Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  The Zamboni driver did not yet merit attention.

  The remainder of Attila’s first championship series continued in much the same vein: riots, dirty bathrooms, Zamboni duty, ejections, police beatings, and even some hockey. Attila did not see any playing time—his ability to take abuse still far outweighed his ability to stop shots with something other than his proboscis. His official position with the club was team janitor, with a salary of 6,000 forints (about $120) per month and responsibilities that included cleaning the rink, repairing the spotty electrical service, keeping track of equipment, and, at night, working as a security guard at the entrance to the complex. But Attila felt he had played some part in what unfortunately had been a bad series for UTE: FTC won the championship, three games to one.

  Little by little, Attila was acclimating himself to his new surroundings. Bóta entrusted Attila with the only key to the pool in the basement of the UTE complex, should he ever feel like swimming alone. Attila was also learning his way around the city’s convenient three-line subway system by visiting every church in town that was advertising free meals for Transylvanian immigrants. He still thought about Katalin, and his uncle László and Ninny, but for the most part, he was too busy working and finding his next meal to dwell on his unmoored existence.

  He did make one friend: Zsuzsa Hamer, an overweight middle-aged clerk at the grocery store across the street from UTE, whose hubcap-size bifocals were always slipping off her nose. Zsuzsa had taken to Attila after listening to his frank and unaccusatory (toward her, at least) complaint that the chocolate milk the store carried was never cold enough. Every day when he came in after practice, she tried to gently extract his story, but he was so resistant that it took her months. Then one slow evening she finally got him talking, only to find herself blubbering along like a psychiatric patient. It was the part about his mother that really got her. The only memory Attila had of his mom was of an afternoon when he was about six. For years, he had begged his father to let him meet her, and finally his dad had agreed. They boarded a horse-drawn cart and trotted over to the nearby village where she was living. Attila was afraid to approach the house, but Károly Ambrus pushed his son up to the window. There was his mother, naked with another man. Attila ran back to the cart, crying, while his father shouted, “Happy now?”

  Zsuzsa began hiding milk for Attila in the grocery’s coldest refrigerator and inviting him to dinner at her cluttered apartment near the UTE stadium. Her husband, who worked several jobs, was rarely home, and Zsuzsa’s ten-year-old daughter, Sylvia, looked up to Attila like an older brother. Sometimes late at night Attila would sneak Zsuzsa and Sylvia into the UTE complex, where he would give them skating lessons and play tag with them on the shadowy rink with only the moonlight as their guide. They were the closest thing to family he had.

  Attila could only assume his aunt and uncle had received the Budapest postcard he’d stolen from the train station, but since they didn’t have a phone, he had no way to contact them. He did know that things had gotten even worse in Romania since he’d left. It was all over the Hungarian news that Ceauescu had been building a barbed-wire fence along the Hungarian border to keep his people in. Meanwhile, Hungary was lurching ever closer to freedom, even if it was in ways that didn’t yet benefit Attila: Russian was dropped from the list of compulsory classes in the schools, travel restrictions were lifted, and, most significantly, in early 1989 opposition parties were allowed to form.

  The resident of UTE’s closet had other concerns. A few months after the hockey season ended, István Bereczky, the former army general who oversaw UTE for the Interior Ministry, called Attila to the stadium unexpectedly. Bereczky knew that on Sundays he could usually find his factotum down the street at the Transylvanian diner, Csülk (the Hoof), where they fed the UTE janitor for free. And he was right: Attila was there, enjoying some pig’s feet and his sixth or seventh home-fermented, 150-proof plum pálinka (a Hungarian brandy), when Bereczky summoned him to the phone and told him to come back to clear the ice for some skating lessons. Shortly thereafter, Attila pulled out of the UTE tool shed astride the wheezing Zamboni.

  The rink was nearly empty, just a few girls standing around in pink and baby blue leotards, looking at him riding high in his motorized saddle like the Lone Ranger. He thought about standing up on the seat or at least waving. Turning the wheel hadn’t entered his mind.

