Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  All this he spoke without looking at Ilona. She hadn’t known him speak so much and be so subdued about it. Had there been some girl in the past who’d left him a legacy of guilt? She said: ‘I don’t see...’

  He rode in over her, tapping at the photograph. ‘I’m talking about Kossuth Square. I could never bear to go back because of what happened there. On the roof they were AVO, not foreign invaders, our own flesh and blood. Blood for sure, blood everywhere. The AVO congratulated themselves on their triumph and then came down to count the corpses. Five hundred? Six hundred? They needed to know so they’d send enough trucks. The trucks were loaded, driven down beyond Csepel Island, the bodies dumped in the river. So you see, I would never be able to pass through Kossuth Square again, never. My memory would take command: it would superimpose six hundred corpses over the place, as if the Danube had washed them back on land.’

  He was tangled in darkest depression. Not knowing how to bring him out she said: ‘We can’t be blamed for that. We did all we could. It’s like the girl you talked of: if the demon is in other people it’s not your fault. No more was that.’

  She gestured at the photograph in his hand.

  ‘This?’ he asked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  She’d assumed it showed the massacre of Kossuth Square. Now it was turned square-on she saw it was the whole group of them lined up on the embankment. She had no recollection of the English journalist who’d taken the picture. She only remembered meeting again the boy who’d broken in on her dreams at the radio station. Here he was, a refugee from the slaughter, eying her like an unknown enemy. Everyone else was facing the camera.

  ‘Where did you get the photo?’

  Steven turned the print over. On the back it was stamped: Hulton-Picture Post Library.

  ‘There are primitive tribesmen — or is it the orthodox view of Islam?’ Steven faltered. Like photographers everywhere, he was uneasy at being taken himself. ‘It doesn’t matter who, but there’s a lot to be said for the view: photography steals the soul. Not in any straightforward sense. Figuratively.’

  ‘Steven, I do not understand one thing you are saying.’

  ‘We were no longer part of the revolution, no longer ordinary people. The camera made us actors. A photographer is a thief. I am a thief, snatching bits of people’s lives in the dark of my camera. I could be the newsman who took this and they’d put a headline on it: KIDS FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, DEFY RED TANKS. Which is a distortion anyhow, because we’d ridden to Kossuth Square on those tanks. Truth gets distorted: the Palomino trying to look like a film star on location. Where’s her ribbon?’ He peered closer.

  ‘Anna’s ribbon?’

  ‘The Palomino wore a ribbon, gathered her hair into a ponytail. Red, green and white. It’s not here.’

  ‘You remember every detail.’

  He didn’t remember the Palomino losing her ribbon. It must have been in the stable during the night. The dead man had deserved a decoration. Steven was tired, dispirited. He’d started with a great and serious resolve: he would make her remember about the past, the betrayals, the loss. It had dwindled to this: that in his hand he held a stolen bit of history. It was a shabby substitute. And talk of the Palomino’s ribbon — petty curiosity. It had been a heroic time and demanded much more.

  ‘You know,’ and still he spoke to Ilona in the photograph, not Ilona in the flesh, ‘we were the first youth revolution. No one over thirty was welcome because they might have been compromised by Nazism during the war. Everything changes at a gallop during a revolution. We weren’t content to be anti-Russian any longer, we were against the whole disgusting system, we were anti-communist. What did Tibor Kassack say? For a decade we had been radish communists: red on the outside, white at heart.’

  There was the other youth revolution too: it was the beginning of the freedom to love. Nowadays it was so accepted, so commonplace, that it was hard to credit that their actions as children had been a beginning. They’d had good reason then: they found love because at any moment they might find death. Their love hadn’t been casual; only death had been. It had been a first love, intense and heartbreaking. It had the power to hold and twist their destiny for years. There were some things too powerful to speak of.

