Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  ‘Who’s in there?’ Ilona asked him.

  ‘They are, the bastards.’

  Edging back from the cover of the wall, Istvan saw one of those buildings that made Budapest so puzzling. It had been run up before the First World War but for what purpose? It seemed too big to be a family home, too small to be a business, in too dubious a social district to be some lordling’s mansion. Perhaps it had been a discreet medical clinic. Istvan shivered for he was certainly nearer the truth. Perhaps it had been a funeral parlour. The building declared itself to Istvan by degrees. First he saw a cluster of chimneys supporting each other like Saturday night drunks. At the same level aerials were etched against the sky, aerials for more important needs than listening to Radio Budapest. The roof sloped down, its tiles grown purple in late afternoon shadow. Twin dormer windows broke the line of the roof and showed where, in old Budapest, the maids slept. Below was a whole row of more substantial windows, nine all told, their glass smashed. He didn’t expose himself further for that is where the guns would be. Also he saw a jutting pole, and a flag hanging limp with its centre still adorned by the communist star.

  ‘Is it an AVO house?’ Ilona asked.

  Istvan nodded. There’d been whispers about such places, usually located in the hills by Obuda and Huvosvolgy and Viranyos, where no neighbours would pry.

  Uncle Zoltan was in deep talk with other students. They stood like mourners — again the funeral parlour suggested itself to Istvan — looking helpless and grim. On the ground, dragged under cover of the wall, lay other figures. The sweat came in Istvan’s hands at the thought that his rifle had been held by one of them a few minutes ago. Zoltan moved down the wall, talking, gesturing, dividing people into two groups. He reached them.

  ‘I’m taking the truck round the block so I can turn and approach the gates from the other side of the road with my foot down. The gates will give. They’re solid wood but the locks are always the weakest point. The students have a heavy machine gun and they’ll have that on the back of the truck. Your job is to run through the gates as soon as they’re open and shoot at the windows. Really shoot, keep the bastards’ heads down until we can swing the machine gun into position. You’ll find shrubs and stone benches on the left for cover. Remember it’s not a game.’

  That was his constant lament, that released from school or university or deserting from the army they would look on events as a holiday. As if reminding them of the deadly serious aspect, a Soviet tank thundered along the street. It had its nose down for Keleti Station and paid them no attention. But for half a minute no one risked any move that might hint at a threat to the tank. They stood like condemned men against the firing squad wall.

  Then Zoltan loped over to the truck and Istvan said to Ilona: ‘Stay here. You haven’t got even a rifle.’

  She looked at him for long seconds before replying: ‘Do you want to lend me yours?’

  After that she moved to the group by the gate. Two people were dead, messily shot, and their coats had been draped over their bodies to conceal the worst of it. Another man had a scarf tied round his head; it seemed to be holding his jaw in place. The scarf was light brown with dark red patches seeping through and the face it framed had turned as pale as moonlight. Watching her, Istvan was struck with admiration. What an amazing girl! For she hadn’t flinched from the dead bodies and had even gone to say something to the wounded man. She was too far away for him to hear the words. Even if he had asked Ilona it would have done him little good for she had no idea what she said. She just hoped she hadn’t been stupid, hadn’t asked a question of a man who couldn’t reply.

  Ilona turned, like royalty, expecting someone at her elbow. She asked: ‘Are you frightened?’

  Istvan answered: ‘Yes.’ He wasn’t. He just didn’t want her to think he boasted. He’d given up trying to understand the lack of fear in his emotional make-up. So far as he could puzzle it out a whole world was organizing itself round him while he remained detached. He had the status of observer even when he did something absurd like smearing apricot jam on a tank, or holding a dead man’s gun.

  He was saved from further shallow philosophy. Zoltan came, in a crash of gears cutting across the width of Imre Mezo Street. He was still accelerating as the snub-nosed truck hit the wooden gates. The locks gave and the gates burst open. Also the headlamps smashed, the windscreen shattered, the radiator burst in steamy rusty fountains and the truck lurched through with a howl from a tyre jammed against the bumper. The machine gun had been lashed to the back and students lay round it like a load from the abattoir.

