Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  Tibor said: ‘We’ll have to double back.’

  There was an alley, narrower even than Puskin Street, that skirted the square. They went down that and then others, working always to the east and south. The sounds in the city were like the first heady hours of the uprising, except for the pounding of heavy guns. That was new. The Russians had the steel now. At each corner Tibor looked over his shoulder to check Istvan followed. He came back to find the group, Istvan thought, and I’m all that’s left.

  On Jozsef Avenue they came across the first corpses. Istvan closed his mind to them, as he had at the AVO house.

  ‘Hurry,’ Tibor urged.

  I’m his audience, it struck Istvan, the only one to witness his heroics. And she was right, that cunning old Russian woman. They have come back. They’ve put Stalin together again, bigger than before, and he’s striding down the streets. What’s Babushka going to do now? She had Ilona to look after her, of course. Babushka’s room had to be where she’d disappeared to. Just thinking about it slowed Istvan’s steps.

  ‘There’s no time to lose.’

  Finally they ran into a little group that huddled by a line of squalid cottages. Their attention was fixed on the end of this back street, all of them staring like wild animals alerted to a predator. Rubble grated under foot. The walls of the houses were gouged by bullets. The end of the road was marked by a building with a wall that leant out drunkenly. It was past this bulging brickwork that the tank flashed, its gun swivelled away from them. They had no more than a glimpse of it. The grinding noise of its tracks lingered in their alley.

  ‘That’s Ulloi Street. The barracks are on the far side,’ Tibor said.

  The barracks were built directly on to Ulloi Street, as long and solid as a prison. All Istvan could see were three windows, one above the other, the glass shot out of all of them. The lowest window had bars and between them poked out a rifle. From somewhere out of sight was a chatter of machine gun fire. Explosions boomed from the heart of the city.

  ‘What do we do?’ Istvan asked.

  ‘Kill as many as we can before our ammunition runs out,’ a man at Istvan’s shoulder answered. Istvan looked in the man’s face, and then at the faces round him, a dozen or more. The faces had changed from ten days ago. Then it had been boys and girls with hope dancing in their eyes. Now they were all ages, a whole people. Locked in their eyes was not fear, not defeat...Istvan wanted very badly to understand that guarded look; a grown-up would understand it. He peered again at the man who’d spoken of killing ‘before our ammunition runs out’. In his phrase and in his eyes Istvan saw simple resignation. The Russians had the steel and would win. But not before the Hungarians had shown the steel in their spirit.

  ‘I haven’t got a weapon,’ Istvan said. He held out his hands to show they were empty. It was as if he held forward a begging bowl.

  ‘No problem,’ the man told him. ‘There’s a tunnel under the road to the barracks. They’ve given us rifles. They’ve given us grenades. They’ve given us submachine guns. They’ve given us everything. Go to the Corvin Cinema.’

  He made it sound as if the treasures of the armoury had been heaped on them. It was just — and the thunder swelled from Ulloi Street — just that the Soviet armoury held much greater riches.

  The Corvin Cinema was circular and domed like a Turkish bath-house. At the front was a poster for the film that had been showing a fortnight ago. The poster was tattered and bullet-ridden. It was a montage: a peasant behind a horse-plough, a uniformed official giving a speech in a village square, a boy and a girl strolling hand in hand beside a tree-lined river.

  Just as — and Istvan’s heart skipped a beat — he and Ilona had walked hand in hand.

  Someone shouted to them from the cinema entrance to take care. A passage led from the front of the cinema to Jozsef Avenue. Istvan could see the tail of a shot-up truck and hear a man’s screams. He must be under the canvas-hooded back.

  ‘Not one of ours,’ Tibor said. There was quiet satisfaction in his voice. They ran with ducked heads into the cinema foyer.

  ‘Why don’t the Russians help him?’ Istvan asked.

  Unlike the folk outside, there were only young people in here, a couple of dozen. They looked a group, looked as if they’d been together from the start. We should have stayed together too, Istvan knew, not slipped away one by one. And I shouldn’t have left Ilona. The faces in the cinema were pale and haggard. They stood gripping their rifles, staring out through the broken glass of the doors. A boy and a girl sprawled together against the wall, drunk with exhaustion, sharing a cigarette. Someone, a student with scraps of beard like a disease on his face, answered Istvan: ‘We have the truck covered from the top of that building.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t shoot if they were helping a wounded man.’ The bearded one shrugged. War might have rules but this was more terrible: this was hatred.

