On his way to the Ministry of Sport (as everyone referred to the National Committee for Physical Education and Sport which liked to pretend it wasn’t a ministry, since a ministry would detract from the atmosphere of amateurism they tried to cultivate) Gyuri spotted a ticket-inspector getting on the tram. Gyuri didn’t have a ticket. He never had a ticket. He had never had a ticket. Gyuri hadn’t paid a filler for public transport since the last years of the war. Furthermore, in all that time he had never even so much as contemplated paying. Not for a moment. This was, firstly, because he didn’t feel like handing over any of his money to the state, however trivial the sum, and secondly, because the trams were normally so crowded, only a risible percentage of his body got in. Most of the time, he had to hang on by one hand, with one foot perched on the running-board, in the company of several similarly positioned citizens and he didn’t feel that such a posture justified payment.
Seated for once, Gyuri was wondering at what point he should vacate the tram, when at the other end, a blue-overalled worker suddenly barked at the ticket-inspector: ‘When the state starts paying me valid money, that’s when I’ll have a valid ticket, okay?’ The ferocity of the outburst was astonishing, much more than one would have believed the question of a tram ticket could have elicited even in the most extreme of circumstances. It hushed the whole tram and centred everyone’s attention in anticipation of some good transport theatre. Ordinarily, people who weren’t interested in paying or weren’t able to jumped off the tram at the approach of the authorities, as Gyuri did, like a tree losing its leaves.
The ticket-inspector had obviously tripped on a long-festering rage. His inquiry had opened the door to a crowd of resentments, and the rebuff’s raw savagery, with its billboarded promise of corporeal damage, both imminent and merciless, persuaded him to move on. Gyuri had only witnessed total refusal once before. An elderly man, flanked on both sides by enormous, slavering Alsatians that he was having difficulty restraining, had smiled at the request to produce his ticket and stated: ‘I honestly don’t feel like paying.’ He hadn’t.
His dignity imperilled, the ticket-inspector had got off at the Astoria. Looking out, Gyuri could see slim groups of students milling around with placards. They had been quiet for a while, cowed by some of the best brutality available on the planet, but now the Hungarians were back at it again, the national pastime: complaining. Everyone seemed to be at it. Even the Writers’ Union, the home of moral malnutrition, was at it, suddenly disclaiming all the things they had written in the last few years. The Union had pulled its head out of Rákosi’s arse and now stood blinking in the daylight.
Setting out for the disciplinary hearing, Gyuri had heard from Laci, Pataki’s younger brother, that the students from the Technical University were going to hold a demonstration. ‘You know, a real demonstration; one that was our idea.’ There was dispute as to whether permission had been granted for it or not. Some rulers said yes, some said no. The students didn’t care apparently.
The demonstration wouldn’t make any difference to anything. Gyuri hadn’t said so to Laci, since Laci had been so delighted by the prospect, but he had been tempted to quote the words of Dr Hepp: ‘Gentlemen, you can turn bearshit upside down. You can take it for a trip to the Balaton. You can put it in a nice box with a blue ribbon. You can shout at it or compose an ode in its honour. It will remain bearshit.’
So what if they changed the Party leader as they had in Poland? So what if the new leader vilified the old leader? What if they had a Gero instead of a Rákosi? Or a Nagy instead of a Gero? They were all turds off the same production line. It was like making a fuss about changing a light bulb. What if the new leader blamed everything on the old leader? It was political leapfrog, musical chairs in the Central Committee. Why get excited by it?
Gyuri’s view of the morning was soured by his attendance being required at a disciplinary hearing, but he was cheered up by the AVO incident.
At the Astoria, an AVO officer got on (uniformed AVO were harder to spot on the streets now – they seemed ill at ease). He was carrying a smart briefcase smartly. He exuded a vigorous belief in his importance, it was as if his importance was flamboyantly doing chin-ups in the tram. A group of labourers was next to him. Dirty, hardy, work-darkened figures who would no doubt place head-kicking at the head of their leisure pursuits. You could see it coming. They took their time, though, eyeing up the officer as the tram rattled along. At the next stop, one of them leaned over and asked him stentoriously to the accompaniment of pálinka fumes: ‘Tell me, did you brush your teeth this morning?’
‘What?’ asked the AVO, puzzled by this forewordless inquiry.
‘Did you brush your teeth this morning?’ insisted his interrogator.’Yes,’ was the only thing the AVO could think of as a reply.
‘Excellent. In that case, just this once, you can lick my arse.’
The detonation of laughter practically blew the AVO officer off the tram. Gyuri felt privileged to be in at the making of an anecdote that would enliven many an evening in a kocsma. Carrying his massive discomfiture awkwardly, the AVO noticed his stop had arrived and alighted.
At the Ministry of Sport, Hepp was waiting outside, looking at his watch angrily as if it were colluding with Gyuri’s tardiness. They weren’t late for the hearing but Hepp always liked to be ten minutes ahead of events. Gyuri really went out of his way to be there on the dot for Hepp, because if you weren’t, you’d pay for it. ‘But we said eleven o’ clock,’ Hepp would say, sincerely bewildered as to why such a clear agreement hadn’t been respected. And he would keep on saying it until you feared for your sanity. If you pleaded tram-famine, earthquake, your home suddenly combusting, Hepp would merely say: ‘Why didn’t you start earlier?’.
Being late was incomprehensible to him, dug-up tablets in some ancient tongue. It was more confusion than anger: ‘But we said eleven o’ clock’. He would repeat this, on and on, tonally turning it up and down, with the determination of a code-breaker trying to crack an unbreakable code. Hepp’s solar punctuality never failed him. As far as anyone knew he had only been late for an appointment once in his life and that was when Pataki, forewarned Hepp was due at a coaches’ seminar, had slipped into Hepp’s office just as Hepp was getting ready to leave. Under the cover of some anodyne conversation, Pataki had withdrawn, palming the key to Hepp’s office door. He had then locked the door from the corridor and had joined everyone outside, on the other side of the street, where they had a good view of Hepp’s office. Within minutes Hepp was loudly ordering them to let him out, shouting at times with great pathos from his second floor window. Eventually, he prevailed on a passer-by to provide a ladder but by that point he was an irrecuperable fifteen minutes late.
Matasits was, naturally enough, behind Gyuri’s appearance in front of the disciplinary tribunal. It was boring, in a way. Every time Gyuri played a game with Matasits refereeing, Gyuri would speedily accumulate his five fouls and be sent off before he could cover the length of the court, whether or not he was actually doing any fouling or even getting into the ball’s neighbourhood. Matasits’s compulsion to blow his whistle every time he saw Gyuri had long before made it clear to Gyuri that Matasits had him down as a bad element, a committed recidivist.
While Gyuri would have freely conceded that the referees wouldn’t be voting him the sportingest player on the nation’s basketball courts, the accruing of this fictional blame was irritating. No matter how exemplary Gyuri was on court, no matter how preposterously courteous he was – handing over the ball on a silver plate to the opposition at the slightest suggestion they had an interest in it, shunning contact with the opposing players as if they were radioactive lepers, if Matasits was there, he was off. There was a rumour that Matasits believed Gyuri responsible for a delivery of two hundred pairs of Soviet spectacles to his home and was seeking revenge for this insult by freight.
However, getting to the tribunal was a first for Gyuri. His gift for lurking in the referees’ blind spots usually enabled him to nobble the opposition with impunity; he had also developed a prestidigitator’s talent for sending the referees’ attention the wrong way so he could elbow, grab trousers and tread on feet under the nose of authority. Hepp would even evaluate the quality of his fouling during the post-match analysis, ‘adequate’, ‘stylish’ or on the day he had head-butted Princz (a man who regarded basketball matches as an unlimited opportunity for the grabbing of testicles) and got Princz stretchered off, ‘world-class’.
However, with Matasits on the sidelines, Gyuri would stick resolutely, if futilely, to nobility. But during a match with the Army, which the Army, despite Pataki’s absence, was scarcely winning, Gyuri and an Army player had gone up for a ball. The Army player had got the ball and had Gyuri crash to the ground where he had remained while the Army player winged his way to Locomotive’s basket and dumped the ball through the ring for two easy points. Like everyone else, Róka had looked on Gyuri’s collapse as an overly histrionic attempt to get the ball back ‘It’s okay,’ Róka had said to the slumped Gyuri, ‘you can get up now.’
But Gyuri hadn’t got up because he was firmly unconscious. Matasits booked him for wilfully obstructing the course of play, saying in all his years of refereeing he had never seen such blatant fakery and that this was going to the basketball council, particularly as, when Gyuri had regained contact with the world and learned what was going on, he had made a groggy attempt to strangle Matasits.
The tribunal was composed of three inert, overflowingly bored gentlemen behind a sweeping desk: they looked as if they were left in the room when the tribunal wasn’t sitting.
Matasits kicked off. ‘Esteemed tribunal, we are dealing here with a debaser of what is most sacred to man.’ He read badly from notes. Gyuri settled down, judging from the depth of Matasits’s sheets that it would be a long haul. Matasits had been leaning on his dictionary. In a number of rehashes, he denounced Gyuri as the fountain of all evil, a homicidal neanderthal, who wandered around the court on his knuckles, only employing his limited power of speech to heap abuse on duly empowered officials. To Matasits’s gaugeable and progressive disappointment, the tribunal didn’t gasp with horror but took notes emotionlessly albeit diligently. Having counted on something on the lines of a burning at the stake, with a little quartering thrown in for good measure, Matasits left the room, dejected at the coolness of his reception. The bored faces buoyed Gyuri a little, although he had a strong awareness of how even bored people could really disembowel a career.
Then it was Hepp’s turn: ‘Gentlemen, while I can in no way whatsoever condone Fischer’s behaviour, I should like to point out that he has been under enormous, enormous, pressures. His mother died recently, and this bereavement combined with his voluntary coaching at the Ferencvaros orphanage, in addition to his outstanding work-record at his place of employment…’ It was good stuff, though Gyuri wasn’t sure there was an orphanage in Ferencvaros.
To conclude, he was asked to stand and make any additional mitigation. ‘I’d like to apologise, gentlemen, for wasting your valuable time and I can assure you this will be the last time you will see me in such circumstances- ’ The tribunal could endure no more. They were paid to sit, not to listen. It was lunch time and Gyuri was cut off by the man in the middle. ‘Fine of fifty forints’ was the verdict. Gyuri, overwhelmed by the modesty of the fine, had a rash impulse to offer to round it up to a hundred if he could punch Matasits in the mouth.
‘Aren’t you going to the demonstration?’ Hepp asked outside. ‘Everyone else seems to be.’
‘If I thought it could make the slightest difference, I’d be leading it.’
Gyuri debated whether to go to work. It was a short debate. The Feather Processing Enterprise could do without him for an afternoon. It had done pretty well without him in the two months he had been there. Hepp had fixed a job for him there; as a good amateur basketball player, Gyuri needed a job. Once he had qualified as an accountant he resolved he should have a position with more status, more prospects and more pay than knocking out the occasional morse code for the railways.
The post of planner had been wangled for him at the Feather Processing Enterprise. Obviously, one didn’t want a job where there was a danger of work but it would have been nice to have had stimulating or glamorous surroundings in which to collect one’s wages.
