by Alan Duff
Let me understand how it is a strong man — a physical man, good with his fists, a family man who used to love his wife, his sons, in my case it was adoration — can be changed into this. That man staring silently out the window as if struck with some form of adult autism. What happened to the ideals he raised us on, of one day our country being a democracy, and that it would require the shedding of blood, of course blood? But for democracy good men must be prepared to die.
Ten times over, I made it a mantra for when anyone ever laid hands on me. Ten for one! So how many blows did this man strike back?
I remember the revelation, of seeing what my father’s words meant when I was nine and gave a bully more than his own back. I walked around the school, and kids were pointing and whispering about me — with respect. As for the bully, he became kind of an older, servile friend who acted silly whenever I was near, like he was the younger, trying to please me. At first I felt incredibly huge and far older than my tender years. They called me giant killer and Attila The Hun. The girls steered clear of me, but in a giggling, newly respectful fashion. In my class I was God. This is what this man at the window pulling hard on his cigarette gave me. The notion that I am so special, so precious an existence that I am prepared to do anything if that existence is threatened, or hurt in any way.
He asks what do I want, and before I can answer, asks if this being a Saturday, do I not have a soccer game to play like normal kids?
I am a bit shocked. And hurt. I have never played soccer, I box, but the national game of soccer never appealed to me, maybe because I knew early from Papa’s teachings that nationalism was a sham. I did not want to participate in anything that suggested even by reference that Attila Szabó was part and proud of his Hungarian nationality. Not this damned, accursed version of it.
Our flag has had a Soviet symbol of wheatsheaf and hammer inserted in it. I would not play any sport that represented it. Besides, fighting sports suit me, I was born to fight. Of my father’s genes. As for what normal kids do — since when have I been normal?
I never played soccer.
No? I was sure you did. So what do you play — not with yourself?
The laugh is more the obscenity, not the intimacy of a father to a son with hormones a little while stirring. The laughter coming through gaps of missing front teeth doesn’t help, nor the weak way he seems to need that cigarette, even though I have the Hungarian love of tobacco myself. He should have offered me a smoke, to hell with my age. How many do I know who don’t smoke? Mama doesn’t, but she used to. Gave it up for some reason.
I inhale pointedly to let him know I wouldn’t mind at least a puff. He misses it at first and then it dawns across his unshaven face, that broken smile. You are smoking now? he wants to know.
He used to add son to a question like this. To let me know that even in disapproval he loved me. It was part of our relationship, like a code of conduct between us. Of trust completely. For he has never laid hands on me, nor Béla.
Yes. (Used to add Papa myself, but I’m in kind now.) I smoke. I box.
You do? (You knew that.) Are you good?
Yes, I tell him with a stare that I am. Strong, like — (Like you? Like you used to be?) Not as strong as you.
He’s looking at me differently, assessing me as a man, a father to his growing son. I’m starting to thrill all over, I’m with such wishing. How strong? he asks.
The coach says very strong.
How strong?
I don’t understand.
Yes you do. How strong?
(Does he want an arm wrestle? Proof of my strength?) I have not lost a bout yet. My coach says I am too serious.
Does that mean you hurt your opponents?
That is why we box, Father.
I asked, how strong?
(Stronger than you, Father.) I don’t understand.
He takes a few steps towards me. The cigarette has gone out in his hand. Smoking fingers are a deep chocolate brown. His upper lip sucks in where the teeth are missing, a bit like we’d call a gumless wonder. His looks are gone. Everyone said he was too rough and tough to be called dashing, but if he wasn’t then dashing would have described him. This man is no longer rough and tough, let alone dashing; more some kind of farm-hand peasant.
For some reason he’s started to tremble; the lower jaw and a raised finger. (Please don’t say anything bad or stupid, or show signs of prison madness. Please don’t.)
No, you don’t understand. You-don’t-understand.
(What am I supposed to say?)