  Tibor Kassack was first through the gates on foot. He had been eating an apple. He lobbed the core like a grenade, scared everybody with his bloodcurdling scream and charged. The rest followed like infantry after a tank: Lazlo in a professional crouch, Tibor Bihari like a rabbit with the dogs after it, Ferenc and Matyas, Ilona and Istvan, a great press of people who slipped out from doorways and trees.

  Istvan pounded towards the dubious shelter of leaves not thinking about the shots that rang out, but of how the hell Uncle Zoltan had known there would be shrubs on the left. Zoltan was swinging the truck round so that the heavy machine gun would point over the tailgate at the building. Sandor stood bolt upright and shot at each window in turn rapid-fire, to make the shadows duck. Then, from behind the shrubs, came a growing chorus of shots. It was swamped by bursts from the machine gun. No glass survived in any window. Puffs of mortar dust spurted like summer hail on dry ground.

  On the outside of the building a paintbrush had daubed U3 with an arrow pointing to a cellar door. The white paint was old and discoloured. This meaningless sign was left over from the war, Istvan concluded. He crouched, with his rifle poking between dusty evergreen leaves, putting shots into empty windows. His thoughts had slipped far away from the present. He tried to picture the place housing the Gestapo or the SS or whoever the torturers had been before this lot, and Uncle Zoltan being taken lovingly to pieces in their hands. Was that it? Was that what banked the fires inside him?

  The shooting died away. The machine gun was the first to grow silent, then all the motley collection of rifles and pistols. Finally a voice from the truck — too hoarse to be Zoltan’s — yelled out: ‘Give yourselves up! There’s no escape!’ No answer came to this and the crowd joined in with shouts to surrender or be flushed out. Finally, Zoltan’s furious voice reached out: ‘In two minutes time I’ll set fire to the building and you’ll burn to death.’ The prospect brought silence to the crowd.

  They waited. The victory was theirs and they knew it, no longer bothering to conceal themselves. They slipped out between the branches to stand in open ground. Tibor Kassack counted off the seconds on his watch. Lazlo decided two minutes was just the time needed for a pee. Sandor scuffed his shoe in the gravel.

  ‘Sandor’s never still,’ Ilona murmured, as much to herself as anyone.

  The front door of good bourgeois solidity opened. A voice called: ‘We’re coming out. Don’t shoot.’

  They came. Heading the procession was a man of thirty, an old man. One side of his face was distorted by a weeping ulcer, undressed. His wrists were handcuffed in front of him. He wore no shoes and hobbled with the infinite care of someone whose feet have been beaten and beaten until the bones are bruised and the pain races like an express train all the way up the legs. His hair lay in patches, the rest having disappeared in some dark midnight.

  At his back was a stocky man with a pistol, wearing the uniform and black boots of the AVO.

  Next in line was someone who had once been very fat. The fat had wasted away until the skin of his neck sagged in folds like a tortoise. Fresh scars showed on his face. His trousers were in tatters, especially round the knees.

  Another AVO, another prisoner. The crocodile lengthened and moved with painful slowness, shuffling towards the open gates and the beckoning anonymity of the city.

  On the back of the truck the students straightened up. There was nothing a machine gun could do
.

  Ilona was stunned. She saw ghosts. She saw shipwrecks. She saw mushrooms pulled out of cellars, blinking even in this twilight, bare feet dirtied with damp and ordure. She saw and understood what she had to do.

  ‘Ilona! Ilona!’

  When she was less than half way across the proud gravel the leading AVO, a colonel it turned out, shouted to her to stop, to stop right there, not to take another step.

  Yes I heard him, is what she said afterwards. She kept moving.

  So the leading AVO, the colonel, followed his instincts. He shoved his prisoner out of the way and swivelled his pistol. Its barrel was lined up on Ilona’s advancing figure when Tibor Kassack shot him down. There seemed no possible fragment of time for Tibor to shoulder his rifle and aim; it was the reflex of a man who had brought down partridge, snap-shooting in just this fading afternoon light. The colonel was winged in the shoulder, his pistol clattering on the gravel, and the whole mood of hostage-blackmail disintegrated. The dozen AVO who’d emerged, their confidence growing with every shuffling step, broke in an undisciplined scramble to gain the open gates.