All Gyuri had done in his two months of employment, out of curiosity, was to take the figures supplied by the Ministry stipulating the amounts the factory should be producing according to the Five Year Plan, and divide these totals by the number of units in the factory. Then, having discovered the unit production figures he added it all up again to get the production figure desired by the Plan. What was actually happening in the factory, he didn’t know. Gyuri doubted that anyone knew or even wanted to know. Most of the little time that he was in his office, his fellow economist, Zalan, and he, would flick matches (fired from the abrasive strip on the matchbox) at each other’s desks, taking bets on which stacks of paper would ignite.
He had only got the Plan details by accident after he encountered Fekete, the director of the Feather Processing Enterprise, as he was belting down a corridor with a couple of fishing-rods. He recognised Fekete because he had been a celebrated all-in wrestler before the war, known as ‘The Fat Boa’. The rumour was he had lent money to members of the Central Committee in the days of their illegality, when they shared the same boarding-house.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Fekete had said, shaking his hand warmly and giving the rippling-biceped smile of a former showman. ‘I’m in a terrible rush, but a copy of the Plan is in my office. Do help yourself.’ That was the only time Gyuri saw Fekete mainly because Fekete only came into the office when he needed was a convenient site for his extramarital ventures, and also because there wasn’t anything to discuss.
Gyuri went to Fekete’s office and with the aid of one of his secretaries who had come in that day to water the plants, searched it thoroughly. No sign of the Plan. Because he was new to the job, feeling inquisitive, and slightly intoxicated by his responsibility, Gyuri decided to phone the Ministry to get some information.
He talked to three people before he realised that simply finding out what he was supposed to be doing would exhaust him and would be going well beyond the call of duty. Gyuri counted, for his own amusement, that he explained twenty-two times that he was phoning from the Feather Processing Enterprise and he wished to obtain correct and up-to-date figures for the Plan, finally, he was connected to a voice whose hostility and reticence convinced him that he had at last reached the right person in the right department.
‘You expect me to tell you all this on the phone?’ reiterated the irate voice. ‘How do I know you’re not an American spy?’
‘Look at it this way,’ said Gyuri, chewing over this epistemological doubt, ‘would an American spy tell you to fuck your mother?’
Ashamed of having tried to do his job, Gyuri had sauntered out of the plant. Passing through the guard’s lodge at the entrance, his eye had been drawn to the vigilant defender of proletarian power vivisecting some dog-ends on his table to frankenstein together a new cigarette. Gyuri noticed that the guard was tearing off a leaf of paper from a document entitled, The Hungarian Feather Processing Enterprise: Revised Five-Year Plan Figures, 1955.
When in doubt, go home, go to bed, Gyuri thought. He had had a restless night fretting over the prospect of the disciplinary session and elaborating his defence, reckoning the tribunal would be the occasion for a backlog of overdue bad luck to unload on him. He opted to go home and file himself between the sheets.
He found Elek trying to persuade some used ground coffee to do an encore and produce more black soup. ‘You’ve just missed Jadwiga,’ he said. ‘She’s come up to Budapest for the demonstration.’ Gyuri swivelled on his heel and went out.
From the other side of the river, he saw the crowd around the Bern statue as he started to cross the Margit Bridge. Bern had been the Polish General who was confused about which revolution he was in, and zealously led the Hungarian Army of Independence in 1848 against the Habsburgs and led it very successfully, until the Russians were called in and the Army of Independence proved how Hungarian it was by getting wiped out. But at least it went down to vastly superior forces, though, apocryphally, when he heard that the ten-times-greater Russian force was attacking, Bern had remarked: ‘Good, I was worried they’d get away.’
The students had chosen to gather around Bern, since one of the goals of the demonstration was to express their approval of the political changes in Poland (Jadwiga had gone on about them with great enthusiasm) which were the sort of changes they wanted in Hungary: a friendly, ideology-next-door, happy-go-lucky sort of Communism. They didn’t seem alone in this wish.
Not only was the Bern square a lawn of heads but the entire embankment around it was one huge dollop of humanity. Thirty, forty thousand people and more drifting in at the edges. It was a vomiting up of an indigestible system. It had all the makings of uncontrollability.
‘Gyuri!’ He turned around to see Laci with two friends who were carrying a huge Hungarian flag. It was the first occasion Gyuri could recall that he had experienced the sensation of feeling old, gazing enviously on those younger than himself, those who hadn’t expended their optimism and could believe that carrying a flag around could change things.
‘Jadwiga’s here somewhere,’ said Laci, looking back at the crowd. ‘She’s here with some friends from Szeged.’ Gyuri surveyed the throng. It could take him the rest of the day to find her if their destinies weren’t synchronised.
‘I must congratulate you. I never thought I’d ever see anything like this’ commented Gyuri, taken aback by the scale of the protest. ‘Have you seen the sixteen points?’ asked Laci, unfolding a sheet of paper and passing it to Gyuri. ‘We started drawing them up yesterday at the University and we just kept going.’
The first demand that Gyuri read was for a change in the leadership of the Hungarian Working People’s Party. That was the sort of thing that, say in 1950, just thinking about it would have got you a ten-year stretch in an unlit cellar with swollen kidneys and icy water up to your knees. Now, what with Stalin smelling the violets by their roots, and Uncle Nikita rubbishing all his predecessors, that sort of thing was negotiable if you were accompanied by a very, very large crowd. The Communist movement, in the best tradition of bankrupt capitalists, was highly adept at changing name and premises and continuing to trade under a new veneer.
The demands grew more demanding. Imre Nagy in, Soviet troops out. Free elections, free press. Gyuri wondered, Why not throw in a requirement for eternal life and compulsory millionaireships for all Hungarians? There was also a demand for the secret files on everyone to be opened up.
‘Good list,’ he said. ‘Good crowd.’
‘The authorities were against it till we started,’ said Laci, ‘but now we’ve got plenty of gatecrashers from the Party. I suppose they want it to look as if they were behind it.’
The idea of Jadwiga demonstrating against the Party had dismayed Gyuri greatly when he heard about it. Apart from the more physical risks such as beating or death, the threat of deportation had gnawed at his innards. Poland for him, as a member of the passportless masses, was as inaccessible as the South Pole. But he could see the crowd was too big to have problems. It was a crowd so huge you couldn’t shoot at it or try to disperse it. The leaders and speech-makers would doubtless be soon invited in to some subterranean cell for a little chat and damage to their structures. But on the streets, the crowd was too much: like an unwelcome relative coming to call, all you could do was humour it until it decided to go home. Everything would be all right as long as Jadwiga could restrain herself from haranguing the populace or reciting some inflammatory poetry. ‘We’re going off to the parliament now,’ said Laci, ‘we’re going to stay there until they make Imre Nagy Prime Minister again.’ Gyuri watched them walk off along the bridge. Laci was only four, five years younger than him, but his idealism made Gyuri feel like a grandfather. Strange how two brothers could contain so many differences and similarities. Pataki had always harnessed his intelligence to the service of his willy and winding people up as much as possible. Laci was self-effacing, studious; every time Gyuri had been in the Pataki flat Laci had been attached to a book, often extremely dull text-books. Though you didn’t notice him, he was always around. It had been no surprise when he won a scholarship to the University, a considerable achievement for someone whose father wasn’t in the Central Committee. However, his mischief had merely been more undercover, more insidious, biding its time. Laci hadn’t said anything about it but Gyuri was sure he was leading rather than following at the Technical University.
Scanning the crowd, Gyuri tried to catch a fragment of Jadwiga. He was heartened not to see her addressing the demonstrators with a loud-hailer. The people milling around were no longer predominantly students, the demonstration was snowballing: soldiers, old folk, nonentities, water-polo players, housewives, office staff, all those who saw the demonstration and the placards and who realised this wasn’t a stage-managed, Communist-led affair, that it wasn’t an out of season May Day, abandoned their business and joined in with an air of why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-before?
There were dozens of people trying to pull down the statue of Stalin, imps gathered around his boots. There were many more people giving advice on how it should be done. The assays and the advice had been going on for some time. Sledgehammers, hacksaws, chains attached to lorries, as well as copious abuse had all been directed at the eight-metre-high statue. It remained highly indifferent to the flurry around its legs.
Gyuri was very glad that he was there. If he hadn’t been out searching for Jadwiga he probably would have missed this – it was a definite bet that Budapest Radio wouldn’t be broadcasting the news that a once-only performance of idol-toppling would be taking place that night.
It was going to be, indisputably, a historic moment, one of those things that grandchildren would be hearing about whether they felt like it or not. Gyuri had never derived such intense satisfaction from anything before like this; pleasure yes, but nothing that had made his soul throw back its head and just laugh. However, it would be nice, Gyuri reflected, if the historic moment could hurry up and get on with it, because it was really too cold to be standing about even for a once in a lifetime sensation and having patrolled the streets all day he was tired. Gyuri also couldn’t quite suppress the feeling that this was going a bit too far. He had carefully positioned himself to have a good view, but equally should penalties arrive, to have a good exit. It was like that moment of schoolboy exuberance when the teacher was going to walk in and curtail the pranks.
There was nothing to give substance to his unease though. A few policemen were circulating but they looked as if they were rather enjoying it and Gyuri had heard the one with the moustache suggest that an acetylene torch would do the job nicely. Two more senior, fatter policemen had been present an hour ago. The fattest, presumably most senior one had endeavoured to disperse the crowd but after issuing a few warnings, he got tired of being laughed at and vanished with his megaphone to more pressing matters elsewhere.
Whatever the outcome of the day, it had been the most enjoyable day, on all counts, that Gyuri had spent for… well, he couldn’t remember the last time precisely but the reign of boredom had lifted for a day.
A lorry pulled up and two workers who handled the acetylene equipment with practised lightness pulled themselves up onto the plinth to amputate Uncle Joe at the boot tops. A ripple of applause rose as the flame bit into Stalin’s calf, a miniature sun in the night’s darkness. The audience for such a monumental event could have been larger; there couldn’t have been more than three thousand gathered around the statue, a mere fraction of those out on the streets that night who would have undergone a quiver of pleasure at the toppling of the bronze abomination. Still, Gyuri knew, tomorrow everyone would be claiming they had been there.
Gyuri assumed that most people were still back in the centre of the city, around the parliament where Imre Nagy had waved sheepishly to the hundred thousand people assembled there and begun his address to them: ‘Comrades…’ This had exactly the opposite effect to what Nagy had wanted. Despite the fact that the crowd wanted him to take over, his opening malapropism brought boos and a rhythmic chant of ‘There are no comrades.’ Nagy had handled the rest of his speech better, urging coolness and good sense. It wasn’t a brilliant performance, but then, as a Communist, Nagy wasn’t familiar with the concept of an audience that wanted to hear him speak. People weren’t overjoyed, but it had been getting late and most of them, content with a good day’s demonstrating, started to go home. Gyuri had seen nearly everyone he had met in his life at the Parliament Square, but not Jadwiga. He was on his way home to check for her there when he happened upon Stalin about to come a cropper.
With some guided combustion, Stalin was tripped up by the will of the people and came crashing down with a clanging slap that dwarfed the ovation of the souvenir-hunters who closed in to feast on the fallen carcass with sledgehammers and pickaxes. Gyuri quite fancied a piece of Stalin as a sort of talisman, a memento of evil not always having its way, but he settled for making one more trip to the Radio to look for Jadwiga if she wasn’t at the flat. She wasn’t. So he took the tram down to Kalvin Square.
