by Alan Duff
Pál is laughing and yet he’s got a troubled frown. Then he says, Do you think it’s about good versus evil?
I say I don’t know. What would I know about such a weighty subject? And yet inside I think I do.
If it is, I say, what are we — good?
Of course good.
But do good people think about murdering?
It’s not murder when it’s Ávós. Listen, fucker, your old man’s just out. And my old man is still in gaol, as if you need reminding. So what’s this shit about it being murder when they’re Ávós and government lackeys?
(I remember Grandma Lili saying, You don’t replace one poison with another. By which she meant our family talk about freedom and what wonderful change it would bring. We were all shocked, Mama told Grandma she shouldn’t be such a cynic. But Grandma said, Dreams don’t come true just because you dream them.)
If we do ever get the chance to murder them, when do we stop, Pál? (Because I fear I might not want to stop. That Rage will make full claim on me.)
When the last one is dead on the ground, Attila Szabó.
But there are other officials, government people, who also oppress us.
Then we kill them, too.
(For some reason Rage is absent from this talk of killing, of revenge.) Some are women, Pál Pogány …
No. You mean sluts. Wives, lovers, mistresses of murderers. Why would you show mercy to them?
Pál, we are dreaming … aren’t we?
Are we? His face is stone.
Shit, Pál, we’re kids — kids on the wrong side.
Are we? Who is just a kid in this country? Who has a chance of a normal kid’s life? Not us, Szabó Attila. Not us.
His words hit home. And he hasn’t finished.
Are we just kids, Tilla? What about our feeling destined, which we’ve talked about? What of fate throwing us together? I wasn’t supposed to be in the part of town where you had the fight. My tram broke down and so I walked.
How then, smart guy? He’s irritating me, getting under my skin, bothering me with that staring look of his.
Don’t ask me. All I know is, one day it will happen.
What will happen? You mean we’ll wake up and things will be the same or they’ll be worse?
Probably.
Probably what?
Worse.
So then what?
Destiny, my friend. Our destiny.
And he starts off down the hill, disappearing briefly into the shadow of the tall statue, its arm holding aloft an olive branch. Yet here we are talking the opposite of peace, and the liberation we dream of can only come, we know, through violent means. Which is hoping for the impossible when your enemy is your government.
IT’S AUGUST 1952, the day of my thirteenth birthday; hot and stuffy in our airless flat with windows and doors closed and locked, because my father is rightly paranoid. It doesn’t feel like a day to celebrate. I feel in transition but to nowhere, since there is no future.
A Sunday, Béla surprises me with a smoked sausage, but we know something’s lost between us. He hardly spends time in the house now, I think he might move out soon — I hope he does. Our parents are at home, though, and Papa remarks how the city used to sound with church bells, and so did the village he grew up in in the country. Now, with anti-Church Communism, they should be tolling the bells for those they execute every week.
He’s saying this to Mama when I walk into the kitchen, and I see Papa’s started early on hard liquor and I’m about to walk out in disgust, when he calls me.
Son …? (Did I hear right?) Your mama tells me it’s your birthday today. How old again? (As if he didn’t know.)
Fifteen, I test him.
Liar, he grins. A missing-tooth grin.
Why, how old did you think I was? You’ve been away two years.
I thought you were … he throws back the small tumbler of liquor, it’s progression pushes out his Adam’s Apple. He next lights a smoke and the way he sucks at it I could go up and punch him, spit my contempt, knock him off his chair, point him at Mama to see how she suffers so in dignified silence, whilst he drinks and sucks on cigarettes and wallows in his sorrow.
Face lost in a cloud of smoke, he says, I always thought of you as older, at any given time. Remember?
(Oh, I remember all right. I remember how whenever you gave me the compliment, of being a man before my time, it flooded me with great joy and pride. And determination never to let you down, never to disappoint.) Yeah. I shift my weight from one foot to the other. (A drinker now, is he?)
