The studios were empty, with the signs of hasty retreat, but from a radio they could hear music being played as if it were a normal Wednesday morning. They were transmitting from somewhere else. ‘Now what do we do?’ said one of the victors putting his finger on the issue. Gyuri passed his rifle to another enthusiastic but unarmed youth and walked home.
In front of the Keleti Station he saw a convoy of unmistakably Soviet armoured personnel carriers and tanks clattering along. Well, it had been a laugh while it lasted.
He got home to find Elek breakfasting modestly in the kitchen.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve missed her,’ he said, looking shocked. Without waiting for further illumination, Gyuri ran out and explored the neighbouring streets persistently. It was ridiculous. He was going to stick to his philosophy of staying in bed (Pataki’s departure had brought him a new sleep machine to replace the one he had burned in Spartan ardour) until Jadwiga turned up.
‘Imre Nagy has been on the radio,’ said Elek. ‘Did you hear?’
‘No, I missed that.’
‘He’s Prime Minister again. He’s asked everyone to calm down.’
‘He’s going to have to ask very hard indeed,’ mumbled Gyuri from his bed.
* * *
On his way to the Technical University, he saw an AVO man taking a flying lesson. He had woken on the afternoon after an unsatisfying six hours’ repose, romance and other adrenalin-pumpers marring his sleep, and he had determined to head tc the University since all the studenty activities were probably being co-ordinated from there. ‘Listen,’ he said to Elek, who felt events justified a day off at home, ‘I’ll be back at eight on the dot, regardless of how interesting the revolution is. Tell Jadwiga she should wait if she comes home.’
Outside, there was the sound of remote gunfire, at the right sort of distance to be piquant but not trouser-soiling. At the Lenin Körút, people had obtained ladders to help pull down the street signs with Lenin Körút on them. A crowd had formed to enjoy this but suddenly there was a scuffle, and a round-faced man in a raincoat was seized by those around him to shrieks of ‘AVO! AVO!’ Gyuri couldn’t tell what had given him away, but there was no doubt that the charge was correct. The round-faced man produced a pistol, and ended his career by firing off two shots, severely wounding a tree. Held by eight pairs of hands, his documents were examined. Then someone said: ‘Let’s give him a flying lesson.’
So they did. He was conducted to a rooftop and made to walk a non-existent plank. The AVO man wasn’t much good at flying. He came straight down and squandered all his energy on screaming.
People didn’t cheer this but nor were they bothered. It was about right. Some public-spirited citizens started to drag the body out of the road, and as they were doing this, a diminutive, silent fellow next to Gyuri, who had been watching all this as if waiting for a bus, threw himself on the body without warning, stabbing away with a penknife as if he were hammering on a door, shouting ‘You killed my brother, you killed my brother’ with the same monotony as his stabbing. The others were perplexed as to what to do, but interrupting his rage would have been impolite.
Gyuri had thought the disturbances would be over by now, that the flirtation with liberty would be a one-night stand. But clearly, people were still doing whatever they felt like. What were the Russians up to?
In the centre of the city, closer to the University, Gyuri saw Russian tanks parked menacingly here and there, trying to look aggressive and unobtrusive at the same time but he didn’t witness any fighting.
Immediately, at the university, Gyuri found Laci, with a tricolour band around his arm and sporting a pistol in a holster. Clearly he was in Laci’s orbit just as he was out of Jadwiga’s. In the main hallway of the University the standard fashion accessory seemed to be a firearm, either a davai guitar, or as a minimum, a revolver. Gyuri was expecting Laci to tell him that Jadwiga had just been looking for him, but he hadn’t seen her at all.
Laci was shaken: ‘We were attacked this morning. Some AVO men in a car drove past, they opened up, killed one of us. I had a machine gun, I had them in my sights… Gyuri, I simply couldn’t pull the trigger.’