The whole network of streets around the Radio in Sándor Bródy utca was full, packed with people. It was like a replay of the World Cup protest, except this time the number of extras had quadrupled. Gyuri heard that a delegation of students had made its way to the Radio in the late afternoon to politely ask for their points to be read out to the rest of the country. More delegations, more well-wishers of democracy, more politeness had arrived throughout the evening and now by eleven o’ clock, the politeness was being discarded and the student idealism was being replaced by proletarian bellicosity. Gyuri hoped Jadwiga wasn’t around here (though he guessed his presence would produce her absence) since he was adamant that the Radio was where the Party would draw the line. The Stalin statue, that was allowing people to let off steam, since, after all Stalin was rather dead and passé, and it saved them the embarrassment of removing it themselves. But the Radio was real here-and-now power, it could pour the unrest all over the sleepier parts of the capital and the nation…
Gyuri spotted Laci and his gang by the main entrance. He squeezed his way through, earning a great deal of rancour from the people he had to shove and step on to reach them. ‘You haven’t seen Jadwiga?’ he inquired. ‘Yes,’ replied Laci, ‘she was here a minute ago.’ Adding proudly: ‘They’re going to read out the points.’
There was a stir around the entrance way and a suit full of shit started to shout: ‘The points are being read out now. Please go home. The points are being read out as I speak. Please go home.’ He sounded familiar and he had a booming voice; Gyuri assumed that he must be one of the presenters. The radio man stressed that the points were being read out and that people should go home. Then, from a window in one of the flats opposite the Radio entrance, a woman with the look of a harried housewife materialised. Balancing her wireless with some difficulty on the windowsill so that everyone in the street could faintly sample the broadcast, she shouted: ‘You evil liar! There’s nothing but music.’
The tear gas followed swiftly after this. It failed all round. The AVO didn’t have gas masks, most of the gas billowed back onto them, and since the street was so narrow and full, even those people who wanted to leave couldn’t do much about it. There was a lot of coughing and crying but more than anything else, there was a large amount of anger. It was something you could watch growing, like a darkening sky presaging rain. Gyuri dropped back to search for Jadwiga and because he knew it was coming. The Communists might not be good at organising the economy but if there was one thing they knew it was how to organise security.
By the time he had forced his way to the sanctuary of the nearby National Museum, not on a direct bullet line from the Radio entrance and endowed with walls and pillars so thick that gunfire would be no more effective than rain, the shooting started. It was the most sickening sound he had ever heard. His fear was overtaken by nausea at people being shot for standing in the wrong place. The streets, of course, were emptying as fast as possible.
In a doorway opposite, revealed sporadically as people ran past, Gyuri saw a tubby man slumped against the door, his legs straight out in front of him, like a propped up teddy-bear. He had a great red patch on his stomach. A companion was whispering in his ear, perhaps trying to talk him out of bleeding to death. Gyuri could discern two motionless bodies lying in front of the Radio. He was surprised how nauseous the sight made him. He had thought he had seen enough corpses during the war to be immune to queasiness, but obviously you had to keep your hand in when it came to indifference to death. And the anger. He had thought he had wanted to kill people before, but now he knew what the real thing felt like, that he truly wanted to, that it wouldn’t be a problem; the desire that had been unperceived in the wings now made its entrance, ready for action.
The shouts and running went on for some time. Then something happened that Gyuri hadn’t foreseen. Shooting started, towards the Radio. Windows began to shatter and Gyuri spied a young man taking advantage of a street corner to snipe at the building. He was dressed in civilian clothes. Where had he got the rifle from? Looking back towards Kalvin Square, Gyuri could see what looked like a parked Army lorry They must have been handing out weapons, because the sound of sniping commenced from every direction.
It would be funny, mused Gyuri, if a second revolution were to start here at the National Museum. It was here on these steps that Petófi had read out one of his poems cutting the ribbon, as it were, to inaugurate the 1848 revolution.
A couple of workers appeared, wearing the obligatory berets that explained they came from Csepel, swathed in belts of ammunition and carrying a heavy machine-gun. They were thinking out loud about how to get onto the roof of the museum from where they would have a superb arc of fire onto the Radio. ‘Never come to the Radio without your machine gun,’ one remarked.
A curly-haired, lanky guy also appeared, and taking up position behind a pillar, began to adjust the sights on his newly-acquired rifle. The payback for forcing everyone to do military training, thought Gyuri. He was positive he knew the man, the face was struggling to be named and placed. Looking at each other, there was a sudden ocular transfer of thought from the aspiring sharpshooter: Yes. It’s what we’ve been praying for. Armed revenge. He smiled widely at Gyuri. Maybe he did know him, maybe it was just the instant camaraderie of that night. ‘I feel so lucky,’ said the man. ‘This is simply wonderful. Wonderful.’ He fired off two rounds without much aim.
It was a long and bewildering night. Most of the shooting was just at the Radio, rather than any particular part of it or any specific target. People had fun simply shooting at the bricks. There was also a protracted exchange of fire with the other end of Sándor Bródy utca during a fear of AVO reinforcements coming. It turned out to be another group of self-armed listeners of the Radio wishing to register their complaints.
Tired and cold, Gyuri nevertheless came to the conclusion he could never forgive himself if he didn’t do a stint of shooting. He sidled up to one well-dressed combatant and asked him where he had obtained his gun. ‘A soldier gave it to me. But if you want one, please take mine. I have to go. It pulls a little to the left.’ Here he peered lengthily at his watch in the dark. ‘I was hoping to knock off an AVO but the wife will be wondering where I am. A gunfight at the Radio won’t be an acceptable excuse.’
At about two in the morning, Gyuri and some others slipped into an adjacent courtyard to see if they could gain entry to a top-floor flat. They found a group of five AVO men huddled in a corner, without weapons and without any inclination to fight.
‘Shouldn’t you be in the Radio building? Defending the gains of the people?’ asked one of Gyuri’s group sarcastically.
‘Do you think we’re going to die for a bunch of fucking Communists?’ retorted one of the AVO men indignantly. Unfortunately they were so pathetic, no one even wanted to kick them a bit. As they were pondering what to do with them, a charming pensioner appeared in her dressing gown and asked if anyone would like tea or coffee. ‘I’ve got a few crackers as well,’ she said, ‘but nothing more. I wasn’t counting on company.’ She brought them all a drink and got very angry when someone tried to give her some money. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
After his tea, Gyuri who still hadn’t fired a shot, went into the old lady’s flat, introduced himself to her husband, opened their windows and fired off three shots in the general direction of the Radio. He closed the window and thanked the couple for their co-operation. He felt much, much better. He had taken part.
Around six o’ clock it dawned on the people besieging that there was no one inside trying to stop them getting in. Going in, they found a few AVO rigors, but to their embarrassment it looked as if most of the garrison had slipped out a back door. One or two shamefaced broadcasters were discovered hiding under desks or in broom-cupboards. One enthusiastic youth, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, called them brothers and exhorted them to take up arms for the revolution. You could tell it was a revolution because this appeal didn’t sound ridiculous. Revolution. It was the first time Gyuri had heard the word mentioned in regard to the proceedings. And why not? Not surprisingly the presenters readily expressed their readiness to do what was requested. It’s amazing how much respect people have for you when you have a gun and they don’t, thought Gyuri.
The studios were empty, with the signs of hasty retreat, but from a radio they could hear music being played as if it were a normal Wednesday morning. They were transmitting from somewhere else. ‘Now what do we do?’ said one of the victors putting his finger on the issue. Gyuri passed his rifle to another enthusiastic but unarmed youth and walked home.
In front of the Keleti Station he saw a convoy of unmistakably Soviet armoured personnel carriers and tanks clattering along. Well, it had been a laugh while it lasted.
He got home to find Elek breakfasting modestly in the kitchen.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve missed her,’ he said, looking shocked. Without waiting for further illumination, Gyuri ran out and explored the neighbouring streets persistently. It was ridiculous. He was going to stick to his philosophy of staying in bed (Pataki’s departure had brought him a new sleep machine to replace the one he had burned in Spartan ardour) until Jadwiga turned up.
‘Imre Nagy has been on the radio,’ said Elek. ‘Did you hear?’
‘No, I missed that.’
‘He’s Prime Minister again. He’s asked everyone to calm down.’
‘He’s going to have to ask very hard indeed,’ mumbled Gyuri from his bed.
On his way to the Technical University, he saw an AVO man taking a flying lesson. He had woken on the afternoon after an unsatisfying six hours’ repose, romance and other adrenalin-pumpers marring his sleep, and he had determined to head tc the University since all the studenty activities were probably being co-ordinated from there. ‘Listen,’ he said to Elek, who felt events justified a day off at home, ‘I’ll be back at eight on the dot, regardless of how interesting the revolution is. Tell Jadwiga she should wait if she comes home.’
Outside, there was the sound of remote gunfire, at the right sort of distance to be piquant but not trouser-soiling. At the Lenin Körút, people had obtained ladders to help pull down the street signs with Lenin Körút on them. A crowd had formed to enjoy this but suddenly there was a scuffle, and a round-faced man in a raincoat was seized by those around him to shrieks of ‘AVO! AVO!’ Gyuri couldn’t tell what had given him away, but there was no doubt that the charge was correct. The round-faced man produced a pistol, and ended his career by firing off two shots, severely wounding a tree. Held by eight pairs of hands, his documents were examined. Then someone said: ‘Let’s give him a flying lesson.’
So they did. He was conducted to a rooftop and made to walk a non-existent plank. The AVO man wasn’t much good at flying. He came straight down and squandered all his energy on screaming.
People didn’t cheer this but nor were they bothered. It was about right. Some public-spirited citizens started to drag the body out of the road, and as they were doing this, a diminutive, silent fellow next to Gyuri, who had been watching all this as if waiting for a bus, threw himself on the body without warning, stabbing away with a penknife as if he were hammering on a door, shouting ‘You killed my brother, you killed my brother’ with the same monotony as his stabbing. The others were perplexed as to what to do, but interrupting his rage would have been impolite.
Gyuri had thought the disturbances would be over by now, that the flirtation with liberty would be a one-night stand. But clearly, people were still doing whatever they felt like. What were the Russians up to?
In the centre of the city, closer to the University, Gyuri saw Russian tanks parked menacingly here and there, trying to look aggressive and unobtrusive at the same time but he didn’t witness any fighting.
Immediately, at the university, Gyuri found Laci, with a tricolour band around his arm and sporting a pistol in a holster. Clearly he was in Laci’s orbit just as he was out of Jadwiga’s. In the main hallway of the University the standard fashion accessory seemed to be a firearm, either a davai guitar, or as a minimum, a revolver. Gyuri was expecting Laci to tell him that Jadwiga had just been looking for him, but he hadn’t seen her at all.
Laci was shaken: ‘We were attacked this morning. Some AVO men in a car drove past, they opened up, killed one of us. I had a machine gun, I had them in my sights… Gyuri, I simply couldn’t pull the trigger.’
So there it was. The shock of being an idealist. Some people can’t tell jokes or touch their toes. Laci can’t pull a trigger. It was funny, his brother would have been trotting around with extra magazines. As Gyuri commiserated with him, another student joined them. ‘Hey, Gyuri, are you enjoying the revolution? Do you want to see our AVO collection?’
