Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  ‘That makes three times.’

  ‘Did you imagine the bastard would give up easily?’

  ‘The boys should roll up their tanks.’

  That wasn’t necessary. A man arrived with a blowtorch. He set to work on the left leg of Stalin. One of those currents set up by the abrupt lurch of the truck had swept Ilona through the crowd and close to the base of the statue. She looked up at the man with the blowtorch, his face eerie from the flame, the skin of his cheeks stretched tight by his goggles, a rich black moustache, his mouth open and showing a lot of teeth. He looked to have a wolfish grin but it was just the strain of concentration. The statue was cast in bronze and he melted a great crack above Stalin’s boot.

  A steel cable had been procured and this was belted round Stalin’s waist. Again the truck strained. The cable tautened and the crowd retreated, fearful of a whiplash. But Stalin toppled like a forest giant. The clamour of his fall was deafening.

  ‘They’ll hear that at Party headquarters.’

  ‘They’ll hear it in the bloody Kremlin, man.’

  There followed a frenzy, as if the tribe were on the rampage. They rained kicks on the unfeeling bronze, beat it with sticks and cobbles till it rang like a cracked church bell. They spat. They pissed on it. Nothing adequately expressed the fullness of their feelings. They seemed to work up to a climax, the final act of a ritual; they built a bonfire of student cards and Party membership cards inside Stalin’s head. The flames danced on people’s faces and showed them exultant and released.

  This pagan festival didn’t interest the man with the blowtorch. With an intensity all his own he set to work with his hissing flame on Stalin’s left shoulder until he had dismembered the arm. He moved to the other shoulder.

  ‘What is your name?’ Ilona was kneeling on the cobbles and studying his face.

  He gave no sign of hearing. He was good with metal, Ilona saw that. Once, before he attacked an elbow, he ran his hand over it, feeling its unseen strengths and weaknesses.

  ‘What is your name?’

  In the only dramatic utterance of his twenty-four years he said: ‘My name doesn’t matter. I am another Hungarian.’ The sentences came out in pieces; Ilona sensed some powerful emotion and that he was unused to expressing his feelings.

  ‘Tell me.’

  He jerked his head round to look at her. The goggles dealt harshly with his face and completely shadowed his eyes. ‘Sandor.’ He returned to his dedicated work.

  ‘What do you do?’

  He wasn’t disposed to answer.

  She tried again, making a joke of it. ‘Sandor, what do you do when you haven’t got Stalin to cut down?’

  He stood his full height to answer her. Above his rich moustache he had a nose that didn’t run straight, as if he had met trouble in some back street.

  ‘I’m a welder, see. I work in the Union Gas Carbide plant. That’s an arms factory, see? Never mind what they call it at the factory gate.’

  Sandor returned to his single-minded work. She had to look away for the light was searing in its brilliance. Finally he brought out the nugget of hate that fed him.

  ‘They took away my brother.’

  He said no more, didn’t volunteer what for, nor even who.

  Ilona didn’t need to ask: the AVO, the Stalinists, the enemies of the people.

  She knelt beside him.

  9 - London, now

  ‘Now,’ Ilona said, ‘he didn’t make a single long break with his blowtorch. He blasted his way through to a hole, moved on and made another hole, and another. Then he came back and melted the pieces in between.’

  ‘Is that important?’ Steven asked.

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘That he didn’t melt in a straight line when he was destroying Stalin?’

  ‘That’s just what he did. Sandor was impatient, wouldn’t you say? Made the holes in a furious hurry. Could hardly wait to get his revenge on Stalin. I understand that now.’

  But what you mean, Steven understood, is that he took a long time and you stayed to watch; you knelt by Sandor. And Steven composed the picture in his mind, putting the young maiden on her knees, the scowling man bent over some angular piece of bronze, a religious light cast up into their faces by the blowtorch.

  Ilona was flitting along a pinboard of photographs. He had made some kind of order out of the chaos of that time. There were snapshots taken by the Budapesters themselves (when, above all, how had he unearthed those?), and then the newspapermen had moved in. The earliest were the local stringers for the world’s press who’d caught something of the smoke and sweat of the first twenty-four hours.

