Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  Is this what I look like to Ilona?

  Someone moved behind Istvan, but someone different, and loneliness struck him with double force. She had become part of his daily existence. She was air, surrounding him, filling his lungs, giving life to the blood in his body. In Natalya Zelenaya’s apartment he could turn and she would look up, catching his movement. Or she could steal forward in silence and he would sense the warmth of her standing behind him. Or he could reach out a hand, even in darkness, and hers would be there to meet it. No words were needed.

  Now he felt a brush against his shoulder, but not the lightness of her touch. He glanced round and faced a death’s head.

  Peter, the medical student, asked: ‘What will you do when it’s over?’

  ‘Find her.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Ilona.’

  There was a pause. We’re soldiers waiting for the attack, Istvan decided, the talk is unreal, filling the silence, noise to keep out thoughts of death. There was enough light to make out the red-rimmed eyes that blinked with weariness as they wandered over Istvan’s face. Can he see the blood spot on my forehead, the cut on my cheek, the change in my eyes? Am I dying, doctor?

  Peter ran his tongue round his lips. Istvan couldn’t imagine those meagre lips ever kissing. There was no passion in them, none of the warmth and softness of Ilona’s mouth. Peter said: ‘I shall go to America. If I live.’

  Go to America? Desert Hungary? No one had dared utter such betrayal. Istvan felt the heat coming to his cheeks.

  ‘Don’t tell me you are shocked,’ Peter said. ‘Perhaps none of us will survive. Free Hungary has shrunk in the night. A few buildings, a few hundred defenders of the faith.’

  ‘A few hundred?’ There were millions. Istvan knew it.

  Peter understood this outrage. He shook his head. ‘We have no government, no generals, no leaders. The Russians have divided us into small villages, a few hundred fighters in each. Our group is a village, surrounded, with no food, no medicines, no tanks, perhaps soon no water.’

  ‘We’re more than a village. The whole of the city is fighting, not just us.’ That had been part of his disturbed night too, the roar of guns.

  Again Peter sensed Istvan’s meaning. ‘Where did we suddenly get such artillery and tanks and planes from? That wasn’t our people fighting. You couldn’t hear our fighting for the thunder of theirs. Of course we’ll fight on. A cornered animal always does. And they want us to fight so that we can be more completely destroyed. When the bravest of us are dead and the spirit of the survivors is broken, then Hungary will be an easier country to rule.’

  Istvan gazed in fascination at the thin face with its constant grimace. He seems to have tasted something bitter and wants to spit it out. Is he cynic or realist? Peter’s thoughts were already on defeat and now they lodged in Istvan’s mind.

  ‘Then what do we do?’

  Peter murmured softly, for to ears like Tibor Kassack’s it would have sounded treason: ‘Surrender, escape or die. Those are the three options. And knowing the Soviets, I cannot be sure the first is even open to us.’

  ‘I’d never surrender. Never.’ Istvan was so vehement that the other pulled back. There was silence while the vehemence rolled round inside Istvan’s head, acquiring the hollow echo of boasting and bravado and other tin gods. ‘I’ll fight,’ he insisted, but more quietly.

  ‘Oh we all have to fight. But that is not one of the final options.’

  In the early days, the apricot jam days, Istvan hadn’t known fear and was surprised by this lack. He knew fear now. Fear was a habit he had grown into. Night had ended and day come. But it never seemed to be full light. War and fear darkened his eyes.

  They fought the whole day. Because they were afraid, they fought with bitterness. It allowed of no mercy, neither to the enemy nor to themselves. The Russians had good reason to hold off their attack until light came; at night every shadow would have held a killer. By day the Russians saw their attackers but were outclassed by a ferocity and determination that verged towards suicide. A woman ran out clasping a bomb to her chest and pursued her chosen target. She wasn’t satisfied to toss her bomb between the tank’s tracks. She clung to the tank until the bomb blew her to pieces. If you allow us no hope, was her message, then I shall make my point one final time.

  Surrender, escape or die — perhaps there weren’t even these three options. Perhaps they had dwindled to one: the Russians had been ordered to hunt them down and kill every last one. To no food and no medicines should be added, no tomorrow. Surrender, escape or die.