The chemistry lecture hall contained twelve predictably miserable AVO employees who had been acquired by student patrols. They were being tortured by a student who was outlining their prospects under the principles of international law and natural justice; how they would be formally, correctly and legally investigated by a properly constituted body and if they had committed any illegal acts they would have to stand trial. Surveying the hunched figures, surrounded by half-eaten plates of spinach casserole (which even starving students found hard work), Gyuri thought how lucky they were to be captured by students, and not walking non-existent planks.
Someone called his name. It was, Gyuri realised, Elemér, the dog-catching mailed-fist of the proletariat. ‘Gyuri, Gyuri, why don’t you explain to everyone who I am? Tell them I only worked in the stationery and office supplies department. They don’t understand I’m no one important.’
Gyuri was so taken aback that he was left fumbling for emotions and responses. Later on, he would wonder whether Elemér’s consummate invertebratery wasn’t in some senses admirable, such a remarkable absence of moral backbone being as worthy of attention as a circus contortionist. The ability to survive surely being a laudable thing. Elemér’s tone would have been apt for greeting a long unseen friend at a party. Gyuri settled for staring at him, aghast that he wasn’t standing between a Radio building and a loaded submachine gun. It was a case of either beating him to death or doing nothing. Since he knew the students would be upset at his tarnishing the propriety and decorum of their AVO reservation, giving Elemér a look that he knew would affect his digestion, Gyuri left.
Outside, he could still hear a muted battle raging, like the muffled argument of a domestic dispute a wall away. Trams had become a rare species, hardly glimpsed, but a tram appeared to take Gyuri across the Zsigmond Moricz Square, where he had a good, close-up view of two Soviet tanks shelling what he assumed were freedom-fighter strongholds. Once the tram was over the bridge track in Pest, things were quieter, a few streetsweepers were brushing the pavements clean with their customary sluggish swishes; their union evidently hadn’t called them out.
While keeping a look-out for any discharging tanks, Gyuri reflected on the corpse of the student killed that morning, now laid out in state in front of the University by some trees, surrounded by impromptu wreathes and flowers, and table-clothed by a national flag that had been draped over him. It was one of the old fashioned tricolours that must have been stored away somewhere, not one of the new-style flags that everyone was parading around, minus the centre where the Communist coat-of-arms had been cut out.
The makeshift catafalque had been moving but didn’t even start to make up for the death. A whole lifetime poured down the drain. The person gone, and a lifesize effigy, a livid, well-observed caricature left. All those beliefs, emotions, memories carefully stored up over twenty-three years junked. Twenty-three years. What? 200,000 hours, a Hungarian Second Army of tooth brushing, cleaning behind the ears, blackhead squeezing, small talk, waiting for public transport, wiped out. An identity, spring-cleaned out. A whole being just left as a resume in a few memories, until those repositories were disposed of as well. Abridged away. Nothing like death, thought Gyuri climbing out of the morbidity, for making life look good.
He got off the tram at the Körút. Although most of the shops were closed, he remembered that the day-and-night people’s buffet (a delicatessen short on the delicacies) had been open earlier, and he decided to investigate what was going in the way of edibles.
Near the buffet, lying in the middle of the road like a giant’s abandoned football, was the head from Stalin’s statue, dragged there by a jubilant public as a mark of their triumph, displaying the traitor’s head on a gargantuan scale. A gentleman was seeking to knock off a chunk with the aid of a pickaxe, and it occurred to Gyuri that he should take a souvenir as well. He queued up patiently behind the man, when the Soviet tank appeared.
It roared into the middle of the Körút and opened fire on Gyuri.
Sheltering behind Stalin’s head with the other souvenir-hunter, the first and only thing that occurred to Gyuri as the bullets smashed into the shops and cut down tree branches, was how much he wanted to live. He had never been aware of how enormous, how global this desire was deep down, a desire that was in no way smaller than the universe – how he would do anything, absolutely anything to live, to live for even a few more seconds. If life meant huddling up to Stalin’s head for the next forty years or so, that would be quite satisfactory as long as he could stay alive. Rolled up tighter than a foetus, he closed his eyes not questioning whether that could be of any use.
The shooting stopped, and there was no movement apart from some shards of glass keeling over; those who had taken up assorted positions on the ground were evidently quite happy with them and were in no rush to move. Gyuri could still hear the rumbling of the tank engine unpleasantly close. An old man embracing the pavement next to a tree, with his bag of shopping beside him, yards away from Gyuri, was protesting with amazing persistence and volume: ‘Two world Wars. Two world wars and now this.’ Gyuri considered whether it might be a wiser investment in self-preservation to run to a more secure and spacious sanctuary but while he had faith in his speed, the notion of having only air between himself and the barrel of the heavy machine gun on the tank was too disturbing. Unless the tank closed in, he was going to sweat it out behind Stalin. The rumbling of the tank continued at the same remove; Gyuri became curious as to what they were up to but he wasn’t going to have a look
‘I never thought I’d be grateful to Stalin,’ commented Gyuri’s companion whom Gyuri was half-crushing. They were there for what may or may not have been a long time but certainly felt like it. Gyuri didn’t mind waiting; it was one of those activities you could only do alive. His co-huddler had been in Recsk, the labour camp that had been set up as an extermination centre in the middle of the Hungarian countryside. Gyuri knew nothing about it except that it had existed and been shut down under Nagy; one of István’s friends had been an inmate but had given him only the most elliptical of accounts.
Normally, Gyuri avoided the offers of life stories offered in the traditional Hungarian style of expanded self-history, the vocal autobiographies that all Hungarians seemed to be working on continually but he didn’t have much choice and besides, Miklós’s extracts were quite gripping. Gyuri had always rated himself unlucky but now he realised he was only a weekend player in misfortune.
‘The Germans, what a cultured people when they’re not invading your country,’ Miklós explained. Miklós had done a stint in the anti-Nazi resistance. Caught, the Hungarians were too lazy to execute him and passed him to the Germans who put him in Dachau where he had been dying of cholera when the Americans arrived. He got better. ‘It seemed a bit pointless to die when you’d just been liberated.’
He came back to Hungary. ‘Talk about being stupid.’ Where he worked for the Smallholders’ Party. ‘Talk about asking for it.’ Then he got a free ride in a black car which led to him being imprisoned in Recsk. The concept of Recsk was that you went in but you didn’t come out. ‘Its scope was modest compared to the Soviet or German models, I suppose,’ Miklós conceded, ‘but we’re a small country, after all: there were only fifteen hundred of us.’ For three years Miklós and the others had no news from outside. ‘The only news we got was from shitty newspaper we filched from the guards’ latrine and let’s be honest, the papers aren’t much to talk about in the first place. We only found out about Stalin’s death when one of us noticed a black border around his picture in the main office.’
Miklós was very talkative despite the discomfort of his position, pinioned by a first division basketball player. ‘You know what the worst thing was? It’s all crap about how important freedom, friendship all that abstract stuff is. You know what matters? Sleep and food. The hunger was unimaginable. You thought it was bad during the War? I tell you, a few weeks, a couple of months of going hungry – it’s nothing, nothing. A doddle. A year… two years…three years without enough to eat,’ he was now shouting, ‘it’s beyond human belief. Ever since I got out, I always carry this.’ With some difficulty, he unwrapped a cloth containing a piece of cheese, a hunk of bread and some radishes. ‘I have to carry supplies with me all the time. I hardly ever use it. I just have to have it with me.’ He offered Gyuri a tired-looking radish.
‘No. Thanks. So are you going to be looking up your old guards while you have a chance to express your gratitude?’
‘That’s an interesting question. We used to discuss that a lot at Recsk. What sort of people could beat someone to death just for the hell of it? There was disagreement about this in the camp, as there’s always disagreement when you get two Hungarians together. You know how the 23rd of October is going to be described in the history books? The day the Hungarians agreed.
‘Anyway, my view was that the guards at Recsk were basically very ordinary, if not too bright lads. They’d been told we were the scum of the earth, the most evil, degenerate, child-murdering, odious, verminous parasites to be found in creation: in short the sort of people who would run concentration camps. What use was it us trying to explain we were there because we h ad voted the wrong way?
‘The other thing is that, you know, someone who is jailed falsely for a long time, not a year or two, but three or more, tends to go to one extreme or the other. Judging from my experience you either become excessively forgiving or excessively vengeful. I feel we should remember Recsk. People should know what happened. But we should also forget about it and get on with other things. When the tanks go.’
A moving-off rumble came. Having made its point and intimidated the vicinity, the tank moved off. When Gyuri saw people emerging from the buffet he knew he could safely stand again. His clothes were soaked with sweat, the nostril-curling stench of fear. ‘Nice meeting you,’ he said, shaking Miklós’s hand, ‘hope you like the revolution.’
He bought some food. It was after seven, and because he had made eight the rendezvous time with Jadwiga and because his luck was sorely depleted, Gyuri was very keen to get home. Moving up to the Keleti Station he was annoyed to see the revolution strengthening. Dead Russian soldiers were lying in gutters and against buildings like inebriated vagrants. While Gyuri had no objection to dead Russian soldiers, it suggested that he was moving closer to the fighting rather than away from it as he desired. His hands were still shaking from his time out on the target range. His stomach would be mulling over the terror for weeks. Ridiculously, in the middle of the shooting he had had the impulse to shout at the tank crew: ‘Stop! You don’t understand. I’m a coward. This isn’t fair. Find some brave people to shoot at.’
A Soviet armoured personnel carrier that had erupted, probably by grenade, was proving a big hit with the locals because, apparently, it had a headless Russian on display inside. People vied to peer into the charred interior. Gyuri was totally unmoved by the sight of the Russian dead. He had heard all the arguments about how the Russians were people, how everyone is the same, what a great composer Tchaikovsky was; nevertheless he couldn’t help wishing that the Russians would fuck off and be people and the same, back in the Soviet Union. An incinerated corpse at his feet failed to elicit any compassion. Probably a conscript- he didn’t give a toss.
All around the Keleti Station, there were groups of tanks cutting off his intended route home. The Russian tanks weren’t doing anything but they didn’t seem to want to move. They were just occupying space. No one, Gyuri noticed, was strolling around close to them. The streets were full of people, no one wanted to stay at home, but a peopleless belt extended for hundreds of metres round the tanks. The streetcorner militia that had formed on the Rákoczi út were discussing what to do. There were two soldiers, several new teenagers (two on roller-skates) and a hotchpotch of individuals you’d find waiting for a bus, including two postwomen. ‘We need petrol bombs. That’s what they’re using at the Corvin. Who can get some empty bottles?’ asked one of the soldiers.
It was nearly eight. Gyuri cut down a sidestreet to see if he could sidestep the Red Army.
An hour later making his final approach, closing in from the direction of the Zoo, Gyuri was annoyed to discover that the Red Army had completely surrounded his flat. He was getting angry enough to attack one of the tanks.
As he was observing the tank blocking the end of Benczur utca and trying to think of a way of blowing it up, safely, without risk, with his bare hands, from an enormous distance he saw a man walk out of one of the blocks of flats at the end of the street and start to knock on the side of the tank, as if he were knocking on a door. He knocked very assiduously and after a few minutes, the turret opened and a leather-helmeted head popped out. What was the man doing? Asking them for a light? Hoping that the Russians would be less likely to open fire in mid-conversation, Gyuri galloped over. When he ran past, despite his grudging Russian, he realised that the man was haranguing the tank crew. ‘What are you doing here?’ the man demanded.