  ‘Where did you get all these?’

  ‘Newspapers. Photo libraries. Friends.’

  ‘Dedication again.’

  ‘Again? What do you mean?’

  But she’d found what she was searching for. Her fingers jerked the black-and-white print free and the pins dropped to the floor. ‘This one?’

  ‘Reuters, I don’t know.’ Steven found it maddening that she was suddenly so withdrawn.

  Looking over her shoulder he caught sight of Stalin’s head lolling on the ground. The kindly smile was still in place. His Santa Claus cheeks would reassure any small tot. He had a moustache that must have flourished like Sandor’s. The curious thing about this giant’s head was the jagged break of the neck: it was streaked with black soot where the bonfire of Party cards had burned. There was a curious feel to the photograph, because of the way the people lined up to face the camera, a couple of dozen of them with the head of Stalin in their midst. The people weren’t elated as if they were displaying some football trophy, in Steven’s opinion, they were sombre because they’d brought down some lord of the jungle.

  Ilona gave the photograph a long stare. The older men wore berets or hats for the most part, while the students were bare-headed. There were half a dozen women in headscarves and shapeless coats. Elsewhere in the city on that first night, in Parliament Square, at the radio building, in a dozen other skirmishes, there had been a sense of victory. But these people had toppled the symbol of tyranny and simply wanted to register their presence. Ilona gazed at one face after another. It was remarkable how faces, like clothes, came in styles; these belonged to a different generation and could almost be a different race. They were stolid, without grace or ease or art or philosophy, save the philosophy of surviving.

  ‘This must have been taken after we left. I went back to Sandor’s room.’

  Steven’s world tilted at the words. She had been with the moustachioed Sandor, had knelt by his side, had watched and waited until his work was done, then she’d left with him. Of course she had. It was only natural. In the turbulent days that followed in Budapest he had accepted that she knew Sandor. Sandor had few words for anybody; instead he had a way of looking at Ilona and away again. But the whole of life had turned mad then and Steven hadn’t cared about such a detail.

  Here, in the Dead Room, Ilona had told how she had felt so long ago. In her actress’s words: I had to give my body to the people. He felt a wholly unexpected stab of jealousy. Sandor was very much a man of the people. He took a deep greedy breath.

  Damn it, what time did anyone have for going to bed that night? He summoned up his courage, though his voice sounded false in his ears.

  ‘Whereas I walked into a hell of a welcome at home.’

  10 - Budapest, then

  It had gone midnight but not gone much quieter. If there was a lull it was because people were drawing breath.

  Istvan was of an age that believed a quick triumph equalled lasting victory. The AVO were in disarray, the army wore national rosettes and mingled with the crowd, the radio building was largely overrun. He surrendered his rifle to a student from the law faculty who swore to make good use of it. ‘Tonight I take the law into my own hands,’ the young man said. There are some jokes, made to relieve tension, that fail to get a laugh. Sounds of shooting still came from behind the warren of studios; rats, when cornered,
turn and fight.

  The streetlamps were out as Istvan turned east. There was starlight and the glow from uncurtained windows and a brightness in him as he thought of the great victory he had taken part in. His head was bursting with it. The streets were by no means empty. He saw a young woman kissing first one man and then his companion and he wondered where the girl he had disturbed in the radio building had run to. Briefly he remembered the Palomino; he had too many things on his mind. Two soldiers loomed out of the shadows of the market in Berkocsis Street but they wore rosettes like campaign medals and wanted to shake his hand and hear his news. As he walked on he heard a clatter and looked back; one soldier was doing an unsteady dance on one of the market tables that peasants used to display their dusty horseradish and Hamburg parsley.

  Matyas Square was covered in gravel where sparrows squabbled by day. His shoes grated loudly and he shuffled to some rhythm in his head. Like the soldier his body longed for a victory dance. Up and up the stairs in his building and he had to knock at his front door because they let him have no key to the flat. He had changed the course of history and yet his parents ordered his coming and going.