You got a twenty-year-old’s look in your eye. Are you a man yet?
Yes. (No, liar.) No. No, not in that way I’m not.
No hurry. He looks at Mama, who is glad to take his hint and leave the room. Though she’s no prude.
Yes there is, I say. Feeling embarrassed, kind of silly. But still, I wanted to say it.
The grin he gives back I do recognise, but am wary of accepting.
I looked everywhere for a present … one to suit a thirteen-year-old. Yet fitting for the young man of more maturity than those years. Understand?
I nod yes when I’m not sure what I’m meant to understand. His eyes fill up with tears. Is the prison experience refusing to let go of him? Or the drink?
He pulls a white handkerchief out of his pocket to, I expect, wipe his tears. Then I see it’s for me. My birthday gift.
(A handkerchief?) Thank you.
I bought it from a gypsy woman in the street. She was dirty. But look what fine embroidery, that’s hand-stitched edging. You don’t like it? You do? No, you don’t and I don’t blame you. Do I buy Budapest-embroidered handkerchief? — the hell I do. I buy from an outsider, a gypsy who understands what life is without rights. Without basic dignity as your right.
Then the tears spill, go down into his character grooves like a river tributary.
My youngest son reaches manhood and what do I give him but a fucking handkerchief — it is all I can give him. Some fucking all.
Papa, it’s all right, I promise you. Here, pass it to me, I want to look at it. Pass it to me … please?
He passes it. It was my intention to please him, except when it comes into my hand it feels like it was meant to be. Light of weight as can be expected, and yet with weight enough to state its own quiet presence, and maybe a subtle entity of its own.
Without shame, I hold it to my face, take in its scent, which is perfumed incense. And I smell gypsy hands that crafted it, cigarette smoke, garlic, dirt; sorrow too.
I smell my father’s smell in it, his loving hands, his broken heart and bowed spirit. I’m savouring it like some feast, a handed-down life experience. A life in itself.
I don’t care he’s staring with mistrust, or is insulted I might be sucking up to him or, worse, pretending to like it — I just don’t care. I only know that this gift of cloth somehow means more than any he could have given me. It’s smallness is what gives it importance, meaning.
It’s white, with red-looped edge stitching and a purple flower with a yellow centre, four green leaves, five tightly bunched red flower petals.
Don’t be sad, Papa. Be glad. I am. Thank you, Papa.
He gets up and puts his arms around me. I am sad because of my promise not to shed tears again. The cement in my wall has hardened. I am happy, I am joyful to see this partial return of my father. But I will never cry, not even in this loving embrace, a man seemingly back from his mental hell.
The smell of alcohol suggests weakness, defeat. He should not let himself be like this. He should not. But better to have back part of a man than none. (I still love you, Papa.) But I will not cry.
PÁL AND I cross over the bridge to Buda, the river dividing our city’s name into the two original settlements they were in historic times, before bridges spanned the Duna.
On the other side, the Gellért Hotel is being rebuilt after suffering heavy damage in the war. I remember vivid scenes of the night sky on fire with tank and mortar f
ire, and how it didn’t fit against the backdrop of stars, as the Germans made a last-ditch stand against the advancing Soviets and its allies.
The city was an endless sight of rubble and destroyed buildings, and I remember my father taking me and Béla through the streets and hardly speaking. We saw bridges blown up by the Germans before they departed, broken steel backs drowning in the Duna. Pontoon bridges took their place and I remember seeing the miracle of the bridges being re-created.
Now workmen repair the hotel’s stone balustrades, the bird and pyre motifs, and its world-famous spa baths that are said to be soon reopened to the public; not that poor boys think it might be for us. Certain to be one of the privileges for government officials.
Carved into the side of Gellért Hill right opposite is St István’s Cave Church, which used to house the Order of Pauline, until the Communists saw it as another means of imposing its rule over all Christian churches and soon they will be boarding it up. At school we are told early that God does not exist, so I cannot imagine that he does. Even if it does feel like only one side got to put their argument.