So there it was. The shock of being an idealist. Some people can’t tell jokes or touch their toes. Laci can’t pull a trigger. It was funny, his brother would have been trotting around with extra magazines. As Gyuri commiserated with him, another student joined them. ‘Hey, Gyuri, are you enjoying the revolution? Do you want to see our AVO collection?’
The chemistry lecture hall contained twelve predictably miserable AVO employees who had been acquired by student patrols. They were being tortured by a student who was outlining their prospects under the principles of international law and natural justice; how they would be formally, correctly and legally investigated by a properly constituted body and if they had committed any illegal acts they would have to stand trial. Surveying the hunched figures, surrounded by half-eaten plates of spinach casserole (which even starving students found hard work), Gyuri thought how lucky they were to be captured by students, and not walking non-existent planks.
Someone called his name. It was, Gyuri realised, Elemér, the dog-catching mailed-fist of the proletariat. ‘Gyuri, Gyuri, why don’t you explain to everyone who I am? Tell them I only worked in the stationery and office supplies department. They don’t understand I’m no one important.’
Gyuri was so taken aback that he was left fumbling for emotions and responses. Later on, he would wonder whether Elemér’s consummate invertebratery wasn’t in some senses admirable, such a remarkable absence of moral backbone being as worthy of attention as a circus contortionist. The ability to survive surely being a laudable thing. Elemér’s tone would have been apt for greeting a long unseen friend at a party. Gyuri settled for staring at him, aghast that he wasn’t standing between a Radio building and a loaded submachine gun. It was a case of either beating him to death or doing nothing. Since he knew the students would be upset at his tarnishing the propriety and decorum of their AVO reservation, giving Elemér a look that he knew would affect his digestion, Gyuri left.
Outside, he could still hear a muted battle raging, like the muffled argument of a domestic dispute a wall away. Trams had become a rare species, hardly glimpsed, but a tram appeared to take Gyuri across the Zsigmond Moricz Square, where he had a good, close-up view of two Soviet tanks shelling what he assumed were freedom-fighter strongholds. Once the tram was over the bridge track in Pest, things were quieter, a few streetsweepers were brushing the pavements clean with their customary sluggish swishes; their union evidently hadn’t called them out.
While keeping a look-out for any discharging tanks, Gyuri reflected on the corpse of the student killed that morning, now laid out in state in front of the University by some trees, surrounded by impromptu wreathes and flowers, and table-clothed by a national flag that had been draped over him. It was one of the old fashioned tricolours that must have been stored away somewhere, not one of the new-style flags that everyone was parading around, minus the centre where the Communist coat-of-arms had been cut out.
The makeshift catafalque had been moving but didn’t even start to make up for the death. A whole lifetime poured down the drain. The person gone, and a lifesize effigy, a livid, well-observed caricature left. All those beliefs, emotions, memories carefully stored up over twenty-three years junked. Twenty-three years. What? 200,000 hours, a Hungarian Second Army of tooth brushing, cleaning behind the ears, blackhead squeezing, small talk, waiting for public transport, wiped out. An identity, spring-cleaned out. A whole being just left as a resume in a few memories, until those repositories were disposed of as well. Abridged away. Nothing like death, thought Gyuri climbing out of the morbidity, for making life look good.
He got off the tram at the Körút. Although most of the shops were closed, he remembered that the day-and-night people’s buffet (a delicatessen short on the delicacies) had been open earlier, and he decided to investigate what was going in the way of
edibles.
Near the buffet, lying in the middle of the road like a giant’s abandoned football, was the head from Stalin’s statue, dragged there by a jubilant public as a mark of their triumph, displaying the traitor’s head on a gargantuan scale. A gentleman was seeking to knock off a chunk with the aid of a pickaxe, and it occurred to Gyuri that he should take a souvenir as well. He queued up patiently behind the man, when the Soviet tank appeared.
It roared into the middle of the Körút and opened fire on Gyuri.
