All sorts of organisations were coming into existence; the old political parties carrying on from mid-sentence where they stopped in 1947 and all sorts of societies for political prisoners, for students, for office workers, for economists, for revolutionary water-polo players. The old joke about two Hungarians on a desert island resulting in three political parties had been enacted in earnest. There was probably already an association of one-legged freedom-fighters for Jankó to join.
Gyuri sauntered around the Corvin yard. The faces of the fighters were young, most of them not out of their teens (he again felt somewhat obsolete); they were working-class generally and well, most of them not too bright. But then would anyone intelligent spend their leisure time taunting Soviet tanks? No, the educated, intelligent people chiefly stayed at home producing pamphlets and let the poor and stupid do the dying for them, coming out to wave the flags at appropriate moments.
The Corvin was in the sort of district that appreciated a good fight, whether it was with rival football supporters or the Red Army. Gyuri kept expecting to see Tamás; the Corvin was his sort of event, and there could be no doubt that if Tamás were alive, Russians would be dying. But there were so many other thriving locations apart from the Corvin to choose from. Still, familiar faces were at the Corvin; he had seen Noughts, arguing with two girls kitted out with submachine-guns. Gyuri had said hello but suspected that Noughts hadn’t placed him, Noughts having played a larger role as Gyuri’s cellmate, than Gyuri with his walk-on part on Noughts’s stage.
Gyuri kept expecting to see Pataki as well. Backs, profiles, haircuts, overcoats, remote forms would imitate Pataki or give off Patakiness. He imagined Pataki might be on his way back to Hungary, he wouldn’t want to miss this. One man coming out of the parliament resembled Pataki so closely, moved so much like him, that Gyuri was getting the joy and the greetings ready and only the absence of any recognition in the irises of the impostor gave him away at the last moment…
In the end, far down the Űllői út by some scenic rubble, Gyuri found Jadwiga having her picture taken by a couple of Western photographers. They seemed to have a fondness for attractive women with weapons. Gyuri didn’t like this at all. Jadwiga was merely handing out one of her polite smiles, her toothy calling card, but they weren’t to know that.
Gyuri came up to glower at the photographers at close quarters but they had already finished and were on the move to their next snap. Viktor the Soviet deserter and another Pole, whom Gyuri thought was called Witold, were leaning on the husk of a tank, where they had been watching the photo session.
Jadwiga was wearing her quilted Soviet jacket, the pelt of a dead Soviet soldier, Gyuri thought bleakly. He had taken weapons from the dead internationalists, but weapons were somehow faithless, they didn’t belong to anyone, they were just carried. Jadwiga’s blue jacket, approximately a third of her small wardrobe, had got ripped to shreds on the 26th as they were crawling along under Soviet fire at the Corvin. The noise of the tanks, more than anything else, had been terrifying. It was no more dangerous, rationally, than being shot at by infantry but it sounded more dangerous. When Jankó fired the anti-tank gun in reply, Gyuri had believed he was going to die of fear. As he lay on the ground, using muscles he had been unaware of to propel himself into the pavement, impressed more forcefully than if an elephant had been standing on him, he pondered how it would only take one of the hundreds of bullets zooming through the Corvin to unanchor him from the continuum, and wondered why everybody didn’t just run away, Jadwiga was only upset by her jacket failing her in combat conditions, and tattering during her sniping. During one of her shopping expeditions in the lulls to collect ammunition and weapons from inoperative Soviets, she had returned with the tough jacket.
‘So how is the great optimist?’ she said to Gyuri. Jadwiga had sided of course with Elek in the morning, insisting that the Red Army had had enough and that Gyuri didn’t want to face up to the fact that he was now free to do whatever he wanted since he could no longer reach for the handy excuse of an inane, dictatorial regime preventing him from being a great success.
‘ Budapest today, Warsaw next week. Right, Witold?’ Witold nodded in agreement. Then she added in Russian: ‘ Moscow, let’s be realistic, one month.’ Viktor grinned in approval.
‘That’s why they have to stop it here,’ said Gyuri. ‘This can’t go on much longer’
‘You’re so miserable,’ Jadwiga remonstrated. ‘I hope our children will have none of that. When I will tell them how stupid their father was, they’ll laugh.’
