‘You should taste the cream cakes at Gerbeaud’s.’
‘That was destroyed.’
‘It’s been put together again, stone by stone. Outside there is a new name, Vorosmarty’s, but inside the pastries are just as sinful. Older people still call it Gerbeaud’s. In the afternoon they sit at the little round tables, bow their heads to acquaintances and stare into the past. Oh Steven, you should see how we’ve rebuilt the city. It’s not like Berlin, all concrete and plastic. It’s our own beloved Budapest, recreated.’
That brought Steven to his feet. He splashed champagne into her glass and announced: ‘I propose a toast.’
‘Why do Hungarians always drink toasts?’
‘It’s an excuse. And exiles need more excuses than any. A toast.’ He stood as a man does who has a vision, a street orator on his orange-box or a preacher in his pulpit. There was a shine to his face and his glass was raised high to some private heaven or hell. ‘A toast,’ he insisted.
Ilona was drawn to her feet. She had a cat’s wariness, troubled by the intensity of his voice.
Steven summoned up his vision. His voice rang out: ‘To the 23rd October, 1956.’
There was no movement. Ilona didn’t breathe.
‘1956.’ Steven said it again, as if there’d been any doubt. He clinked his glass against hers and drank. He gestured to her. Her lips moved:
‘1956.’
The glass crawled to her mouth. She sipped and sank down on the chair.
During the previous night, in a wakeful hour, Ilona had considered Steven. She had known him as a boy. Now, as a man, he had sought her out. Lying alone in her bed it had occurred to her that Steven might have a man’s reason for wanting to meet. Effervescent and tingling she had approached the rendezvous. She had captivated him: his eyes and the way he held himself told her. And if he showed a dark side, she put it down to his disgusting profession. She had taken in the rich display of food and champagne, and they had seemed the commonplace of sexual manoeuvres. But this had become extraordinary, like nothing she had expected. There was violence in his voice.
‘You can’t have forgotten.’ He was bending over her.
She shook her head.
‘Ilona?’ He was trying to look into her eyes, his face close to hers. He found nothing; her gaze had gone private.
‘We were united then,’ Steven told her. ‘You, me, the whole of Hungary. We had a single aim — to rid our country of communism.’
Again she shook her head. Perhaps this was the time to speak. ‘No. I am a Marxist. Surely you understand. Our show isn’t propaganda, it’s what we believe. I have always been a Marxist. I joined the fight in 1956 as a Marxist. I fought for the people. It was a struggle so we could decide our own future.’
She stopped. She’d wanted to say something about what they were struggling for, what her beliefs were. But he wasn’t listening. Not really. He was just waiting for her to finish. She had been mistaken. Why hadn’t he just wanted her body? That was a ritual with responses and language that everyone understood. Instead she had aroused in him a new and dangerous passion. What was he saying? His voice was so loud she could hardly hear the words.
‘You can’t have forgotten the fever in our blood. We were burning for freedom. We defied the Russians. We felt we could take on any force and win. What’s that? What are you saying?’
‘I said we were young. The young always feel that.’
‘Why won’t you look at me? Why do you just sit there sipping your wine? You’ve forgotten everything.’
This was an evening for shaking her head. He paid no attention to her denials. She had her own memories. It was just that she hadn’t brought them into the light for a long time. Why wouldn’t he let the past rest? He kept on at her, conjuring images that had lain half-buried.
‘Have you forgotten that first night? People made a bonfire of their Party membership cards. They wanted to send the whole rotten past up in flames. Tell me just one thing, Ilona. Imre Nagy came out on the balcony of parliament and addressed the crowd as “comrades”. Do you remember how the crowd hissed and booed?’
There had been electricity in the air that night. The crowd had been jammed together and the charge ran through all the touching bodies. It had been dark but Ilona remembered all the faces being lit up. That was the electricity in them. The whole of Budapest had been plugged into the crowd in the square; the whole of the city had been lit up.
