The Company

by Robert Littell

  “The American government is wary of pushing the Soviets too far—“

  “Over something as inconsequential as Hungary,” Arpád snapped, finishing the sentence for him. “That is what you dare not say.”

  “Hungary is not inconsequential to us. Which is why we want you to postpone any uprising until the groundwork has been laid; until Khrushchev, who has a tendency toward dovishness in these matters, has consolidated his hold on the Politburo hawks.”

  “How long?”

  “Somewhere between a year and eighteen months.”

  Ulrik repeated this in Hungarian to make sure he had understood it correctly. “Igen,” Elizabet told him. “Between a year and eighteen months.”

  “Reménytelen!” sneered the young man.

  Elizabet translated for Ebby. “Ulrik says the word hopeless.”

  “It is not hopeless,” Ebby said. “It is a matter of prudence and patience. The American government is not interested in being drawn into a war with the Soviets—“

  “I will say you what Trotsky said to the Russians before the 1917 revolution,” Arpád declared, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Ebby’s. “‘You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.’” Mátyás muttered something and Arpád nodded in agreement. “Mátyás says we can neither start nor stop an uprising against the Communists, and I hold the same view. Whatever will happen will happen with or without us, and with or without you. We live in a country sick with what we call esengofrasz—“

  Arpád looked at Elizabet for a translation. “Doorbell fever,” she said.

  “Yes, yes. Doorbell fever. Everyone waits for AVH agents to ring his bell at midnight and take him away for questioning or torture. I myself have been arrested five times in my life, twice by the fascists who brought Hungary into the world war on the side of the Germans, three times by the Communists who seized power with the help of the Red Army after the war. I have spent eleven years and four months of my life in prisons—that is fifteen years less than Sade and six years more than Dostoyevsky. I have lived for months at a time in airless subterranean cells crawling with rats in the fortress prison of Vac north of Budapest. Over one particularly bitter winter I tamed several of the rats; they used to come out to visit me in the evening and I would warm my fingers against their bodies. I was tortured in the same prison—in the same cell—by the Hungarian fascists before the war and the Communists after. The difference between the two ideologies is instructive. The fascists tortured you to make you confess to crimes you really committed. The Communists torture you to make you confess to imagined crimes; they want you to sign a confession they have already written—admitting to contacts with fascist elements of foreign countries, admitting to plots to assassinate the Communist leaders, admitting to putting ground glass in the supply of farina to cause economic sabotage.” Sinking back into his chair, Arpád sucked air through his nostrils to calm himself. “Once, to avoid more torture, I confessed to passing state secrets to the chief of American intelligence in Vienna named Edgar Allen Poe. For this crime I was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but I was quietly pardoned when someone in the superstructure recognized the name of Poe.”

  Waving a hand in scorn, Ulrik spoke at length to Arpád in Hungarian. Arpád nodded several times in agreement. “He would have me say you that your Radio Free Europe has spoken endlessly in its broadcasts to us about rolling back Communism,” he told Ebby.

  “Radio Free Europe is not an organ of the United States government,” Ebby insisted. “It’s an independent enterprise staffed by émigrés from the Communist countries. Its broadcasts don’t necessarily represent official American policy—“

  “If you please, who pays for Radio Free Europe?” Arpád demanded.

  The question reduced Ebby to silence. Drumming a knuckle on the table top, Ulrik spoke again in Hungarian. Arpád nodded in vehement agreement. “He says the moment of truth approaches. He says you must be ready to assist an uprising, if one occurs, materially and morally. He says that if you can keep the Russians from intervening, only that, nothing more, Communism in Hungary will be swept onto the dust-heap of history.”

  Here the young student spoke for a moment to the others with a certain shyness. Smiling, Arpád reached across the table and gave him a mock punch in the shoulder. Elizabet said from the couch, “Mátyás quotes the Bertold Brecht poem on the brief uprising of the East Germans against the Communist regime in 1953.”

  Closing his eyes, collecting his thoughts, tilting back his large head, Arpád recited four lines in English:

  Would it not be simpler

  If the government

  Dissolved the people

  And elected another?