  ‘Ilona, you’re mad.’

  ‘They were going to escape. They were blackmailing us with our own people.’

  They were no longer escaping. The ones who ran were shot down. The colonel, on his haunches and gripping his bleeding shoulder, was kicked and beaten in the face with rifle butts. There was no telling the screams apart: vengeance, pain, pleading. In this walled garden was the jungle.

  They dragged the colonel to a tree, an old lime tree with grey bark cracked like broken skin that isn’t allowed to heal. They tied his ankles with his own belt and used the belts from two of his dead colleagues to string him head down from a branch. Coins cascaded from his pockets and were left to lie in the dirt. He screamed abuse at them, cursing them as rabble, threatening dire retribution. He never wavered in his belief that this was only a temporary indignity except once. Then he appeared to offer the lot of them — over fifty now — a share in the good life, details not given.

  His pockets were systematically emptied. There was a quantity of paper money, which was added to the heap of leaves and old newspapers and branches that grew beneath his head. Being the last Thursday of the month he had his payslip in a pale blue envelope. It caused stupefied amazement and was pinned to the breast of his jacket like a campaign medal. Colonel Zelk, as he was named, earned more money in a month than Sandor, say, in a year at his arms factory.

  They burnt him to death. The others they had shot; this one they sacrificed to avenge their own past and all the suffering. It was Uncle Zoltan who put a match to the funeral pyre. He hissed at the AVO colonel above the crackle of the flames: ‘That’s for Ildiko, understand me.’

  What was there to understand? Istvan saw him as a man goaded beyond endurance, taking his revenge at last. Uncle Zoltan’s eyes were fixed on the face of the AVO man. At the first scorching of skin Istvan caught something in Zoltan’s eyes: disappointment perhaps. Impelled by the sudden fierce pain, Colonel Zelk flexed his knees and his body swung through the flames like a pendulum.

  ‘More of that where you’re going.’

  Even graveyard humour seemed out of place. The circle of people, men and women, schoolchildren and students, terrible wrecks of prisoners, watched with set faces.

  ‘Long live Stalin!’ were the Colonel’s last coherent words as his hair caught fire. By then Ilona had buried her face in Istvan’s chest. She would not go away but neither would she witness this final reckoning. Istvan noted that human hair burnt with a fierce orange flame tinged with red.

  Beyond the brick wall and the barbed wire was a view of another building, an ordinary house of peeling paint and cracked plaster. At an upstairs window the faces of children grew like flowers. The Colonel screamed defiance to the end.

  13 - London, now

  There are screams of pain, screams of rage, screams of terror. Ilona screamed in anguish.

  There was nothing of the actress in it. Her eyes closed and her mouth widened and she screamed again. Her face was naked and Steven saw horror revealed there. Her chest was greedy for air, her whole body heaving with desperation to scream out the memories that had come flooding back.

  She hadn’t forgotten their past. The proof of that rang in Steven’s ears. She screamed for the dead and for their own child-hood that had come to an end on that day.

  In Budapest, when the sights and sounds had proved too much, Ilona had gone to him and hidden her face in his chest. Steven went to her now, put an arm round her for comfort. He held her as tight as a lover to stifle the screams and soothe away the memories. She remembered. There was no doubt he’d succeeded in that. But the elation he’d expected to feel was strangely missing.

  ‘God damn them,’ he muttered.

  There was a wall inside people’s heads, to Steven’s way of thinking, that blocked out memories too painful to live with. It was like a brick wall that kept a house private. Some buildings needed high walls. Prisons and mental asylums needed the tallest of all. A lot of bricks had gone into making Ilona’s wall; there were whole areas of the past to hide away. Finally it had trembled, cracked, the bricks come tumbling down; the past came screaming out and he felt no triumph.