Pál’s parents are Catholic; some of it has rubbed off on him. He believes people should have a right of religious worship. He glares at the forcibly vacated church, says, Can’t you hear the sad chanting of the monks who once lived there, echoing in that grotto, mourning for themselves?
I can when put like that.
We walk along the river embankment, against the flow, against this suffocating life, but to no avail. Our bitterness walks alongside us like a taunting friend, and there is nothing we can do or say to answer him.
All down this side, along the hill-line that starts at Gellért, is Hungary’s history built into its edifices: castles; monuments; classical architecture; statues; each telling the lie of this city and nation — that we have progressed, as civilisation is meant to. When we’ve done no such thing. Even the river aids and abets the lie, a muddy blue seam of gentle curves, cleaving a city as though without pain. The river should be blood red. The buildings should be prisons, and wretched mental asylums and miserable catacombs.
We cut up a steep bank and head past the Gellért Monument, the figure of St Gellért holding aloft a cross, which we remark will soon be a Soviet red star. A curve of stone columns swept behind the murdered bishop’s statue, but to my eyes murder cannot be transfigured into this: the monument says nothing of the people. Of we, ordinary citizens, boys, looking out for our own Secret Police spying on us, ready to be stopped at any time and our identity papers demanded, questions asked, eyeing us as if cattle for the slaughter yards or lucky to be out grazing for another year.
On to the Liberation monument, our own history re-written by our latest conquerors, the Soviets. A statue of a Russian soldier at its base, and a plaque, bearing the names of Russian war casualties. All part of the claim they liberated us — from what and to what?
We know the story, that this huge Lady of Liberation statue, sculpted by a Hungarian, Zsigmond Stróbl, was intended to celebrate the memory of István Horthy, son of the Regent, who mysteriously disappeared on the eastern front in 1943. But a Russian commander spotted it in the sculptor’s studio and reassigned it for Soviet purposes.
We view Parliament building, a magnificent sight of the central dome — if you emptied it of current rulers and replaced them with decent leaders. Partly modelled on London’s Houses of Parliament, we say it’s like having a slice of England but without the democracy. All before us a city is laid out, church spires and steeples, sculptures, domes, the red-orange tile rooftops of which Pál and I have come to know so many, everywhere prominent landmarks that should make us feel proud. Instead, they seem like precious possessions stolen from us, no different to the statue towering above us.
For hours we roam this park, seeing citizen snitches on the prowl, giving us suspicious glances, and Pál with the foresight to have brought notebooks and pencils to make out we’re on a study outing.
We’re stopped by a trio of Ávós minions, pretending they’re more important than that. Papers! What are you doing here! Where do you live! Give us those notebooks, see what you have written! Every question yelled. Every look showing menace out of all proportion to who and what we are. Which is schoolboys, though experienced at making out we’re more innocent than angels. They send us on our way with shoves, young men but a few years older than us.
Couples push their young children in squeaky cane prams handed down by their mothers, since there is no money to buy new, nor shops they can go to if they did have the means. Old men sit on benches staring into a past that never really was, every Hungarian knows that; we’re a screwed-up nation. Our elders say we’re a nation of clever people, but with fatal character flaws. Though some of us love being Magyar, if only we could have our version of it.
We go the long way home, through the hilly streets of the new ruling class, where before in these better abodes, some of them mansions, dwelled doctors, lawyers, architects and business people, the educated, the affluent. Now, the order is reversed; the old class has been shipped out to the country or gaoled, transported to Siberia on class enemy charges. The poacher class, of Communist party members and bureaucrats and ÁVH, have crept up the lawns and moved into the mansions.
Look how the wives in their stolen residences act the lady, the affected airs, the contempt and naked suspicion they give their own working-class youths daring to walk through their domain.
Look at every house with a guard dog, fearful the rightful owners will come to reclaim their homes, take back their seized status. To keep us, formerly their own kind, out.