‘We’re here to protect you from hooligans and reactionaries,’ the officer protested.
‘Where are the hooligans? Where are the reactionaries?’ It was an intriguing exchange, but Gyuri had had enough current affairs for one day. Going up the stairs, he met Jadwiga coming down.
‘You’re late,’ she said sternly.
‘Time flies when you’re having a revolution.’
Inside, Elek greeted them with the news that Imre Nagy had formed a new government. ‘I’m pleased for him,’ said Gyuri, ‘but if you’ll excuse us, there are some urgent aspects of Hungarian-Polish relations to consider.’
Why shouldn’t things be conducted in comfortable conditions? thought Gyuri, glad that he had obtained a fully-qualified bed from Pataki as his farewell present. Worn out by history, worry, fear and his conjugal work, he was reclining into sleep when Jadwiga said apropos of nothing:
‘We are winning. It will be Poland next.’
He loved her craziness. Did it really matter what went outside the bedroom where they had established a bad-free zone? ‘Who knows, maybe even the Czechs will do something?’ Jadwiga continued, recounting her day out in the revolution and how she had come to Budapest. On Saturday, the students at Szeged University had held a meeting, as was suddenly the fashion, to discuss the pervasive iniquity of things. ‘It was the first time in my life I’ve seen anything that could even loosely be called democratic. Strange that I had to wait twenty-two years to see someone saying what they thought in public; there was something almost improper about it. So we voted to withdraw from that Communist-guided student union and to set up our own. I told them we had to do it. I remembered what you said about fighting all the way. That pushed me.’
Gyuri strained his memory but he couldn’t recall any such dictum.
The Szeged students had then voted to send a delegation to the university youth of Budapest to urge them to do the same. Jadwiga had arrived in Budapest on Monday night but hadn’t wanted to come and break the back of Gyuri’s sleep by saying hello at four in the morning. She had then been touring the collapse of the Party’s power. While Gyuri had been sheltering behind Stalin, she had been at the Corvin cinema, with one of the best seats in town to watch the fighting. Gyuri related his various encounters with Soviet tanks.
‘Were you afraid?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he lied, choosing a tone of cool indifference to the lethal nature of Soviet armour but not one of scorn, since he didn’t want to overdo it.
‘I wasn’t afraid either,’ she said. Not for the first time, Gyuri registered that Jadwiga was much braver than he was. A soul as firm as her breasts, beauty and fortitude, Venus and Mars in one. And her bravery was a self-fuelling, independent, detached bravery, the sort that would work alone, in the dark, in the gas chamber. What is she doing with me? Gyuri could envision rustling up some bravado if there was an audience or some support, but the sort of solo bravery that exists even though there is no one to witness or mark it was, he knew, beyond him.
Could doing brave things make you brave, as push-ups made you stronger? Was courage bone or muscle? Something that was meted out at birth or something that was up to you?
They vacated the bedroom to merge the food Gyuri had bought into an omelette. After they had eaten, Jadwiga went out of the kitchen and reappeared with a submachine-gun, the classic davai guitar, which she placed on the table. ‘Do you have anything to clean this with?’ she asked. Gyuri caught Elek looking at him with vast amusement.
The only thing that would have been more unlikely than a revolution, thought Gyuri arriving at the British Embassy with a folder full of AVO documents showing that a British diplomat had been spying for the AVO, would have been my arriving at the British Embassy with a folder full of AVO documents showing that a British diplomat had been spying for the AVO.
He rang the bell. After a suitably dignified pause, the door was opened, Gyuri was pleased to see, by Nigel. ‘Good morning,’ said Gyuri in his floweriest pronunciation. ‘How are you, Nigel? Do you know if the Ambassador is free?’
‘Actually, he’s a Minister Plenipotentiary, but don’t let that stop you.’ Gyuri had no idea what Nigel was talking about but didn’t want his status as a star English speaker to be diminished. He had met Nigel three days earlier, during the heaviest of the fighting. The agreement had been that anything moving down the Nádor utca would get it. They had a heavy machine-gun set up ready to rip, which was hogged by a surly, burly coal miner from Tatabánya, who didn’t like anyone coming anywhere near it. ‘I was a gunner in the Army, all right? I know how to use this thing. I don’t want anyone messing around with it, I don’t want anyone fucking it up.’
He didn’t take any breaks and he urinated on the spot, because he didn’t want to let go of the machine-gun or let it out of his sight. When the car appeared, the miner immediately misfired the gun, which was just as well since it gave everyone time to distinguish the Union Jack tied sloppily to the bonnet of the car. The car trundled up respectfully to their position, and as the miner continued to swear, to curse the quality of Soviet manufacturing standards and to eject cartridges left, right and centre, Nigel had got out and said cheerfully, ‘Good afternoon. Is there by any chance anyone here who speaks English and who knows the way to the British Legation?’ Gyuri had earned this conversation.
Nigel had the elegant garb of a top spy, a rising diplomat: someone, in short, well worth getting to know. But in fact he said he was an aspiring opera singer, studying in Vienna. With a friend, he had driven to Budapest to deliver medical supplies. There was no one else who spoke English, but even if there had been they wouldn’t have had a chance. Gyuri took charge, exulting in every well-spent forint of his English lessons. ‘And how do you like Budapest, Nigel? Let me escort you to the Embassy. And do tell me what you think of Viennese women.’
A week after the start of the revolution it was all over, barring the history-writing. To Gyuri’s amazement, to everyone’s amazement, and no doubt most of all, to the Russians’ amazement, the part-timers of Budapest had beaten the Red Army. True, a lot of the Russians hadn’t been very eager to fight, most of them had been based in Hungary for some time and seemed to understand what they were being asked to do and that they weren’t combating international fascism or the Hungarian underworld but the populace of Budapest. Indeed the only Russian Gyuri had seen who was wholly enthusiastic about trigger-pulling had been a Russian deserter he had met at the Corvin who had been fighting his former colleagues.
But the main problem for the Russians, who had been counting on the AVO to pull their weight, had been that, without proper infantry support, their tanks had been bizarrely vulnerable in the streets of Budapest. People simply waited for a tank to pass and then for the price of a good drink, lobbed their petrol bomb on the rear of the tank, where the burning fuel would be sucked in through the ventilation grilles of the T-34s and into the engine, turning the occupants of the tank into charcoal sticks; those fast enough to avoid being burned were shot as they clambered out.
Imre Nagy formed a new new government, one this time with a few people who hadn’t been in the Communist Party. Ceasefire. Exultation. Hungarians had fought their way to paradise.
Along with many other curious folk, Gyuri and Jadwiga had taken a look in the White House, which appropriately enough for a revolution looked as if it had been turned upside down, all the drawers and shelves emptied as people indulged their prurience or just enjoyed themselves making a mess. ‘You always choose the most romantic places for outings, Gyuri,’ she remarked. The first document Gyuri picked up to read was a file detailing the blackmailing of a British diplomat who had been apprehended smuggling gold and then moulded by the AVO. Gyuri grabbed the file and headed for the British Embassy, pleased that he had found a bridge to more civilised parts, leaving Jadwiga to studiously read, slowly and carefully the way she always did, from the vast anthologies of turpitude.
With remarkable speed and ease, perhaps because of a good word from Nigel, perhaps because of the informality of the times, Gyuri was shown in to see the Ambassador, who received the file with courtesy. He puffed on his pipe, manifestly at home in the revolution and pored over the first few pages. ‘Ah. Dawson. Yes,’ he thought out loud.
‘Thank you very much, Mr Fischer. It’s very kind of you to bring this round.’ It took fifty seconds; Gyuri was out almost as fast as he had got in. He hadn’t been expecting anything in particular, though some gold bullion, a British passport, a job offer, something like that would have been quite acceptable. A little excitement and incredulity as a minimum. The Ambassador showed him out as if he had just return a stray button from the Ambassador’s overcoat.
In the waiting-room, next to the entrance, Nigel was chatting with a man whom Gyuri had met before, The Times correspondent. Gyuri had been excited to meet him because The Times was The Times, and also because everyone knew that their foreign correspondents worked for British Intelligence, although the correspondent did a good job of disguising it. In fact his behaviour was rather dim. Brilliant cover. Gyuri admired professionalism. There was also a broad, military figure who looked as if he would be happiest inspecting rifles, who sure enough, was introduced to Gyuri as the military attaché.
‘What do you make of the new government?’ asked The Times, presumably looking for some good quote.
‘It’s fine. I approve of it, while it lasts.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Russians will be back.’
There was gentle British scoffing at this statement. In the few days he had been dealing with live Brits, Gyuri had rapidly become attuned to how the British had reached a level of civilisation where they could clearly tell you how stupid you were, without actually having to say so; that’s what cricket and centuries of parliamentary democracy could do for you.
‘The Russians have given an undertaking to leave. I saw Mikoyan in the parliament with my own eyes, the man was in tears over losing Hungary,’ explained the correspondent. ‘They’re leaving. They have no choice.’
Gyuri had had the same argument that morning with Elek who was cock-a-hoop over the news. ‘I told you this couldn’t go on much longer,’ Elek had said. Gyuri summoned up a simplified, profanity-free version of his thesis for British consumption.’I know the Russians have lost one fight. They are leaving. But I do not believe they will say: “Oh. You want to be independent. We’re so sorry we didn’t understand that you didn’t want us here.” They will return.’
There was more quivering of stiff upper lips in amusement at the wary Hungarian who had no grasp of the international situation. ‘No,’ pronounced the military attaché, ‘they’re finished here.’
‘Indeed,’ said The Times, ‘I’m willing to bet you five pounds that they don’t come back. You can give me a few Hungarian lessons when I win.’
‘I hope you do win,’ said Gyuri.
Jadwiga had told Gyuri to meet her at the Corvin and going there he stopped on the Körút to buy a newspaper. A Soviet corpse was still lying there, an unusual sight now, since the dead had been mostly packed away out of sight. Something metallic glinted on his wrist. It looked familiar: an Omega watch, like the one the Red Army had relieved him of back in ’44, exactly the same model. He undid the strap, and looked on the back of the watch. There were the initials Gy. R ‘Thanks very much for looking after it,’ he said, pocketing the watch.
Walking across to the newsagent, a shout stopped him. It was Róka. ‘Hey class alien! This is what you want,’ he said, handing Gyuri one of the stack of papers he was nursing. ‘Kill anyone interesting?’ he enquired. ‘Not really,’ Gyuri replied, ‘but I was being choosy.’ Róka had spent most of the livefire time chasing a lorryload of AVO who were keen on surprise atrocities; they would flip open the flaps on the lorry’s rear and blast away at anyone in view, male or female, young or old, unarmed or unarmed. Róka’s crew had missed them several times by seconds. The story ended with the AVO being last seen motoring in the direction of the Angyalföld. ‘They couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes,’ Róka obituarised. The paper that Róka had handed over was entitled The Truth. ‘I’m working on the editorial committee,’ he explained proudly. ‘Oh, before I forget, Hepp wants everyone out at the club at Hepp-time, Monday morning. He says we’ve wasted enough time.’ With a parting injunction to look up Gyurkovics, who had managed to get himself put in charge of the distribution of a vast amount of processed cheese from Switzerland, Róka carried on down the street dishing out his journal to anyone willing to take it.
