Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  The Soviets rescued Hungary from the Nazis the following year in an operation that by its own trigger-happy ending left Budapest with just 30 percent of its majestic prewar buildings intact. Then, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin calculated Hungary’s tab for services rendered by the Red Army: everything. Russian troops were installed and communist rule from Moscow imposed. Hungary became part of the western hem in the Iron Curtain. Transylvania remained inside Romania, which also capitulated to Soviet communist rule.

  During communism, Hungary’s factories produced much of the Soviet bloc’s lightbulbs, televisions, and those ubiquitous Eastern Europe roadside decorations, the Ikarus bus. The cost of a one-room apartment in Budapest was approximately eight years of average wages, an unachievable savings. Families fortunate enough to live in multiroom dwellings were forced to take in strangers as roommates. The price of getting a phone line was extraordinary patience: the waiting list was twenty years long. The countryside remained a predominantly green, if discouragingly impoverished, agricultural land. But in Budapest, where one-fifth of Hungary’s population lived, as well as in the smaller cities, the air was filthy from cheaply manufactured, blue-exhaust-belching Soviet- and Czech-produced cars, and the rivers were poisoned by unregulated industry.

  There was a brief flicker of hope in 1956, when a group of young Hungarians managed to stage the historic first, and largest, uprising against Soviet communist rule. For twelve days Budapest was transformed into a shooting gallery as sniper-fired machine guns pointing out of apartment- and cinema-house windows picked off Red Army soldiers. Molotov cocktails delivered in jug-shaped liquor bottles set Soviet tanks ablaze like cake candles. It was, briefly, euphoria. Hungarians relayed the urgent word to America and the West that they had seized control of their capital and needed reinforcements to hold the city. Time was of the essence. But Western Europe and America, which had encouraged the uprising via radio broadcasts, were too busy to take a call from Hungary. They were fighting off an impending conniption over a Soviet-financed dam in the Suez Canal, which, a few people could tell you, was located in Egypt. The SOS from Budapest was answered not by American aid but by a line of Soviet tanks that rolled into the city like a funeral procession. Twenty-seven hundred Hungarians lost their lives, two hundred thousand more fled the country, and within a few short months Hungary once again felt as if it had been pronounced dead.

  For those who remained, however, the failed uprising was not wholly without benefit. It was such an embarrassment to the Kremlin that rather than risk another rebellion, the Russians opted to give more latitude to János Kádár—the Hungarian leader Moscow had installed—than to any other leader in its eastern orbit. As a result, Hungary was the least oppressive place to live in its communist neighborhood. The media remained hopelessly state-owned and -controlled, but Hungary was the only Eastern bloc country that allowed people to listen to shortwave foreign radio broadcasts about what flourished beyond the Curtain. Unlike in Romania, where President Nicolae Ceauescu ran his country like a police state, Hungary allowed monitored meetings between dissidents and Western reporters and had no known political prisoners.

  This isn’t to say insouciance reigned in Hungary’s sixteenth-century Turkish bathhouses. Even if people weren’t being hauled off regularly, there were enough incidents of the Political Investigation Department haranguing intellectuals to remind the populace that harboring aspirations of anything but a gray, unsatisfying life was useless, and possibly even hazardous to one’s health. As it is with such subsistence, Hungarians mollified themselves with theories of relativity—in their case, the pronouncement that their country was, as they put it, “the happiest barracks on the (Soviet) bloc.” And as time went on, Hungary began to edge toward free market capitalism, albeit painfully, without interference from the Kremlin. In order to shrink the spiraling $13 billion budget deficit it had accrued over years of corrupted fiscal policies, the Hungarian government began shaving social services such as health care. To curb inflation, it caused an outcry by raising prices for bread, flour, electricity, and other staples. Slowly, Hungary’s leadership broke with Soviet practice, signing worldwide trade agreements and conforming to enough human rights conventions to qualify for International Monetary Fund aid. In the early 1980s, citizens were even permitted to open their own businesses.