Having secured a promise from her that she would return home soon, Gyuri started back for Damjanich utca. Passing by a bookshop that had puked out its contents into the street, it occurred to him the household was short of paper, and because he wanted to carry out a scientific experiment, Gyuri gathered up a few volumes that hadn’t been burned or only just nibbled by the flames.
At home, relaxed on the loo, he tried out the books. Revai, the Party ideologue, was disappointing. It was an imposing volume, We Knew How to Use Freedom (684pp), but the paper was too shiny to merit the diploma of bottom-wiping. Meray, the journalist who had fearlessly invented and then exposed American atrocities in Korea in his illustrated Testimony (213 pp) looked promising. Gyuri had no idea what had really happened in Korea but he was quite willing to stake his life that the only things in the book that weren’t downright lies were the author’s name and the commas. Nevertheless, Meray afforded a greater degree of absorbency. Coming to Rákosi’s Selected Speeches and Articles (559pp), there was still a perceptible failure to carry out the work in hand. The most effective nether napkin was Rákosi’s The Turning Point (359pp), an earlier offering, from 1946, on coarse paper which almost worked.
Gyuri was trying to enjoy his sojourn at the hindquarters’ headquarters with extracts from these books but although the idea had been highly pleasing, the reality wasn’t as satisfactory. The Communists couldn’t even hack it as toilet paper. You could imagine Rákosi, forecasting that people might well one day seize his books with a hankering to convert them into arse-fodder, ordering that his works should be printed on the most unaccommodating of paper. Still, it would make an amusing paragraph when he wrote to Pataki.
Where were Revai, Rákosi and the others? Gyuri wondered. Where were all those bastards, the beloved favourite sons of the people? The Russians probably had them tucked away in the basement of their Embassy, in storage for future necessity, labelled ‘spare dictators’.
The last book Gyuri turned to was in English, Eastern Europe in the Socialist World by Hewlett Johnson who was supposed to be the Dean of Canterbury. The book was a paean to the Socialist order. Either the book was a forgery, or else the Dean must have been caught wanking off small boys in Warsaw and blackmailed into writing this, thought Gyuri, because no one could be stupid enough to write things like this of their own volition.
* * *
It was the largest park in Hamburg, full of ducks, but he still couldn’t manage to catch one. Ducks were brainier and faster than they looked and Pataki was disadvantaged by having to keep looking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t arrested. He was sure there would be some by-law protecting German ducks from hungry refugees. He tried improvising traps with string and dry bread, he tried netting them with his overcoat, he tried a straight grab and wring. As it got dark, Pataki resigned himself to dining on boiled eggs again. He had explored all the options for cooking eggs and somehow boiled seemed the least dispiriting. Eggs were far better than nothing but after months of unrelenting eggs, non-egg edibles had deployed an unprecedented fascination.
But, as he strolled past an off-licence, Pataki snapped and resolved to blow a little money. Two beers to celebrate the Revolution. There was one pinguid German in front of him at the counter who stupidly seemed to be buying more beer than he could possibly carry. As the man struggled to find a way of managing his impossible load, Pataki was about to ask for two bottles of beer, when a hand landed on his shoulder
. He turned to see a long-haired figure behind him say in German: ‘I’m a Hungarian, let me buy you a drink.’ Insane? Drunk? Uncontrollably gregarious? Just Hungarian?
‘I’m Hungarian too, and I’ll let you buy me a drink,’ Pataki responded in the mother tongue. His host was called Kineses and he was evidently a man used to going to great lengths for company. His room was virtually above the boozery, so they repaired there to drink. Kineses was very pleased he didn’t need to employ his appallingly accented German and that he could really get loquacious. Kineses had been in West Germany for over three years. He had done some work as an artist’s model, but a vogue for abstract expressionism had dried up most of his employment and he was now working as factotum in one of the liveliest brothels. ‘It was all very German. There was an interview. They asked whether I had any previous experience of working in a knocking-shop. They were perfectly serious; they were terrified of taking on unqualified help. What do you do?’
‘I’m the head of the postage-stamp acquisition department in a bank,’ replied Pataki. ‘I’m the one they send down to the post-office.’ They drank to the revolution.
