Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  As morning dawned, his stomach began to cramp. At last, the train appeared in the distance. He got up from the ground and readied to time his run so that he would be shielded from view of the checkpoint as much as possible and still be at full speed when the train passed him. Before he knew it, he was racing diagonally out of the field. But the window of time he’d given himself was too small. When he reached the tracks—legs churning, the train roaring over his right shoulder—he realized he couldn’t keep up.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a handrail sticking out from the front end of one of the cars. As it passed, he lunged and grabbed it with both hands, the force of the train pulling his arms ahead of his legs, first lifting his body horizontal to the ground, then swinging it back down and smashing him against the side of the car. He held on as his body steadied enough for him to reach out one foot and then the other onto the metal grating between the two cars and gain purchase on the connecting platform. He needed to be beneath the grating on which he stood, lying flat along the wide bar that held the cars together.

  The border checkpoint was approaching. He got on his knees on the edge of the platform with his back to the fields and gripped the steel below him. He looked like a gymnast on the parallel bars—arms locked, teeth clenched, as he prepared for a swoon and a swing that would either propel him safely under the connecting platform and above the couplings or, if his form was less precise, onto the tracks, where he would be instantly killed. Attila pushed his torso up and swung his curled knees back over the edge of the train, then quickly and forcefully pulled his legs back in and shot them straight out along the platform beneath the one on which he’d just stood. He could feel his thighs drift across the black metal slab that functioned as the connector to switch the cars. As his legs settled on this slab, he forced his body to follow, belly-up, by pushing with his arms against the bar he was holding, like a reverse chin-up. There was just enough room to balance himself on his back. But his body… his body was slipping on the grease as the train chugged along the rails toward Hungary. If he were to lose his balance now, it would be a short, quick tumble to a gruesome death. He held the metal platform with his hands and pushed his feet against the grating above him to steady his trunk. The train would surely be checked and probably even inspected, but he hoped it would not be examined for people flattened corpselike between two cars, hanging so low to the tracks that a muscle twitch could remove a limb.

  And all of this to get from one communist dictatorship to another.

  A few minutes later the train slowed to a stop at the checkpoint. Attila held his breath as footsteps approached, paused, and then, after what seemed like an eternity, passed. Finally the train began moving again. Supine and six inches off the ground, Attila Ambrus entered Hungary.

  Four

  Budapest

  The following week

  Attila’s James Bond escape yarn and Hungary’s deep distrust of Ceauescu were more than sufficient for the immigration office to tag him as a potential spy or budding reprobate. As a result, instead of being given a room in one of the city’s new housing blocks for Transylvanian refugees, Attila was assigned a bed in a policemen’s dormitory, where he could be more closely monitored. It being communism, he was also assigned a job—a bad one. He became an electrical assistant at a glass factory, where he was paid slightly less than the average $150/month Hungarian wage to make sure a truck-size glass-cutting machine didn’t overheat. Daylight hours weren’t so bad. It was having to go to sleep among two hundred communist cops every night that undercut the logic he’d prevailed upon when weighing whether to throw himself at a moving train. Didn’t these Hungarians understand he was one of them? Apparently not. Every few days someone from an official post approached his bunk and, after a short chat, asked him to describe the industrial swamp pit of Galati where he said he had done his military service (which he could do) or where Romania’s power grids were (which he couldn’t do).

  During his breaks at the glass factory, Attila disappeared into the sports pages of the precious Hungarian-language newspapers, each filled with stories of Hungary’s championship pro hockey team, UTE (Újpesti Torna Egylet, or Újpest Gym Association). In October, UTE had won a European championship tournament in the world’s C division, two competition levels below that in which the global puck powers from the Soviet Union, Sweden, Canada, and the United States played. And in one week in November, the Budapest-based UTE club won three straight games over its foes in the eight-team Hungarian professional league by a combined score of 42–4.

