When in doubt, go home, go to bed, Gyuri thought. He had had a restless night fretting over the prospect of the disciplinary session and elaborating his defence, reckoning the tribunal would be the occasion for a backlog of overdue bad luck to unload on him. He opted to go home and file himself between the sheets.
He found Elek trying to persuade some used ground coffee to do an encore and produce more black soup. ‘You’ve just missed Jadwiga,’ he said. ‘She’s come up to Budapest for the demonstration.’ Gyuri swivelled on his heel and went out.
From the other side of the river, he saw the crowd around the Bern statue as he started to cross the Margit Bridge. Bern had been the Polish General who was confused about which revolution he was in, and zealously led the Hungarian Army of Independence in 1848 against the Habsburgs and led it very successfully, until the Russians were called in and the Army of Independence proved how Hungarian it was by getting wiped out. But at least it went down to vastly superior forces, though, apocryphally, when he heard that the ten-times-greater Russian force was attacking, Bern had remarked: ‘Good, I was worried they’d get away.’
The students had chosen to gather around Bern, since one of the goals of the demonstration was to express their approval of the political changes in Poland (Jadwiga had gone on about them with great enthusiasm) which were the sort of changes they wanted in Hungary: a friendly, ideology-next-door, happy-go-lucky sort of Communism. They didn’t seem alone in this wish.
Not only was the Bern square a lawn of heads but the entire embankment around it was one huge dollop of humanity. Thirty, forty thousand people and more drifting in at the edges. It was a vomiting up of an indigestible system. It had all the makings of uncontrollability.
‘Gyuri!’ He turned around to see Laci with two friends who were carrying a huge Hungarian flag. It was the first occasion Gyuri could recall that he had experienced the sensation of feeling old, gazing enviously on those younger than himself, those who hadn’t expended their optimism and could believe that carrying a flag around could change things.
‘Jadwiga’s here somewhere,’ said Laci, looking back at the crowd. ‘She’s here with some friends from Szeged.’ Gyuri surveyed the throng. It could take him the rest of the day to find her if their destinies weren’t synchronised.
‘I must congratulate you. I never thought I’d ever see anything like this’ commented Gyuri, taken aback by the scale of the protest. ‘Have you seen the sixteen points?’ asked Laci, unfolding a sheet of paper and passing it to Gyuri. ‘We started drawing them up yesterday at the University and we just kept going.’
The first demand that Gyuri read was for a change in the leadership of the Hungarian Working People’s Party. That was the sort of thing that, say in 1950, just thinking about it would have got you a ten-year stretch in an unlit cellar with swollen kidneys and icy water up to your knees. Now, what with Stalin smelling the violets by their roots, and Uncle Nikita rubbishing all his predecessors, that sort of thing was negotiable if you were accompanied by a very, very large crowd. The Communist movement, in the best tradition of bankrupt capitalists, was highly adept at changing name and premises and continuing to trade under a new veneer.
The demands grew more demanding. Imre Nagy in, Soviet troops out. Free elections, free press. Gyuri wondered, Why not throw in a requirement for eternal life and compulsory millionaireships for all Hungarians? There was also a demand for the secret files on everyone to be opened up.
‘Good list,’ he said. ‘Good crowd.’
‘The authorities were against it till we started,’ said Laci, ‘but now we’ve got plenty of gatecrashers from the Party. I suppose they want it to look as if they were behind it.’