‘Jesus save us.’ His voice had sunk to a whisper. She had to concentrate on his words. ‘You don’t want to remember, that’s it. You’ve taken the film out of the camera and wiped out the past. The pain, the fighting, the sense of freedom — all vanished. Are you ashamed of how you felt?’
She had nothing to say. She wanted only that the storm would pass so she could run.
‘Frightened you might hunger for that same freedom again?’ She couldn’t even shake her head. Please let him finish, she prayed to herself, let me escape from this prison.
‘I have something to show you,’ Steven said.
His voice had returned to a normal level and she found even that frightening. People with the most reasonable of voices could do terrifying things.
‘Come,’ he said.
She couldn’t move.
In a sudden gesture he smashed his glass into the corner and snatched her wrist. She hadn’t intended to resist; it was just that he was dragging her faster than she could follow. She tripped on the carpet and he never heard her cry. He pulled her from the room, hauled her along the gallery, pushed her against the wall by a locked door. He fumbled for a key, unlocked the door and shoved her inside.
‘Oh my God.’ She’d found her voice again.
5 - London, now
‘This is my Dead Room.’
Thus you can enter a room and the owner says quite normally: This is Katie’s bedroom, and here on the table is a picture of her when she was three on the lawn at Aunt Edna’s. Steven’s voice was calm. Ilona had processed from the portrait gallery of death downstairs to the sumptuous feast and now to this place of amazement. There was no tremor of excitement, no sly glance, to hint that he had unlocked the door to anything out of the ordinary.
She echoed him: ‘Dead Room?’
‘Everybody has a living room,’ he continued in his rational way, ‘where they talk and laugh and go about the daily business of living. Well, here is my Dead Room. I created it to honour dead people and dead hopes.’
But this place honours nobody, Ilona thought. A stone in a cemetery or a plaque on a wall will honour the dead: for they are a public expression of sorrow. This place fed a private obsession. It was a museum of the uprising of 1956 when the Hungarians had fought with bottles and stones against the tanks of the Red Army.
Some things are too shocking to be looked at and too shocking to miss. The only way is to take them in small sips; for the whole draught will make you reel.
She saw at once there could be no escape. There was one window in the room. It was shuttered and Ilona could no longer tell on which side of the building she was, facing the courtyard or overlooking the Thames. Not that she would be able to slip away even if the window and shutters were wide open and an iron staircase led to freedom. Steven’s grip on her was complete: the iron grip of his obsession. The window was firmly shut, though one discordant detail struck her: a pane was broken, the glass lying on the floorboards. Icy air flowed in, though the cold she felt had another source.
So, the windows, the walls, a table, a horde of things claimed her attention. But dominating everything, even down the perspective of the room, was a figure at the far end. There were no expensive spotlights in here; bulbs in dreary shades were suspended on flex from the ceiling. In their glow she saw the figure was clothed in coarse grey trousers, a plain workman’s jacket, muddied boots. His face under the beret had a pallid complexion, blind eyes and mirthless lips. The mouth should have been screaming because there was a gaping bullet hole in the chest of the jacket, with blood sta
ining the rough material. His knees were buckling. His arms were upraised in the classic gesture of a man surrendering his life.
She closed her eyes.
They flickered open. There was no movement from the figure. It was a shop-window model, one of the old-fashioned kind with lean cheeks, a high forehead and aristocratic nose.
She swung round, some notion in her mind of remonstrating with Steven, and caught sight of another figure in the corner. There was no mistaking this for a flesh-and-blood creature: it was simply a wire tailor’s dummy on a stand, draped in a uniform. The uniform was that of an officer in the Hungarian army.
‘Look at the braid,’ Steven pointed out.
The braid had been unpicked from the shoulders, which had been the Russian fashion, and restitched on the collar, which was the traditional Hungarian style.
‘That was how we knew they’d come over to our side,’ he said. ‘That showed they were true patriots. Imagine these proud officers with a bloody revolution going on round them, sitting on their beds with a needle and thread. And over there, look what they did with scissors, or maybe it was a bayonet.’