  Attila loved hockey even more than he loved the Transylvanian delicacy pig’s feet. Aside from playing goalie at the private school, he used to sneak into every game at Csíkszereda’s four-thousand-seat indoor hockey arena, where Romania’s only all-Hungarian professional team played. And as much as he loved hockey, he hated his current job. So, one afternoon at lunch, Attila went to a pay phone and dialed the number of the UTE facility. “I’d like to speak to the general manager,” he said. “This is Attila Ambrus.”

  By the time Gustáv Bóta picked up, Attila’s new phone card was nearly creditless. “Can I help you?” Bóta asked.

  “Hello, Comrade. I’m Attila Ambrus from Transylvania,” Attila said. “I’m a goalie and I’d like a tryout.”

  Bóta paused. Comrade? Who called anyone “comrade” anymore? In the decade or so since Hungarians had received the unofficial all-clear to start using “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” the communist honorific had all but disappeared from the lexicon. “Ancsin?… Flóra?” Bóta said, attempting to match the voice on the other end with one of the jokesters from the team but encountering only silence. “Well,” he said, composing himself, “we actually do need another goalie.” Everyone in hockey knew the illustrious reputation of the all-Hungarian hockey program in Csíkszereda. Bóta hadn’t heard of this Ambrus fellow, but news didn’t transmit out of Transylvania in people years. Bóta told Attila he’d pick him up the next morning and take him to practice. In the meantime, Attila decided to keep quiet about his colossal lack of competitive goal-tending experience.

  The following day, when the UTE general manager pulled up in front of Attila’s dorm in a bright orange two-door Soviet-made Lada, he was surprised by the diminutive size of his new recruit. Hungarians weren’t behemoths to begin with, but the Transylvanian variety usually came a few sizes bigger. True, for goalies, size mattered less than reflexes, and there were plenty of international greats under six feet tall. But Attila looked about five feet eight and a little on the thin side. Then again, at five feet four and a dead ringer for the bearded, rosy-cheeked Sneezy of the Seven Dwarfs, Bóta wasn’t one to judge on sight. Surely, he figured, Attila would make up for his height in speed and smarts. And he would fit in the car.

  Attila folded himself into the Lada, and he and Bóta lurched through the curving, narrow streets with the fashion and firepower of a toaster. It didn’t take Bóta long to realize that Attila’s “comrade” comment had been no joke. His passenger spoke in an archaic Hungarian dialect that Bóta couldn’t always follow. When Attila mentioned his love of the forest surrounding his home in Csíkszereda, he didn’t call it erd—he called it rengeteg, or, in Budapest Hungarian, a “big pile.” When Attila said his boss at the glass factory was lópokróc, or a “horse rug,” Bóta could only guess it meant that he was rude. It was like talking to a Hungarian Shakespeare.

  Half an hour later, after negotiating stop-and-go traffic and passing the dilapidated, white wooden row houses near the sports complex in the city’s northern suburb of Újpest, Sneezy and his Transylvanian catch pulled into the UTE parking lot. The light gray November sky illuminated a locale Attila had only read about in the papers—UTE’s hulking ten-thousand-seat soccer stadium and barren bleacher-ringed hockey rink. (UTE fielded teams in several sports.) Attila was surprised to see that the latter didn’t even have a roof.

  Bóta and Attila walked to the far end of the rink, where they entered a brown silolike building with
the distinct bouquet of urine. At the end of the hall, Bóta showed Attila in to the small square locker room. Black-and-white team pictures hung at odd angles on walls painted in purple and white, the UTE team colors. A couple of dozen players ranging from eighteen to thirty with buzz cuts and in various stages of undress sat on wooden stools. “This is Attila Ambrus,” Bóta announced to the group. “He’s going to be trying out as a goalie today.”

  A few of them grunted. Attila went around in a circle, reaching out his hand to each of them. “Hello, Comrade, I’m Attila Ambrus from Transylvania,” he said. He got about halfway around the room before someone finally asked, “Who the fuck is this bumpkin?” Even Bóta couldn’t hold back his laughter.