Gyuri had never thought he would ever in his life earnestly want to read a Hungarian newspaper. Newspapers were now teeming with the sort of increases that could normally only be found in the production figures of Communist enterprises.
The old papers had changed, they had received editorial transplants and new ones were springing up like mushrooms. They weren’t much good but you did have the novel sensation of wanting to read what they had to say. You couldn’t tell before you read the paper what would be in it; now you got all those things that hadn’t been there for nearly ten years, opinions that weren’t the Party’s. Casting his eye over The Truth, Gyuri read some soggy new poetry, some exhausted old poetry and some articles about the 23rd which hardly counted as news. It was still a pleasure to read.
After the fighting, the tidying up. Everywhere, shattered glass, masonry and martial litter was being victoriously swept up by the city-proud populace. Soviet wreckage was being pushed out of roads so that traffic could circulate properly. Everyone was on their best behaviour as if the Revolution was an honoured guest they wanted to impress with their hospitality and civility. A bubble of decency had risen out of the earth’s core and burst in Budapest. Peasants were driving in from the countryside with their carts to distribute food to whoever they came across, dishing out sacks of potatoes, apples, marrows, some late melons. In a broken jewellers’ window Gyuri saw a note explaining that the contents had been taken to the flat above for safe-keeping. There were cardboard boxes on pavements marked ‘for the fallen’, overflowing with banknotes contributed for the dependents of the dead.
The worst fighting or the best fighting depending on how you felt about it had all been around the Corvin Cinema. The Corvin Cinema was not a very salubrious or comfortable cinema, as a cinema it wasn’t much to brag about, but as if with astonishing forethought, it couldn’t have been better designed for street fighting. The circular cinema was surrounded by a ring of flats with lots of convenient alleyways in and out.
But the Corvin had not been the only streetfighting club. All over Budapest they had jack-in-the-boxed. Even around the Corvin, there had been stiff competition: the Prater utca school, just behind the Corvin, and, just across the road, on the other side of the Űllői út, the Kilián Barracks, the home of a ‘C’ battalion, a collection of soldiers considered by the authorities to have no commitment to the cause of Communism, who had been down for even more than the usual excessive ditch-digging and road-laying and who generally had a menial, unpaid, unfed time and who had been particularly interested to hear about the Revolution.
As if that wasn’t enough, running parallel to the Űllői út which had been the major route into Budapest for the Soviet troops, was the Túzoltó út, a ludicrously narrow street which had sired its own warriors, known locally reasonably enough, as the Túzoltó boys, who had pulled off one of the neatest coups of the fighting, known locally as the Túzoltó massacre. Seeing that his comrades were having nasty, mainly fatal, accidents on the Űllői út as they came to look for hooligans and reactionaries, a Soviet tank commander had made the decision to go down Túzoltó út. Five tanks had gone in, but none had come out.
‘We got the first tank and we got the last tank,’ one of the participants (a leading water-polo player) had related to Gyuri. ‘So the other three were stuck there. They weren’t going anywhere. We had a break for lunch and then we finished them off.’ So gorged was Túzoltó út with bits of Soviet tanks that the boys had to move their operations to another street.
When Gyuri arrived at the Corvin, as always there were lots of groups congregated outside the cinema; the necessity to be out on the street hadn’t diminished. People wanted to see history with their own eyes. The anti-tank gun was still out by the entrance with a sign ‘retained by popular demand’ propped up on the barrel; people were still carrying their weapons, despite the call for people to start handing them in. Jankó, the commander of the Corvin’s single anti-tank battery, was hobbling about on his wooden leg and didn’t look as if he would be paying heed. He had a rifle in his hand, a greatly-prized AK-47, the latest Soviet assault rifle, slung over his back, a holstered pistol and a bayonet peeking out of the top of the boot on his good foot. Indisputably a man who was afraid of missing an opportunity of killing some Russians, Jankó had certainly done a faultless job on the anti-tank gun, six tanks burst open like popcorn, one shot apiece. Not surprisingly in a man with such homicidal proficiency and a knack for the gadgets of death, he had a mean set to his face. Gyuri could imagine him working as a rat-catcher, getting a kick out of killing small mammals, until larger, more Soviet ones came along.
Jadwiga, true to form, was nowhere to be seen where she should have been seen. Gyuri glanced in at a few of the meetings that were taking place, but he couldn’t see her. Now the fighting was over, people were doing one of two things, either holding meetings or painting the old national insignia on everything. The meetings, initially bracing and euphoric, were lurching towards tedium. The absence of free association had been wearing, but it was like not reading a book for five years and then trying to read five at the same time to make up. Creedal orgies, nationwide.
All sorts of organisations were coming into existence; the old political parties carrying on from mid-sentence where they stopped in 1947 and all sorts of societies for political prisoners, for students, for office workers, for economists, for revolutionary water-polo players. The old joke about two Hungarians on a desert island resulting in three political parties had been enacted in earnest. There was probably already an association of one-legged freedom-fighters for Jankó to join.
Gyuri sauntered around the Corvin yard. The faces of the fighters were young, most of them not out of their teens (he again felt somewhat obsolete); they were working-class generally and well, most of them not too bright. But then would anyone intelligent spend their leisure time taunting Soviet tanks? No, the educated, intelligent people chiefly stayed at home producing pamphlets and let the poor and stupid do the dying for them, coming out to wave the flags at appropriate moments.
The Corvin was in the sort of district that appreciated a good fight, whether it was with rival football supporters or the Red Army. Gyuri kept expecting to see Tamás; the Corvin was his sort of event, and there could be no doubt that if Tamás were alive, Russians would be dying. But there were so many other thriving locations apart from the Corvin to choose from. Still, familiar faces were at the Corvin; he had seen Noughts, arguing with two girls kitted out with submachine-guns. Gyuri had said hello but suspected that Noughts hadn’t placed him, Noughts having played a larger role as Gyuri’s cellmate, than Gyuri with his walk-on part on Noughts’s stage.
Gyuri kept expecting to see Pataki as well. Backs, profiles, haircuts, overcoats, remote forms would imitate Pataki or give off Patakiness. He imagined Pataki might be on his way back to Hungary, he wouldn’t want to miss this. One man coming out of the parliament resembled Pataki so closely, moved so much like him, that Gyuri was getting the joy and the greetings ready and only the absence of any recognition in the irises of the impostor gave him away at the last moment…
In the end, far down the Űllői út by some scenic rubble, Gyuri found Jadwiga having her picture taken by a couple of Western photographers. They seemed to have a fondness for attractive women with weapons. Gyuri didn’t like this at all. Jadwiga was merely handing out one of her polite smiles, her toothy calling card, but they weren’t to know that.
Gyuri came up to glower at the photographers at close quarters but they had already finished and were on the move to their next snap. Viktor the Soviet deserter and another Pole, whom Gyuri thought was called Witold, were leaning on the husk of a tank, where they had been watching the photo session.
Jadwiga was wearing her quilted Soviet jacket, the pelt of a dead Soviet soldier, Gyuri thought bleakly. He had taken weapons from the dead internationalists, but weapons were somehow faithless, they didn’t belong to anyone, they were just carried. Jadwiga’s blue jacket, approximately a third of her small wardrobe, had got ripped to shreds on the 26th as they were crawling along under Soviet fire at the Corvin. The noise of the tanks, more than anything else, had been terrifying. It was no more dangerous, rationally, than being shot at by infantry but it sounded more dangerous. When Jankó fired the anti-tank gun in reply, Gyuri had believed he was going to die of fear. As he lay on the ground, using muscles he had been unaware of to propel himself into the pavement, impressed more forcefully than if an elephant had been standing on him, he pondered how it would only take one of the hundreds of bullets zooming through the Corvin to unanchor him from the continuum, and wondered why everybody didn’t just run away, Jadwiga was only upset by her jacket failing her in combat conditions, and tattering during her sniping. During one of her shopping expeditions in the lulls to collect ammunition and weapons from inoperative Soviets, she had returned with the tough jacket.
‘So how is the great optimist?’ she said to Gyuri. Jadwiga had sided of course with Elek in the morning, insisting that the Red Army had had enough and that Gyuri didn’t want to face up to the fact that he was now free to do whatever he wanted since he could no longer reach for the handy excuse of an inane, dictatorial regime preventing him from being a great success.
‘ Budapest today, Warsaw next week. Right, Witold?’ Witold nodded in agreement. Then she added in Russian: ‘ Moscow, let’s be realistic, one month.’ Viktor grinned in approval.
‘That’s why they have to stop it here,’ said Gyuri. ‘This can’t go on much longer’
‘You’re so miserable,’ Jadwiga remonstrated. ‘I hope our children will have none of that. When I will tell them how stupid their father was, they’ll laugh.’
Having secured a promise from her that she would return home soon, Gyuri started back for Damjanich utca. Passing by a bookshop that had puked out its contents into the street, it occurred to him the household was short of paper, and because he wanted to carry out a scientific experiment, Gyuri gathered up a few volumes that hadn’t been burned or only just nibbled by the flames.
At home, relaxed on the loo, he tried out the books. Revai, the Party ideologue, was disappointing. It was an imposing volume, We Knew How to Use Freedom (684pp), but the paper was too shiny to merit the diploma of bottom-wiping. Meray, the journalist who had fearlessly invented and then exposed American atrocities in Korea in his illustrated Testimony (213 pp) looked promising. Gyuri had no idea what had really happened in Korea but he was quite willing to stake his life that the only things in the book that weren’t downright lies were the author’s name and the commas. Nevertheless, Meray afforded a greater degree of absorbency. Coming to Rákosi’s Selected Speeches and Articles (559pp), there was still a perceptible failure to carry out the work in hand. The most effective nether napkin was Rákosi’s The Turning Point (359pp), an earlier offering, from 1946, on coarse paper which almost worked.
Gyuri was trying to enjoy his sojourn at the hindquarters’ headquarters with extracts from these books but although the idea had been highly pleasing, the reality wasn’t as satisfactory. The Communists couldn’t even hack it as toilet paper. You could imagine Rákosi, forecasting that people might well one day seize his books with a hankering to convert them into arse-fodder, ordering that his works should be printed on the most unaccommodating of paper. Still, it would make an amusing paragraph when he wrote to Pataki.
Where were Revai, Rákosi and the others? Gyuri wondered. Where were all those bastards, the beloved favourite sons of the people? The Russians probably had them tucked away in the basement of their Embassy, in storage for future necessity, labelled ‘spare dictators’.
The last book Gyuri turned to was in English, Eastern Europe in the Socialist World by Hewlett Johnson who was supposed to be the Dean of Canterbury. The book was a paean to the Socialist order. Either the book was a forgery, or else the Dean must have been caught wanking off small boys in Warsaw and blackmailed into writing this, thought Gyuri, because no one could be stupid enough to write things like this of their own volition.
It was the largest park in Hamburg, full of ducks, but he still couldn’t manage to catch one. Ducks were brainier and faster than they looked and Pataki was disadvantaged by having to keep looking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t arrested. He was sure there would be some by-law protecting German ducks from hungry refugees. He tried improvising traps with string and dry bread, he tried netting them with his overcoat, he tried a straight grab and wring. As it got dark, Pataki resigned himself to dining on boiled eggs again. He had explored all the options for cooking eggs and somehow boiled seemed the least dispiriting. Eggs were far better than nothing but after months of unrelenting eggs, non-egg edibles had deployed an unprecedented fascination.