  His mother must have been waiting behind the door it opened so promptly. The tears flowed at once.

  ‘Oh my poor baby, I’ve been worried sick about you. Where have you been? I haven’t seen you since breakfast yesterday morning and now it’s after one o’clock. My lamb.’

  But it wasn’t mother love as she enveloped her son in her arms. Istvan had a distinct sense that she was aggrieved at being deserted by him, as she was deserted by her husband every night. At length he was able to give himself some air.

  ‘It’s a miracle. The revolution has come at last, or the counter-revolution.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘We captured the radio building. I was there. I took part...’

  ‘Oh praise God, I thought you had gone with a girl. I was so worried and your father was past helping. He had one of his turns.’

  He was drunk: her vocabulary.

  Istvan gave himself more room. ‘Do you know nothing of it? The whole of the city is in revolt and you’ve heard nothing?’

  He went to the windows overlooking Matyas Square and threw one back to let in whatever the night had to tell, shouting, firing, ambulance bells.

  ‘He was giggling about something, I couldn’t make sense of it. Promise me, Istvan, you’ll never start drinking. And do shut the window or you’ll catch your death of cold.’

  The sound of laughter was all that floated up. Down in the square two soldiers — it could have been the same pair — were whooping it up on the children’s swing.

  Istvan lay in the dark waiting for sleep to come. They’d turned the world upside down, hadn’t they? They’d routed the hard men and the murderers. They’d shown the Russians they weren’t dealing with sheep. And she had flashing eyes, didn’t she?

  Soviet tanks came in the night.

  They came from Szekesfehervar, with an easy run down Martirok Street, peeling off to hold the intersections, over crooked Margit Bridge, fanning out to patrol Marx Square, Kossuth Square, Deak Square, delighting in the straight passage along the boulevards of Lenin and Bajcsy-Zsilinszky. Later Gero and Hegedus disputed for the honour of who called the Soviet tanks in. The people of Budapest, summoned by the roar of engines and the screech of tracks on cobbles, bloody well disputed their right to be there at all.

  Istvan was asleep in his parents’ flat.

  Ilona was bedded down in Sandor’s room.

  Tibor Bihari dossed in the radio building.

  The Palomino had found a friend in the army — Hungarian to his scratchy socks — and saw the inside of a tank for the first time. It proved impossibly cramped.

  The crash of the plumbing after his father used it disturbed Istvan. Then he was wide awake to sounds of war. He scrambled into the same clothes that stank of last night’s battle. He took a hunk of bread from the kitchen and slipped out of the flat. In the dream he’d woken from he’d been stumbling in blinding smoke up an endless staircase. The reality was uncannily the opposite: he stumbled down and down stone steps that were dingy with dawn and out into Matyas Square.

  The cold of early morning hit him and he felt the skin of his face contract and icy fingers clutch at his ribcage with each breath. It wasn’t fear; he was cold. And he didn’t move yet because he was uncertain. He kept his back to the gaunt prison of the flats, imagining his mother’s hopeless eyes and imploring hands between the curtains. No lights shone in any building; it was too early for the little semi-basement workshops where they bashed metal and sawed lengths of timber, but there were usually lights in kitchens and bedrooms. Had the power workers — and he hesitated at the thought, for this was unknown in the Hungary he’d grown up in — had they come out on strike? Or the power stations been blown up, or the lines come down? There were half a dozen extraordinary possibilities in this new world. He moved off a few steps and changed his mind: he wouldn’t rouse Erwin. Erwin, his best friend, lived on the other side of the square. This was a day, a spirit in Istvan decided, when the air bit your lungs and you did impossible things; and they only became possible because you did them with new people. With old friends you had no need to prove yourself.