  Out of the corner of his eye Ebby caught a glimpse of Elizabet curled into a contorted position on the couch, her legs tucked under her, one arm flung back over the back of the couch. He could feel her eyes on him. “No one in the American camp doubts your determination to rid yourselves of the Stalinist dictatorship,” he told Arpád. “But you must, in our view, put realities above romanticism. The realities are stark and speak for themselves. Two Soviet tank units, the second and the seventeenth Mechanized Divisions, are stationed forty miles from Budapest; they could be in the capitol in an hour’s time. We have abundant evidence that the Soviets are not blind to the explosiveness of the situation here. They clearly have contingency plans to rush reserves into the country in the event of unrest. I can tell you that we have information that they are in the process of assembling large mobile reserves on the Ukrainian side of the Hungarian frontier. I can tell you that they are constructing floating pontoon bridges across the Tisza River so that these reserves can reach Hungary at a moment’s notice.”

  Arpád and Elizabet exchanged dark looks; Ebby’s information apparently came as a surprise to them. Elizabet quickly translated what Ebby had said for the others. “The Soviet General Konev,” Ebby went on, “who led Russian ground forces in the capture of Berlin and is considered to be one of their best tacticians, is the operational commander of the Soviet reserves. The Soviet General Zhukov, the current Minister of Defense, is pushing Khrushchev and the Politburo to be ready to intervene in Hungary for strategic reasons: the Russians are secretly constructing intermediate range ballistic missiles which eventually must be based in Hungary if they are to menace NATO’s southern flank in Italy and Greece.”

  With Elizabet translating phrase by phrase, Ulrik, who worked as a political analyst in a government ministry, conceded they hadn’t known about the pontoon bridges, but he challenged Ebby’s assessment that Khrushchev would send Soviet armor across the Tisza if there were to be an uprising. “The Kremlin,” Ulrik argued, “has its hands full with its own domestic worries.“

  Arpád produced a cloth pouch from the pocket of his corduroys. “Which is why,” he agreed as he absently started to roll a cigarette, “the Russians accepted Austrian neutrality in 1955; which is why Khrushchev publicly recognized Yugoslavia as a country on the road to Socialism this year despite it being outside the Soviet bloc. In Poland, the threat of popular unrest has led to the Communist reformer Gomulka being released from prison; there is a good chance he will be named first Secretary of the Polish Communist Party any day now.” He deftly licked the cigarette paper closed with his tongue, twisted the tip with his fingertips, tapped the cigarette on the table to pack down the tobacco and, thrusting it between his lips, began searching his pockets for a match. “Even the hawks on Khrushchev’s Politburo seem resigned to living with the situation in Poland,” he added. He found a match and, igniting it with a thick thumbnail, held the flame to the twisted end of the cigarette. Smoke billowed from his nostrils. “Why should Hungarian reformers cringe at the menace of Soviet tanks when the Polish reformers have succeeded?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Because the situation in Hungary is different from the situation in Poland,” Ebby argued. “The Polish reformers are clearly Communists who don’t plan to sweep away Communism or take Poland out of
the Soviet bloc.”

  “We’d be fools to settle for half a loaf,” Mátyás exploded.

  “You have put your finger on the heart of the problem,” Ebby grimly suggested.

  When Elizabet translated Ebby’s remark, Mátyás angrily scraped back his chair and came around the table to flop onto the couch next to her. The two, whispering in Hungarian, got into a lively argument. It was obvious that Elizabet was trying to convince him of something but was having little success.

  At the table, Arpád stared past Ebby at a calendar on the wall for a long moment. When he finally turned back to his visitor, his eyes appeared to be burning with fever. “You come to us with your Western logic and your Western realities,” he began, “but neither takes into account the desperateness of our situation, nor the quirk of Hungarian character that will drive us to battle against overwhelming odds. We have been at war more or less constantly since my namesake, the Hungarian chieftain Arpád, led the Magyar horsemen out of the Urals twelve hundred years ago to eventually conquer, and later defend, the great Hungarian steppe. For Hungarians, the fact that a situation is hopeless only makes it more interesting.”

  Ebby decided not to mince words. “I was sent here to make certain that you calculate the risks correctly. If you decide to encourage an armed uprising, you should do so knowing that the West will not be drawn in to save you from Konev’s tanks massing on the frontier.”