Sheltering behind Stalin’s head with the other souvenir-hunter, the first and only thing that occurred to Gyuri as the bullets smashed into the shops and cut down tree branches, was how much he wanted to live. He had never been aware of how enormous, how global this desire was deep down, a desire that was in no way smaller than the universe – how he would do anything, absolutely anything to live, to live for even a few more seconds. If life meant huddling up to Stalin’s head for the next forty years or so, that would be quite satisfactory as long as he could stay alive. Rolled up tighter than a foetus, he closed his eyes not questioning whether that could be of any use.
The shooting stopped, and there was no movement apart from some shards of glass keeling over; those who had taken up assorted positions on the ground were evidently quite happy with them and were in no rush to move. Gyuri could still hear the rumbling of the tank engine unpleasantly close. An old man embracing the pavement next to a tree, with his bag of shopping beside him, yards away from Gyuri, was protesting with amazing persistence and volume: ‘Two world Wars. Two world wars and now this.’ Gyuri considered whether it might be a wiser investment in self-preservation to run to a more secure and spacious sanctuary but while he had faith in his speed, the notion of having only air between himself and the barrel of the heavy machine gun on the tank was too disturbing. Unless the tank closed in, he was going to sweat it out behind Stalin. The rumbling of the tank continued at the same remove; Gyuri became curious as to what they were up to but he wasn’t going to have a look
‘I never thought I’d be grateful to Stalin,’ commented Gyuri’s companion whom Gyuri was half-crushing. They were there for what may or may not have been a long time but certainly felt like it. Gyuri didn’t mind waiting; it was one of those activities you could only do alive. His co-huddler had been in Recsk, the labour camp that had been set up as an extermination centre in the middle of the Hungarian countryside. Gyuri knew nothing about it except that it had existed and been shut down under Nagy; one of István’s friends had been an inmate but had given him only the most elliptical of accounts.
Normally, Gyuri avoided the offers of life stories offered in the traditional Hungarian style of expanded self-history, the vocal autobiographies that all Hungarians seemed to be working on continually but he didn’t have much choice and besides, Miklós’s extracts were quite gripping. Gyuri had always rated himself unlucky but now he realised he was only a weekend player in misfortune.
‘The Germans, what a cultured people when they’re not invading your country,’ Miklós explained. Miklós had done a stint in the anti-Nazi resistance. Caught, the Hungarians were too lazy to execute him and passed him to the Germans who put him in Dachau where he had been dying of cholera when the Americans arrived. He got better. ‘It seemed a bit pointless to die when you’d just been liberated.’
He came back to Hungary. ‘Talk about being stupid.’ Where he worked for the Smallholders’ Party. ‘Talk about asking for it.’ Then he got a free ride in a black car which led to him being imprisoned in Recsk. The concept of Recsk was that you went in but you didn’t come out. ‘Its scope was modest compared to the Soviet or German models, I suppose,’ Miklós conceded, ‘but we’re a small country, after all: there were only fifteen hundred of us.’ For three years Miklós and the others had no news from outside. ‘The only news we got was from shitty newspaper we filched from the guards’ latrine and let’s be honest, the papers aren’t much to talk about in the first place. We only found out about Stalin’s death when one of us noticed a black border around his picture in the main office.’
Miklós was very talkative despite the discomfort of his position, pinioned by a first division basketball player. ‘You know what the worst thing was? It’s all crap about how important freedom, friendship all that abstract stuff is. You know what matters? Sleep and food. The hunger was unimaginable. You thought it was bad during the War? I tell you, a few weeks, a couple of months of going hungry – it’s nothing, nothing. A doddle. A year… two years…three years without enough to eat,’ he was now shouting, ‘it’s beyond human belief. Ever since I got out, I always carry this.’ With some difficulty, he unwrapped a cloth containing a piece of cheese, a hunk of bread and some radishes. ‘I have to carry supplies with me all the time. I hardly ever use it. I just have to have it with me.’ He offered Gyuri a tired-looking radish.
‘No. Thanks. So are you going to be looking up your old guards while you have a chance to express your gratitude?’
