by Alan Duff
Other posters have single demands in large letters: WITHDRAW RUSSIAN MILITARY! PENAL AND ECONOMIC REFORM IMMEDIATELY! MOSCOW RECOGNISE HUNGARIAN INDEPENDENCE. DISBAND THE ÁVÓS — NOW!
Students and schoolkids pin notices to trees, starting to shed leaves, to warn of winter on its way; they stick them to lamposts, on walls, on buildings, anywhere that will hold paste and paper. Leaflets are handed out, thousands of heads lower to read what they say, and lift in gladness. The people have had enough.
Pretty young Hungarian girls make their own definition of what is happening by tripping along with tri-coloured crèpe paper trailing behind. It could be a party, or mass release of prisoners being celebrated.
Trams are halted everywhere, unable to progress through the crowd. Halted traffic can never be the vehicles of the average citizen; we do not own cars, feeding ourselves is difficult enough. We see the confusion and the fear of this privileged car-owning class as they abandon their vehicles rather than invite question from an openly challenging citizenry. Though it is hardly violently hostile.
Parliament Square is vast, though we fill it to overflowing. Yet still that building seems to impose its dark will on us, daring the people to believe they could be a challenge to its might.
The call goes up, demanding demoted former Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, to come and address the crowd, since they trust Nagy, even though he is the faithful Communist puppy dog. They know he is nonetheless a good man.
Speakers take turns on megaphones to amplify their demands. To hear such talk in this spot is unheard of, and yet the single overwhelming feeling is one of abandon, joy let loose; not dangerous anarchy about to go mad. Traditional folk songs break out frequently.
I see Aranka’s reflected joy breaking through her private walls of hatred and mistrust of nearly everyone since Colonel Friss’s arrival in her life, both our lives. I see and think it comes too soon, this joy, even as it laughs and cheers and claps and sings and dances all around us.
I want to grab her and shake her, tell her: Aranka, stay on guard. We must always stay on guard. This is only the good part. Ask why we are protesting in the first place, then think of the very same oppressors coming to crush this.
I pull at her sleeve to ease back from the centre, back to the edges of this unbelievable gathering. She is reluctant but comes anyway, we have this unspoken understanding that whoever of us is with the strongest instincts takes priority. To move through the crowd is a task in itself, like swimming through mud.
We wait out the afternoon like everyone else, part of something and yet not knowing what it is. Not one with a desire to go home. No thought on such a fine day that anything could go wrong, even though we are doing something we have never done before. Evening comes and the crowd remains in high spirits. And still the authorities have not come out with violent retort.
Imre Nagy makes a brief appearance, but those close enough to hear his words are disappointed and say he must have had Soviet heavies standing in the shadows behind him, watching what he said. It could be that it wasn’t even him for it is impossible to see from where we are.
Stars come out in all their best glory, an auspicious sign from the heavens. People carry newspapers and the pamphlets rushed to them by the students, bearing the same demands they have been echoing all afternoon.
Suddenly the street lights go out and Parliament plunges into darkness. The government bastards have turned off the electricity! Now they’re going to mow us down!
Panic might be the next moment, except no one does, only a collective movement of uneasiness at what might happen next in this sudden dark gloom cast over us.
The square is but silhouetted hats and heads, above them the building outlines, church spires, domes, square edges, and stars above.
I want to pull Aranka further back, expecting that at any moment all hell will break loose. Then I’m ashamed at myself when I see a burst of flaming light, and soon it’s scores and then this whole world is lit up, by pamphlets and newspapers in rolls set alight. And held aloft to the fires in the heavens.
I wish Pál were here, to share our marvel at the human spirit like this: a single body of fifty thousand or more, in a single act of holding torches of burning paper to the sky, to the authorities.
When we hear a call go out that we’re to move to the Magyar Rádió building in Bródy Sándor Street next, it feels like we have taken another step down some irrevocable path. We know why the radio station has been chosen: to get the demands broadcast nationwide.