  By the time Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s progressive policies of perestroika and glasnost, or “economic restructuring” and “openness,” arrived to the USSR in the mid-1980s, Hungary was setting the pace for Eastern Europe’s march toward Westernization. While Attila Ambrus was warding off knife-wielding Romanian bunkmates in a desolate Transylvanian juvenile detention facility, Budapest was welcoming an Adidas sports store and Eastern Europe’s first McDonald’s.

  As the end of the 1980s neared, it was clear that even bigger changes were coming, and so—for the first time in most people’s lifetime—was the unknown prospect of true Western-style opportunity. This is where our story begins.

  Two

  Budapest

  Wednesday, October 12, 1988

  The day he arrived was one only he would remember: cloud-covered, sticky, unending. Attila stood beneath the small black Departures board suspended between tracks seven and eight from the sloping, steel-beamed, grimy glass ceiling of the Keleti train station. People streamed around him like a river over a rock. Bocsánat, they said. Excuse me. According to the train schedule, a traveler could even go to Vienna, at least if he had the right papers. Attila was content just to ponder it. Four hours ago, he should have died. Bocsánat, he responded, smiling.

  Some of the women smiled back. Not bad, this guy with the soft whisker-sprouting face, standing unharried in the vortex of Budapest’s primary transportation hub. He carried nothing but his determination. Attila’s straight dark bangs, carelessly pushed underwear-model-style to one side, could even have passed for cutting-edge; new fashions were arriving quickly now that some of the Western boutiques had been allowed to stake their claim of Budapest real estate. But… was that a pair of overalls? It was hard to tell exactly what he was wearing. His clothes were striped with black grease, as if he’d just stepped out of an oil well. Sorry, but they had a train to catch.

  He didn’t care. He didn’t want to go anywhere. Attila Ambrus had long known that if he ever got to Hungary, he would never leave. Sure, it was still communist terrain, but he was finally among his own—a very Hungarian Hungarian who had never, until today, been to Hungary. To his eager ears, even the most banal statement that afternoon was a shrstk-hat-chop sonata, the syncopated conflagration of consonants, accents, and unabashed umlauts an auditory orgy.

  Daylight faded. He walked down a stairwell to the city mall, a dingy concourse beneath the street lined with kiosks offering the best vendibles on the market: at the music booth, Madonna, Jefferson Star-ship, and Komár László Sings Elvis Presley cassettes; at the feet of wrinkled women with bulbous noses and black shawls, waist-high sacks of sunflower seeds; and at the newsstand, crossword-puzzle books with naked women on the cover and a selection of Hungarian-language newspapers, trumpeting the impending arrival in Budapest of U.S. deputy secretary of state John Whitehead. Earlier that day in Berlin, Whitehead had implored East German authorities to tear down “that gray, monstrous snake,” the Berlin Wall.

  Attila swiped a postcard: Budapest at night, when you saw only what they illuminated—the windows of the stately former Hapsburg palace twinkling like a thousand cubic zirconias over the electric golden garland that outlined the Széchenyi Bridge. With a pen borrowed from the nearby subway ticket counter, he wrote on the back of the card, Itt vagyok—I’m here— and stuck it in his back pocket to mail later.

  When night fell, the proprietors padlocked their wooden booths and went home. The Gypsy women tied up their sunflower sacks and curled into the station’s dank corners. The cool cement hall was almost quiet when a lone busker on a violin appeared at the subway entrance playing the theme to Attila’s favorite TV show, those
Communist Party–approved darlings of contemporary Eastern Europe, The Flint-stones. There were no police around and those he had seen earlier appeared neither armed nor dangerous. Relieved, Attila sat down against the wall, singing himself a lullaby: Let’s have a doo time, a dabba doo time. Let’s have a gay old time!

  In the morning he awoke in a slump at the edge of a people stampede with a stiff neck and a six-part question. He went outside to where the cabbies were lined up in black-and-white-checkered Russian Zhigulis and let it fly: Where might he find some food, clothes, money, a job, an ID, and a place to live?