  The boards along the north end of the stadium never knew what hit them. Nor did Attila, who, after piloting the blue and white machine straight through the wall, found himself flying headlong toward the third row of bleachers.

  Bereczky, a former national team ski jumper who was now a vodkaswilling drunk, was not trained to find humor in calamity. He ordered Attila to collect his sweater and vacate the storage room. Only the intervention of Bóta, Pék, and Gogolak stopped the general from firing Attila from his janitorial duties entirely.

  A week later Pék, on whose couch Attila had subsequently been living, told his boarder that he’d found him a new home. He drove Attila to a little place near his house, just a few miles from the hockey stadium. “I think you’re going to like it,” Pék said as they pulled up in front of the building.

  Attila took one look at the rectangular structure with the holey door and said, “It’s a horse paddock.”

  “A former horse paddock,” said Pék, getting out of the car. “See,” he said, pushing open the barn door. “They’ve put in a floor.”

  Five

  At times, Hungary itself felt a bit like a former horse paddock, as it shoveled out from under the stinking debris of communism. In May of 1989, just after Attila was ejected from the UTE closet, Hungary’s move to open its western border with Austria enabled thousands of trapped and persecuted East Germans to flee through Hungary to the West. (Few Hungarians utilized the newly open border; they had been allowed to travel with some limitations for several years.) Six months later East German officials watched as their citizens tore through the Berlin Wall with their own hands, a scene that inspired bedlam across Germany. In contrast, when the Hungarian politburo officially agreed in October 1989 to dissolve the Communist Party and declare the country a republic, the red star atop the Hungarian parliament was extinguished without fanfare—no victory chants, not a single highlight-reel image.

  The lack of drama belied some real anxieties. Having become accustomed to seeing their hopes dashed every time they were raised, most Hungarians had already marked their farewell to communism earlier that summer by holding not a party but a carefully choreographed funeral service. Two hundred fifty thousand people crowded into Budapest’s statue-ringed Heroes’ Square in June 1989 for a reburial ceremony for former Hungarian prime minister Imre Nagy, a supporter and symbol of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, who had been executed for his role. Attila was not among those present for the Nagy service. He was in a cemetery on the other side of the city. In order to help make his rent on the horse paddock, he had taken a second job as a gravedigger.

  From Attila’s vantage point at the bottom of a wormy pit, life was pretty good. He may have been six feet under, but at least it was Hungarian dirt. Most of the natives, however, were looking ahead with a combination of exhilaration and fear, as if a collective decision had been made to enter a Formula One race without ever having driven a car.

  At the start line in March of 1990, when Hungary’s first democratic elections in forty-five years were held, fifty-two political parties were on the ballot. The results were read on Hungarian television by sports-casters. While Czechoslovakia was rallying around the charismatic former playwright Václav Havel, and Poland behind the outspoken labor leader Lech Walesa, Hungary crossed its fingers as József Antall, a former medical science museum curator who emerged as the country’s new prime minister, admitted he wasn’t sure how or even if he could steer his country in the right direction. (Neither could he determine the time, as his watch had been swiped by Parliament guards prior to his inaugural address.) “Moses probably also had doubts,
or he wouldn’t have gone up the mountain for guidance,” Antall said, not so reassuringly.

  In this case, the mountain Antall intended to scale was across the Atlantic Ocean: America. The profligate United States was the standard to which all of former communist Eastern Europe aspired, that exalting country whose capital markets would shape global discourse in the millennium’s final decade. “The prime criterion for anything,” wrote Hungary’s most prominent—and formerly dissident—writer, George Konrád, “is, How does it work in America?” In October 1990 Antall made a six-day trip to the States to find out. He met with former spy chief and then-president George H. W. Bush in Washington, former film star and president Ronald Reagan in Los Angeles, and, in New York City, business titan Jack Welch, whose General Electric Company would soon own a controlling stake in the Hungarian state electric concern. “We aspire to let the United States play a predominant role in making investments” in Hungary, Antall proclaimed during the visit.