I’m excited as hell and my survival instincts seem to be reassured. Until I look up and find the eyes of an old woman, as if specifically and only for me, staring from a second-floor window, face lit from below, perhaps a candle, a kerosene lamp. A woman with knowing that says: you are doomed, unless you heed this face, this warning from a complete stranger, you are doomed, young man.
I don’t mention the woman to Aranka, nor know why I don’t. But I feel vulnerable. I wish I had my gun. I wish I could put meaning to this night by using it against Friss. Or better, Aranka use her gun to bring the man to an end, this night to a beginning.
The pace of the march has picked up, taken on a different kind of urgency, for there is anger in those shouts ahead, of a people in demand but now had enough of saying it in a reasonable voice.
Where will they ambush us? Will we hear the rumble of lorries giving us time to run, go home and come back with our guns? Why does this night feel as if it is going to last forever, when no night can, even less so in this country? Why?
Coaches arrive, full to the brim with students, ordinary citizens; clearly commandeered from the city authorities. The outpouring is turning extraordinary. I want to be armed even more.
Bródy Sándor Street is much narrower than the Museum Boulevard it branches off. Hardly a dozen paces wide, it’s more like a tunnel offshoot, an entrance to quite another world; there, a cobbler’s shop, a shop window with second-hand furniture, a hairdresser’s sign — small privately owned businesses the State allows to eke out a living in an otherwise wholly owned and controlled State apparatus. Old roller shutters, shadows of door recesses, figures without detail in a throbbing mass of energy, surging down a danger-ridden tunnel.
The closeness magnifies everything and yet reduces it at the same time. This is a place of high vulnerability, not heaven or even a rainbow at the end. Or why else would I be with this sense of dread?
So many young people are here, as if it is more their protest than the older generation’s. As if this is a protest to protect the last of youth’s right of innocence.
I see the distinct difference, between the students and the rough working-class youths who have never had idealistic dreams, just a normal expectation of even half a decent life, some relief from this relentless poverty. One side demands increased funding for university study, whilst the other, in the same surging march, bellows for an end to bread queues. A boot smashes through a window, and his fellow working-class mates delight and look for their own to shatter, whilst the others look on like well-behaved school prefects, not wanting to upset the authorities. We think we’re at the same party, in the same verbal fight, when we’re not. I can see it, feel it, that my lot is spoiling for an actual fight and the other to have their articulate demands heard.
I find one student stopped, pushed himself tight against a building, he does not want to go on. I ask him if he’s okay, and he says, No, this is not going to change a thing.
Makes me suddenly unreasonably angry. I shout in his face: Then go home and read about it in tomorrow’s State newspapers, read their version of the truth, of facts, you fuck.
Aranka pulls me away. You cannot make a frightened man brave, Attila. We leave this wimp to shiver in his own coward’s juice.
Word comes that the radio building has locked its security gates and there are several protesters locked inside the compound. The crowd does not like this; makes sound that is less cheerful than earlier, more of a low groan, no, deeper than tha
t: a growl, a threat.
Now there is a commotion, of several lorries trying to force their way into the street. And voices screaming, Fuck off, Ávós! We feel the change, like a sharp temperature drop, a chill wind racing down the street. We see a flash of object hurled from somewhere and a brick bounces off an Ávós lorry bonnet. We hear the roar of the crowd’s approval.
More bricks fly. The lorries halt and start backing away. Glass breaks somewhere. Someone has thrown thunderflash crackers at the reversing vehicles. The cry goes up for Ávós blood, though none dares make a rush at the departing trucks.
Now I’m desperate for my gun, for I would have made a move for those fleeing Ávós. But they get clear and the crowd calls in glee that the dreaded Ávós have scarpered like kicked dogs.
An army lorry emerges from a side street, and the crowd is unsure where the army’s loyalty lies. They call out patriotic urgings to the soldiers to remember who and what they are. Their answer comes when the lorry stops and several soldiers leap out from the back and start handing out weapons; tommy-guns and rifles and grenades — how can this be?
In ecstatic delight, people scramble to gain a weapon, and I find myself in possession of a rifle. I prefer a tommy-gun and I call out if anyone will swap with me.
