be grateful to look back on the time we spent together. The few memories she has will somewhat mitigate her regret over all the fun things we
could
have done.” I shook my head to clear it, and then asked if he wasn't getting anything out of it at all, and Bobby shrugged: “No, it's boring over there. Run-of-the-mill mom and kid stuff. I put it on for her, you know—Mom the big authority, Bobby the little kid—to make her feel better. But I'd rather be here working on our doomsday machine.”

I kept doing my numbers, day in day out, at George Nix & Associates Chartered Accountants. Sometimes Bobby would sneak out of bed at night to peer over my shoulder at the figures and tables and code, shaking his head, saying he couldn't sleep, sitting on my lap watching as I keyed in “all those boring numbers,” as he called them, and sooner or later he'd
look into my face and say, “You know, you could do something different with your life. It's not too late! So much of age is a function of the mind—an ingrained attitude.” He'd wait while I smiled and hit the equation keys to complete a spreadsheet, and then I would ask if he'd like to sit with me on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and watch
The Omega Man
or any of those other bad post-apocalyptic movies he was always researching and asking me to buy. Bobby would nod eagerly and we'd sit down, his small body snuggled beside me on the couch, my arm up along the backrest and around his shoulders.

 

So it went, year after year, until Bobby was nine, and Otto Kovács knocked on the door—or rather just
before
he knocked on the door.

We were sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast, Bobby and me, the Saturday before Halloween. Bobby was more excited than usual, which is saying something, though it was a nervous excitement, hopping around the table, glancing out the window, checking the time on the microwave. I finished, pushed my plate away, and looked at him. “You want to do something today? Laser Quest? Maybe drive in to the Science Centre in Toronto? Take another trip out to the Conestoga Reactor and see if we can finally get past the guards?”

“Oh, we can't go anywhere,” Bobby said. “Otto Kovács is coming.”

“Otto what? Who are you talking about?”

He was talking about the Nazi nuclear program, that's what he was talking about. “Otto Kovács,” he repeated, pronouncing
the name with a very believable Hungarian accent. “He was a member of the original
Uranverein
.”

“
Uranverein
?” My German, by contrast, was terrible. “What the hell is the
Uranverein
?”

Bobby put his hand on my arm. “The Uranium Club,” he patiently explained. “German scientists who worked on nuclear fission. Some of them went on to form the second
Uranverein
in 1939. Kovács was a Hungarian physicist who ended up siding with Diebner against Heisenberg, when Diebner was administering the
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik
. . .”

“Jesus, Bobby, what the hell are you talking about?”

Bobby let out a long sigh. “Don't you know anything?”

“No, I don't know anything!”

“They were Hitler's physicists, early theorists of the atomic bomb.”

I looked at Bobby like I was looking at some dark hole just prior to sticking my hand in.

“Some of them fell into American hands after the war,” he said, “but Kovács went back to Budapest in 1944, when it became obvious—to him at least—that Germany would lose the war.”

“Back to Budapest.” For some reason this didn't sound like a good career move.

“He survived the siege of the city at the end of the war.” Bobby shook his head. “I could tell you about that.”

“I'll bet you could.”

“Afterwards, when it looked like the Soviets weren't going to leave—this was 1948, in case you don't know—he
got out fast. But for some reason,” Bobby paused a minute, “well, some reason I haven't figured out yet, he never caught on in the west—like Heisenberg, von Laue, Hahn, von Weizsäcker, and some others—and he ended up tutoring high school and university physics students in Toronto. We're lucky it was Toronto.” He stared at me. “I mean, if he was anywhere else, he wouldn't have the money to come out here.” Bobby kept looking at me. “What?” he asked. Then he dropped his head. “I wrote him a letter, sent him some bus fare I saved up from my allowance. I thought since he'd been forgotten, it might make him feel better.” Bobby waited for me to say something, then made one last attempt to justify himself: “He's one of the forgotten greats!”

I sat there, completely speechless. “So this guy is coming
here
?
Today
?”

Bobby got up from the table, walked out of the kitchen, and returned with a folder he pushed under my nose, marked with the words “Doomsday Machine Project—Otto Kovács,” in thick felt marker on the tab. I pushed my plate to one side and leafed through it, skimming Xeroxed copies of articles showing pictures of Kovács in Berlin in the 1930s and early 1940s, even a few from after the war, when he'd worked briefly for the Soviet weapons program. Mostly the file contained articles about other people—Heisenberg, along with the other scientists Bobby mentioned—with the name “Kovács” highlighted whenever it came up, notes along the margins in Bobby's precise handwriting, and, at the end, a translation of the “open letter” Kovács wrote for the June 1947 issue of
Nemzet-talanság
, a short-lived anarchist
newspaper published out of Miskolc (Bobby had remarked: “Three issues published, no extant copies of number two”).

This last article was the reason Bobby had contacted him. Kovács was definitely of the right-wing anarchist persuasion, hating government not because it prevented organic community, but because he didn't want
anyone
—especially government—telling him what to do with himself, or his wife, or kids, or property (not that he had a wife or kids or property). The letter was ten pages long, more like an autobiographical essay, written in an attempt to justify where he'd ended up. He talked about Germany during the war, how the Nazis had failed to “properly fund” the “super-weapon” they'd been developing, how everything was constantly bogged down in “ideology and bureaucracy,” how various scientists had decamped to the Soviet or American authority, and who among them had “betrayed the principle of disinterested scientific inquiry by contaminating the laboratory with moral questions.” By this point, I could tell the letter was a long farewell, the last words of a man who knows he's vanished into obscurity and will not get another chance to put into words his vision of life (or, in this case, his vision of the
end
of life).