You’d show mercy to these fat sluts? Pál reminds me of a discussion we had a while back. As we come under the hostile stare of a large woman on a front doorstep, gross in her silk-clad obesity, the fishwife pretending to be the aristocrat, with a German Shepherd on a leash, the faintest hard smile indicating she’s holding all the cards.
If I had a gun, I’d shoot the dog then shoot her, the Ávós wife bitch. (I’m letting Rage take over here.)
How do you know she’s an Ávós’s wife? We all know they recruit dumb thugs to the Ávós. Her husband’s probably high up in the Communist Party. Pál’s probably on the mark.
Or the Ministry of the Interior, I add. Which we joke means the people’s interiors — as in having our guts for garters any time they choose. Then I say, Shoot them with what? Dream on. To a Pál whose face darkens as if I have given personal insult.
He points at me: One day soon we’re going to change that situation.
Oh yeah, sure. I’m not doubting my friend, just provoking him to go into action and acquire guns. Tell me how.
The buildings we trespass into, why not go where guns might be kept? We could find out where an Ávós man lives, or someone in the army. There are drunk Russians in our streets at night, we could roll one. That’s how we’ll get guns.
Then what do we do with them?
Why, shoot people — shoot our fucking oppressors.
We’re two and they’re the government, and they’ve got the Soviets behind them.
All right, all right, then we keep the guns — and killing — for the day that must come. Do you believe it will, Tilla Szabó?
Yes. Now I do. (Believe or roll over and die, Attila Szabó.)
THE TRAM CAN’T move fast enough, and it’s unusually buzzing with excitement, barely able to hold itself in check. Everyone’s whispering and murmuring on the same subject. A ticket inspector beams and shows where his feelings lie by simply strolling through, not bothering to check our tickets. A man whistles in an obvious way of exaggerated happiness. I feel like applauding him, for the tune is our national anthem.
They are saying: Stalin is dead. He is dead!
We get off one stop earlier, Pál and I, as we can’t be too cautious. This talk of Stalin’s death could bring at any moment a massive reaction from Rákosi’s thugs to show us he is still in control. For what the people are saying is, Rákosi, being Stal
in’s bootlicker, won’t last long.
We head for Stalin Square. I wonder aloud if Stalin’s death might be the end of schoolchildren’s compulsory attendance at Russian-made films. Our theatre centre is in the Corvin district, where we are forced to watch these propaganda movies of low quality, meant to convert us to Communism and to glorify the Soviet Union.
We pass the vacant space of land where Rákosi had the Regnum Marianum Church destroyed, mere remainder of brick debris. To the statue of the Russian who has decided all our lives since the Communists took over. We’re looking up at the giant grey-metal representation — why do they make it three times taller than a real man? — the moustached face, the greatcoat, the eyes ignoring us to look supreme over our city, another foreign invader. It was made from melted statues of Hungarian heroes, the ultimate insult.
Pál and I argue over who is first. He claims seniority, I claim greater anger. We both end up doing it at the same time: spitting at the statue. Joyful in the act, oblivious to the consequences. I want a revolution to start, on the back of Stalin’s death. I want freedom.
Szabadság! Pál hisses triumphantly through clenched teeth.
Free? I’m thinking he’s taking Stalin’s death a bit far.
For now, yes. We are free for this day, or these few hours, Szabó Attila.
We walk — no, we stride — back to the city centre, at every step seeing, hearing the people’s excitement. But soon we’re seeing increased military vehicles on slow patrol, and ÁVH in their cars in menacing mode, daring any to think we might challenge their rule.
At home we find my parents in private celebration. They have the radio on a station playing Hungarian folk music, and they’re dancing an old-fashioned folk dance, which Pál and I find quaint. I’m ecstatic at seeing my father this close to normal in a long time. His dance tempo is so full of joy he loses time; and for a while looks like a child excited beyond control. A child I very much like.
We leave them to it. Before Béla might arrive and put a damper on this momentous day.