  The rain had come back. In the silence between them the gutters rushed like plumbing in a cheap hotel. Laos, Vietnam, Congo, she-rains always troubling him. He’d lost his way. It had seemed like a mission: to make Ilona relive their revolutionary times together. She had forgotten what it was like. She’d forgotten the sensation of freedom, like coming out onto a plateau with the sun suddenly brilliant. She’d forgotten how for the first time they could think what they liked, say what they liked, read what they liked. She’d forgotten the amazement they felt at the blossoming of a free press. They had actually read the first issue of Igazsag over the loudspeakers at Keleti Station. And there were others, Magyar Nemzet, Esti Hirlap, Szabad Dunantul...

  The Dead Room was reasserting its magic. He snatched at the pages of these ephemeral freedom papers. Age had turned them into the yellow press. And then there was the flag, huge, nailed across one wall so it seemed to billow in a breeze. His hesitation vanished along with his tiredness. He ran his hand along the stripes of the flag and said like a kind of incantation:

  ‘Green for our land. Red for our blood. White for the soul of our nation.’

  A rough hole was at the centre of the flag. The Party symbol had been hacked out, as it had from every flag in Hungary within twenty-four hours. ‘How dare they put their emblem there? Do we have to honour communism every time we salute the flag?’

  ‘Steven, you have the soul of an exile. For them the world is frozen at the moment they leave. You think nothing changes. It’s captured for all time in photographs all round you. 1956 still exists, perfect in every detail. But we have no communist star at the centre of the flag. Don’t you realize? You’re fighting against a world that doesn’t exist. It’s finished.’

  ‘Finished? Jesus Christ. We’ve never been free. In 1848 we fought and didn’t win freedom. In 1948 it slipped through our fingers. In 1956 we were free for a few days — you can count them on your fingers — and it was snatched back. Listen. Here’s a story, though I’ve never quite seen the joke. When Golda Meir died and went to heaven she asked God: When will Israel have peace with the Arabs? God answered: In twenty years. When Martin Luther King was assassinated he asked God: When will the blacks be equal? God answered: Be patient — in thirty years. When our own hero Pal Maleter was executed by the Russians and went to heaven he asked: When will Hungary be free? And God began to cry.’

  There was no stopping him. She shrank back as the words flooded out. When he should have remembered love, he recalled only violent images.

  ‘You can’t speak,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you why. 1956 is an old show and you’ve drawn the curtains over it. Forget all about it. Lousy reviews, big mistake, audiences walked out. Ring down the curtain. Reach for the next script. But you can’t do that. There are things behind that curtain you have to face. Can you drag out Magyarovar? The AVO shot dead eighty-two people in the town square. Their crime was to be singing the national anthem. The bodies were laid in the church: eighty-two coffins and some of them very small. I’ve a picture somewhere. No matter. Then the AVO who shot down these terrible singing fascists were lynched, torn to pieces. There’s no record of that. Would you look even if there were?’

  No she wouldn’t, her eyes confessed. No, she wouldn’t remember any more. No, she wouldn’t draw the curtains open. Please no, don’t go on.

  ‘The AVO were always lynched,’ he insisted. ‘There were other lynchings. Wherever they were found. You haven’t forgotten. Screwed the memory tight down and draped the black curtain across it. But you can’t forget. You were there. You wanted to be there. That’s what frightens you.’

  Suddenly Steven could see a long way into her eyes. At the back, like a penitent alone in a darkened church, pain huddled.

  12 -
Budapest, then

  At the point where Gyulai Street ran into Rakoczi Street there was a square, nothing grand. It was as if through an oversight on some blueprint two districts of the city didn’t exactly match. The result was this strip of gravel with trees too close together for elegance, fallen leaves in a mess everywhere. Ilona smelled damp and despair and childhood afternoons in Eger. At one corner of the square was St Rokus Church, roof half gone but from an earlier war.

  Next to the church was the hospital. Here people grouped round the entrance, stolid and expressionless. That’s how they wait at the pithead, Ilona told herself, when there’s been a rockfall underground. There was no show of emotion; grief was private and this was a public matter. They were still bringing casualties from the massacre outside Parliament. They trudged across the square, an arm round a helping shoulder, disturbing the leaves and spattering them with blood. There was no longer any screaming; the pain and hatred had set solid.