‘I tried to go back yesterday. Got as far as the Austrian border,’ said Kineses. ‘But the Austrians wouldn’t let me in. They were convinced there were enough Hungarians in Hungary. Mind you, I don’t know why I wanted to go back so badly when I think of the trouble I had getting out. I had to waltz through the minefields. What about you?’
‘My personalised railwagon. You must have wanted to get out quite badly to go out that way.’
‘I didn’t have much choice really. That always makes things easier. You see, I’d walked out of a place called Recsk, a labour camp.’ Kineses outlined the inspiration behind Recsk. ‘Lots of people helped with my escape. It took us months to scrape together a guard’s uniform. It was very cheeky, very dramatic. A big brass neck, a dark winter evening, bored, dim guards and I was out. I just walked out. There was no hope of staying at liberty in Hungary so I knew I had to leave.
‘We all thought it important that the world should know about Recsk. I memorised everyone’s name, their date of birth, occupation and the city they lived in. I was working on the addresses when the uniform was completed.’
‘So what did the world say?’ asked Pataki.
‘Nothing much. Walk out of a labour camp, that’s heroic; walk out of a labour camp and walk through an Iron Curtain and you’ll find you’ve walked round the moral globe and it’s not heroic, but extremely suspicious. Everyone was very polite, but I had the impression they thought I was on a payroll somewhere in Moscow.’ (Pataki remembered his debriefers: ‘Ach, Herr Pataki, we understand you are saying you were sent out by the AVO but we have been told by people who were sent out by the AVO that people who are sent out by the AVO are told to say that they have been sent out by the AVO.’ The meeting had been a stalemate; he was staying in the country but without a generous salary from the security services.)
‘Are you going to go back?’ Kineses inquired.
‘When I leave, I leave.’
* *
‘You don’t think I should tell him?’ Jadwiga asked.
‘No. Best not to interfere in that sort of emotional traffic,’ Elek answered.
‘But there can’t be any doubt; the documents were very clear.’
Elek looked unhappy. ‘The documents might have been very clear. But you didn’t really know Pataki. He was as fast off the court as on. His sun-bathing stunt outside their front door would have been a hard one to talk his way out of but he’s slippery. The AVO might have thought he was working for them, but he probably agreed just to get out.’ He lit a long-saved cigarette. ‘And I bet he got an advance out of them.’
* * *
It was the artillery that woke them up. Faraway, but forceful. Gyuri looked out of the window. Darkness, stillness. No sign of dawn or the Russians but both were coming. Switching on the radio, they heard Imre Nagy announce the obvious attack by the Russians and state that Hungarian forces were fighting. This was followed by an appeal for help from abroad. He got dressed, since misfortune had to be faced in trousers, the juices in his stomach can-canning.
‘We must go to the Corvin,’ said Jadwiga. Gyuri really didn’t want to go to the Corvin. He wasn’t at all pleased at being right. Being right, he discovered, doesn’t necessarily do any more good than being wrong. He had thought he had been angry before but he realised his previous rages had only been false starts compared to his present anger. Thanks to the Red Army, he was going to explode, but he didn’t want to fight. He was trembling from a mixture of ninety per cent fury and ten per cent fright. He wanted to suggest going to the border, but he knew Jadwiga wouldn’t listen. He suggested it anyway, knowing he would regret it more if he didn’t. ‘Let’s go to Austria,’ he said.
‘You don’t mean that,’ she retorted.
They ran out into the streets, Jadwiga carrying her favourite gun. There were few people, and those that were out, whether armed or unarmed, didn’t seem to know what to do. He tried to keep the thoughts submerged because he didn’t want them to come into the world because they wouldn’t help but he couldn’t keep them down; they floated up to the surface. We’re going to lose. We’re going to be killed. They bobbed around in his mind. The other people looked to Gyuri as if they were holding down the same prompts. Stealthily, they reached the Körút, which Gyuri suddenly recognised as the street where he was going to die. ‘I feel safe with you,’ said Jadwiga cocking her weapon, which was intriguing because Gyuri certainly didn’t feel safe with himself.