  But before that there was the retreat. The whole of the far side of Jozsef Avenue was in Soviet hands. Now their soldiers overran the buildings on this side, crossing over the boundary of Kisfaludy Passage, taking the cinema, while the Hungarians retreated from room to room, building to building, courtesy of the holes punched in the walls by the Soviet guns. The dead were left behind. Some of the dying would not be moved either, demanding instead that a grenade be left in their hands. Ulloi Street was under constant fire, their side, our side, the bullets were equally lethal. Finally they crossed to Kilian Barracks by the tunnel under the road. The area round the barracks was honeycombed by tunnels with the rot and stench of half a century in them.

  Kilian Barracks, the huge fortress, was a cauldron of shouts and screams and explosions. When an ocean liner sinks, Istvan knew, it would be like this. All he got to see of the place was a long corridor and a couple of rooms with beds jammed under the windows. He assumed the beds were pushed under the windows to make it easier to kneel and shoot. Figures with rifles pointing out supported this theory. But when he approached he saw the beds were a support for corpses, and that the dead defended Kilian Barracks more than the living.

  It was night again. A chunk had dropped out of Istvan’s life. He had no recollection of the afternoon or evening. Day had simply turned inside out to blackest night, except for hazy moonlight and flickering flames. Had he passed out? Amnesia? There was cold air from the wrecked window fanning his face. He breathed deeply and the floor tilted. The liner’s sinking, he told himself in all seriousness, and the lifeboats are all shot to hell.

  Tibor Kassack reappeared. He still sported his cloak, as a first-class passenger should. But it was as soiled as the rest of the clothes down here in steerage.

  ‘Did you get him?’ Tibor asked.

  Istvan stared. Get who? Tibor the bold Kassack was now patently mad. Also he was shrinking. And gliding into the distance. If Tibor would only come closer, he’d ask what the devil he supposed he was talking about. There was an explosion in the bowels of the engine room and the liner lurched. Now Tibor Kassack was very close, on top of him, bending over like a surgeon or his mother, except his mother had no beard.

  But Tibor never used to have a beard. He would have been ashamed of a moth-eaten beard such as this. It was a Soviet trick, he was an impostor, a spy. Istvan was stretched on a bed and struggled to get up.

  ‘Eat this,’ Tibor said.

  It was half a tin of sweet red peppers stuffed with rice in thick tomato sauce. It was, Istvan judged, one of Gundel’s greatest creations.

  ‘What happened?’ Istvan asked, worried about the blanks in his life and how he came to be prone on the bed.

  ‘I’ll tell you what bloody happened,’ Tibor said hotly, mistaking the other’s interest. ‘They had a meeting down there in the yard and accepted the Soviet offer of an amnesty and safe-conduct. They wouldn’t listen to me. If they’re not cowards, they’re fools.’

  ‘Not cowards.’

  Tibor stared and gave a final curt nod. ‘The other then.’

  Surrender, escape or die. So the survivors had made their choice. ‘When is this happening?’

  ‘At first light.’

  ‘Is everyone surrendering?’

  ‘Not me. Not you, I expect. Half a dozen others.’

  It had shrunk to this, a handful of stubborn souls who refused to accept defeat.

  ‘So? What
happens to us?’

  ‘It is through the tunnels again. The Russkis haven’t uncovered them all yet.’

  Tibor turned aside. He didn’t want to die. He wouldn’t surrender. He couldn’t accept they were running away.

  There was Istvan, Tibor, Peter and eight others. They watched from the highest windows of the barracks, the upper portholes of this shipwrecked liner. Light was seeping into the scene outside.

  First the dying chimneys and smashed roofs were silhouetted against the dawn sky. Then a jigsaw of gaping brickwork. Next a sort of newly-constructed wall rose across Ulloi Street and Istvan saw with sickening dread that the street was closed off by double lines of Soviet tanks. The last thing you noticed in this warscape were the human figures. Some lay like abandoned children’s toys among the broken cobbles and fallen masonry. Other figures, just as motionless, lined the pavement opposite. Were they cripples on crutches? The light strengthened and the crutches changed to rifles.