  In the hospital, discipline and order had been overwhelmed. Istvan’s only memory of hospital was his appendix operation. Pain had taken complete charge of him, pushing everything else far away: so the ceilings had seemed lofty, the doctors withdrawn, the nurses mere disembodied hands. Breathe deeply, a voice had said. The voice had been calm and grave, perfectly suited to the place because...one, two...a hospital was a different civilization, a different universe...three, four...and he had breathed in the anaesthetic and counted...five, six...a hospital might even be heaven, seven...seventh heaven, and this remote and masked apparition was the face of God...eight, what came after eight? God was speaking in a voice that came from the clouds and holding up his hands and asking how many fingers, ridiculous that God didn’t know how many fingers he held up. Well it was the number that came after eight. Afterwards a nurse had told him he’d called for his father and he said, ‘No, Our Father, which art in heaven...’ The nurse had said: ‘He’s still drifting.’

  ‘We’ve come to offer blood.’

  This nurse didn’t speak, just pointed. There was nothing calm and remote about the doctors and staff here. Some had been nearing the end of their normal shift when the battle for the radio station had brought in the first casualties with the result they had gone forty-eight hours without sleep. There were no longer empty beds. There was no longer floor space between the beds. The wounded lay on blankets in the corridors. Do they lay them down like that, all facing the wall, Ilona wondered, or do they turn over so they keep the pain in their faces to themselves?

  They wouldn’t let Matyas give blood, because of his wound. Worse, they wouldn’t let Tibor Kassack give blood, something to do with a childhood illness.

  ‘They have given blood for Hungary,’ and Tibor Kassack’s arm swept along the line of blanketed figures in case anyone had forgotten they were there. ‘I demand to give blood for them.’

  ‘Oh please,’ said the young nurse, exhausted beyond arguing.

  The Palomino led Tibor Kassack into the square holding the arm that wasn’t declaiming and whispering a magic incantation in his ear to soothe him. For some time they waited, for the most part in silence. The shock of the massacre dwarfed everything. Each was wrapped in a private vision of hell.

  From somewhere Zoltan spirited an open truck. No one asked his source. They let him build his legend. The mud on the boards in the back was splashed with red, as if it had transported a load of beetroot to market. Except beetroot didn’t bleed that colour.

  Zoltan adopted the classic commander’s position: standing on the step by the driver’s door with a hand on the cab roof to steady him. It was Ilona’s first chance to study him. She thought his face had been bolted together and the joins not smoothed over; that was how deep the scars of his frown were.

  He said: ‘Boys, we’ve got a job to do.’ His voice slid higher as he spoke, in Ilona’s view, as if some emotion had slipped the leash.

  But the boys were unmoved. Uncle Zoltan jerked his eyes from face to face searching for some response. The Palomino bucked her head and swung her hands on her hips. Ilona pushed to the front so that she stood directly in front of Zoltan, looking into his eyes and the flickering within. She recognized the same fire that burned inside Sandor and wondered if it had the same cause and whether he took the same small acts of vengeance. If he doesn’t release some of that pressure inside him, she decided, it’s going to blow him apart and nobody in the hospital is going to be able to put him together again, nobody’s going to have the time, and maybe they don’t have the right kind of doctors.

  Zoltan tried again, his voice under tight control: ‘Hungarians, we’ve got a job to do.’

  There was movement everywhere. Ilona saw a smile on the face of the only other girl, while Tibor Kassack made a mock formal bow to her, like a courtier. The stirring at her own elbow was Istvan. He didn’t grin or make ironic bows. He held out his hand to shake and then gave her a tug into the back of the truck that Zoltan had coaxed to life. Zoltan backed the truck and braked so hard he threw Tibor Bihari out through the open tailgate and had to stop at the corner of the square to let him clamber back up.

