by Ailsa Kay
Across Margit Hid, the crowd heaves. When Agi looks back, the river of people behind her seems to have no end. They keep walking, and the swell carries her, and the bridge miraculously holds as the evening sun lights the Duna on fire.
At Bem Ter, on the other side of the river, they stop. It’s a small square, smaller even than Petofi, not big enough for the crowds that keep coming. Shoulders push at her shoulders, and she breathes into another woman’s neck. They shuffle to make room for more, but there’s no more room to be had. Just off Bem Ter, the Radetzky Barracks holds soldiers. Have they come to challenge them? But she’s barely thought it when she realizes what’s happening. Guards and soldiers are spilling into the crowd, yanking reds stars from their sleeves. They’re shouting with the crowd, “Down with Gero. Down with Rakosi. Out with the Russians!” One of them comes up behind her and lifts her up into the air, onto his shoulder, in sheer jubilation. With him, she punches the sky: “Now or never!”
Is that Gyula? Over there by the statue of the lion? Yes. And he sees her, waves two ecstatic hands. “Now!” she shouts just as the soldier lets her down.
Now! Full force and thick with love, the crowd pushes back, back over the Duna. To the parliament. The sun has sunk below the horizon by the time they get there, and Agi stands in Kossuth Ter next to an old woman, as old as her mother, whose hand grips hers. There’s no such thing as a stranger tonight. They stand together as Magyars. They wait for something to happen. Kids have clambered onto the roofs of streetcars that have halted, electric current collectors lowered to the street. People chant their different demands. “Put out the star on the parliament. It wastes our electric current.” “Russians, go home.” Until all the shouting gathers into one: “We want Imre Nagy. We want Imre Nagy.” And tonight, this seems possible. He was prime minister once, for a few months, until he was ousted by the hard Communist Rakosi and the terrors began again. But maybe it’s possible. Maybe the sheer force of their voices will bring him back to power. Yes, and maybe her father will be returned to her unharmed, and maybe the borders will be opened, and she can just walk across it. Maybe there will be meat in the stores, and loud, raucous laughter in the streets, and she and Gyula will get married and be happy here, in Budapest. Right now, as thousands of Hungarians stand together in a square, shouting loudly for the return of Imre Nagy, all this is possible. But wherever this singularly honourable comrade is hiding, he doesn’t appear. The chanting goes on and on, the crowd swells larger and larger, and still Imre Nagy doesn’t step out onto the parliament balcony to hear what the people have to say.
Suddenly, they’re swallowed in darkness. Someone has turned off all the lights—inside the parliament and all the streetlights surrounding Kossuth Ter. They stand blind. Agi feels the woman’s hand tighten around hers and bends her head to the woman’s ear. “We’re fine. As long as we’re all together here, we’re fine.” But she hardly believes her own words in a night so pressing, so purposeful.
A match flares, lights a single scrap of paper. Another match. Another scrap. To another scrap, another match. And another. And another. Scraps flare, pass, and vanish. Agi finds the screwed-up flyer in her pocket. She touches it to the flame offered by the hand in front of her. She lets it burn. She touches it to another’s and so it goes. Tiny lights flicker and fall as wisps of paper burn. When she sees Gyula, she’ll apologize. She’ll stand by him, shoulder to shoulder, and try to see things his way.
At the parliament, suddenly two lamps. The crowd buzzes. “It’s Nagy. Shh. It’s Nagy.”
“Comrades.” The loudspeaker launches the word over their heads.
“Boo,” the crowd responds.
And again: “Comrades—”
“No!”
“My esteemed Hungarian fellow citizens.”
The cheers drowned out his next sentence. Agi hears hardly a word of what follows, but the crowd grows restless. People turn one to the other. “What’s he saying?” Something about friendship. Soviet troops will stay. A new friendship? With the Soviets?
An entire city has left its post and wandered out into the streets to proclaim itself free, and this is Nagy’s response? He was their only hope and he’s offering friendship with Russia? No. No, this is not enough.