The idea of Jadwiga demonstrating against the Party had dismayed Gyuri greatly when he heard about it. Apart from the more physical risks such as beating or death, the threat of deportation had gnawed at his innards. Poland for him, as a member of the passportless masses, was as inaccessible as the South Pole. But he could see the crowd was too big to have problems. It was a crowd so huge you couldn’t shoot at it or try to disperse it. The leaders and speech-makers would doubtless be soon invited in to some subterranean cell for a little chat and damage to their structures. But on the streets, the crowd was too much: like an unwelcome relative coming to call, all you could do was humour it until it decided to go home. Everything would be all right as long as Jadwiga could restrain herself from haranguing the populace or reciting some inflammatory poetry. ‘We’re going off to the parliament now,’ said Laci, ‘we’re going to stay there until they make Imre Nagy Prime Minister again.’ Gyuri watched them walk off along the bridge. Laci was only four, five years younger than him, but his idealism made Gyuri feel like a grandfather. Strange how two brothers could contain so many differences and similarities. Pataki had always harnessed his intelligence to the service of his willy and winding people up as much as possible. Laci was self-effacing, studious; every time Gyuri had been in the Pataki flat Laci had been attached to a book, often extremely dull text-books. Though you didn’t notice him, he was always around. It had been no surprise when he won a scholarship to the University, a considerable achievement for someone whose father wasn’t in the Central Committee. However, his mischief had merely been more undercover, more insidious, biding its time. Laci hadn’t said anything about it but Gyuri was sure he was leading rather than following at the Technical University.
Scanning the crowd, Gyuri tried to catch a fragment of Jadwiga. He was heartened not to see her addressing the demonstrators with a loud-hailer. The people milling around were no longer predominantly students, the demonstration was snowballing: soldiers, old folk, nonentities, water-polo players, housewives, office staff, all those who saw the demonstration and the placards and who realised this wasn’t a stage-managed, Communist-led affair, that it wasn’t an out of season May Day, abandoned their business and joined in with an air of why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-before?
* * *
There were dozens of people trying to pull down the statue of Stalin, imps gathered around his boots. There were many more people giving advice on how it should be done. The assays and the advice had been going on for some time. Sledgehammers, hacksaws, chains attached to lorries, as well as copious abuse had all been directed at the eight-metre-high statue. It remained highly indifferent to the flurry around its legs.
Gyuri was very glad that he was there. If he hadn’t been out searching for Jadwiga he probably would have missed this – it was a definite bet that Budapest Radio wouldn’t be broadcasting the news that a once-only performance of idol-toppling would be taking place that night.
It was going to be, indisputably, a historic moment, one of those things that grandchildren would be hearing about whether they felt like it or not. Gyuri had never derived such intense satisfaction from anything before like this; pleasure yes, but nothing that had made his soul throw back its head and just laugh. However, it would be nice, Gyuri reflected, if the historic moment could hurry up and get on with it, because it was really too cold to be standing about even for a once in a lifetime sensation and having patrolled the streets all day he was tired. Gyuri also couldn’t quite suppress the feeling that this was going a bit too far. He had carefully positioned himself to have a good view, but equally should penalties arrive, to have a good exit. It was like that moment of schoolboy exuberance when the teacher was going to walk in and curtail the pranks.
There was nothing to give substance to his unease though. A few policemen were circulating but they looked as if they were rather enjoying it and Gyuri had heard the one with the moustache suggest that an acetylene torch would do the job nicely. Two more senior, fatter policemen had been present an hour ago. The fattest, presumably most senior one had endeavoured to disperse the crowd but after issuing a few warnings, he got tired of being laughed at and vanished with his megaphone to more pressing matters elsewhere.
Whatever the outcome of the day, it had been the most enjoyable day, on all count
s, that Gyuri had spent for… well, he couldn’t remember the last time precisely but the reign of boredom had lifted for a day.
A lorry pulled up and two workers who handled the acetylene equipment with practised lightness pulled themselves up onto the plinth to amputate Uncle Joe at the boot tops. A ripple of applause rose as the flame bit into Stalin’s calf, a miniature sun in the night’s darkness. The audience for such a monumental event could have been larger; there couldn’t have been more than three thousand gathered around the statue, a mere fraction of those out on the streets that night who would have undergone a quiver of pleasure at the toppling of the bronze abomination. Still, Gyuri knew, tomorrow everyone would be claiming they had been there.
Gyuri assumed that most people were still back in the centre of the city, around the parliament where Imre Nagy had waved sheepishly to the hundred thousand people assembled there and begun his address to them: ‘Comrades…’ This had exactly the opposite effect to what Nagy had wanted. Despite the fact that the crowd wanted him to take over, his opening malapropism brought boos and a rhythmic chant of ‘There are no comrades.’ Nagy had handled the rest of his speech better, urging coolness and good sense. It wasn’t a brilliant performance, but then, as a Communist, Nagy wasn’t familiar with the concept of an audience that wanted to hear him speak. People weren’t overjoyed, but it had been getting late and most of them, content with a good day’s demonstrating, started to go home. Gyuri had seen nearly everyone he had met in his life at the Parliament Square, but not Jadwiga. He was on his way home to check for her there when he happened upon Stalin about to come a cropper.