Kurucz was also making his way along the Körút, slithering along the doorways, a couple of grenades in his belt, carrying his gun ready to use it; Kurucz was one of the professional soldiers who had ended up at the Corvin. The sight of Kurucz cheered Gyuri up; Kurucz was a close personal friend of surviving.
Clever. Lucky. Kurucz didn’t make mistakes and would take a lot of killing. Being close to him might cast some protection on them. Gyuri noticed his pullover was on back to front.
‘You heard about Maleter?’ Kurucz asked. Gyuri shook his head. Colonel Maleter had been appointed Minister of Defence a few days earlier on the strength of his activities at the Kilián Barracks. ‘Went to have supper last night with the Soviet High Command, didn’t come back.’ More good news, thought Gyuri, deafened by the voice that was shouting you’re going to die in his ear.
‘Well, military leadership was never this country’s strong point,’ observed Kurucz. It was stupid, but Gyuri couldn’t help thinking things would have been different if Pataki had stayed. Pataki wouldn’t have let this happen. Pataki wouldn’t have been conned by a load of fat Soviet generals. He wouldn’t have let them shit all over the country. Gyuri couldn’t see how but somehow Pataki would have foxed them, or at least not lost the match before the start.
‘If only Pataki were here…’ he said, trying to think what to do.
‘If you were better read you wouldn’t say such things,’ snapped Jadwiga. Gyuri didn’t understand what she meant but she was always having bouts of Slav mysticism.
The Corvin seemed to be getting the brunt of the attack, the price of celebrity, a murderous tribute to its teenage army. Aircraft, artillery and new, larger tanks were all in action. They inched down the Körút but it looked suicidal trying to get any closer. They were behind a pile of sandbags, remnants of the earlier round of fighting, when one of the tanks, hundreds of yards away, opened fire.
Half the building behind them disappeared. It took Gyuri a while to convince himself he was still alive and that all the components of his body were in the right places and still working. Jadwiga was next to him, covered in dust and debris. When he saw her wound two thoughts raced through him, the axiom that stomach wounds were always fatal, and the other that his sanity couldn’t cope with this. Holding her as if that would help, he tried to keep the horror from his face, the knowledge that he was about to see the last thing anyone wanted to see, the death of the one he
loved.
She knew anyway. ‘You won’t forget me,’ she said.
* * *
Nigel was whiling away the time before the start of World War Three by polishing all the shoes he could lay his hands on in the Legation.
The phone was ringing. Nigel had answered it once.’Hello, British Legation,’ he had said.
‘We are trapped. We are going to die,’ a voice had said. It was a rich, deep, calm voice that spoke fluent English with only enough of a Hungarian accent to give a pleasing colour; you could imagine the voice belonging to a professor of English literature. Nigel didn’t know what to say. Clearly commiserations were in order, but there was nothing at hand in his immediate etiquette to cover a situation like this. The voice carried on though, fortunately, without giving Nigel a chance to participate. ‘Our building is completely surrounded by Russians. We will fight to the last bullet, but we will die. We don’t matter, but you must help our country. Hungary must be free- ’ The line had gone dead.
Everyone was chipping in, running things in the Legation but Nigel wasn’t going to answer the phone any more. The building was a refuge for a strange mixture of Britons, well-wishing students, adventurers, journalists, holidaymakers and two businessmen whose unflinching devotion to marketing their brand of razor-blade in the face of history was remarkable. No one talked about it but there was an unspoken assumption that war was going to break out and they would be well behind enemy lines; whatever was going to happen it wouldn’t be pleasant. Everyone had been presented with a copy of their own death.
Nigel had opted to clean shoes since it gave him something to do and as he joked, ‘We want to look good when the Russians capture us. My old housemaster would never forgive me if I met my end with dulled footwear.’ The BBC journalist was roaming up and down the building, clutching a bottle of vodka, and repeatedly accosting any female on sight with ‘Anybody for a fuck?’ Nigel could see the Minister would be making representations to the BBC when this was over, if he were in a position to do so. The Minister took a dim view of journalists; the correspondent of the Daily Worker had almost been barred by him. ‘Shouldn’t you be outside with your Communist friends?’
Under the Frog Page 25