by Alan Duff
Then I have another frightened Ávós before my eyes. A handsome, elegantly attired man steps forward, he’s in his early thirties, could be Péter Pálfia before the State re-classified him to a lesser class, wearing a white silk scarf, dark corduroy trousers, fashionable spring jumper, smart shoes, and a most calm expression. He raises a pistol to the Ávós’s head.
The Ávós’s eyes greet death bereft of courage: his mouth falls open, dribble rolls out his mouth, he’s saying, Please, please sir, in this tone I want to end myself with a bullet. No man should let himself fall that far.
The gentleman says to the Ávós, All your years of causing such suffering. Now it is your turn. Not in a raised voice, not emotional, not shrill. Like a judge, reading out an obligatory sentence of death for a capital crime: making innocents suffer, murdering them. Then the gentleman fires.
Now the mob are a coven of warlocks and witches. What they’ve changed to, in the instant after the man’s summary execution. It alarms me and maybe even frightens. As if a mirror has been thrust in all our faces. When I can’t afford to be thinking like this — we are in the right. One of these arseholes murdered my father.
Turning to take direction from Aranka, I find her wearing the same mask of expressionless indifference as the handsome man — until you look into her eyes and see something fundamental being resolved. Justice done.
Now a huge bearded man lumbers forth and makes a parting in the mob and plucks out the last living Ávós, firstly in a grip of jacket collar, which turns to a bear-hug from behind, and he carries the man across the street, to a tiny park area, promising the man: Ávós dog, you have an interesting last few moments of life ahead.
We warlocks and witches march over to the park and form around the giant patriot, and we heft the man by the ankles, dangling him from a tree bough with rope somehow produced on the spot, as if someone has carried it for years hoping for this day to come.
The Ávós hangs upside-down, face at less than knee height. The giant tells us to step back. To let, it transpires, an old woman shuffle forward. But then not old, nor woman, nor mother nor grandmother nor even someone’s wife. This is Widow who steps forward. This is Victim whose features are contorted beyond anything those close to her would recognise; her teeth are bared, lips drawn back in a snarl. And she draws back a skinny, sock-covered ankle then brings forward an almighty kick in the Ávós’s face.
It is more the whip of dress material that has the meaning in this act. Since the garment was never designed, nor dreamed to know whipped action like that. It’s in the way she keeps her balance, as if finishing a rather good football kick.
The Ávós’s shirt is fallen down around his face, but the features are visible where the buttons have been torn off. Blood spurts forth from his nose, where the small and aged limb has kicked. The old woman looks at what she has done, tries to make another snarl but throws hands to her face instead, bends forward, and her real self starts sobbing inconsolably.
A younger woman leads her away, telling her she is a courageous patriot and to remember all the victims of the Ávós. Quickly do those words work their magic, and the woman stops, turns, and spits curses at the upside-down man.
But then a voice is heard clearly to ask: Good suffering fellow citizens, but do we do the right thing? The voice of a pious man. By the skull-cap, a Jew, and anyway the distinctively non-aggressive demeanour of his inscrutable race, with serenity and endurance painted on like armour. But hardly a fellow citizen, if the nation guilty of sending them off to the German extermination camps would admit it. This man must have greater survival skills, especially that he now puts such a question to a half-crazed mob like this. Yet I see none who want to turn the attack on him.
The right thing by whom? Or what? Ourselves, or the God who deserted us all these years, Jew man? someone replies.
Oh, don’t talk nonsense, another pipes up. To desert someone you first have to exist. And God does not exist. Only the righteous people do, taking back control of their lives.
They turn on the Jew. You, Jew, should understand suffering, yet you stand there implying mercy for the unmerciful?
I am putting a fundamental question of morality. For is it murder being done here?
I, Attila, answers this. No! It is the opposite of murder — but life we give! To those these Ávós would have killed. Go off to your synagogue and have this debate with God by yourself.