  The only extra skates the team could find for Attila were three sizes too big. Attila picked some newspapers off the floor, crumpled them up, and shoved them into the toes. Asking for a helmet, he reflexively used the Romanian word, kasca, which was what they’d called it back in Csíkszereda but which was nonsensical in Hungarian. The room exploded into laughter again.

  Once out on the ice, it didn’t take long for the players to recognize the new kid’s level of talent: Zero. It had been six years since Attila had stood in front of a hockey net. He was flailing and diving all over the ice like a soccer goalie on roller skates. A few of the players started a contest to see who could hit him in the face mask the most times. His hand-me-down helmet was so old, it provided little protection. The third or fourth bull’s-eye broke his nose. As the shots continued to batter his face, chest, legs, and arms, George Pék, the team’s captain, skated over to Bóta, who was standing in a stupor on the side of the rink. Pék was a tall man, a former cop whose ice-blue eyes and blank stares endowed him with the authority of someone who operated on the fringes of anger and insanity. And he’d seen enough. “Whatever this guy is doing,” Pék said to Bóta, “it has nothing to do with hockey.”

  Sneezy blew his whistle and tried to wave Attila over, but Attila ignored him. No matter how many pucks flew past him or into him, no matter how many times he flopped onto the ice, he kept returning to his hermit-crab crouch in front of the net as if the scrimmage in which he purported to be playing were the national title game. And so, partly out of morbid curiosity, Bóta let Attila play on until, two hours later, his whistle ended practice. Pék skated over to confer with Bóta and Dezs Széles, the head coach, at the side of the rink. “It’s simply amazing,” Pék said, “that there is a person on this planet who wants to be a goalie for our team so badly even though he clearly has never had anything to do with hockey before in his life.”

  The decision was unanimous. Attila was offered an immediate position with the team. He had what it took.

  Three months later Attila sat alone in the locker room with his head in his hands. The brown linoleum floor was strewn with tape, sneakers, and the plastic hospital cups the team doctor had brought around earlier on a tray like hors d’oeuvres. “Don’t forget your antifatigue pills, boys,” he’d said. “Same as the Russians use.”

  The rest of the team had already headed out to the ice, and the raucous commotion that had attended their entrance rumbled through the building’s thin walls—horses braying, people screaming, unimaginable objects thunking. In twenty minutes UTE was to play its crosstown rival, FTC (Ferencvárosi Gym Club), in Game One of the Hungarian national hockey championship, and from the sounds of it, Attila was about to wade into the biggest battle of his life.

  Ice hockey was popular across much of Eastern Europe, with the Soviets consistently among the world’s best. It was one of the few things Hungarians admired in the Russians. Hungary couldn’t come close to duplicating their talent, no matter how many steroids the team doctor mixed into their energy drinks. Nonetheless, Hungary boasted a modest but respectable pro hockey league, and even though it drew smaller crowds and fewer televised games than soccer, Hungarian hockey’s rabid fans didn’t seem to notice. Anytime UTE played FTC—much less Game One of the finals—it was a good bet that two or three dozen supporters would leave the premises in paddy wagons. In fact, the hostilities in the stands often seemed to be of greater interest than the game. When the two teams had played a month earlier, the contest had to be called off in the third period when the FTC fans wouldn’t heed their own team’s exhortations to please stop hurling fireworks at the UTE goalie.

  As the crowd noise grew, Attila slowly got up and went to the entrance to the bathrooms, casting a longing glance at the fetid stalls. Anna, the team’s cleaning woman, had recently decided that her job title did not carry with it the requirement that she do the work it described. The eau de toilette was motivation enough for Attila to get to the ice. He headed back into the changing area, grabbed two heavy purple equipment bags, and began the long walk through the dim corridor.