The crowd turns. Angry and right, it thrusts deeper into the clotted streets. It breaks apart. It finds itself. To Radio Budapest. It crashes against the wall, it storms: “In the name of the Student Revolutionary Council, let us in! We want our manifesto read on air! For all of Hungary to hear. For the world to hear.”
Broken glass crackles and crunches under Agi feet. Somewhere, windows have shattered. She’s in one of the side streets when she hears it: the unmistakable stutter of gunfire.
Wednesday, October 24
In the early morning, Agi sits with her mother, both fastened to their chairs and to each other by the same impossible unknowing. She watches her mother’s hands, clenched together on her lap. She watches the movement of her mother’s unforgiving mouth as she murmurs prayers or incantations into the air, and Agi closes her eyes because she hates this and she doesn’t know where Gyula is and Zsofi hasn’t come home so she waits with her mother. The same wait. The same room. The same hands.
Somehow, in the long, chaotic minutes after those first shots into the crowd, the revolutionaries procured weapons. They shot their way into the building. She still doesn’t know if Gyula was in there, or if he was captured by the AVO, the Allamvedelmi Osztaly, the secret police. Or if he’d been shot. She fought her way through the crowd moving in the opposite direction and she saw bodies but not his. That wasn’t proof he was alive, but at least it wasn’t proof that he was dead. She stumbled into the square, desperate. She seized strangers by the arm, “Have you seen…?” Trying to find the words to describe him, receiving in return either compassion or a brutal “How should I know…?” She turned a corner and stumbled into a girl who fell into her arms. Agi helped the girl to the shelter of a doorway where they both collapsed, tucking back into the shallow alcove. How could the night have turned like this? The girl could be no more than fifteen years old, the same age as Agi’s students, and she was bleeding from her stomach. Her blonde hair curled bright from underneath a beret. Agi held the girl as fighters and ordinary people clamoured by through air that stank of bitter smoke and filled with the dust of buildings blown apart.
“Hush,” Agi whispered. “What’s your name?”
“Eva.” The blood seeped through Eva’s shirt and coat, and though Agi pressed her hand to staunch it, the blood kept pumping.
“Eva, that’s a pretty name. We’re safe here, Eva. Don’t worry.”
Not that it mattered.
“I’ve got a little candy in my pocket,” Eva said before she lost consciousness. “Would you like it?”
When Agi walked in to the apartment shortly before four that morning, her mother had been awake in the dark, sitting in the same stern wooden chair she always sat in to write her letters.
“Anyu?”
Hearing her daughter’s voice, Margit said nothing. She did nothing. Not a hug or a “Thank God,” and Agi felt deserted. She stripped off clothes stiff with the stranger’s blood and went to bed, but she didn’t sleep. Explosions and fear kept her awake, sporadic gunfire ricocheted. Her mother muttered prayers. And now they sit.
Margit twists a piece of string around a ball of string ten years in the making, thankful that one daughter is here, though that’s not nearly enough. If she had opened her mouth last night, she would have said nothing kind. If she’d opened her hand, it would have slapped. Such nonchalance. Such easy, careless nonchalance with her love when anyone can see she can’t afford to lose any more. No, if Margit could do it, she would put them, her precious daughters, in a box, wrap them up tight, incant prayers over that box to protect them, assign soldiers to guard them with guns and grenades and loyalty as fierce as her own. Miklos, your daughters take their lives too lightly.
From the street, a loudspeaker crackles a
nd bellows: “Hungarians, Hungary needs you. Support our heroes of the revolution. We are all on strike. Do not work today.” As if anyone could even think of working after last night. Whatever today might ordinarily have been, it is not and nothing is certain. Ordinary time is over. This is revolutionary time. This? This waiting inside a cold apartment for news? This is his revolution and she doesn’t even know if he’s still alive, or Zsofi. Agi flings yesterday’s bloody cardigan over her dress, remembers that her jacket is still hanging on its hook at the school where she left it yesterday afternoon. She says not a word to her silent mother, and she slams the door on the way out.