Kovács finished with a description of what was awaiting him when he returned to Budapest in 1944—months of siege, soldiers looting the city, dead bodies in the streets, starving civilians, places so devastated you could no longer tell if you were standing on a street or on top of some fallen building. It was all there—rapes witnessed, throats slit over wristwatches, fires burning people alive. But what was truly remarkable was his fascination with the machinery of war—the tanks, the
guns, the airplanes, all of it—set down in complete reverence, as if in addressing them he was addressing some higher intelligence, even a god. It was here that the words “doomsday machine” made their first appearance. Bobby, reading over my shoulder, said, “It had something to do with evolution.” He pointed to the relevant but vague passages, and then read verbatim, “‘Not the National Socialist understanding of Darwin, not the emergence of the super-man, the Aryan master race. This is not evolution as the siege made it known to me,'” wrote Kovács, “‘rooted in that absurd organic determinism. When I speak of the machinery of evolution I am not using a metaphor.'”

I looked at Bobby, one eyebrow raised, then went back to the letter. “The siege,” Kovács wrote, “radically altered my opinion of our labours.” For the first time, he was happy not to be working under Nazi guidance, for while Hitler would have used the super-weapon to rid the world of certain races only to have
other races
take their place—which had seemed like an okay idea to Kovács back in the day—Kovács now wanted to get rid of
all
races, period.

“Equal-opportunity genocide,” Bobby said, clearly in disagreement with Kovács.

“You say he's coming here?” I asked, coming up from the depths of the file and the information it contained. Without waiting for Bobby's reply, I continued, “So he wants to destroy all humanity, and you just want to destroy most of it—what's the difference?”

It was the first time I'd done that—seriously taken up what Bobby had been doing all these years—and I could see in his eyes that I'd broken some rule, transgressed some code
in which my indulgence, my humour, my forbearance, acted as a counterweight to his own behaviour, keeping it all in the realm of play. But this wasn't play anymore. Otto Kovács was coming, and I had no idea what to expect.

“I never said I'd actually go through with it,” Bobby quietly replied.

“You just want the power? Is that it?”

“Yes.” He laughed maniacally. “Yes, that's it! I just want the power!”

“Seriously?” I said.

“No.” He shook his head. “Power's no good unless you can use it. I'd have to use it.”

I could not for the life of me tell whether he was kidding or serious. But I had to laugh. The way he said it, the whole thing, was so ridiculous.

 

Otto Kovács showed up early that afternoon, around one o'clock. Bobby ran to the door and had it unlocked and open before I'd had a chance to come in from the kitchen and peer out the window to see what Kovács looked like, whether he'd brought along any henchmen, whether the sky had suddenly darkened on his arrival, the wind begun to blow, forked lightning in the sky. He stepped into our home on a sunny autumn day looking indescribably old, worn out, broken, a tattered black overcoat hanging off his bony shoulders, a white goatee trimmed short, hair missing in patches, a twig-like cane in one hand and a creased leather suitcase in the other. The look in his eyes was neither mean, nor wary, nor embittered—none of the things you'd expect from a mad scientist. Instead, he looked grateful, and in fact the first words
out of his mouth were directed at me and Bobby both: “It's so nice to finally meet you,” he said, his Hungarian accent thickening every word, “and thank you very much for inviting me to your home.” He looked around. “It's been a while since anyone let me inside.”

I could see how that might be the case. There was a smell on him you got from month-old beer bottles not properly rinsed. I could picture him in one of those drippy apartments in Toronto's east end, broken furniture propped up with outdated phone books, scarred coffee tables with the veneer peeling off, drawers full of mismatched knives and forks, dishcloths duct taped around the handles of frying pans. It was all there in my mind, along with the room dedicated to Kovács's work—the tin filing cabinets, the cardboard file boxes, the shelves of books stacked haphazardly to the ceiling, charts and diagrams and mathematical formulas pinned to the wall, the very small dossier, not much bigger than Bobby's, filled with clippings on Kovács's career. And spread across the floor were the blueprints for the super-weapon that he'd sit down to every day, and which were no further advanced than they had been in 1948. But what flashed through my mind, more than this, was an image of Kovács walking out of his apartment every day, past the whores on the front steps recovering from a hard night, through the park, Allan Gardens, drug dealers bopping alongside asking if he wanted pot, meth, crack, keeping up their pitch until another potential customer came along, across Church Street heading west, three or four blocks during which the city shed its homeless and overnight shelters and bedsits and took on business towers, gaslit restaurants, and finally the hipster scene along Queen, its boutiques
and sparkling electronics and restaurants overflowing with
mojitos
and brie burgers and fresh sushi and designer coffees and the clientele to go with them. But it was all the same to Kovács no matter where he walked, the things he'd seen in Budapest during the winter of 1945 had not ceased—there were still those who scrambled in the ruins because of those others who soared above—as if the siege stretched right across history, as if the siege
was
all of history, and the only way to end it was to reach the threshold and refuse to carry anything human across. Kovács was never out of it, he knew better than to even
want
out of it, and he'd take relief from Queen Street, from the way it made the siege real, and then turn and walk home again to sit in front of his blueprints, dreaming of the new elements, the new radiation, that would finally allow him to pass from theory to practice.