You wouldn’t know how a simple light-bulb filament could become more important than the sun …
How do you mean, Papa?
Burning twenty-four hours a day in your cell. They won’t turn it off. It starts to fuck up your mind. Your body clock, your sleep rhythms are decided by the sun. That’s why we sleep at night and when, if you remember, I was on night shifts, it took months to adjust to sleeping in the day.
Is that what they did to you, Papa? You haven’t talked about it … (I solicit.)
What to talk about? The fucking light bulb that becomes the sun and then, one day, they take it away — snap! Switch it off, leave you in darkness in these cavernous hellholes, so you end up so wanting the sun back you go mad in another way.
(Well, why wouldn’t I understand this?) I think I do understand. Or I’m trying. (Tell me more. Help me know this other Sándor.)
No you don’t. You only think you do. They hose you down with cold water and let you shiver all day and night in your damp cell, shivering so badly your teeth crack. Who left this room, this miserable allocation of dwelling place, but still my home, two years ago? Eh? Tell me it was a man, yes?
(Yes, a man.) I nod. Sure a man. (Like no other.)
Sándor Szabó, right? Who no one would dare mess with, who never — never — hurt anyone who didn’t hurt him. Right?
Right.
Who would walk down this street, the surrounding neighbourhood, and his name would be called out: Hey Szabó Sándor! You’ve got mischief written all over you! Who you going to upset today?
I remember the people calling out to you … They liked you.
Liked? They loved. Sándor Szabó was a man of the people. Of ordinary folk, all in the same boat. I was one of their lights. (But it got extinguished, Papa. Unless this is it starting to flame again.) I spoke up for them. At work — even when they demoted me from sheet-metal tradesman — qualified, I am, with papers to prove it — to dogsbody on the shop floor, what did I do but learn how to weld. And got so good even my cunt of a boss knew I was of value to his output figures and he had no choice but to promote me. You remember your papa coming home drunk and with food treats as if we were Habsburg aristocrats? Yes, you do. That is the man who left this house, is it not …?
He’s gone quiet. Abruptly. From that surge of memory to the other.
I understand what happened, what they did to you … Truly, Papa. I do. (This is Attila speaking. Look at me, into me, at your beloved son. Tell me the better part of you is still alive, just taking time to get over as if an illness. Tell me, Papa.)
Papa, they came unexpected. You were not to blame. It’s how they do it with everyone. Fucking ÁVH cunts.
Mentioning the Államvédelmi Hatóság by their initials has unwittingly had startling effect on my father. For he’s stepping slowly backward.
Á … V … H …, he says as slowly as his movement away. Állam … védel … mi … Hatóság. Turns his back to me and looks out the window, says the full name of the Secret Police once more, which, if you didn’t know, would sound like he was savouring: Állam … védel … mi … Hatóság.
Then he puts on a voice: Államvédelmi Hatóság officers here! Come to arrest you, stupid citizen of Magyar. We are ÁVH, short for God. We’re life and death, preferably the latter. Heil the Hungarian Motherland! Heil all us Magyar Hitlers! He turns this face to me.
A face announcing its own demise, and it says in this hollow tone: The Á
vós did this to me, son … (Near to crying.) The fucking Ávós did this …
At least he called me son. It’s been months. Helps me understand the painful sight before me. (The son knows who did it to you, Father. I just need to get it figured out in my mind how to take myself to the same place: of no limits, no mercy therefore, so I might cope better than you when my turn surely comes. For I am going half mad with holding back.)
Papa …? Hear I you again …? (Just a whisper of the old will do.)
But he’s shaking his head. No. No.
No. (No?) No, that man can never be again. (Is he pleading then, for me to learn strength so that none can lay claim to my soul?) His jaw is trembling again. One day, Attila Szabó, I will leave a legacy.
I believe him, even when the evidence staring wildly and sadly in the same instant says don’t. I believe because I want to believe. I believe because I hear hatred and patience inside me shuffle to make room for each other, smiling like old friends.