Visegradi teems with people. They mill about, they pull toward Szent Istvan Korut. Some walk, some march arm in arm and sing. Many like her just stand in doorways, watching. A car trundles by. It’s past ten and there’s an air of holiday festivity but purposeful. Someone’s singing the national anthem. Flags wave. She pushes through it all. This is impossible. How will she find them if she has no idea where to look? On Szent Istvan, she hears the sound of shooting from somewhere up near the Nyugati train station. Cars burn, a bus rocks, crashes onto its side. The air smells of burning gas and metal. Who will bury the dead? Old men clatter by with guns they must have kept from the war. Teenagers and young people clatter with weapons too. She stops one. “Where did you get the gun?”
“Technical University,” he shouts. “It’s the armoury now. Lots left if you want one.”
The university an armoury? In one night, an entire city has turned itself inside out. Hungarians have become loud. Russian books have become flares. She, Agi, has become a revolutionary, and tanks have blown new holes in the city centre. She can’t imagine Gyula with a gun, but then yesterday she wouldn’t have imagined last night, and tomorrow, tomorrow, they are supposed to leave for the border. Skirting Szabadsag Ter, she hears someone shout that the Csepel munitions factory has gone out on strike and the workers are sending arms, truckloads of them. “Death to the AVO,” shouts a woman in a faded housewife’s dress. Her face shines with justice as she walks with purpose, locking arms with the woman next to her. “Now or never!” the women shout, and others join them. Agi hurries. The Technical University is on the other side of the river, at least ten kilometres from here, and streetcars stand, stalled and abandoned on their tracks. Still, it’s good to have a destination. Her feet hurt already on the cobbles and she wishes for Zsofi’s thick-soled, ugly shoes. Tomorrow’s shoes. Approaching Jozsef Atilla Utca, a knot of people tangles round a lamppost. As she passes, they hoist a man from his ankles up the post. AVO. His car burns on the road. Calmly, an older woman in battered, once-stylish high heels walks to the burning car, dips a rolled paper into the fire, returns to the dangling, bloody man, and touches the flame to his left shoulder, his right, his hair. He screams as he ignites. Agi runs.
She runs until her chest hurts and stops, finally, on the corner of a street where a high wall hides a garden. She realizes she’s sobbing: “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” I can’t. What does this even mean? This can’t be my life. I can’t lose him. I can’t run. She crouches like a small animal against the stone wall. She shudders and she rocks. “I can’t.”
Enough. The voice in her head is her own: as bossy and abrupt as she is with Zsofi sometimes. Get to your feet, hulye. Are you dead? No. Are you hurt? No. So stop your crying. Find Gyula. There is still time to escape. This is the best time to escape.
By the time she gets to the university it’s three hours since she left home. A truck’s parked out front. Students form a line, passing rifles from one hand to the next, loading the truck. Everyone is wearing an armband of red, white, and green to indicate their allegiance; they are fighting for Hungary. “Gyula Farkas?” she asks. “Zsofi Teglas?” She makes her way from one revolutionary to the next. No one knows. She follows the line back to the gymnasium, where hundreds and hundreds of crates are spread about the floor bearing Rakosi’s stamp. So, Csepel’s munitions have arrived already, arms stolen from the enemy. In the corner, a radio blasts. Martial law has been declared. No surprise, Hungary’s most devoted Stalinist, Matyas Rakosi, is calling the revolutionaries counter-revolutionaries and fascists, traitors who threaten Hungary. He swears he will cut them off, like so many slices of salami. Soviet reinforcements are on their way. A boy jangling with bandoliers dashes into the gymnasium: “The soldiers have joined us,” he shouts, and the old wooden auditorium resounds with cheers and stomps.
Agi wanders into the hall. An older man who looks like he’d be comfortable selling cabbages and turnips assumes she’s here to enlist and directs her to Room Nine, on the second floor, where they’re dispensing armbands.
“I’m looking for Zsofi Teglas and Gyula Farkas,” she says.