  ‘Surely we can go and help.’

  ‘The Russians are in position just down the street.’

  ‘But they’d never shoot.’

  ‘Why not? They’d lose one soldier but they’d get a couple of us. You don’t know Russians. That’s how their minds work.’

  ‘No.’

  The bearded student lost interest and drifted away.

  Beyond the ticket kiosk, against the curving wall, a chess board lay abandoned on the floor. A chess board is always quiet, but this was as if death had stopped the game. Tibor’s cloak swept across the pawns that had been sacrificed and he stopped.

  ‘So. The battle inside mirrors the battle outside. Do you play?’

  Now? Istvan was amazed.

  ‘I belonged to the White Knights Club,’ Tibor said. ‘The challenge was that the whites played with a knight missing and still had to win. Our country, yes? I’ll take this for luck.’ He stooped to gather up a white knight, tossed it in the air and caught it. ‘Choose your token of good fortune.’

  There was madness circling behind his eyes. Istvan was certain of it. With the drums of war beating outside, Tibor tossed the piece again with a flourish.

  ‘What is your choice?’

  Istvan hesitated and reached down.

  ‘Of course,’ Tibor said. ‘The white queen. Full of attack.’

  But Istvan moved the white queen across the board, saying: ‘Checkmate.’ And picked up the black king. He didn’t know what impulse made him do that. The effect on Tibor Kassack was extraordinary. He gazed at Istvan and his gaze, as the Palomino’s had once done, wandered from one eye to the other. His focus sharpened and he breathed out explosively like someone who’d swum the width of a river underwater.

  ‘A man, Istvan Ketesc, a man after my own heart. Afterwards we shall exchange pieces.’

  A man? By this trick one becomes a man? Istvan pocketed the black king. It lay hard against his thigh.

  They were on the second floor of a building at the corner of Jozsef Avenue. A third man in the room was Peter, a medical student with a face so thin it was like the skull in a lecture room demonstration. A flurry of snow had come and gone. For a few minutes it had covered the ground and given its magic touch to the hard world. It had lain on the canvas of the truck but not on the bonnet where the engine was still warm. The Russian soldier had gone silent. He must be dead. No one had helped him.

  Istvan looked away from the truck. He felt a terrible guilt about that one soldier. I mustn’t feel guilty, he told himself, a man doesn’t feel guilty for suffering he hasn’t caused. But still he looked away, to the alley below. There was a nameplate on the wall opposite. He rubbed his eyes because he was very tired and his eyes might play tricks. But it was true. He grunted.

  ‘What is it?’ Peter asked.

  ‘It’s called Kisfaludy Passage.’

  ‘So?’

  There was nothing Istvan could answer. Ilona was Ilona Kisfaludy. The fighting had become intensely personal.

  *

  Later in the day Peter came back into the room with a face gaunter than before. There we
re heavy clouds outside. The light that came through the window was religious and painted his face all in grey. He had a stare that bisected Istvan and Tibor Kassack, as if he didn’t care to look at either of them. He spoke slowly, stunned with bereavement.

  ‘Maybe we got four. But they’ve got Pal Maleter and he’s worth four hundred thousand.’

  Pal Maleter, Pal Maleter, Pal Maleter. The name hammered through Istvan’s head with the rhythm of a train. He knew the name, just couldn’t connect it with the person. His brain was numbed with shock, tiredness, worry. What was happening to her? She would be doing something because she wasn’t a girl who waited at home. So was she safe? Ilona. Her name blotted everything out. It rang in him like a bell from a long way off on a summer’s evening.

  In long seconds of silence nobody moved. Coming out of shock Tibor Kassack laid a hand on the student’s shoulder and shook him.

  ‘Got him? Do you mean he’s dead?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Peter said. ‘He went to Tokol last night to negotiate the Russian withdrawal and they kidnapped him.’