  Ilona and Istvan stood together gripping the board that did for a side of the truck. Istvan angled his face enough to watch her profile. She knew he watched; no need to check. She knew him already. She had an awareness of him, his moods and his actions, a feeling for his whole presence deep inside her. And if, at that moment and despite all her determination and freshly-minted freedom, if she dropped her eyes, the crazy manoeuvres of the truck were reason enough.

  Zoltan drove east, hauling the truck over to the south whenever he was faced with a dead-end or a rubble-blocked street or any-thing that could be a speedway for tanks. The fighting in the city was like a bush fire; it raged in patches with blank areas of normality before it blazed unpredictably again.

  First words don’t come easily. Even with the feeling of old comradeship, there remained a gap to be closed. Like old friends who haven’t met for years neither was sure where the other had reached in life: current loves and hates and commitments were still to be established. The truck slammed round a corner and it occurred to Istvan that this ‘job’ had developed a pressing urgency. Also that Zoltan hadn’t detailed the nature of the ‘job’. But his voice had been as nearly out of control as his driving, giving a special emphasis to it. Though it already had that special status, because of Ilona. Before the hour was over it was to bind them in shared horror.

  They passed a shop with a cluster at the door and a line of people fifty metres long. Istvan recognized the bakery his mother went to. It came as a shock that people continued a daily routine in the middle of death.

  Ilona’s first words to him were: ‘What happened to your rifle?’ The truck had turned the corner too fast and Istvan, in the first of those little proprietorial gestures, had steadied her with a hand on her elbow.

  Yes, he’d had a rifle when he first saw her. The room had been lit only by streetlamps and a bonfire. But he saw that scene very clearly in his mind. He’d given up the rifle to a law student. Then he’d had a second rifle, lost in the mêlée by Parliament. He may have shrugged an answer to Ilona but the jolting made gestures indistinct.

  Lazlo was singing in a voice cracked by the cobbles:

  ‘The Sergeant tells us

  We’re going to war, war, war.

  But Sergeant darling

  We want to whore, whore, whore.’

  From above his rich moustache, Sandor kept watch on them both. It was apparent that whatever claim he laid to Ilona had become ancient history, even during this brief journey. Every lurch threw Istvan and Ilona together and Sandor’s eyes noted this.

  Ilona was sensitive to every nuance. She said: ‘Don’t worry about it. Sandor shoots at stars with his rifle.’

  Literally shoots up at the stars, Istvan wanted to confirm, or what do you mean?

  The sun was lowering, the sky hazed. A dozen plumes of smoke made exclamation marks above pocket battles and private revenges. Zoltan braked ha
rd and screamed over his shoulder to get out, get out, get out.

  Istvan jumped down and recognized Imre Mezo Street. They must almost have passed his home and he’d had eyes for other things. The avenue was at its broadest here; on the far side was an open-air bus station, the wall of the cemetery and a ragged playground where boys from Istvan’s own school would come in normal times to pass round a cigarette and kick a ball. Once the Palomino had followed him there. A tank was burnt out. Nothing living moved.

  ‘Where’s your rifle?’

  Istvan swivelled to face the wrath of Uncle Zoltan.

  ‘I...’

  ‘Take this. Check it’s loaded. It’s not a toy to be thrown away, understand me. This is not a game.’

  The words spat out as urgent as gunfire.

  It was a dead man’s rifle. The stock still had sweat on it. It was like the Great Patriotic War, as the history books had it, when half the Soviet army had thrown themselves against the German panzers with no more than their bare hands to fight with. They had armed themselves, as the battle dragged on, with rifles snatched from the dead. Courage and dedication to the socialist Motherland was the stirring message intended; appalling inefficiency and callousness was what Istvan understood.

  Automatic fire came from a window high up in a building. Istvan sprinted to a newish brick wall with barbed wire rolled along the top. On one side he had Ilona, on the other a tousled student whose chest was shaking as if from sobs. The student hugged a rifle, though with his heaving shoulders he would be hard put to hit the building, let alone a shadowy figure in a window.