“Farkas? I just saw him. Try that way.” He nods toward a hallway lined with portraits of principals, some now slashed or dashed to the floor.
She passes three doorways, and as she approaches the last, she hears his voice. Gyula. “We must establish a radio transmitter somewhere in Buda. Who can do this?” At the open door, she pauses. He’s sitting on the teacher’s desk, surrounded by six fighters. Grenades hang from his waist. A gun is slung from his shoulder, sleeves rolled up. Three days ago, he was an ordinary student of engineering, awkward and gangly as he ran toward her on Margit.
“I could likely figure it out. If we can take a transmitter from the radio building, bring it up to the top of Harmashatar, maybe?” says one of the men.
“Good. We need to be in touch with Gyor, and with other student groups. There’s no organization, no communication between our groups, an enormous weakness. We have to rectify it.”
It hardly sounds like Gyula—so abrupt and decisive. He glances up, sees Agi by the open door.
“Agi.” He bounds across the room and plants an exuberant kiss on her lips. Agi feels her cheeks light up. Is this part of the revolution too? Everything coming out of hiding, including love?
“Farkas, what did General Kovacs have to say?” This was a different young man, but they all looked the same to Agi—too young, too fired up.
“That’s what I’m telling you, Marton. Next time, be quicker about it and you won’t miss the information.” Holding fast to her one hand, he speaks louder, tenser, faster than she’s ever heard him. “Every minute matters. Feri’s got his hands on an armoured vehicle. He can drive it. Can someone else manage the defence?”
The rattle of machine-gun fire is constant, if distant. Explosions blast, but everyone here ignores them. She tries to follow the conversation, but it’s obvious she has nothing to add. The others have forgotten her. His hand lets go. She stands, purposeless and awkward, beside the revolutionary.
Finally the group breaks, and Gyula turns back to her. “Did you see how organized we are already? Did you see what’s in the gymnasium?”
“Thank God you’re safe, Gyula. Last night, I thought maybe you were at the Radio and—”
“From Csepel. Rakosi’s own weapons, turned against him. And you know what General Kovacs said to me today? ‘The most faithful allies of the army are the students and the workers in the city, and the peasants in the country. Together, we have risen against Soviet domination.’ It’s happening, Agi. You see? Just like I told you. Soon, we will be Hungarians on Hungarian soil again.”
He’s talking at her, face shining with fervour, his black eyes bright with it. All the apologies she’d wanted to make dry on her tongue.
“Gyula, they’re burning men alive out there—”
“AVO men, Agi.”
She can’t even begin to answer this. “There’s talk the border guards have left their posts. It would be so easy, Gyula. We’d just have to walk—”
He looks at her in confusion. “I’m fighting for my country.”
He’s lived through one war already, as she has. He knows what Russian tanks can do as well as she does. He knows the terror of hiding in a cellar for days, weeks on end. He had to clean Russian boots, bring them cigarettes
and goose fat and beer. “But you will lose, Gyula.”
His face goes smooth, mercenary. “Get out of my way.”
“Gyula.”
“I have things to do, Agi. Now let me go.”
She’d grasped his sleeve without realizing. He strides away, shoulders set, grenades rattling loose around his waist.
When Agi leaves, the apartment walls close in. The fighting’s not many streets away. Margit hears the ricochet of bullets, the shouts. What is Miklos thinking, where he dwells, down below? Can he hear the guns, the jubilation that fills the air? Is he tempted by that jubilation to hope? Don’t you dare hope, Miklos, thinks Margit. Don’t you dare. But before she even has a name for what she’s doing, she’s putting down the ball of string. She’s standing, getting her coat on, wrapping a scarf about her head. With a key, she’s opening the cabinet beside her bed and she’s taking out the gift Miklos gave her after he came back last time and she told him what the Russians did and he couldn’t have stopped them. It’s only a pistol, but she has a full carton of bullets. She puts the box of bullets in one coat pocket and the gun in the other. If there has to be a revolution, then fine, let there be a revolution.