THOSE BOYS ARE coming at us again and I’ve had enough. We’re two facing three. A couple of streets from home. The leader is asking Béla in a sneering way, Where is this fucking uncle in the Ávós? Béla is not answering; he has lost his voice.
Béla should never have threatened them using a fictitious uncle in the ÁVH. We should have answered their threats as we have been taught — ten to one. Ten to one. Three weeks they’ve taunted us. Now here they are again, and this time they mean business.
I look at my brother and tell him without words, let’s do it. But I see a stranger looking back at me, or maybe not as much a stranger if I were honest and take my mind back a little while. Still, it is a sickening sight to see Béla like this, so raw, so exposed, more than naked.
I can see this gives the leader more confidence. I am very scared for a brief moment, and resentful and ashamed that Béla’s brought this about by bullying the leader’s younger brother. But it’s too late for thinking about that now. This is a fight about to start.
Then it all changes: in the leader’s eyes, I am seeing not just into his inner being, but at humanity summarised. As if a pecking order is being revealed to me, or a higher order still, of each person his and her own will. His place in the world. It is so clear I want to laugh out loud. I see how life works at the fundamental fighting level. I see an older and bigger boy who yet is afraid of my unblinking stare into his very soul. I see him at a crossroads, faced with choice, and he is trembling before it, even as he scowls and swears and calls our family name scum. Which he cannot do. I understand he is trying to dismiss his own fear, that the contempt is for himself and the real person he knows is about to be exposed. But no one insults our family name.
Then Béla breaks away from beside me, runs away, and our antagonists laugh and jeer and relish that they have only me to deal with.
Inside of me, by some miracle, I feel this certainty that they have made a mistake in their assumption. As for Béla’s action, right then I cannot indulge my hurt, my disbelief.
Leader comes towards me; yet I see his hesitancy, the truth of him. I see and measure the distance to his face, and the two shuffling steps I have to take to get within optimum striking range and how easy it is this passage from the younger boy to, I guess, the man.
His reactions to those two steps go through my mind, and I know what to do, from which angle to strike, no matter how he moves. Oh, and so quickly does this energy surge to the muscles, such understanding does it give to the animal in a human. His face becomes one of explanation even as my fist flies towards it: the surprise, the realisation, and perhaps a resigned acceptance that this is what he has always been, this is the moment that is his wall, which he can never go beyond. (Whilst I — yes, I: Attila Árpád Szabó — can fly.)
I hear the mantra: ten for one, ten for one. Except this boy hasn’t struck the first blow to form the equation. Then I think why he’s doing this, because he’s defending his younger brother, whom my brother has been bullying. That Béla’s told him we’ve got an uncle who’s high up in the ÁVH, of all the things to say. But then I look at him again, and I think, chump, you should have run with the strong until you could learn to be like them. And the strong advances on him.
His mouth opens to attempt a plea, make a statement of retraction, apology, a promise never to cross the Szabó brothers — no, this Szabó brother, me, Attila Árpád —never to insult him like he has, no matter that my brother started this. It’s too late. The arrow has left its bow.
It connects with his face. It sends signals straight up my arm into my brain that it is a soft face, one to which nature has not bestowed any deep quality of hardness or endurance, supported by a neck that does not understand how to ride a blow — take out some of its power — nor the will to endure it. The knuckles slamming into gristle and flesh and bone and inferior personality know all this. They know. He drops as if he’s been shot.
I turn to the next, and hit him without thought. My turn for surprise, for he does not stagger, just throws one back and it hurts. Not physical pain — that does not exist in any fight, except play fights — it is the pain of underestimating him, for assuming the leader is the main person, not the follower.
He has hatred on his face. Which brings from me this sense of huge outrage that he should bear such feeling for a stranger, as if against my very soul and its hope of some kind of immortality, some journey of destiny that this boy might have stopped me from going on. (Yes, that is how my mind worked at that time. That he could have ended my dream of being someone. Even a dead someone, I don’t care. Just as long I’m not a nobody in a land full of them.)