The idea of a bayonet being used seemed to please him. He smiled. It seemed forever since she’d last seen him smile. It wasn’t her presence that kept him serious. There were no laughter lines running round his mouth. She suddenly noticed that and a lot more beside. He frowned a lot, but it was a frown of concentration not anger. His gaze was alert, not just for a detail but for the whole shape of a thing, its relationship with its surroundings. He was as watchful as an animal, aware that every man was a potential enemy.
These things about Steven she understood all at once, truly seeing him for the first time. And what he’d been staring at: a huge flag nailed down one wall, a Hungarian flag with a hole gouged from the centre. The communist emblem had been there before it was cut out. In 1956, after a single night of the uprising, no flag in Hungary had remained intact. She herself had seen men hauling down a flag over some Ministry, hacking at the material with a pocket-knife and running the flag up the pole again, raising it with cheers. Yes, she had that image in her mind.
‘Remember?’
She didn’t answer. This was no time for words. There were too many other things for her mind to grasp. How had she missed the guns until now? Rifles were leaning like last year’s bean-poles against the wall. Four, five of them, dusty and old, she didn’t know the make. They looked used, mon Dieu, there was a businesslike air to the way they were stacked; at any time there could be a clatter of boots and their owners would return to pick them up.
On the floor was a rusty five-litre can of the kind one carries petrol in. Around the can, dropped like toys when the school bell rings, were bottles. The bottles were smudged and dirty in the manner of bottles found in park shrubberies. Some had their necks plugged with strips of torn cloth. This is what you do, a small voice began in her head...
The table was a jumble, a secondhand stall of worthless junk. Except for the pistol; that had a value, especially if there were bullets. Indeed a box of ammunition lay open beside it. Ranged on the other side was another wooden box that had been broken open: twin rows of toy metal pineapples nestled in greased paper. Not toys, those, not toys.
Then there were all the ephemera: yellowing and cracked newspapers, curling photographs, posters with urgent graphics, handbills. So many words, excited words, black headlines, bold and brave heresy. You could spend a day immersed in all these, if you had a mind to indulge in nostalgia.
Nostalgia? She couldn’t think of that time of pain and disaster with nostalgia. She shut her eyes at last, not bearing to see any more. Wanting no part of it and feeling the terrible power of history in front of her, she barricaded her eyes with her hands. No more. She’d taken it all in until she seethed with giddiness. She was not prepared to suffer more madness.
‘You find it too much.’ Steven’s voice was hot. ‘Can’t you feel the past — the noise, the fever, the turmoil. Can’t you feel the tension of the first days?’
Steven’s hands were tugging at hers. Not Steven’s hands, Istvan’s. He was exposing the past.
‘Open your eyes. Don’t you remember?’
His face loomed close to hers. Its fierceness reflected his will. ‘You must remember.’
And Steven, confronting her eyes, saw them lose focus on his, retreating into the depths.
‘I do remember,’ came under her breath. Yes, to herself, oh yes.
6 - Budapest, then
The young man was turning towards her.
A Tuesday it was.
In a voice pitched high with excitement he said: ‘The demonstration starts at midday. You know where, don’t you?’ And then added because it was much too big to stay bottled inside: ‘By the Petöfi statue. That’s the right place for a protest meeting. Don’t be late.’
He hurried on his way. With his scrappy moustache and his long coat swirling round his knees he looked a university student, and that is what he must have taken Ilona as. Already her face had shed its schoolgirl puppyfat and her body had the firm definition of a dancer’s.
Ilona stood watching this unknown man disappear. He’d simply spied her waiting at the bus stop and turned towards her and used words like demonstration and protest. Who’d ever heard such words spoken? This was Budapest, this was 1956. Such words lay packed in attic trunks along with crinolines and kings and parliamentary oppositions and suchlike dusty notions. No, to be honest the words were a little different because she had heard them used: about peaceful demonstrations of workers, for instance, protesting against the actions of imperialist governments. But this? Everyone knew there had been strikes and protests in Poland; now the ferment had started here.