  The answer to all six was 55 Népköztársaság, just a few doors down from the infamous Communist Party headquarters building, from which a summons might still be interpreted as a memo to cancel your plans and pack a toothbrush. As the Thursday workday began, Attila set out into the linty fall air. The city was like a bustling ghost town, an inhabited shell of the place it had been at the turn of the twentieth century, when it was the fastest-growing city in Europe. Bullet-pocked five- and six-story fin de siècle limestone buildings loomed over the sidewalk like uncalled witnesses to the carnage of the 1945 Soviet “liberation” and the unsuccessful 1956 uprising. It was never quite clear if the scars remained as a warning or as evidence that there were no quick fixes in the lands of the Red Star.

  Many of the street names were Russian, which Attila assumed explained why he had to zigzag back and forth in order to maintain the direction in which he’d been pointed. On the looping, traffic-choked avenues, ottoman-size automobiles and the occasional brightly colored BMW or Mercedes coursed like clots through damaged arteries. On the diagonal side streets, boys on bikes went bumping along the uneven black stone and men smoking Multifilters stood in patches of sunlight.

  When he reached Népköztársaság (which was only a year away from reclaiming its original name, Andrássy) he turned left onto the wide, leafy boulevard that was modeled after Paris’s Champs-Elysées. Above him, the crenellated windows of the baroque attic roofs looked out from their curved perches like sunken eyes. Walking in the opposite direction of the statue-filled Heroes’ Square, where Chief Árpád and the seven other founding fathers of Hungary rode bronze horses, Attila passed the renowned Mvész café and confectionery, whose patrons debated the merits of democracy while employing aluminum spoons to shovel sugar into their espressos; the nineteenth-century Opera Pharmacy, where pitchers of water sat on the counters for those who couldn’t wait to take their medication; and the neoclassical State Opera House, roosted atop a swath of marble steps, behind a statue of Liszt. Every few minutes a banana-yellow tram, linked to a network of elevated cables, clanked to a stop and deposited its passengers onto a cement island in the middle of an intersecting avenue, there in the convenient, high-occupancy, and fashionably invadable neighborhood of dead central Europe.

  At number 55, Attila stopped. Under a small red, white, and green Hungarian coat of arms, a sign read, BEVÁNDORLÁSI HIVATAL—Immigration Office. He’d made it.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the woman sitting behind the counter on the second floor.

  “Take a number.”

  He looked around. The small room was empty. Nevertheless, he took a numbered square from the stack of paper and sat down on a bench.

  A few minutes later, with the atonal fervor of the condemned, she called his number. “Fill this out,” she said, handing over a two-page form and a pencil.

  Name: Attila Ambrus

  Place of birth: Csíkszereda, Romania

  Date of birth: October 6, 1967

  Member of associations: UTC KISZ

  (Communist Youth Association)

  And so on.

  At the bottom of the second page was a paragraph stating that if he renounced his foreign citizenship, he could not be involved in any political activities in Hungary and that he would respect the laws of the land. Below it Attila volunteered, “Hereby I state that I do not want to return to Romania. Never again. I would like to live in Hungary as an upstanding man. I accept that I cannot get involved in any political stuff.”

  He left only one question blank: Have you ever been prosecuted before?

  He signed his name in tall half-cursive lettering that leaned exaggeratedly backward as if laboring in a headwind, then brought the form back to the woman. Told to wait, he returned to the unforgiving bench.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Three hours later a man in an olive green Party uniform with silver buttons down the front appeared from behind a door and asked him to follow. All too familiar with state-sponsored hospitality, Attila had already begun making mental notes of potential escapes from the building, and as they walked, he added a couple more windows and a likely back hallway to his list.

  He was ushered into a windowless room with a desk upon which two small flags sprouted from a coffee mug—one bearing the communist Hammer and Sickle, the other the horizontal red, white, and green stripes of Hungary. The dark wood furniture whispered, Shoot me.