(Fuck him. Though inside, I think he got to me.)
But not so much it lessens the spring in our step, as Aranka and I walk home, sporadic bursts of gunfire sounding like trumpet bursts and the night sky promising tomorrow as a most glorious day.
AIMLESS, DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY citizens roam the streets at will, so many of them armed: rifles, pistols, sten and tommy-guns, ammunition belts strung at diagonals around bodies, some so young they look ridiculous. Eleven-year-olds tote rifles that nearly knock them over. Young girls burdened with guns taller than themselves, though one look at their expressions tells they mean business.
Somewhere a town clock strikes three a.m. Normally another hour left to the Ávós for their reign of terror. Now it is their turn to be murdered, beaten as we walk for home, to grab just a few hours of sleep lest we miss a moment of this unimaginable revolt actually happening.
Inside our building, the entrance foyer feels like my road has ended, the stairs taking her life away from me. Mine being right there, behind door 1B.
So quiet, too, as if the sleeping residents do not know what has taken place. My mother is behind that door — I’ve not given her a thought this long night. (Sorry, Mama. But I think you’d understand.)
Just me and her. And I hope what I’m seeing is Aranka’s own hesitation, as if this is not the right conclusion, to say goodnight and part.
Aranka? (Aranka what, Attila? Can I sleep with you? I promise my desire is the opposite of Friss’s cruel violation of you.)
Her lifted right eyebrow asks, yes, you were about to ask me something?
Shift my weight from foot to foot, awkward, embarrassed. Been some night, hasn’t it?
Oh yes, she says. They’ll come to call this The Night of the People, yes?
For sure they will. — Aranka? Shall I walk you up the stairs?
You don’t have to.
I would like to.
Sure. Come. She takes my hand.
At the top of the stairs she is puffing, just a little, flicks back her hair and lifts a face.
Oh yes, Attila Szabó. Some day it’s been. You know, I don’t think it’s sunk in … what we did back there … They were Ávós …
And now they’re dead.
We shared our blood …
We did. And spilled theirs.
I have only a stare left — and forlornly soliciting it must be, too.
A blood oath that makes us closer than sister and brother, she says.
I swallow. I’m so hard down there I’m sure it shows. She’s looking, thankfully, only into my face. I ask myself if I should feel ashamed at wanting a woman who has been subject to what she has. Yet no guilt follows. I do not have the same intentions as Zoltán Friss.
Some night, Attila Szabó. Now we must get some sleep, see what daylight brings.
(It could bring you, lovely woman. If only you’d say so.) I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep, I say with one last lunge of hope.
You had better, or you’ll have nothing for what follows. She grabs me by the wrists. Attila, we are revolutionaries! Who would have thought?
(A revolutionary who feels more like a rejected lover.) I kiss my comrade good night.
I find Papa in my brief time of sleep. He is pointing at light switches and lights and urging me to go into this tunnel, but I must choose the right switches. I ask him why and he says I must just trust myself. Keep your eyes out for the lights that will lead you, son. You have never needed them more.
I’m crying with wanting to hug him, to tend to that head wound of his shot-out eye. To tell him he died w
ith his manhood returned. But he keeps moving away, and whilst my world becomes brighter with light, my dear papa moves into a darkness to become an outline. Then just a sense of a presence. A voice echo. Then he is no more. The light switches on in my head. I wake to Pál standing right there, and Mama.
Pál has a rifle slung over his shoulder; he was part of last night, too. I know by his face, it’s glowing. He can’t wait to get going. But first I must explain things to Mama.
But she has understanding and, she says, ears of her own. I heard you come home. You walked Mrs Pálfia up to her flat, good boy.
I’m complicit in the murder of last night, yet to my mother still a good boy. And if only she knew of my yearning.
My mother will go to see people she knows and trusts, find out what role she can play. I’ll use a gun if I must, of course I shall. It would be a pleasure to shoot dead an Ávós or two. But then again I’m a woman and we ought to be about life. I shall heed my friends’ advice.