But, as he strolled past an off-licence, Pataki snapped and resolved to blow a little money. Two beers to celebrate the Revolution. There was one pinguid German in front of him at the counter who stupidly seemed to be buying more beer than he could possibly carry. As the man struggled to find a way of managing his impossible load, Pataki was about to ask for two bottles of beer, when a hand landed on his shoulder. He turned to see a long-haired figure behind him say in German: ‘I’m a Hungarian, let me buy you a drink.’ Insane? Drunk? Uncontrollably gregarious? Just Hungarian?
‘I’m Hungarian too, and I’ll let you buy me a drink,’ Pataki responded in the mother tongue. His host was called Kineses and he was evidently a man used to going to great lengths for company. His room was virtually above the boozery, so they repaired there to drink. Kineses was very pleased he didn’t need to employ his appallingly accented German and that he could really get loquacious. Kineses had been in West Germany for over three years. He had done some work as an artist’s model, but a vogue for abstract expressionism had dried up most of his employment and he was now working as factotum in one of the liveliest brothels. ‘It was all very German. There was an interview. They asked whether I had any previous experience of working in a knocking-shop. They were perfectly serious; they were terrified of taking on unqualified help. What do you do?’
‘I’m the head of the postage-stamp acquisition department in a bank,’ replied Pataki. ‘I’m the one they send down to the post-office.’ They drank to the revolution.
‘I tried to go back yesterday. Got as far as the Austrian border,’ said Kineses. ‘But the Austrians wouldn’t let me in. They were convinced there were enough Hungarians in Hungary. Mind you, I don’t know why I wanted to go back so badly when I think of the trouble I had getting out. I had to waltz through the minefields. What about you?’
‘My personalised railwagon. You must have wanted to get out quite badly to go out that way.’
‘I didn’t have much choice really. That always makes things easier. You see, I’d walked out of a place called Recsk, a labour camp.’ Kineses outlined the inspiration behind Recsk. ‘Lots of people helped with my escape. It took us months to scrape together a guard’s uniform. It was very cheeky, very dramatic. A big brass neck, a dark winter evening, bored, dim guards and I was out. I just walked out. There was no hope of staying at liberty in Hungary so I knew I had to leave.
‘We all thought it important that the world should know about Recsk. I memorised everyone’s name, their date of birth, occupation and the city they lived in. I was working on the addresses when the uniform was completed.’
‘So what did the world say?’ asked Pataki.
‘Nothing much. Walk out of a labour camp, that’s heroic; walk out of a labour camp and walk through an Iron Curtain and you’ll find you’ve walked round the moral globe and it’s not heroic, but extremely suspicious. Everyone was very polite, but I had the impression they thought I was on a payroll somewhere in Moscow.’ (Pataki remembered his debriefers: ‘Ach, Herr Pataki, we understand you are saying you were sent out by the AVO but we have been told by people who were sent out by the AVO that people who are sent out by the AVO are told to say that they have been sent out by the AVO.’ The meeting had been a stalemate; he was staying in the country but without a generous salary from the security services.)
‘Are you going to go back?’ Kineses inquired.
‘When I leave, I leave.’
‘You don’t think I should tell him?’ Jadwiga asked.
‘No. Best not to interfere in that sort of emotional traffic,’ Elek answered.
‘But there can’t be any doubt; the documents were very clear.’
Elek looked unhappy. ‘The documents might have been very clear. But you didn’t really know Pataki. He was as fast off the court as on. His sun-bathing stunt outside their front door would have been a hard one to talk his way out of but he’s slippery. The AVO might have thought he was working for them, but he probably agreed just to get out.’ He lit a long-saved cigarette. ‘And I bet he got an advance out of them.’
It was the artillery that woke them up. Faraway, but forceful. Gyuri looked out of the window. Darkness, stillness. No sign of dawn or the Russians but both were coming. Switching on the radio, they heard Imre Nagy announce the obvious attack by the Russians and state that Hungarian forces were fighting. This was followed by an appeal for help from abroad. He got dressed, since misfortune had to be faced in trousers, the juices in his stomach can-canning.
‘We must go to the Corvin,’ said Jadwiga. Gyuri really didn’t want to go to the Corvin. He wasn’t at all pleased at being right. Being right, he discovered, doesn’t necessarily do any more good than being wrong. He had thought he had been angry before but he realised his previous rages had only been false starts compared to his present anger. Thanks to the Red Army, he was going to explode, but he didn’t want to fight. He was trembling from a mixture of ninety per cent fury and ten per cent fright. He wanted to suggest going to the border, but he knew Jadwiga wouldn’t listen. He suggested it anyway, knowing he would regret it more if he didn’t. ‘Let’s go to Austria,’ he said.
‘You don’t mean that,’ she retorted.
They ran out into the streets, Jadwiga carrying her favourite gun. There were few people, and those that were out, whether armed or unarmed, didn’t seem to know what to do. He tried to keep the thoughts submerged because he didn’t want them to come into the world because they wouldn’t help but he couldn’t keep them down; they floated up to the surface. We’re going to lose. We’re going to be killed. They bobbed around in his mind. The other people looked to Gyuri as if they were holding down the same prompts. Stealthily, they reached the Körút, which Gyuri suddenly recognised as the street where he was going to die. ‘I feel safe with you,’ said Jadwiga cocking her weapon, which was intriguing because Gyuri certainly didn’t feel safe with himself.
Kurucz was also making his way along the Körút, slithering along the doorways, a couple of grenades in his belt, carrying his gun ready to use it; Kurucz was one of the professional soldiers who had ended up at the Corvin. The sight of Kurucz cheered Gyuri up; Kurucz was a close personal friend of surviving.
Clever. Lucky. Kurucz didn’t make mistakes and would take a lot of killing. Being close to him might cast some protection on them. Gyuri noticed his pullover was on back to front.
‘You heard about Maleter?’ Kurucz asked. Gyuri shook his head. Colonel Maleter had been appointed Minister of Defence a few days earlier on the strength of his activities at the Kilián Barracks. ‘Went to have supper last night with the Soviet High Command, didn’t come back.’ More good news, thought Gyuri, deafened by the voice that was shouting you’re going to die in his ear.
‘Well, military leadership was never this country’s strong point,’ observed Kurucz. It was stupid, but Gyuri couldn’t help thinking things would have been different if Pataki had stayed. Pataki wouldn’t have let this happen. Pataki wouldn’t have been conned by a load of fat Soviet generals. He wouldn’t have let them shit all over the country. Gyuri couldn’t see how but somehow Pataki would have foxed them, or at least not lost the match before the start.
‘If only Pataki were here…’ he said, trying to think what to do.
‘If you were better read you wouldn’t say such things,’ snapped Jadwiga. Gyuri didn’t understand what she meant but she was always having bouts of Slav mysticism.
The Corvin seemed to be getting the brunt of the attack, the price of celebrity, a murderous tribute to its teenage army. Aircraft, artillery and new, larger tanks were all in action. They inched down the Körút but it looked suicidal trying to get any closer. They were behind a pile of sandbags, remnants of the earlier round of fighting, when one of the tanks, hundreds of yards away, opened fire.
Half the building behind them disappeared. It took Gyuri a while to convince himself he was still alive and that all the components of his body were in the right places and still working. Jadwiga was next to him, covered in dust and debris. When he saw her wound two thoughts raced through him, the axiom that stomach wounds were always fatal, and the other that his sanity couldn’t cope with this. Holding her as if that would help, he tried to keep the horror from his face, the knowledge that he was about to see the last thing anyone wanted to see, the death of the one he loved.
She knew anyway. ‘You won’t forget me,’ she said.
Nigel was whiling away the time before the start of World War Three by polishing all the shoes he could lay his hands on in the Legation.
The phone was ringing. Nigel had answered it once.’Hello, British Legation,’ he had said.
‘We are trapped. We are going to die,’ a voice had said. It was a rich, deep, calm voice that spoke fluent English with only enough of a Hungarian accent to give a pleasing colour; you could imagine the voice belonging to a professor of English literature. Nigel didn’t know what to say. Clearly commiserations were in order, but there was nothing at hand in his immediate etiquette to cover a situation like this. The voice carried on though, fortunately, without giving Nigel a chance to participate. ‘Our building is completely surrounded by Russians. We will fight to the last bullet, but we will die. We don’t matter, but you must help our country. Hungary must be free- ’ The line had gone dead.
Everyone was chipping in, running things in the Legation but Nigel wasn’t going to answer the phone any more. The building was a refuge for a strange mixture of Britons, well-wishing students, adventurers, journalists, holidaymakers and two businessmen whose unflinching devotion to marketing their brand of razor-blade in the face of history was remarkable. No one talked about it but there was an unspoken assumption that war was going to break out and they would be well behind enemy lines; whatever was going to happen it wouldn’t be pleasant. Everyone had been presented with a copy of their own death.
Nigel had opted to clean shoes since it gave him something to do and as he joked, ‘We want to look good when the Russians capture us. My old housemaster would never forgive me if I met my end with dulled footwear.’ The BBC journalist was roaming up and down the building, clutching a bottle of vodka, and repeatedly accosting any female on sight with ‘Anybody for a fuck?’ Nigel could see the Minister would be making representations to the BBC when this was over, if he were in a position to do so. The Minister took a dim view of journalists; the correspondent of the Daily Worker had almost been barred by him. ‘Shouldn’t you be outside with your Communist friends?’
The political attaché and the military attaché strolled up to where Nigel had set up his shoe-cleaning business.
‘Kadar has finally resurfaced. He’s been broadcasting from somewhere saying he’s established a workers-peasants’ government which has invited the Russians to tidy up. I’d love to count the number of workers and peasants in his government,’ remarked the political.
‘Who’s Kadar?’ asked Nigel.
‘Was Minister of the Interior under Rákosi. Home-grown Communist as opposed to the Muscovites. Was also a Minister in Nagy’s latest government but he seemed to get tired of it and disappeared a few days ago.’
‘Anyone know where he’s been?’ asked the military attaché.
‘Somewhere safely Soviet, I’d venture. He’s probably spent the week trying to think up a new configuration of socialist/ worker/party to name his new outfit. But he’s stuck with the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, which Nagy thought up. I suppose all the variants have been used up.’
‘Mmmm. I suppose it’s time to earn the King’s shilling,’ said the military attaché, stepping out into the Revolution.
You don’t get any braver, you just get tired, bored with fear, thought Gyuri as he scrambled over the wall to land in the Kerepesi Cemetery. He and Kurucz ran through, dodging gravestones and undergrowth. Where were the others? Gyuri wondered. Looking back, he could see the Mongols coming over the wall.
The return of the Red Army relied largely on troops from Central Asia or some slant-eyed part of the Union. Unlike troops who had been stationed in Hungary and had some idea what was going on, Gyuri had heard the Mongols thought they were fighting at the Suez Canal. They certainly didn’t mind killing people.
Kurucz signalled that they should make a stand. Gyuri still had enough energy to savour the irony of having a shoot-out in a cemetery; very convenient for the people who had to clean up afterwards. The Mongols moved cautiously, as if expecting American paratroopers to open up on them at any moment. All day Gyuri had been hearing stories about American paratroopers arriving all over Hungary, particularly in places where they weren’t needed. Well, if they didn’t hurry up, it would soon be over.