  At last the name connected in Istvan’s brain. Maleter had been made Minister of Defence in Nagy’s cabinet. Before that he had organized the defence of Kilian Barracks, not a hundred metres away. He was a hero who deserved a hero’s end. But the story, as Peter told it, was squalid enough. Maleter had gone to meet the old Russian General Malinin to arrange an orderly and even honourable withdrawal of Soviet forces. Vodka had been poured, toasts drunk, so far so good. Towards midnight Serov himself, the chairman of the KGB, accompanied by a score of military police had burst in and arrested Maleter. One aide had made a fortuitous escape through a lavatory window. On the appearance of the KGB, this aide Horvath had dived for his pistol and been restrained by Maleter who barked: ‘I have given no orders to fire.’ Then, still in Horvath’s version, Maleter murmured as he was escorted away at gunpoint: ‘Save your ammunition. Use it well.’

  Tibor Kassack was visibly moved by this. He seemed also, in Istvan’s eyes, to be shrinking, the piracy going out of him. He was reduced to a rock of stubbornness. Here he would fight and here he would undoubtedly die. For Istvan, his wits sharpened by anguished longing, there could be no more dangerous a comrade-in-arms.

  With the late afternoon sleet came the soldiers, Russian infantry in lumpy boots and creased uniforms. Istvan’s training with his schoolmates had taught him nothing of military tactics but even he could see the Russians had no sophisticated plan. Orders had been received to flush out the Corvin Cinema area and orders would be carried out. Bring in what infantry was available — since tanks couldn’t squeeze through the alleys — and throw them at the buildings. If twenty, thirty, forty soldiers were gunned down from upper windows, send for more. There were two hundred million more where these had come from.

  The earlier snow had softened the harsh lines of the buildings and covered the rubble. This sleet did nothing except turn to slush in the road. It came from the north, as the two Soviet trucks did, halting by the burnt-out tank. The soldiers jumped down, forty or fifty of them, an invasion, never ending.

  Istvan found himself shooting from the window. There must be a conscious decision to aim to kill another person. He didn’t remember taking it. Afterwards, long afterwards, he remembered the scene only in shades of grey: the sky, the uniforms, the buildings, the wrecked room, the people crouching at windows. There were men in soiled coats, women with scarves tied round their heads to keep their hair from their eyes, men in army uniforms without caps. Outside it was drabness and sudden bright redness and a tumbled grey figure. When he recalled this first front-line battle, Istvan could summon up no emotions: he felt no fear, no anger, no hatred. He understood the despair of his father: that, in the twentieth century, man had become another machine of war.

  ‘Stop them, shoot down the bastards.’ It was a hoarse shout that filled the room, a soldier’s voice.

  They were already too late. A heavy machine gun had been manoeuvred through the far side of one of the Soviet trucks and set up by the tailgate. Two or three Russian soldiers were knocked down. Their replacements merely stepped over the prone bodies. Darkish features they had, but not Mongolian. The gun opened up first on the neighbouring building and moved to theirs, splintering glass off already smashed windows, hammering plaster off the ceiling. They sprawled on the floor or glued against the wall. Istvan, crouching under the sill, opened his eyes again when the firing stopped and took in the faces in the sombre light. The elation of the first uprising had withered. There was just that stubbornness he’d noticed in Tibor. He supposed his face was the same.

  Someone risked a single shot from the window, risked his life. But the machine gun was all powerful. When Istvan peeped over the sill the Soviet infantry had already moved into the neighbouring building.

  Was it Peter, the medical student, or one of the soldiers who warned them to withdraw? Istvan missed it in the thunder of the blood in his ears; but Tibor cried ‘Never’, and stood in the window and nearly lost his head. His beret flew off and then they all found themselves out in the corridor, crouching, Istvan not remembering how he’d got there. This was war and not playing at it, not juggling with jam jars. You kept your head down and survived because being a hero and getting killed wasn’t winning a war; getting killed was what the other side wanted.