Upstairs, Aranka is dressed and ready, pointing out that we have no food for breakfast.
The city we emerge into is unrecognisable. Gunfire comes in bursts and explosions. When yesterday we were innocents on a protest march, now everywhere citizens walk around openly armed. It is as I saw yesterday, as much an uprising of disgruntled youth of my class as all citizens. This is a fight about fundamentals: food, better housing, better work conditions, no more Communist propaganda, and no more Secret Police.
We’re armed as though all dressed up for a party and nowhere to go. So we move around the streets relying on incident or instinct to guide us. We make jokes about being revolutionaries who might have to ask our oppressors for directions to the firefight.
Down by the river we sight our oppressors: T54 Soviet tanks blocking the bridges and lining the embankment. See a tank barrel lift and erupt with fire into a building. Smoke puffs from numerous windows in the same building and two along from it there’s return fire. But like in a dream: they’re firing blanks; against such targets they may as well be blanks. The game has started.
People are running everywhere. I’m trying to adjust my thoughts, my psychological state to accepting this is not a brawl, but war to the death. Then a tank, impossibly, lifts up off the ground for a brief explosive moment, comes down transformed to twisted shape like a drastically changed facial expression. I think its fuel tank was hit by a rocket.
Crew are scrambling from the burning beast. We fire at them and they are flopping, sagging in the throes of being hit. We’re killing the bastards. And it feels almost like nothing.
Yet a moment later, when we’re racing for cover, it feels like everything that matters in this world. We’ve killed the bastards. Shot them dead. Claimed them with revolutionaries’ bullets instead of wasted breath of resentment and hatred.
Pressed against a wall the three of us, tank machine-gun fire a cacophony around us, stone pieces fly, windows shatter, and we’re grinning. Hey Aranka? Pál? I think it’s started.
And I get laughter, wild laughter, back from the pair.
So cool-headed, I can make melodrama of this. You want fucking war, I say to that enemy, seeking us out by blast and hope method, we’ll give you fucking war. And I step around the building and fire a short burst of my tommy-gun. Aimed at nothing except my life, all of our lives, that they never let us have. Until now, seized by our own hands.
It doesn’t take long to figure that information has found its own routes: word of mouth, telephone link-ups, observers stationed on tall buildings relaying what they see, university students and ordinary schoolkids, acting as runners to get information hither and thither through this city, changing by the minute.
Tram wires are being cut down, to entangle the Soviet tanks. Paving stones are being torn up and piled into mounds of obstruction, as are trams turned over and used as shields for freedom fighters to fire against the tanks and lorry-loads of roaming Ávós. The noise of tank fire is constant and when it is close compresses the air. In comparison our small-arms reply is just chatter.
Nowhere can we find any centre of organised revolt. Moving on the run, we cover a large part of the central city, and it is the same everywhere: spontaneous revolt. Individuals, small groups, families, and all of it with the ubiquitous presence of children in a ferocious state, their released fury giving it true meaning. We’re fighting military that remained loyal to the government, the ÁVH, and the Soviets, who seem to be making it their battle.
It’s confusion, too, with some Hungarian Army units taking our side. There is confusion amongst the Soviet military as well; tank crews arguing with locals, who are reminding them of their relationship over the years with the people. We hear stories of Russians swapping sides. But then we come across evidence quite otherwise.
The street is old cobblestones, of irregular shape and protruding cut, shaped by cart wheels and the clop of hooves. (And funeral cortèges. And blood, much blood.) Now they are covered by slumped human forms, all of them still, most broken, in posture not intended nor designed by nature, not living beings.
They’re children, most of them. The engine-rumble of departing tanks tells what has happened. A departure of sound filled by people screaming and crying. But then we three witnesses have known such grief ourselves. And look, the mother, or just woman, running to that moaning form of child still alive, she does not make a sound, we know that, too. First it is shock, disbelief, as if breath must be but sipped lest it break the spell of denial. Shock that won’t let the voice of truth tell you that is your loved one lying dead there. Lady, dear disbelieving lady, we know what you go through.