‘That’s an interesting question. We used to discuss that a lot at Recsk. What sort of people could beat someone to death just for the hell of it? There was disagreement about this in the camp, as there’s always disagreement when you get two Hungarians together. You know how the 23rd of October is going to be described in the history books? The day the Hungarians agreed.
‘Anyway, my view was that the guards at Recsk were basically very ordinary, if not too bright lads. They’d been told we were the scum of the earth, the most evil, degenerate, child-murdering, odious, verminous parasites to be found in creation: in short the sort of people who would run concentration camps. What use was it us trying to explain we were there because we h ad voted the wrong way?
‘The other thing is that, you know, someone who is jailed falsely for a long time, not a year or two, but three or more, tends to go to one extreme or the other. Judging from my experience you either become excessively forgiving or excessively vengeful. I feel we should remember Recsk. People should know what happened. But we should also forget about it and get on with other things. When the tanks go.’
A moving-off rumble came. Having made its point and intimidated the vicinity, the tank moved off. When Gyuri saw people emerging from the buffet he knew he could safely stand again. His clothes were soaked with sweat, the nostril-curling stench of fear. ‘Nice meeting you,’ he said, shaking Miklós’s hand, ‘hope you like the revolution.’
He bought some food. It was after seven, and because he had made eight the rendezvous time with Jadwiga and because his luck was sorely depleted, Gyuri was very keen to get home. Moving up to the Keleti Station he was annoyed to see the revolution strengthening. Dead Russian soldiers were lying in gutters and against buildings like inebriated vagrants. While Gyuri had no objection to dead Russian soldiers, it suggested that he was moving closer to the fighting rather than away from it as he desired. His hands were still shaking from his time out on the target range. His stomach would be mulling over the terror for weeks. Ridiculously, in the middle of the shooting he had had the impulse to shout at the tank crew: ‘Stop! You don’t understand. I’m a coward. This isn’t fair. Find some brave people to shoot at.’
A Soviet armoured personnel carrier that had erupted, probably by grenade, was proving a big hit with the locals because, apparently, it had a headless Russian on display inside. People vied to peer into the charred interior. Gyuri was totally unmoved by the sight of the Russian dead. He had heard all the arguments about how the Russians were people, how everyone is the same, what a great composer Tchaikovsky was; nevertheless he couldn’t help wishing that the Russians would fuck off and be people and the same, back in the Soviet Union. An incinerated corpse at his feet failed to elicit any compassion. Probably a conscript- he didn’t give a toss.
All around the Keleti Station, there were groups of tanks cutting off his intended route home. The Russian tanks weren’t doing anything but they didn’t seem to want to move. They were just occupying space. No one, Gyuri n
oticed, was strolling around close to them. The streets were full of people, no one wanted to stay at home, but a peopleless belt extended for hundreds of metres round the tanks. The streetcorner militia that had formed on the Rákoczi út were discussing what to do. There were two soldiers, several new teenagers (two on roller-skates) and a hotchpotch of individuals you’d find waiting for a bus, including two postwomen. ‘We need petrol bombs. That’s what they’re using at the Corvin. Who can get some empty bottles?’ asked one of the soldiers.
It was nearly eight. Gyuri cut down a sidestreet to see if he could sidestep the Red Army.
An hour later making his final approach, closing in from the direction of the Zoo, Gyuri was annoyed to discover that the Red Army had completely surrounded his flat. He was getting angry enough to attack one of the tanks.
As he was observing the tank blocking the end of Benczur utca and trying to think of a way of blowing it up, safely, without risk, with his bare hands, from an enormous distance he saw a man walk out of one of the blocks of flats at the end of the street and start to knock on the side of the tank, as if he were knocking on a door. He knocked very assiduously and after a few minutes, the turret opened and a leather-helmeted head popped out. What was the man doing? Asking them for a light? Hoping that the Russians would be less likely to open fire in mid-conversation, Gyuri galloped over. When he ran past, despite his grudging Russian, he realised that the man was haranguing the tank crew. ‘What are you doing here?’ the man demanded.
Under the Frog Page 23