  As Attila was now all too aware, UTE contests had the capacity to provoke a particularly vehement rage among the public, and not just because the team had won six of the last seven Hungarian championships. In Hungary, all of the professional sports teams—much like everything—were run by the government. But the branch of the government that ran UTE was the Interior Ministry, the agency in charge of the police, who were probably the most spectacular of all rohadt bolsi (rotten Bolsheviks) the country had to offer. Some Hungarians, particularly loyal fans of the green and white FTC—“the people’s team,” run by the Agricultural Ministry—even thought of the purple-shirted UTE as the police team, though in reality the UTE roster rarely featured more than one or two actual cops.

  Had Attila known any of this earlier, he would never have phoned UTE. To him, hockey had always represented rebellion. The fans at the Csíkszereda hockey games he attended were so maniacally anti-Ceauescu that the Csíkszereda arena was known as the only place in Romania that the Securitate was too afraid to enter. They waited outside while inside, four thousand inebriated Transylvanians chanted the Hungarian anthem and other jingles at the opposing Romanian players, such as “Next time you’ll have to bring your passport to get in here!” While the Romanian referees were under orders from Ceauescu himself to prohibit Csíkszereda from winning the important games, if they were too egregious with their calls, they risked being held hostage inside the arena and getting beaten senseless by the locals.

  But as much as the idea of being associated with the police troubled him, Attila couldn’t do anything about his connection to UTE now. Once the team’s staff saw just how little he had—he was confined to his dormitory every weekend because that was when he washed and dried his only outfit—they immediately began the requisite string pulling, paper shuffling, and mild-to-moderate Interior Ministry rank pulling to get the immigration office to approve a formal work transfer from the glass factory. That accomplished, Bóta even arranged for Attila to move out of the police dorm and into a closet at the UTE facility, where he was now living rent-free. It was a lot better than sharing a roof with the police, though Attila now shared something even stranger with his former bunkmates: he, too, was an employee of Hungary’s Interior Ministry.

  Not that that was going to be of any help to him in the coming hours if war broke out at the stadium, which was the way it was beginning to sound as he approached the double doors at the end of the long hallway. With one quick rocking motion, Attila smacked the entrance-way open with the bulky purple shoulder bags.

  The late-afternoon fog was low and thick, as if he’d stepped into a cloud. All he could see were arms swinging and horse legs kicking, the prechampionship game riots already at full tilt. The open-air rink was less than fifty yards away. He lowered his head and began to run. “Get him!” someone shouted. “He’s bringing reinforcements!” Before he could react to the erroneous accusation of ferrying battle supplies to the front lines, people and police horses converged on him from all directions. Attila was forced to the ground and subdued by that most contemporary of crowd-control techniques, beating by leather-sheathed police sword. “They’re not reinforcements!” he screamed. “They’re hockey sticks for th
e game!”

  As if it mattered. He lay back down with his forehead on the cement and took it. A decent beating, he thought, but he’d had much better. When the UTE captain, George Pék, found him sometime later, he was lying in a semicircle of broken sticks.

  “Get up,” Pék said, pulling him by his arms. László “Gogi” Gogolak, one of UTE’s starting forwards, was there, too. He threw a bloodied towel at Attila. “The game’s starting in five minutes,” Gogi said. “Get a move on.”

  Attila brushed himself off and headed to the metal shed behind the south goal. A few minutes later came the soundtrack that regularly accompanied his arrival on the ice. It wasn’t cheers or a catchy theme song, but a noise like a sick animal coughing, followed by a tinny ping like the thawing of a frozen pipe, and then the sputtering hum that denotes a piece of, well, machinery with an engine. It was the ice-starching automobile, the Zamboni, starting. Then came the cheers, borne by the confirmation that there would in fact be a game that night—as soon as Attila, black and blue and behind the big wheel, finished clearing the ice.

  In a haze so dense that the goalies couldn’t see each other across the ice, UTE prevailed, 5–2, in a Game One showdown that featured nearly two dozen penalties, three ejections, and two thousand fans in a traditional Hungarian-style frenzy. The daily sports newspaper Népsport remarked of the sellout crowd the following day, “There was the typical chanting we can’t print, but the cheers made use of an entire zoo as well as the players’ whole family genealogy.”