  Right now he was with nobody. The square was eerie in its emptiness as if all the inhabitants had burrowed into the earth. The sudden booming of a tank’s cannon only half a dozen blocks away shattered that idea. People weren’t hiding; they had gone to war. When he put his ears to work he noticed sounds from all over the city. He was taking long loping strides across the gravel now and he stopped to hear better: a deep rumble from up towards the station, the sharp bark of the cannon down towards the radio building followed by the muffled crash of masonry, isolated shots and small explosions, all the strange symphony of war. There were voices raised, a high scream, shouts from in front of him. People he couldn’t see were in one of the cross-streets near the broad Rakoczi thoroughfare that cut from Keleti Station direct to the river, and they were engaged in some struggle. Istvan started running. He had the sprinter’s classic high action and there could have been the white tape ahead of him and the roar of the crowd in his ears as he hurtled round the corner at full pelt and bundled into a thin blade of a man. The thin man had the reflexes of a lightweight champion and hooked his elbow through Istvan’s and swung him round, taking all the force out of his headlong rush, and then pinned him against the grimy plastered wall of the building.

  ‘And what the devil are you running from?’

  Istvan couldn’t answer with his breath coming in gulps and the thudding of his heart and the closeness of this man filling his eyes. Istvan couldn’t tell how old he was: simply an adult, a category in which he lumped everyone who was no longer a student; later they passed from being adults to being old.

  ‘Have you swallowed your tongue, lad?’ he barked out.

  Istvan’s brain was sorting out impressions now: that the man’s voice was gruff but not unkind, like he imagined a foreman in a factory. His fingers were steel rivets in Istvan’s arms.

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘Go? Where the devil do you imagine you’re going?’

  The man’s eyes were piercing, his nose pointed, even his chin sharp. That face full in front of Istvan could slice right through him.

  ‘Let me go.’ Istvan struggled against the steel fingers.

  ‘Are you going to run like a madman, laddie? If you do you’ll run smack into a Russian tank round the next corner.’

  ‘I’m not afraid.’ For a moment he had in mind an image of the Palomino opening her coat and blouse and daring the soldier to shoot into her thrusting breasts.

  The man didn’t lessen his grip.

  ‘Are you planning to fight a Russian tank with your bare hands?’

  ‘I tell you, I’m not afraid.’

  ‘Then you’re crazy.’

  But there was another voice now, a girl’s: ‘Bravo, Istvan, bravo,
bravo!’ Standing in a doorway and clapping her hands at such fine sentiments was the Palomino. Behind her, two faces that were strange to Istvan. The rivets loosened on his arm and the Palomino bounded forward and looked set to kiss him. He was suddenly pleased to see her even if she wasn’t the new people he’d determined to find. He waited to embrace her but she linked her arm with his, much as the thin man had done, and swung him round.

  ‘Crazy people, crazy times,’ the thin man muttered, and gave his name to Istvan: ‘Zoltan Janca.’

  ‘Istvan Ketesc.’

  ‘Uncle Zoltan, aren’t you,’ the Palomino said sweetly and got a fierce look in return. ‘He’s our uncle today, Uncle Zoltan for all of us.’

  Then there was the boy with spiky hair, a bit younger than Istvan from the slightness of him and his unformed expression. ‘Tibor Bihari.’ He wanted to shake hands. He was grave and formal, as if acting twice his age would banish all nerves.

  The other one had the pudding basin haircut and fleshed-out features of the young conscript though he’d found a grey jacket and worn trousers somewhere. He clapped Istvan on the shoulder and said his name was Lazlo. He had a free and easy look for the Palomino.

  ‘Lazlo was in a tank until this morning.’

  ‘Hate the things. Noisy as hell, hammering away over the cobbles, stinking with sweat, can’t move without rubbing up against a leg or a back.’

  The Palomino grinned at that. ‘So he’s joined us, joined Uncle Zoltan’s band.’

  There was a slight pause while they all looked to their leader. His eyes were weary, as if he’d already had a night prising up cobblestones.

  ‘We have one simple aim,’ Uncle Zoltan explained. ‘Get the Russians out. And if they won’t leave, kill them.’

  He spoke without drama. There were nods all round. We’re all orphans today, thought Istvan, and this iron man is going to save us and save Hungary. Yesterday we were in the classroom and now we’re looking for Russian tanks to destroy. There seemed nothing outlandish in the idea. He nodded too.