  ‘They tortured and murdered for years. They destroyed our innocence, took away our humanity. We hated and we took revenge. Colonel Zelk was the winner because he made us into his own image. We were corrupted and there’s no forgiving that.’

  ‘Why do you go on?’ Ilona asked. ‘There’s a wound there and you won’t let it heal. Why do you want me to suffer? You make me twist and turn again until I bleed. Why, Steven?’

  ‘If you forget what they did to us, then you forgive them.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all she said. In the same listless manner she drifted out of the Dead Room. There was a view down to the studio where the spotlights splashed the walls with high drama and ghosts waited in the shadows. Steven followed her back to the living room. The wreck of their dinner was everywhere. Ilona picked up a wine glass and sipped with her face ducked down and her elbows tight against her sides. She wouldn’t sit. She’d withdrawn into a private hell and when she came out it would be to say goodbye. Still sipping, her eyes wandered round the room looking for a memory to take with her, something less bitter than the Dead Room.

  ‘Why haven’t you got anything personal here?’ She swung round to question him. ‘There’s nothing that says you live here. No photographs, no souvenirs, nothing from Africa or Asia. Nothing from Hungary. Nothing from that time. Nothing from school or home. Where are the prizes you won at school for running?’

  ‘Running?’ Steven pounced on the word as if it had some shameful undertone. He shrugged. ‘We lived through a revolution. You can’t fight with a silver cup in your pocket.’

  ‘Your Dead Room is a museum. It’s a different kind of dead here. It’s like waiting in the departure lounge of an airport.’ The leather and glass and stainless steel had lost their attraction.

  ‘I keep the past locked away. I couldn’t bear to live with it. We were defeated. It’s as simple as that. Can you tell me any General who wants to be reminded every day of a battle he lost?’

  He crossed the room to pick up the Camembert box with its picture of Napoleon. He held it out to her in both hands, an offering.

  ‘Do you imagine he was proud of Waterloo?’

  How like an actor he is, Ilona thought, always searching for his piece of business, some little action to help him. How like me even, she decided.

  Disconcerted by that, she missed his next words. She suddenly caught that he was talking in earnest to her.

  ‘Perhaps for us it was more like the Russian campaign, Napoleon pushing on until he could smell the sewers of Moscow; further and further until every man in the army must have believed they’d won the final victory. Instead, they were defeated by the size of the country and the weather and hunger and came marching back and back. The Russians like to make you think you’ve w
on, it makes their counter-attack so much more stunning. There were a few days when we thought we’d won a famous victory. We actually dared to think that. We boasted we’d taken on the hard men and beaten them. All the time the Russians were drawing us on. The same as with him.’

  For a time Steven stared at Napoleon. Napoleon stared back with his deep and private eye.

  ‘The Russians were pulling out, that was the story. Don’t try and sell them that idea down at the Kilian Barracks. The Russians still had a couple of dozen tanks in the streets round there and from time to time they’d wake people up with a few cannon shells. Don’t worry, the cocky ones said, it’s only their damn Russian pride. They won’t get out of Budapest with their tails between their legs. When they go it’ll have to be with bands playing and banners flying. It’s their Russian craziness but who understands Russians anyway? Too much snow, too much vodka. Crazy. You know what?’ For a few moments Steven busied himself pouring a glass of flat champagne. Ilona was patient. ‘You know what, we were the crazy ones to be taken in by fairy tales.’

  Again he was quiet. He drank some of the wine and Ilona had the disconcerting idea that he was refuelling. There was a stillness about him and the room and the whole building. There is a stillness at the heart of a hurricane and that is where we are now, she told herself. Her spirits sank. We’re in the eye of the hurricane and we have to pass right through the storm to the other side. No wonder he filled his glass again. Drinking against the storm.

  Steven resumed. He was like a player setting the pieces on a board for a game. Everything had to be in its correct position. ‘Zoltan left us. The fire had gone out of him after the attack on the AVO house. He said nothing but you could see he’d lost interest. An eye for an eye. His private war was over so he slipped away. A mystery.’