  The three men around the table exchanged faint smiles and Ebby understood that he had failed in his mission. “I and my friends thank you for coming, at great personal risk, to Budapest,” Arpád said. “I will give you a message to take back to America. The Athenian historian Thucydides, speaking twenty-four hundred years ago about the terrible conflict between Athens and Sparta, wrote that three things push men to war—honor, fear and self interest. If we go to war, for Hungarians it will be a matter of honor and fear. We cling to the view that the American leaders, motivated by self-interest, will then calculate the advantages to helping us.”

  The conversation around the glass-covered table rambled on into early evening. From behind the thick curtains came the muted jingle of ambulance bells or the mournful shriek of a distant police siren. As a sooty twilight blanketed the city, Elizabet disappeared into the kitchen and turned up twenty minutes later carrying a tray filled with steaming bowls of marrow soup and thick slices of dark bread. Arpád quoted two lines from the legendary Hungarian poet Sándor Petöfi, who had been killed fighting the Russians in 1849:

  Fine food, fine wine, both sweet and dry,

  A Magyar nobleman am I.

  Lifting his bowl in both palms, he gulped down the soup, then lugged a heavy German watch from the coin pocket of his trousers. He’d been asked to read poems to a group at the Technological University, he told Ebby. The students there were considered to be among the most defiant in Budapest. If it would interest him, Ebby was welcome to come along. Elizabet could translate some of what was said.

  Ebby eagerly accepted; if he wanted to get a feeling for the mood of the students, a poetry reading was as good a place as any to start.

  Arpád dialed a phone number and mumbled something to the comrades surveying the street from another apartment. Then, with Arpád leading the way, Ebby, Elizabet, and the others filed down a narrow corridor to a bedroom in the back of the apartment. Mátyás and Ulrik pushed aside a large armoire, revealing a narrow rug-covered break in the brick wall of the building that opened into a storage room in a vacant apartment in the adjoining building. The two young men remained behind to shoulder the armoire back into place and block the secret passage as Arpád, Elizabet, and Ebby entered the adjoining apartment and let themselves out of its back door, then descended five flights to a cellar door that gave onto a completely different street than the one Ebby and Elizabet had arrived on hours earlier. Making their way on foot through the meandering dimly lit side streets of Buda, avoiding the main thoroughfares, the three crossed Karinthy Frigyes Road and moments later entered the sprawling Technical School through a basement coal delivery ramp. A young student with a mop of curly hair was waiting for them inside. He led them through the furnace room to an employees’ canteen crammed with students sitting on rows of benches or standing along the walls. There must have been a hundred and fifty of them crowded into the narrow room. They greeted the poet with an ovation, tapping their feet on the cement in unison and chanting his name: “Ar-pád, Ar-pád, Ar-pád.”

  At the head of the room, Arpád blew into the microphone to make sure it was alive, then flung his head back. “‘Without father without mother,’” he declaimed.

  Without God or homeland either

  without crib or coffin-cover

  without kisses or a lover.

  The students recognized the poem and roared their approval. Elizabet pressed her lips to Ebby’s ear. “Those are lines from a poem by Attila József,” she told him. “He wrote around the turn of the century…his subject was crazy Hungarian individualism…”

  “Your friend Arpád broke the mold,” Ebby said into her ear.

  Elizabet turned on him. “He is not my friend, he is my lover. The two are worlds apart.” The admission broke a logjam and disjointed phrases spilled through the breach. “You are right about Arpád…he is one crazy Hungarian…a chaos of emotions…a glutton for words and the spaces between them…addicted to the pandemonium and pain he stirs in the women who love him.” (Her use of the plural women was not lost on Ebby.) She looked away, her fingers kneading her lower lip, then came back at him, her dark eyes fierce with resentment. “He is the poet-surgeon who distracts you from old wounds by opening new ones.”