It is the men in their furious acceptance of truth, of plain undeniable evidence strewn all around them, who shout and roar their outrage and screamings of revenge, the men who state the obvious — too obvious — that this dark deed was caused by fucking Soviets. By that tank left the scene.
I want to tell them it isn’t the Soviet tank, it isn’t even their military carrying out orders, it’s the thinking — the thinking going back and back into the same old history, which keeps repeating itself.
I want to tell them — roar back at them — that all carnage and suffering and injustice repeats itself until the day good people assert their right to rule. It’s why our tiny trio of freedom fighters stands here, armed to the teeth and ready to fight and die: because it cannot go on like this. My mind so clear.
They see us, do these residents, these freshly grieving folk; and I see their anger with someone to turn on, how they do not see us as fellow citizens who might weep with them — no. They look at us and our arms as if we represent the killers of their children. Several men advance on us, blinded by grief, blinded by the life allocated to them, like drunk men of fixed, singular purpose.
My reaction is to warn them off with my gun, but Aranka says leave it to her, as she moves towards them. Pál and I are left to stare and feel our immaturity.
Her calm, reassuring voice tells them, We are the same as you, brothers and sisters. Of the same suffering. We’re on the same side, against the same enemy. Can you trust us?
The dozen or so men stop and discuss amongst themselves. One steps up to Aranka with a hand demanding the rifle on her shoulder. She hands it to him, which wins his immediate trust. He says in apology, You are sure to get another before the day is out.
Yes, the beautiful woman of inner beauty says. Of course. In this narrow street, echoing with women howling, children hysterical in confusion, a littering of small dead bodies, the widow who has known grief goes over to a lifeless form, on her knees on the cobbles.
She runs long, summer-browned fingers through its blood-matted hair, touches its death-pale cheek, and kisses its forehead, still shiny as though with last remnant of life. And I am dumbfounded, I’m chronologically too many years short, I’m not of instinct pure enough to make such a gesture as she. I’m too hardened inside, even now. Yet I’m more hopelessly in love than ever.
If we believed in God then it would be Hi
m we thanked, when a few streets on we come across a Hungarian Army lorry with soldiers handing out guns and ammunition to their own. They’re laughing at the fact Hungarian blood has proved thicker than Soviet water — weasel piss they call it. And their fellow Magyars laugh back welcome to their sons, who’ve chosen the right loyalty. Aranka loses a rifle, gains my pledge of love, and gains a sten gun in space of fifteen minutes.
We head for the main thoroughfare of Üllo´´i Road. I cut a back way there, between buildings the unknowing would think lead to a dead-end, but there is an entranceway behind the stacked garbage bins, an old wooden door with a missing lock; we push past the smell of rotting food and rotting, living human presence somewhere residing here. Go through an interior courtyard echoing our footsteps, but today we have no fear.
We step out onto Üllo´´i Road, knowing what to expect because we can hear and have already experienced them. But the sight is more overwhelming than their sound: a wide avenue completely taken over by T54 tanks.
Since my childhood, after the war ended in 1945, the Russians have had a military presence here. We’ve got used to it, and many Russian tank crews formed friendships with Hungarian citizens. But we never saw this, an endless convoy of them, rumbling on idle in a collected cloud of their own exhaust. Russian steel elephants wearing the Soviet star on their grey flanks.
We, the people who have nominated ourselves as revolutionaries, have no such tanks at our disposal, nor army of soldiers, nor organisation, not even a crude, majority-agreed plan.
What took place last night, this morning, seemed to promise all we had dreamed of. Today, in the presence of our Communist master’s tanks, sitting there announcing a superior might, it’s like the harsh truth of daylight has descended upon us. Yet nowhere do I see fear descend.