  Wish granted. By the end of 1990, more than a thousand U.S. companies had flooded into Hungary—among them Citicorp, General Motors, Price Waterhouse, US West, and Ralston Purina—to take advantage of the tax-free operating incentives and bargain-basement labor force. Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch bit off two Hungarian periodicals (turning them into brassy tabloids), and British publisher Robert Maxwell helped himself to the former official communist state organ, Magyar Hírlap, intending to turn it into one of the country’s first new legitimate journalistic endeavors. Despite being the smallest country in the region, Hungary found itself—by virtue of its location and its comparably developed infrastructure—the designated entry point for the biggest and most unscrupulous gold rush in years. Western boutiques such as Estée Lauder, Benetton, and the vaunted Levi Strauss were turning Váci Street, Budapest’s downtown pedestrian shopping avenue, into Rodeo Drive minus the balmy weather, palm trees, and rich people. With the average Hungarian salary at $200 a month, the only humans in Hungary who could afford to shop on Váci were the tourists, members of the mushrooming expatriate population, or the select few natives connected to the former Communist Party who were bequeathed lucrative businesses formerly owned and operated by the Hungarian government. (Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.) Inflation quickly started to spiral upward, and much of the country began to feel about as under control as Attila’s final, pálinka-fueled Zamboni ride.

  Here was an idea. Hamstrung by the exorbitant foreign debt that had been acquired under communism, the new Hungarian government decided that “in the entrepreneurial spirit,” it would begin renting out rooms in Parliament.

  The closing of factories that had once manufactured products for the now-collapsing economies of the former Soviet bloc facilitated the arrival of some other capitalist by-products: unemployment and homelessness. The situation wasn’t as bad as in places like Moscow (still in communism’s final throes), where the streets were stocked with the destitute and the supermarket shelves stood bare. Average Hungarians still had food, but the longest lines at the Budapest butcher were for the cheapest cuts, chicken necks. In a place that had formerly provided its citizens with not just jobs and homes but health care, rigorous education, three years’ paid maternity leave, and more sick days than a malingerer could misuse, a lot of people were feeling queasy.

  The UTE gang read in the local sports pages about NHL hockey star Wayne Gretzky buying a new $3.2 million home in Beverly Hills, where he could be “closer to the stars.” Meanwhile, the sloping, wooded hills that rise up over Budapest from the west were being colonized by Eastern Europe’s nouveaux riches, who were building walled compounds complete with landscaped gardens, moats, and airplane-hangar garages in which to park their luxury sedans and sports cars. Theirs was a class to which these professional athletes, and the vast majority of their countrymen, weren’t sure they would ever belong. Most of the UTE players lived on top of one another in two-room apartments in the gray cinder-block high-rise clusters that littered the outskirts of the city. Twenty-five percent of the population, Attila included, were living in poverty. Except for the overalls, T-shirt, and sweater he rode in with, every piece of clothing Attila owned was a hand-me-down. While Czechoslovakia’s playwright president Václav Havel was championing “living in truth,” Attila was still living in his teammates’ underwear. He rolled up his pants four and five times so they didn’t drag along the ground and used a piece of string as a belt. Other than the fact that they all had holes, none of his socks matched.

  But there was some upside to the country’s economic distress. As state funding for sports was slashed to almost nothing, Hungary’s best sportsmen began heading westward in search of places where “payroll” wasn’t code for “manager’s wallet.” The ripple effect was not insubstantial. In April of 1990, for example, after two seasons as a janitor, UTE employee Attila Ambrus was promoted to second-string goalie.

  It would be a couple of years before Attila actually saw action in a real game, but for the time being, it was enough for him just to see his name, once synonymous with trouble in Transylvania, on the roster of one of Hungary’s most revered sports teams. And despite the player defections, the 1990–91 season was shaping up to be a good one, assuming you were a fan of comedy, concussions, or the circus. The other way to look at it was that the league had gone to hell.