With some guided combustion, Stalin was tripped up by the will of the people and came crashing down with a clanging slap that dwarfed the ovation of the souvenir-hunters who closed in to feast on the fallen carcass with sledgehammers and pickaxes. Gyuri quite fancied a piece of Stalin as a sort of talisman, a memento of evil not always having its way, but he settled for making one more trip to the Radio to look for Jadwiga if she wasn’t at the flat. She wasn’t. So he took the tram down to Kalvin Square.
The whole network of streets around the Radio in Sándor Bródy utca was full, packed with people. It was like a replay of the World Cup protest, except this time the number of extras had quadrupled. Gyuri heard that a delegation of students had made its way to the Radio in the late afternoon to politely ask for their points to be read out to the rest of the country. More delegations, more well-wishers of democracy, more politeness had arrived throughout the evening and now by eleven o’ clock, the politeness was being discarded and the student idealism was being replaced by proletarian bellicosity. Gyuri hoped Jadwiga wasn’t around here (though he guessed his presence would produce her absence) since he was adamant that the Radio was where the Party would draw the line. The Stalin statue, that was allowing people to let off steam, since, after all Stalin was rather dead and passé, and it saved them the embarrassment of removing it themselves. But the Radio was real here-and-now power, it could pour the unrest all over the sleepier parts of the capital and the nation…
Gyuri spotted Laci and his gang by the main entrance. He squeezed his way through, earning a great deal of rancour from the people he had to shove and step on to reach them. ‘You haven’t seen Jadwiga?’ he inquired. ‘Yes,’ replied Laci, ‘she was here a minute ago.’ Adding proudly: ‘They’re going to read out the points.’
There was a stir around the entrance way and a suit full of shit started to shout: ‘The points are being read out now. Please go home. The points are being read out as I speak. Please go home.’ He sounded familiar and he had a booming voice; Gyuri assumed that he must be one of the presenters. The radio man stressed that the points were being read out and that people should go home. Then, from a window in one of the flats opposite the Radio entrance, a woman with the look of a harried housewife materialised. Balancing her wireless with some difficulty on the windowsill so that everyone in the street could faintly sample the broadcast, she shouted: ‘You evil liar! There’s nothing but music.’
The tear gas followed swiftly after this. It failed all round. The AVO didn’t have gas masks, most of the gas billowed back onto them, and since the street was so narrow and full, even those people who wanted to leave couldn’t do much about it. There was a lot of coughing and crying but more than anything else, there was a large amount of anger. It was something you could watch growing, like a darkening sky presaging rain. Gyuri dropped back to search for Jadwiga and because he knew it was coming. The Communists might not be good at organising the economy but if there was one thing they knew it was how to organise security.
By the time he had forced his way to the sanctuary of the nearby National Museum, not on a direct bullet line from the Radio entrance and endowed with walls and pillars so thick that gunfire would be no more effective than rain, the shooting started. It was the most sickening sound he had ever heard. His fear was overtaken by nausea at people being shot for standing in the wrong place. The streets, of course, were emptying as fast as possible.
In a doorway opposite, revealed sporadically as people ran past, Gyuri saw a tubby man slumped against the door, his legs straight out in front of him, like a propped up teddy-bear. He had a great red patch on his stomach. A companion was whispering in his ear, perhaps trying to talk him out of bleeding to death. Gyuri could discern two motionless bodies lying in front of the Radio. He was surprised how nauseous the sight made him. He had thought he had seen enough corpses during the war to be immune to queasiness, but obviously you had to keep your hand in when it came to indifference to death. And the anger. He had thought he had wanted to kill people before, but now he knew what the real thing felt like, that he truly wanted to, that it wouldn’t be a problem; the desire that had been unperceived in the wings now made its entrance, ready for action.