  At the next window one of the watchers was whispering. He wasn’t a student but a middle-aged man with a face as creased as a ball of string.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Istvan asked.

  Tibor listened and said: ‘He’s praying.’

  Istvan knew that prayers were useless. When had they ever been any use in Hungary? He felt the pricking of the cold air on his cheeks and an answering pricking in the palms of his hands. Prayers would rise and wouldn’t be answered: the gods wanted the final act. Glancing at the strip of heaven visible above Ulloi Street, Istvan saw tiny clouds in a baby blue sky. The clouds were gun-metal on the west side and lemon-yellow on the east.

  From their windows they heard the thuds and crashes as the barricaded gate was cleared. Leaning far out Istvan could just see the first people as they stumbled through the opening. From that high angle the figures were tiny. They stood, half a dozen of them, ten now, in an uncertain group. In their hands they still gripped their weapons.

  A figure in Soviet officer’s uniform picked his way through the rubble, shouting orders. Istvan couldn’t hear the words but the meaning was plain. The fighters as they stepped through the half-cleared gateway laid their rifles in a heap. The Soviet officer stood to one side, with the tanks at his back, and gestured the surrendering men and women in the other direction, along the length of the barracks. They went as they were directed, slowly, as cattle move. They were the remnants of a defeated army, all defiance gone, obedient. Half seemed to be wounded and the other half could muster barely enough strength to help them.

  ‘Forty-two,’ muttered Tibor, counting the figures. ‘Forty-four. Weeping Jesus, is that all?’

  No more came out of the barracks. All the others — a thousand, two thousand, as many as an ocean liner’s passengers — were dead or lay inside dying or had slipped away during the last hours of darkness or watched now from these few upper windows.

  When they were strung out in a line along the wall, shuffling their feet, waiting for release from this place of defeat, the Soviet officer barked an order and the rifles and machine guns opened fire. The forty-four were shot to death. None of them had the spirit to run. The Soviet officer hopped among the crumpled figures with pistol drawn. Limbs twitched and he shot twice. In half a minute it was all done. In this upper room the man with the criss-crossed face stopped his prayers.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tibor Kassack as if some great question had been answered.

  They had a stub of candle that dripped hot wax on Tibor’s hand.

  ‘God-cursed thing.’ Tibor dropped the candle again and they bumped to a halt, the eleven of them like a chain gang. Tibor lit a match and it flared in the rotting brickwork of the tunnel. The bricks arched just above their heads and grey moulds spread like a hopeless disease.

  Tibor was the leader. Behind him was a soldier dressed in someone’s cast-off raincoat; he hadn’t thought to throw away his army boots which cracked like sledgehammers in the tunnel. Next, a woman who kept crying and pulling with her fingers at her cheek, mauling her own flesh over some immense grief. Then Istvan. Behind him, Peter and the others in a long tail. Exhaustion dogged Istvan. It was as if his body held a certain quantity of it and when he forced it out of his legs, so he could walk, it rose up to his brain. His imagination was popping again. His eyes rose to the arched roof, slipping along the wavy lines of mould. Those patterns of grey were the prayers of ghosts: his imagination insisted on it. And he had a prayer too: Ilona. It was a damn long tunnel to reach her. Perhaps it went all the way to the old woman’s apartment.

  They’d stopped again. Istvan bumped into the woman in front and like the wagons of a train it was passed down the line. They were at a junction where the tunnel divided, one branch continuing straight on, a second going at a tangent to the right. The yellow light of the candle glowed on the forehead and prominent cheekbones of Tibor’s face. Where his eyes and nostrils should be were holes so black that rats could have eaten them.

  ‘Straight ahead? Turn right?’ There was a mist of grey over Tibor’s face. Istvan recognized with revulsion the dusty streaks of cobwebs.

  They set to squabbling, the comradeship and singleness of purpose evaporating with defeat.

  ‘How do we know? Aren’t you leading us?’

  ‘Do you suppose I have a map? Perhaps I give conducted tours?’

  ‘How about you, soldier? Which is the best way?’