  There was confusion in the corridor because some considered it a matter of honour to stay and fight. Maleter, setting up his defences, had talked of Corvin Cinema and the buildings round it as his vital outposts, enfilading the enemy, keeping them jumping. But Maleter was gone, shot, thrown in some foul prison. Istvan had a moment of longing for Uncle Zoltan. He would have improvised, pointed out the places for ambushes, rallied their spirits. In the end there were no heroics, only muddle. From the front of the building came shouts — some Georgian or Armenian dialect, anyway no Russian words that any of them understood. It was this black ignorance that panicked them. The Soviet soldiers could be planning anything: blowing up the building, burning it down, they didn’t know. The whole group of them scrambled downstairs. The clamour of boots on bare wooden boards echoed like a cavalry charge. The Russian soldiers fled, fearing they were being lured into an ambush.

  See, exulted Istvan in a rare moment of hope, that is how Uncle Zoltan would have tricked them, and tricked them again.

  They crossed Kisfaludy Passage one at a time, darting singly for fear of attack. It was dirtied with torn paper and smashed wood and mud. Dusk had narrowed it to a ditch. But when his turn came Istvan found it had widened suddenly to a chasm and he heaved across in slow motion, his body a huge tempting target to the crack Soviet marksmen. He hurled himself through a gaping doorway and left behind Kisfaludy Passage, his last link with her.

  Ilona.

  Night brought its own treacheries.

  Their group hadn’t after all withdrawn all the way into the stronghold of the Kilian Barracks. They held the corner building, forty or fifty of them: soldiers, students, workers, all sorts mixed in together, shooting from upper windows at shadows. The Russian soldiers occupied the building they’d retreated from. Kisfaludy Passage was the frontier, a perilous stretch of no-man’s-land you could almost jump across. They barricaded the door against a surprise Soviet attack and kept watch from little windows that squinted into the darkness.

  They waited. They waited all night. Some time after midnight, exhaustion finally overwhelmed Istvan. It struck him like an illness, a fever that weakened his limbs and disturbed his brain. Slumping against the wall he fell into a haunted sleep, jerked awake, drifted off again. He was troubled by dark images, dreams, hallucinations, maybe real events. He saw the body of the dead AVO being hurled from the window, the face of Natalya Zelenaya ravaged by secret grief, and Tibor Kassack shaking his shoulder.

  ‘Istvan, Istvan, how can a man sleep at this moment in history?’

  Tibor knelt beside him. He thrust a knife under Istvan’s nose. Istvan gulped and knew fear then. There was no light
in the room, just the dimness that came through the window. Istvan couldn’t see the madness in Tibor’s eyes but he heard it in his voice.

  ‘That’s one less,’ he breathed. ‘They have red blood, just like pigs. See?’ He wiped the blade on a piece of cloth, both sides, as if he was cleaning a knife of butter. There was a smear of something that Tibor peered at. He grunted in recognition of it, and the grunt turned into a kind of laugh. The laugh stopped dead. To Istvan’s horror, Tibor daubed him on the forehead with the cloth, then down to the chest and across to form the sign of the cross. ‘In the name of the fatherland...’

  Istvan scrambled away.

  Had it been the scratching of an exhausted brain? He might have imagined that ominous whisper, or dreamt it. It was all of a piece with nightmares of the AVO sliding through the window and Babushka’s mouth gaping in a soundless scream. His eyes were popping with little stars, miniature fireworks on the retina. Solemnly he reassured himself: not real fireworks. Perhaps the knife and the smear on the cloth were also illusions. But they filled his imagination. When he turned his mind to Ilona, her lips were as vivid as blood, her skin had the pale gleam of steel, her hair was as dark as the varnished hilt.

  The night passed. In the first light of dawn he went to find a mirror to see if his forehead was spotted with blood. He tried three rooms and down the stairs. There were figures asleep on the floor, people staring from windows, a boy and a girl discovering love in whispers. There was no mirror. He tried to make out his reflection in the bottom of a discarded can. Every kind of dirt was smudged on his face; there was his own blood where he had been cut by a flying splinter of glass; there were bruises as dark as autumn plums under his eyes. He twisted the can to catch what light there was. The face that stared back was a stranger’s. How long had it been since he’d seen his own features? He had changed almost beyond recognition; the planes of his cheeks shifting, the flesh sinking, cracks appearing at the corners of his eyes, the beginning of a moustache darkening his upper lip.