And so the return punch I throw comes from inside my gut, my deepest being, where Rage dwells. I hit him so hard I think I might have killed him; he drops like a stone to the pavement. And makes this moaning sound like I have never heard.
My friend Rage wants to finish him. I argue with Rage in myself, voice against voice, that Rage will become my enemy if I do further harm to this boy.
If I let Rage murder him.
My eyes are on this boy, his blood tracks quickly to the kerb edge and starts a path into the groove of a grey cobblestone. Centuries and centuries of spilled blood have these stone thoroughfares known. Now I have caused more to spill. But how dare he insult my family name, threaten me?
Rage is screaming inside my head that I am justified, that it is right to finish this bully. But my other voice is glad to have eyes distracted by the third boy running, and it brings with it reminder of my Béla running, my brother. So the Rage changes to something else. A hurt beyond deep, because even Rage would not murder a brother.
I hear a weeping, as though at my brother’s funeral. As clear as if the keening were coming from someone on the street, still echoing with my cowardly brother’s fleeing footsteps.
I have great need then for my father, when it is Mama we are closer to physically, of course we are. We know her better and for longer, if you take away our father’s prison absence, and what else it robbed of him and us. I have need for my papa’s embrace and only his. But he’s at work, a State slave in another factory being told the lie they’re doing it to better themselves. Besides, he comes home every night like the condemned man, who has nothing to live for. If I tell him of Béla, it might be the final straw.
I walk away in the direction Béla fled, to find him, scream at him, maybe hit him — no, how could I strike the person I’ve shared a bed with most of my life? But then how could he have left me like that? Wait till I see him.
A few steps and I’m going towards this youth looking at me, with an odd smile. I guess it’s to do with the fight he has just witnessed. I am still angry though, will fight him if that’s what he wants.
He says, My, you’re a Magyar warrior, all right.
Gives me a surge of pride, as if this stranger has described perfectly what I have done and what I am. A warrior. For my country that can never be, for a past therefore, that once was. For a race that can one day rise again. I feel all th
is.
He’s about Béla’s age, maybe a little younger but bigger. Smooth Hungarian complexion and the stark whiteness of eyes we all seem to have, with a pale-blue centre, another Hungarian gene, distilled from the mixing of Mongols, Turks, Germanic races, who have taken turns at occupying our country over the last eight hundred years. That is why we have never been, my father has told us, a unified society. I see it in this youth’s eyes, I guess my own, sometimes, of what our elders have said of our race: that for a people of such beauty, we’re a sad lot.
He tells me he lives not far from here and asks if I would like to go to his place to get cleaned up. So your mama doesn’t have a fit thinking you’ve had a run-in with the Ávós. Pauses, then mutters quite audibly, Fucking Ávós scum.
It could be a trick, but his risk. Which I shall make my risk, too. Sewerage, not just scum.
Up their arses, he says, with a rusty pipe.
A stick spiked with nails, I say.
How about a piece of hot steel? (I like his grin.) Oh, but can you look after yourself!
They insulted our family name.
Do you box?
Yes.
You ever see a boxer in power?
So, what are you saying?
Brawn doesn’t count. You either become a betrayer, or you use this: taps his forehead, gives this most intriguing smile. Next time, step them into an alley, or a dark place somewhere. Want to clean up at my place?
Clean up what?
Your nose is bleeding.
So it is. What about their noses? I look back and see the leader is up on his feet with that look of the defeated, like a dog, with sloped-down eyes and slumped shoulders; the other youth has been helped to his feet by an older man who is throwing accusatory looks this way. Fucking snitch, as if we need more like him.
You better get out of here before that old fellow calls a policeman.
Either my new friend is a fluke, or he’s setting me up. I go for the fluke and we duck around a corner, he introduces himself on the fast walk. Pogány Pál.