  The students quieted down and Arpád, reciting in a droning matter-of-fact manner, launched into a long poem. “This is the one that made him famous,” Elizabet whispered to Ebby. “It’s called ‘E for Ertelmiségi’—which is Hungarian for ‘Intellectual.’ Arpád wound up spending three years in prison because of this poem. By the time he was released, it has been passed from hand to hand until half the country seemed to know it by heart. Arpád describes how he tried to slip across the frontier into Austria when the Communists came to power in 1947; he was betrayed by his peasant-guide, given an eight-minute summary trial and jailed at the notorious prison Vac, where the dead are not buried but thrown to the vultures. When he was finally set free, at the age of twenty-nine, he discovered that his internal passport had been stamped with a red E for ‘Ertelmisegi,’ which meant he could no longer teach at a university.” She concentrated on the poem for a moment. “In this part he describes how he worked as a mason, a carpenter, a plumber, a dish washer, a truck driver, even a dance instructor when he could no longer find literary magazines willing to publish his essays or poems.”

  The students crowded into the canteen appeared spellbound, leaning forward on the benches, hanging on the poet’s words. When he stumbled over a phrase voices would call out the missing words and Arpád, laughing, would plunge on. “Here,” Elizabet whispered, “he explains that in the prison of Vac the half of him that is Jewish—Arpád’s mother was a Bulgarian Jew—transformed itself into an angel. He explains that Jews have a tradition that angels have no articulation in their knees—they can’t bend them to someone. He explains that this inability to kneel can be a fatal handicap in a Communist country.”

  The poem ended with what Arpád styled a postlude. Raising his arms over his head, he cried: “Ne bántsd a Magyart!”

  The students, each with one fist raised in pledge, leapt to their feet and began stamping the ground as they repeated the refrain. “Ne bántsd a Magyart! Ne bántsd a Magyart! Ne bántsd a Magyart!”

  Elizabet, caught up in the general excitement, shouted the translation into Ebby’s ear. “Let the Magyars alone!” Then she joined the Hungarians in the battle cry. “Ne bántsd a Magyart! Ne bántsd a Magyart!”

  As the bells in the Paulist monastery on Gellért Hill struck eleven, one of the AVH man in the blue Skoda spotted a male figure on the walkway of the S
zabadság Bridge. For a moment a passing trolley car hid him. When the figure reappeared the AVH man, peering through binoculars, was able to make a positive identification. The vacuum tubes in the transceiver were warm, so he flicked on the microphone. “Szervusz, szervusz, mobile twenty-seven. I announce quarry in sight on the Szabadság walkway. Execute operational plan ZARVA. I repeat: execute operational plan ZARVA.”

  Clawing his way out of an aching lethargy, Ebby toyed with the comfortable fiction that the whole thing had been a bad dream—the scream of brakes, the men who materialized from the shadows of the girders to fling him into the back of a car, the darkened warehouse looming ahead on the Pest bank of the Danube, the endless corridor along which he was half-dragged, the spotlights that burned into his eyes even when they were shut, the questions hurled at him from the darkness, the precise blows to his stomach that spilled the air out of his lungs. But the ringing in his ears, the leathery dryness in his mouth, the throb in his rib cage, the knot of fear in the pit of his stomach brought him back to a harder reality. Flat on his back on a wooden plank, he tried to will his eyes open. After what seemed like an eternity he managed to raise the one eyelid that was not swollen shut. The sun appeared high over head but, curiously, didn’t seem to warm him. The sight of the sun transported him back to his stepfather’s seventeen-foot Herreshoff, sailing close hauled off Penobscot Bay in Maine. He had been testing the boat to see how far it could heel without capsizing when a sudden squall had caused the wind to veer and the boom, coming over without warning, had caught Ebby in the back of the head. When he came to, he was lying on the deck in the cockpit with the orb of the sun swinging like a pendulum high over the mast. Stretched out now on the plank, it dawned on Ebby that the light over his head wasn’t the sun but a naked bulb suspended from the ceiling at the end of an electric cord. With an effort he managed to drag himself into a sitting position on the plank, his back against the cement wall. Gradually things drifted into a kind of two-dimensional focus. He was in a large cell with a small barred slit of a window high in the wall, which meant it was a basement cell. In one corner there was a wooden bucket that reeked from urine and vomit. The door to the cell was made of wood crisscrossed with rusted metal belts. Through a slot high in the door, an unblinking eye observed him.