The shouts and running went on for some time. Then something happened that Gyuri hadn’t foreseen. Shooting started, towards the Radio. Windows began to shatter and Gyuri spied a young man taking advantage of a street corner to snipe at the building. He was dressed in civilian clothes. Where had he got the rifle from? Looking back towards Kalvin Square, Gyuri could see what looked like a parked Army lorry They must have been handing out weapons, because the sound of sniping commenced from every direction.
It would be funny, mused Gyuri, if a second revolution were to start here at the National Museum. It was here on these steps that Petófi had read out one of his poems cutting the ribbon, as it were, to inaugurate the 1848 revolution.
A couple of workers appeared, wearing the obligatory berets that explained they came from Csepel, swathed in belts of ammunition and carrying a heavy machine-gun. They were thinking out loud about how to get onto the roof of the museum from where they would have a superb arc of fire onto the Radio. ‘Never come to the Radio without your machine gun,’ one remarked.
A curly-haired, lanky guy also appeared, and taking up position behind a pillar, began to adjust the sights on his newly-acquired rifle. The payback for forcing everyone to do military training, thought Gyuri. He was positive he knew the man, the face was struggling to be named and placed. Looking at each other, there was a sudden ocular transfer of thought from the aspiring sharpshooter: Yes. It’s what we’ve been praying for. Armed revenge. He smiled widely at Gyuri. Maybe he did know him, maybe it was just the instant camaraderie of that night. ‘I feel so lucky,’ said the man. ‘This is simply wonderful. Wonderful.’ He fired off two rounds without much aim.
It was a long and bewildering night. Most of the shooting was just at the Radio, rather than any particular part of it or any specific target. People had fun simply shooting at the bricks. There was also a protracted exchange of fire with the other end of Sándor Bródy utca during a fear of AVO reinforcements coming. It turned out to be another group of self-armed listeners of the Radio wishing to register their complaints.
Tired and cold, Gyuri nevertheless came to the conclusion he could never forgive himself if he didn’t do
a stint of shooting. He sidled up to one well-dressed combatant and asked him where he had obtained his gun. ‘A soldier gave it to me. But if you want one, please take mine. I have to go. It pulls a little to the left.’ Here he peered lengthily at his watch in the dark. ‘I was hoping to knock off an AVO but the wife will be wondering where I am. A gunfight at the Radio won’t be an acceptable excuse.’
At about two in the morning, Gyuri and some others slipped into an adjacent courtyard to see if they could gain entry to a top-floor flat. They found a group of five AVO men huddled in a corner, without weapons and without any inclination to fight.
‘Shouldn’t you be in the Radio building? Defending the gains of the people?’ asked one of Gyuri’s group sarcastically.
‘Do you think we’re going to die for a bunch of fucking Communists?’ retorted one of the AVO men indignantly. Unfortunately they were so pathetic, no one even wanted to kick them a bit. As they were pondering what to do with them, a charming pensioner appeared in her dressing gown and asked if anyone would like tea or coffee. ‘I’ve got a few crackers as well,’ she said, ‘but nothing more. I wasn’t counting on company.’ She brought them all a drink and got very angry when someone tried to give her some money. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
After his tea, Gyuri who still hadn’t fired a shot, went into the old lady’s flat, introduced himself to her husband, opened their windows and fired off three shots in the general direction of the Radio. He closed the window and thanked the couple for their co-operation. He felt much, much better. He had taken part.
Around six o’ clock it dawned on the people besieging that there was no one inside trying to stop them getting in. Going in, they found a few AVO rigors, but to their embarrassment it looked as if most of the garrison had slipped out a back door. One or two shamefaced broadcasters were discovered hiding under desks or in broom-cupboards. One enthusiastic youth, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, called them brothers and exhorted them to take up arms for the revolution. You could tell it was a revolution because this appeal didn’t sound ridiculous. Revolution. It was the first time Gyuri had heard the word mentioned in regard to the proceedings. And why not? Not surprisingly the presenters readily expressed their readiness to do what was requested. It’s amazing how much respect people have for you when you have a gun and they don’t, thought Gyuri.
Under the Frog Page 22