  ‘Do you think they’d tell us? Do you reckon they hold instruction classes: How to escape from barracks?’

  ‘Bloody useless.’

  ‘Toss a coin.’

  Someone started to laugh, shrill and hysterical, and it ended in the sharp smack of flesh on flesh. They stood in silence, with their nerves all over the place, and the matter was settled for them by dull thumps from straight ahead and a shout that died a very old echo. In a sudden draught, the candle guttered.

  ‘That’s the wind from Siberia,’ Tibor said. ‘We go the other way.’

  Now they bunched together, knocking into each other in their urgency. The tunnel went on, the dampness of it fading as it sloped up. They lurched to a halt again. Peering past the shoulders in front Istvan could make out a body on the floor of the tunnel, just ahead. The body wasn’t neatly laid but humped over on its stomach as if it had crawled this far into the burrow to die. It was a girl with long dark hair and Istvan felt a terrible stab. One by one they stepped over her twisted legs. In the fading candle light Istvan caught a glimpse of teeth blackened with blood and felt a wild release. It wasn’t her. She still throbbed with life, he was positive of it. He would touch her again and feel her warmth.

  The nightmare journey ended abruptly as first Tibor with the candle disappeared and then each in turn dropped into the coal bunker of a cellar. Daylight came through a grating at the far end. Steps led up and they stumbled out into the sweet fresh air. They blinked at the sunshine and the dreary normality of the old buildings of hideous violet brick.

  ‘Prater Street,’ someone said. Just giving a name to it seemed to release the group. They split to left and right without saying goodbye or wishing each other luck. There remained only Peter, Istvan and Tibor Kassack.

  ‘So this is the end of it,’ Peter said. His mouth puckered as if he’d bitten into an unripe plum.

  ‘No, it will never end,’ Tibor told him angrily.

  ‘Well then, the end of you,’ Peter said and silenced Tibor. There was an awkward pause until Peter continued: ‘The Russians must have sealed the borders so I’m making for Neusiedler See.’ He used the Austrian name for Lake Ferto, as if he’d already left behind the country of his birth. ‘There’ll be a rowing boat or a canoe, something to slip out of the country. Are you coming?’

  ‘We must fight,’ Tibor began.

  ‘It’s finished here, finished. Can’t you understand?’

  But Tibor was beyond understanding anything any more. Peter turned to Istvan.

  ‘Do you think you can make it? A week, four or five days if we’re lucky with farm trucks.’

&
nbsp; Istvan shook his head. ‘Someone I must find.’

  ‘Your mother? We’re going to be travelling rough...’

  ‘My girl. I left her to come here.’

  ‘This is the only chance to leave, while it’s still chaos.’ Peter’s lips stretched thinner. His grimace plainly stated that there was a whole world of beautiful girls to choose from, out there, across the frontier, beyond the shadow of the tanks.

  No one had anything more to say. The three of them shook hands. Finally Peter nodded and said, too casually: ‘I’ll drink a toast to you with my first Coca-Cola.’

  He went with a loping stride, like a wolf, and turned the corner without looking back.

  ‘So it’s goodbye,’ Istvan said and shook hands with Tibor all over again. ‘Goodbye and good luck,’ he said with great emphasis, not wanting Tibor to dog his footsteps to the rendezvous with Ilona. But Tibor still grasped his hand.

  ‘We should stay together, fight them as a team.’

  ‘Just the two of us?’

  ‘Yes, the two of us. We’re all that’s left of Free Hungary. Me as President. You as High Priest.’

  Istvan stared into eyes that were glittery with private visions. Tibor Kassack had lost his country estate (or had he ever had one?). He’d lost his girl, lost his beret, lost his war and finally lost his reason.

  Their hands were still locked together.

  ‘I must go to her,’ Istvan said.

  ‘It’s better like this. Girls only hinder us. The unbeatable team against the Russian imperialists. Magnificent. We’ll fight and fight for our country.’

  In a calm voice that didn’t match the growing desperation he felt inside, Istvan said: ‘You’re the white knight. It attacks by going one square sideways and two forwards. That is how you must fight now, with a sidestep, with cunning. Not head on like a pawn.’