  “Mr. Ambrus,” the officer said, sitting down behind the desk and pointing for his subject to take a seat. He had Attila’s forms in a brown folder, marked by his case number, 0224-877-6.

  “Yes, Comrade,” Attila answered.

  Comrade? Was this peasant serious? “You are from Erdély [Transylvania]?” the man asked.

  “Yes, Comrade,” Attila said.

  “Why do you make this request for temporary residence in Hungary?”

  “Because I would like to stay in Hungary and live here,” Attila said. “And with time I would like to get Hungarian citizenship.”

  “How do you plan to make a living?” the officer asked, unmoved.

  “I would like to work,” Attila stated. “In Romania there’s no point trying to make ends meet.” Bureaucrats, Attila thought. Did he need to spell out hell for him, too? Attila assumed he knew only bits and pieces of current events, but from what he understood, even the United States had condemned Romanian president Nicolae Ceauescu for his human rights abuses against the Hungarians living in Romania. He’d heard it himself on an illegal shortwave radio, tucked comfortably in a patch of beech trees, on the far-reaching signal from Radio Budapest. Now he wondered if he’d taken the news too much for granted.

  “Have you ever been prosecuted before?” the officer asked, eyeing Attila.

  “No, Comrade,” Attila said, lying.

  The man paused, then continued. “Do you have a profession?”

  That was a tough one. “After school I went to work as an electrician,” Attila said, stretching the traditional definitions of school, work, and electrician. “But not long afterward they took me to be a soldier. For a year and four months I was a member of the Romanian army. After that I started to work again, but even then it was my intention to live in Hungary. And I succeeded because I escaped. And now I’m here…. In Hungary!

  “Bocsánat,” Attila added, apologizing that the last two words—in Hungary!—had jumped out of him like a victory toast.

  “So you did not come on a visa, then,” the man noted coolly. “Did you come across the border on foot?”

  “No, Comrade.”

  “How did you come, then?”

  Attila shifted in his seat. According to the Radio Budapest report he’d believed, Hungary was admitting all of its Hungarian brethren who made it out of Romania, with or without the paperwork. But it was a tenuous time. A few months earlier, in May of 1988, János Kádár, the apparatchik who had led Hungary for the past thirty-two years, had been ousted by the forward-thinking Hungarian nomenklatura in favor of a bickering collection of reformers and opportunists, each hoping to make history as the man to lead Hungary from communism. But not all of Hungary’s Communist Party tentacles were ready to play dead. In June, Budapest police had beaten about a hundred people who were trying to publicly commemorate the thirty-year anniversary of the death of Imre Nagy, the former Hungarian prime minister who was hanged for his role as an instig
ator of the 1956 uprising. And while Attila pondered his fate that morning in the airless immigration office, Hungary’s neighbor to the north, Czechoslovakia, watched as Moscow sacked its newly appointed reform-minded leader in favor of another iron-fisted lackey.

  Romania, as Attila could report, was even less predictable. The country of 23 million had become the closest thing there was to a police state in communist Europe. Ceauescu’s secret police force, the Securitate, patrolled the cities in machine-gun-toting militias and had one in every seven citizens working for it as an informant. Food was closely rationed: each household received a cup of oil and sugar and one pound of an item referred to as meat every month. Even in the notoriously frigid winters, homes were allowed only two hours of heat per night. Some had taken to calling their country Ceauswitz.

  Of course, it wasn’t only the ethnic Hungarians who were living in fear and misery, but they had the right to be especially terrified. Transylvania (population, 7 million), where almost all of Romania’s 2 million Hungarians lived, was a highly prized and historic piece of land that both Hungary and Romania claimed was the birthplace of their culture. And Romania, an independent state only since 1878, believed its ancestors, the Dacians of Rome, had lived there seven hundred years before Hungary’s Chief Árpád. If you were one of Romania’s Hungarians circa 1988, there were an increasing number of reasons you might suddenly disappear from society, among them the crime of speaking Hungarian.