  One of UTE’s informal assistant coaches was the father of the forward Gogi. “Old Gogi,” as he was known, had done a coaching stint in Moscow years earlier, and through his well-maintained connections he’d managed to lure three former Soviet hockey stars out of retirement to join UTE for the year. Among the theories proffered to explain why in God’s name these Russian icons would agree to add this asterisk to their career stat lines were that Budapest was two or three degrees warmer than Moscow, that the goulash was tangier, and that Old Gogi was a KGB agent. Alexander Maltsev, Sergei Svetlov, and Valeri Vasiliev (aka “the Russian Bear”)—who were so grizzled that they played without shoulder pads—quickly became known around the Hungarian hockey league as the “Three Musketeers.” They burnished quite a different reputation in the UTE locker room as the incomprehensible geezers who hobbled around on bum knees and guzzled vodka from tall glasses before taking the ice.

  There was another key addition to the roster that season: Transylvanians. Two of them, and they came knocking on Bóta’s door together in the spring like a “guess what?” act. “Bubu,” said one, reaching out a hand the size of Bóta’s femur. “Karcsi,” said the other in a voice like a chipmunk’s.

  Ceauescu was dead. The previous December a Hungarian pastor had incited his western Transylvania congregation to take up arms against its oppressive dictator. The revolt quickly spread across the country, culminating in the capital, Bucharest, with a live, televised Christmas Day finale in which the “genius of the Carpathians” and his wife, Elena, were presented with bullets to their heads. It was the bloodiest of Eastern Europe’s 1989 revolutions, resulting in an estimated several hundred dead. Afterward, thousands of Transylvanian Hungarians, including Bubu and Karcsi, came charging over the newly porous border into Hungary.

  As it happened, Bubu and Karcsi were both from Csíkszereda, and Attila, despite being almost three years older and having lived outside the city for much of his teen years, knew their hockey reputations. With Attila’s urging, Bóta reluctantly agreed to try out Bubu and Karcsi, hoping he wasn’t going to wind up feeling obligated to add two more janitors to the roster. But as soon as he saw the new Transylvanians play, he realized they were the real things.

  Károly “Karcsi” Antal skated around UTE’s defensemen as if they were gates on a slalom ski course, and his finger-dislocating slapshot would soon make him one of Hungary’s leading scorers. For his part, at six feet five and 280 pounds, Jen “Bubu” Salamon earned the nickname Gép Játékos, or “player machine,” because of his bionically heedless approach to the sport. The program listed Bubu as a defenseman, but not unlike Anna the cleaning woman, he was unburdened by
titles—or the rules. When Bubu wasn’t sitting in the penalty box—which he did more than anyone in Hungary that year—he played his own game. Chasing after a tiny round disk was not of interest to him. He preferred instead to focus on a particular style of throttling that he had nearly perfected. The process, beginning with stick abuse and followed by gloved-hand combat, was perpetuated on the opposition as soon as the whistle blew and in the following order: best player to worst player. By the third period, Bubu expected to be well into the second line.

  Bubu’s value to UTE was inestimable. No one wanted even to imagine how pained they would have been if he had shown up on another team’s doorstep first.

  The three anachronistically accented Transylvanians became UTE’s other indecipherable Three Musketeers. They were “cooked and boiled,” as they said, presumably meaning “inseparable.” Weekdays were all hockey and work, but on Saturday afternoons the Transylvanian trio moved into a back corner table of the Hoof and didn’t leave until early morning. No orders needed to be placed: the waiters knew to bring nyers hús, or meat tartare, for Karcsi; sokat, or “a lot,” for Bubu (he wasn’t picky); disznóláb kocsonya, or pig’s feet in aspic, for Attila; and an extra round of whole purple onions for the table. The three of them commiserated about days wasted in red kerchiefs trying to impress their group leaders in Ceauescu’s Communist Youth Association, the Boy Scouts for the blasphemed. Bubu told Attila how one of Csíkszereda’s worst Securitate men—persze, of course, Attila remembered him—had been stomped to death during the revolution, right in front of the town jail, a building that each of them, it turned out, had once inhabited long enough to become proficient in the xylophone-like language of tapping on iron bars.