A middle-aged man steps forward from the semi-gloom, seems some of the lights have been knocked out. I will, young man. Hands me a tommy-gun. You will put this to better use than I.
I shake his hand. Except I know nothing about tommy-guns. I go up to a soldier and ask him how they operate; get a lesson on the street, and he slips two boxes of cartridges into my jacket pocket, kisses me on each cheek, like we’re already brothers in arms. Naturally, I’m flushed with pride, with sense of manhood and that this is my time. Even though I have no idea of what will happen, if this gun is ever going to be used. (The gun at home, definitely.)
The soldier is swallowed by the grateful crowd; women are kissing him and his fellow soldiers, men shake their hands, the tough youths give stern expressions of gratitude, more interested in what power they hold now in their young hands. I must look like them: girded loins with none to battle.
Aranka has gained a rifle and we’re about to do something to symbolise what this means, except we are suddenly not sure what. She says, Well, it means something. Which this night or tomorrow will show.
Bródy Sándor Street echoes with taunting and derisive calls at another attempt by the Ávós to take control, three lorry-loads of them. It is their arrogance, assuming a mere hundred or so can dominate several thousand.
Well, the unthinkable is happening: the people are not only challenging but laughing at them. We hurl bricks and torn-up cobbles, force the trucks to an ignominious retreat yet again.
I know this isn’t the time to be firing my newly acquired gun. I get a thought of Béla and wonder if he would have taken the chance to be armed. Up at the radio station there’s lots of shouting, but it’s counter-manded by the harsher shouting of, it is clear, the station’s Secret Police, perhaps bolstered by Ávós come in the back way.
All we want is our legitimate demands broadcast on public radio! a voice yells.
Then a woman screams; moments later, a delayed ripple of movement a couple of paces back. Then the sound of gunfire. So rapid it can only be tommy-guns. Stutters, more like mechanical coughs, and absorbed by this narrow, human-packed street that’s little more than a lane.
Voices answer the stutter in roaring outrage, fury. Men bull forward towards the site of firing, in a blind rage, some armed and yelling to be let at these murderous bastards.
We make our way closer to the station, where automatic gunfire sounds like rapid coughing. We see a space cleared in the crowd, hear the distress. A torch-beam puts part of a teenage girl curled on her side in wan spotlight; the blood pooled at her mid-level is black even under the wavering torch-light. She has the still pose of death. Nothing matters and yet it makes everything matter. (I have seen this before.)
In a shop doorway is a woman, pregnant, sitting up with splayed legs, showing the slump of her stomach, her dead unborn child, like its mother, is dead. Everywhere there is moaning and angry words, useless like slow bullets in a dream.
The tommy-guns continue their collective stutter and the screams they cause are still strangely muffled. The crowd is divided, between those who want to express their rage and those trying to get out of the way of this murderous attack.
Now green explosions of light, one after the other, of smoke bombs. I can’t get a clear view of the Ávós murderers, let alone a chance to shoot. Anyway, Aranka Pálfia tugs at me, claiming priority, to leave. She has to shout in my face to snap me from my murderous trance.
We leave the firefight behind us. Running blindly, and yet drawn by the direction of others with a set purpose. Down one street, turn into another, hundreds heading the same way. This is chaos now when only minutes ago it had been mere mass, but peaceful, protest. It has changed. The definition has changed and will keep changing.
From one mayhem to another: Stalin Square, where a large crowd has gathered. The bright glow of oxyacetylene torch-light reflects on bystanders’ faces. Grievances are being shouted, for once in public, ordinarily such anarchy would be punished by death, at best a long prison sentence. They’re cutting down Stalin’s statue, at which I spat upon over three years ago.
Seven metres of metal image, the moustachioed monster smiles — for now — down at the people, furiously hacking away at his feet. A noose is tied, fittingly, around Stalin’s metal neck, and three mobile cranes are attached to the ropes.
Stalin topples! He topples! And Communism with it! Down comes the dictator’s exaggerated image crashing to the road. The mob sets upon it — as if it were Joseph Stalin himself — with sledgehammers, axes and crowbars. Their fury creates a clanging that could be death tolling for not just dictatorship, but oppression forever in this country.