Her bus passed.
There was a tingle in her fingers and she moved the satchel to her other hand. The satchel was loaded with books and her dancing shoes. The tingle remained. It wasn’t the straps of the satchel that caused it. It was the student and his words and the sharpness in the air.
So the decision was made. She wasn’t going to dancing class. She wasn’t going to school that day. Students weren’t workers but, in a socialist state, students were of the people. The people were demonstrating. She would join the people.
*
Ilona looked at faces but she couldn’t have singled out that student again anyway. There were few moustaches but there were plenty of long coats. There were girls too, though not so many. She asked one: ‘Who’s going to speak, comrade?’
This girl, this woman student, looked askance at Ilona who felt at once that she had strayed into an adult world and said something out of place.
‘We’re waiting for Gyula Hay.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He is one of us.’ She turned her attention to the man next to her.
Someone was pressing close behind Ilona. She shook her hair, which was dark and to her shoulders, then jerked round. It was another one, another student. She decided he was just close because of the gathering crowd. There were needs for food and warmth, she knew, and for love or whatever you wished to term it. But he showed no interest in her closeness, just in the figures at the base of the statue.
Petöfi had been a great nationalist, a great poet in the last century. His statue turned its back on the Danube and the President’s residence on the hill beyond. Petöfi was done in a noble and romantic style that touched Ilona: he carried a scroll in his left hand and his other hand gestured towards a glorious future somewhere to the north-east, somewhere out of sight.
It was a noisy meeting, heaving with activity in the way that yeast froths and grows and leavens the dough. It was a young persons’ meeting with high school truants like herself, students from the technical university and the agricultural university, representatives from the Writers’ Union. Placards identified them for, her. These were not the anonymous masses demonstrating, these were people who wanted it to be known who they were. That struck her because it was so unusual. It wasn’t all young pe
ople, there were grown-ups too. No, they’re all grown-ups here, she decided, though she was uncertain about herself. Anyhow, there were older people, professors and such by the untidiness of their hair. These professors seemed to have come to the meeting to bestow a blessing like...like, well, like priests she supposed. The students were pleased with this support and showed their pleasure by supporting the professors. So that each professor became a focal point of gesticulating, talkative, earnest students. Ilona saw heads everywhere bobbing up and down as people jumped above the crowd to see better or call out to friends; the yeast was frothing.
Now here was something strange. Among the flags and placards there were banners proclaiming Hungarian-Polish solidarity. Is that what this protest meeting is about? she demanded of someone. Yes, yes, that and more. Well, Ilona reasoned to herself, you can’t protest about solidarity. This was sign-language, a code, rather as at school at one time (not so long ago) she and Katica had referred to B.B.s, their code for Beastly Boys. Thus this solidarity was for the reforms just won in Poland and which were being demanded here. In the wide world such sign-language was frequently used, indeed had to be used in a dictatorship, even a dictatorship of the proletariat. She understood that and was pleased with her understanding, wondering whether it had ever occurred to anyone else.
A man was speaking from the stone surround to Petöfi’s statue. Ilona couldn’t hear his words but she could see his hand raised to emphasize the important parts. All his speech seemed important.
‘What’s he saying?’ she asked of no one in particular.
‘He’s stating our demands,’ someone replied.
‘What demands?’
‘Our demands to the government. It’s all in the leaflet.’
There had been a bright-faced student passing out leaflets. Ilona hadn’t pushed herself forward enough to get one.
Someone else spoke. All his speech seemed important too. Obviously even more important because there was cheering at the end and a slow movement in the crowd like the turn of the tide, as she imagined it (for she had never seen the sea). Ilona was swept steadily with this mass of people out of the little square, along the road by the river, past a police car, not one of the cars marked Rendorseg, one of the others. She recognized it. Everybody did. They didn’t care, or weren’t betraying fear. Ilona absorbed that along with the tingle in the air and the speakers’ fists above their heads.
Shooting Star Page 5