A lot of Party people are buried here, Gyuri noted, hoping he could find a cadre tombstone to shelter behind so that it would get shot up.
Kurucz gave their pursuers a magazine’s worth, really working their cardiovascular systems, maybe nicking one of the yellow bastards. He and Kurucz fell back a few yards further to a gigantic mausoleum, a sort of mini-history of architecture, composed of a dozen different styles, perhaps to cover any changes in fashion up to Judgment Day. It looked awful but must have cost a fortune. ‘In memory of the Gerebend family’ read the inscription. The Gerebend family are going to take some punishment, thought Gyuri.
He and Kurucz were both short of ammunition. Kurucz still had one grenade but that was it. They could start throwing rocks after that. The Mongols argued loudly about their strategy, a long way off. After a few minutes, one of them appeared, crawling on his belly, weapon cradled in his arms in the textbook manner but out in the open. Did he think he was invisible? It was insulting.
Gyuri felt a flash of anger on his emotional palate. He’d missed his targets all morning but with his last two rounds he hit the serpentine Mongol. The Mongol turned out to be a screamer, expressing eloquently in a universal language how painful it was to be shot.
There was more hurried, Asiatic consultation and then from a wide front came small arms fire, chipping away at the Gerebend family’s final abode. Gyuri could tell Kurucz wanted to hang around and try and gouge their eyes out but he indicated they should leave. It was easy. They left the cemetery while the shooting continued with a bit of perfunctory grenade-lobbing. The Mongols would be there for hours before they realised they had used the back door.
‘I’m going down the Űllői út,’ said Kurucz.
‘You won’t come back,’ said Gyuri, noting by the sound of his voice he was hysterical. He wouldn’t have believed he had enough vigour for that. The Űllői út was a preview of the end of the world, a little localised armageddon. It was safer firing a revolver in your mouth.
‘I lived like a worm for a long time,’ said Kurucz, although Gyuri couldn’t envisage Kurucz doing so. ‘I’m glad I can die like a man. Where are you going?’
‘Out West. Austria,’ replied Gyuri.
‘You won’t come back either.’
Gyuri threw away his empty gun. If he needed another gun, he could pick one up off any street-corner, and carrying one didn’t do you any favours. ‘The Red Army won’t forget about its outing in Budapest,’ said Kurucz. ‘It’s been… well, people will write about us.’
Clinging to walls all the way home, Gyuri crashed into the British military attaché, recessed in a doorway, observing the proceedings. The way Gyuri greeted him in English made the attaché realise they were acquainted, though he obviously couldn’t place Gyuri. ‘Awesome, these new tanks,’ he said gesturing at a herd on the other side of Hósök Square, ‘those new guns too, formidable rate of fire.’ Gyuri nodded because he was unable to add anything to the conversation. He merely smiled politely in the way one does when one’s country has been invaded by interesting new tanks. The attaché was carrying an umbrella, Gyuri observed, as all Englishmen should.
At home, the flat was empty. Elek had, along with everyone else in the block, taken refuge in the cellar, just as they had done during the siege in ’44. In a final act of defiance and rebellion, Gyuri climbed into his bed and slept indefatigably for the next twenty hours in truly passive resistance.
He was woken by István moving around in the lounge. István was taking down a landscape picture off the wall, an oil painting so ghastly that it had been snubbed by legions of plundering Soviet soldiers and even when they had been starving Elek had been unable to find anyone willing to take it off their hands for a few forints. ‘A tank put a machine-gun round through our still life,’ said István. ‘Ilona insisted that I find something to replace it. Been fighting, have you? I can tell you, you look frightening enough.’
Gyuri rummaged in the kitchen for food, out of reflex rather than hunger. ‘Where’s Jadwiga?’ asked István. The look that Gyuri gave him made everything plain.
Gyuri started putting on layers of clothing. When he got to his overcoat, he reached into a pocket and put Jadwiga’s effects, some identity cards and rings, on the table. He kept the passport. ‘I need a favour. When things get settled, could you send these to Poland?’ Grabbing his scarf, he said to István. ‘I’m off. Have a good life and so on.’
Hamstrung by sadness, it was a long walk. Dear God, thought Gyuri, does it really have to be like this? It was colder than usual for November, and it seemed much blacker at six than it should have been, as if the Russians had imported extra darkness with themselves and dawn had given up. There weren’t many trains running, but the Keleti Station had a train, greatly over-subscribed, getting ready to leave. It wasn’t a train taking people anywhere in Hungary, although nominally it had a Hungarian destination. Although no one said so, everyone knew it was the slow train to Vienna.
The centre of the city had quietened but as the train chugged out of Budapest, passing Csepel Island, explosions could be heard. Csepel, always referred to officially as ‘red’, since it was inhabited exclusively by industrial workers, was the last part of Budapest to hold out. They had a munitions factory. They had anti-aircraft batteries so powerful they could be used to turn most tanks into Swiss cheeses. Their own leaders had told them to give up. They had been instructed to go to hell. Huge columns of smoke had hung immobile over the island all day as if pinned there. People who lived in Csepel had a reputation for tenacity, toughness and an implausible degree of violence second only to Angyalföld.
There were two people on the train that Gyuri knew. The first, Kórodi, who lived at the other end of Damjanich utca. Gyuri hadn’t seen him for years despite his proximity, and it was ironic to bump into him in a dash to see if the border was still open. Clutching his violin-case like a life-belt, Kórodi was very pleased to see Gyuri. ‘Haven’t seen you for a long time,’ said Gyuri sitting next to him in the buffetless buffet car.
‘No one’s seen me for a long time,’ said Kórodi laughing. ‘I’ve spent all my time practising. Fourteen hours a day sometimes. No evenings without a violin. No romance. No long baths. No trashy novels. No good novels. I may not be the greatest violinist alive, but I’ve been the hardest working. I cut everything out, because I knew, I knew one day I’d get out and then it would all be worth it. Those lazy bastards in the West won’t know what hit them.’
‘The streets may not be paved with gold,’ said a part of Gyuri’s mind responsible for repartee.
‘You know what? I don’t care if they’re paved with turds.’
Gyuri’s other acquaintance was Kurucz. Looking for a seat, Gyuri hadn’t recognised him immediately because most of his face was swathed with bandages. He was leaning on a crutch. What Gyuri could see of his face looked awful, worse than some of the corpses that had been lying around for a couple of days. They didn’t acknowledge each other at first, the old caution having silently returned but an hour out of Budapest, Gyuri noticed Kurucz having a cigarette in the corridor. They had enough space for a hushed conversation.
‘What happened?’ asked Gyuri.
‘I got killed,’ said Kurucz, speaking with the mellowness of someone who hasn’t eaten or slept for days. ‘Near the Rákoczi út. We were surrounded. Ammunition gone. Have you ever tried to kick a tank in the balls? There was a chance if we surrendered we might live. Not that we were expecting much. There were twelve of us, mostly lads. They lined us up on the spot, shot us and tossed a couple of grenades in for good measure. I was hit in the neck and I don’t have much left ear left. Not to mention a generous helping of shrapnel. It must have looked bad, thank goodness. Next thing I knew I was in a flat being patched up, thinking what lousy wallpaper heaven has; the people who helped me said I was the only one alive.’
They stared at the blackness outside the window. Solid gloom, a sinister aspic. No features from outside made it through.
‘Did we kill too many? Not enough?’ asked Kurucz speaking apropos of the AVO and the Party. ‘They always seem to find replacements. Quislings, shits, like hope, spring eternal.’ Kurucz had done a spell of military service at the border; he offered to take Gyuri through a very green part of it.
Elek, bored in the flat and not eager to find out if he had a job to go to at the hospital, greeted István warmly when he appeared.
‘Have you seen Gyuri? I’m getting worried. I managed to buy his favourite cakes. Can you imagine in the middle of all this, the patisserie’s back at work?’
István sighed at Gyuri’s untidiness. ‘He’s gone,’ he said. That November there was no need to say more.
‘Just as he was getting interesting,’ remarked Elek.
People got off the train at different points once it reached Western Hungary, depending on how they saw their escape. There were families with two, three or even four children and innumerable suitcases, solitary voyagers, couples just carrying each other’s hands, and even a farmer who had voiced intentions of trying to smuggle his prize pig out. There was an atmosphere of a grim holiday excursion.
Kurucz seemed to know what he was doing, although well on the way to being dead. This, at least, saved Gyuri some thinking. He couldn’t be bothered to be afraid; the events had quelled his terror, if at great cost. They walked slowly towards the border, warily appraising any other figures, most of whom shunned them with as much alacrity and distance as they did. The plan was to get within a kilometre or so of the border, wait till dark, then move.
There was a thin carpet of snow. Why did it have to be so cold? Gyuri had thought he would remain unmoved by his circumstances but the cold was coming through loud and clear. He wasn’t at all hungry. Nothing like death to dispel appetite; he couldn’t even imagine wanting to eat. He would have happily traded some cold for hunger. However, he couldn’t really complain. Kurucz, who had so much more material to work with, hadn’t grumbled once.
‘They’ve taken up the mines, haven’t they?’ asked Gyuri almost as an afterthought, recalling that as an act of friendliness towards Austria, an announcement had been made that most of the fortifications and minefields would be removed.
‘Yes, the minefields should have been taken up,’ said Kurucz, continuing, ‘but can you tell me one thing that’s ever been done properly in this country?’
Towards dusk, according to Kurucz, they were in sight of Austria. There were just trees and snow on all sides. Austria looked remarkably like Hungary. Waiting in the woods, it was so chilling that Gyuri lost touch with several extremities. Circling around to prevent himself completely freezing up, Gyuri stumbled across three bodies, lightly covered with snow: two women, one boy. His emotions, he discovered, were as numb as his fingers.
The moon was fullish, which wasn’t very encouraging. But, probably because of the cold, they could see the huge light of fires where shadowy sentinels of unknown nationality were gathered, beacons which drew them away. Gyuri and Kurucz moved very unhurriedly, very carefully, but still tripped up and stumbled a lot on a surprisingly uneven border. They were especially circumspect when they reached an open strip which was presumably the former minefield. Although his feet had become very uncommunicative, somehow Gyuri suddenly felt there was something unfield-like under his right foot. He seized up completely.
Eventually, in a tiptoeing whisper, Kurucz, anxiety and anger split fifty-fifty, asked ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. I think I just trod on a mine.’ Gyuri had deduced by the thin light that he was standing on what resembled an unearthed mine, finally, he walked on, surmising that if the mine was going to explode it would have already done so. Soviet rubbish.
They found a barn. It was no warmer than outside, but it at least gave them the possibility of believing it was. Gyuri spent a few hours in attempted sleep, quivering with cold and misery. As soon as there was a suspicion of dawn, he went out to piss. He could hardly find his dick, it had been so reduced by the cold.
‘Right. Let’s find somewhere warm,’ said Kurucz as soon as there was enough light to navigate by. Looking back, Gyuri could see that they were out, because of a faraway row of guard-towers behind them. He was out. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he started to cry. He walked half backwards, as best he could, so that Kurucz wouldn’t see.
Tears, in teams, abseiled down his face.