Everyone is either running like excited children to the next incident, or they stand around with gleeful, but disbelieving, expressions. Many have rifles or tommy-guns slung over shoulders, and a voice dares to make the final definition of this warm, autumn night: The revolution has finally come!
Rise up, Hungarian people! Rise up!
We, the unlikely pairing of male and female divided by age, stand looking at each other. Pálfia Aranka and Szabó Attila. At the same time in the same street a mob pushes at a tram to topple it; heaving by sheer numbers the impossible weight and bulk onto its side.
Our two fists punch the air, our other hands clasp tight at the miracle delivery of armed hope. People all over are doing the same as us, punching the air in disbelief and triumph, drunk on this event.
Attila, she says as we march up the street. I do believe this makes us revolutionaries. Smiling — no, beaming she is. As am I.
At one stage, she stoops and picks up something, grabs my wrist, causes me sharp pain, blood to flow. Does the same to herself: cuts a wrist with a piece of broken glass. Then brings our wrists together. The two of us join, fuse, in a street filled with clamour and sweet calamity, bleeding a pact into one another’s bodies from a shard of broken window glass.
Then … she kisses my lips. I stir, but know to keep control, not misunderstand it. It was a kiss of comrades in arms. Could not be more apt for this moment. (If only she would kiss me for myself.)
A JEEP-LOAD of Ávós are surrounded by scores of citizens yelling at them. Someone invites — no, dares — them to strip off their uniforms and join the people. One starts stripping, but the mob jeer that he’s showing his true colours. He can’t win, not this one. Not ever.
Another begs for mercy, told he showed none, why should he be given it? Ludicrously, he answers: Because you are citizens, with a higher moral sense than I. Or what I was previously.
We don’t know whether to laugh or kill him on the spot.
We see this man reduced from position of power to its opposite. A macabre play with the audience turned into centre-stage
actors; in derisive laughter and taunts and fixed faces of hatred and murderous glee, they pull the men out of their vehicle.
I press closer through the mob. They look so ordinary; there are no officers here like Friss, these are just nobodies. I feel a bizarre kind of sympathy wash over me, over my earlier intentions. For a moment I think I’m looking at victims themselves, like us.
But then Rage comes furiously forward, stabbing a finger at me, at these men in their Ávós uniforms. Ávós! They are Ávós! And you are a fool for even thinking mercy.
So it is I, Attila Szabó, who throws a closed fist into the face of the nearest Ávós. I, Sándor’s son, the late Sándor Szabó, who starts this attack.
The man staggers backwards; he looks surprised at, I think, my youth — fuck him. This is man to man. Though when the mob howl their approval of my actions, I do realise it’s one-sided, a reversal for once. I hit him again, then drag him by the shirt front off the ground and whack him several times. I’m not going mad, I catch Aranka, her face in calm, narrow-eyed approval, and even her astonishing beauty registers, even as I feel this Ávós’s flesh and gristle and breaking bone surrender to my knuckles. I’m in a state of perfect clarity.
Some of mob start in on him, kicking, kicking, screaming as they do, though I don’t join this; my work is done, at least with this one it is.
A wider ring encircles the central mass of kicking, screaming men — and several women, a couple of teenage girls — to prevent escape for the other Ávós. I see this now as if I’m hovering above it.
I know this scenario since I have dreamed it and dreamed it, of justified men — and not a few women — inflicting violence back at those who have done the same to us for years. Right now I know all. And yet, somewhere far back in me, I know nothing. But it is not a darkness, rather a place where words, where pleading reason, fall on deafest ears.
Three men pluck out another Ávós and drag him off into the darkness, down an alley. I am suddenly aware of the weight of the gun slung over my shoulder, wondering how I threw punches without it hindering me. I have that sight of the Ávós man taken down the alley, and sense this killing weapon, its power to restore justice. I hear them doing it with bare hands, feet; then the throttling sound of his life being squeezed to an end by strong hands.