Szabad

by Alan Duff

  Hundreds and hundreds of us in this street, likely most of the city streets, are like this: armed and ready to fight, and yet this gathering of the enemy, second after the Ávós, seems unwilling to engage. Or so it looks as we walk past them, less bold as brass as tentative, ginger, even scared, of these great slabs of armour-plated metal and firepower in such numbers that young ones like me can hardly remember: the Soviet star is there always to remind us that they are on another side. We’re not Communist brothers, we’re their poor cousins. The ones they hate.

  Walking in this state of uncertainty, it almost feels ridiculous. Aranka must feel that, too, for she starts reminding us that our country declared war on Russia in 1944 and they’ll never forgive us. That Russians have elephant memories, they’re big and crude like their ugly tanks. They think flush lavatories are places to wash things in. Why, I’ve heard the first time they came to Budapest Russian soldiers were cleaning fish in the lavatory bowls. Pál and I know she’s a different class, she calls it lavatory to our toilet.

  Then all hell breaks loose. No warning, no indication, not with two hours of no action. And it doesn’t start in this street, we hear it in a side street: tank fire, explosions, screams drowned in more thunder, buildings breaking; and we’re running. To an alley I know.

  All the rest of this day of 24 October we are in skirmishes. Our actions and directions have no aim, we don’t even discuss what we are doing. We have simply reacted to the years of living how we have.

  Organisation, like water, finds its own level. People nominate themselves different roles, without having to ask permission of any higher command. We’ve heard the uprising has erupted in other cities and towns, news that further lifts us.

  Farmers arrive in their old trucks laden with vegetables, whole animal carcasses. Rebel army soldiers have raided more weapon armouries and now hand out guns and grenades on the streets. Men give lessons to youngsters on how to make and use Molotov cocktails, joking about using a Russian invention against the inventors.

  By late afternoon there are disabled and wrecked tanks everywhere. The city, in less than twenty-four hours, has been turned upside-down — again, says Aranka, who is old enough to remember the chaos of a decade ago, the downed tangle of tram wires, the ripped-up paving stones, and even that there are corpses of our own being tended to. She adds: If we don’t see this day out, we have still won.

  Night comes and we’re exhausted, but the fight goes on. Though we’re as much using our knowledge of the streets to run parcels of grenades, or food, doing our bit to keep the city alive and dispensing death the same time. Not a moment to think.

  When we do go home to get some rest, I find my mother at our table with a rifle still shiny with packing grease. She is neither pleased nor bothered. I will fight, she says. But not beside my own son, since you have the face of fervent mission (does it show that easily?). Then she hands me a key. Here, to your brother’s building, remember he lives at flat 2B, 179 Sárkány Street. To where I head.

  Of course, he’s surprised, and he was asleep. The first I ask him is, Are you part of what is happening? I get my answer in his detached eyes even before his mouth opens.

  No, I am not.

  I can’t help seeing he is less muscular than me, but taller. Not imposingly taller, just factually so. He’s sleep-dishevelled, grumpy when he’s woken, I know this person so well. Over his shoulder, to the flat he has yet to invite me into, it is little different to any other I know; so he hasn’t revealed another Béla of furniture, new possessions or adornments that better reflect himself, rather than the Béla defined by living with us. I am glad to see that.

  Look at you, he says almost with scorn. You’re armed. (And who do I think I am? Right, Béla?) Who do you think you are — some kind of rebel?

  Freedom fighter, Béla. That’s what we’re calling ourselves. Or revolutionaries.

  No, you are fools. Then realising he’s gone too far, corrects himself. I mean foolish. For they will surely crush this and punish each and every one of you.

  He doesn’t know that we have thought about that and don’t mind. Doesn’t realise that we have all as individuals been rehearsing for this moment all our thinking lives, of being prepared to die. My coward of a brother doesn’t know how exciting it is knowing you are ready to die at any given moment. The battle-strength that gives you. For we know that our enemy wants to live because he has so much more to live for.

  My brother goes to close the door. But I put a foot out, to stop it. Mama sent me. That’s how I got into your building.

  Why did she?

  To ask if you are OK.

  Tell her I am old enough to flat, old enough to make up my own mind. And by the way, I have visited Papa’s grave many times. Though found it difficult to procure flowers to leave in tribute. And you?

  (Is that accusation in his tone? Of me, who loved my father more than any? No, I’ve not visited his grave. It’s too upsetting, would leave me feeling more helpless, even angrier. Then I’d get reckless. And my papa is alive in my head, he still lives, dwells safely inside me. My anger must be showing because Béla’s eyes show alarm and he steps back.)

  You listen here, I was there when he was murdered. I cleaned him up — Béla, remember when we used to dream of living as free citizens?

  Of course. When we were young and silly. Remember we had a father who was an indestructible hero? Then they snatched him away and sent him back a shell. Remember you that?

  Béla, last night a group of us — we killed four Ávós on the street. Can you hear what I’m saying?

  I hear all right, that they’ll know who you are, someone will have given up a name, and right now will be processing their files, the millions of names until they get you.

  It was dark. (Though I remember the Jew. But he won’t know any names. He was a visitation from God, posing a moral question. And we sent God on his way, with our answer, from non-believers.) Walking here, nearly everyone I saw had a gun. Normally the nightshift would be in overalls waiting for the tram to work, but Hungarian corpses lie all over the streets, and so do Ávós and Russian bodies. Today, who knows what is going to happen? Only that life has changed for all of us — in just one day.

  No life changes in just one day, not for the better. He looks at his watch. It is past eleven p.m. I have work tomorrow.

  A general strike has been called. Why wouldn’t you join it?

  I am a public servant. We do not strike against our employers. Nor take strike orders from revolutionary idiots. And you, you come to me, after what has taken place between us? We’re not talking.

  I turn my back, leave, thinking this is the last time I will see him. Let him rot in hell.

  WE JOIN A group of well over a hundred, it might be two hundred, and more joining us all the time. Activity is centred around the Corvin Theatre, a semi-circular building that fronts out directly a hundred metres distant from Ferenc József Boulevard, a main artery road we are told the Soviets must use.

  Group leaders have been appointed before our arrival, and they instruct us in running to different addresses in the Corvin district, or to meet lorries, carrying boxes of ammunition, grenades, crates of guns still in their packing grease unloaded to us by grinning rebel soldiers. Out of chaos has come a kind of spontaneous order.

  We roll forty-four-gallon drums of petrol on their bottom edges to the back of the theatre, to which hand-pumps are fitted and hundreds of empty beer bottles filled with a mixture infinitely more explosive than beer. We tote from a basement home-laboratory containers of, our group of four are warned, highly explosive glycerine. It seems Corvin is the destination of many raided armoury caches.

  We do as we are told, in this morning yet with no sun to break up the fog. Yesterday autumn was held at bay; today an early winter is warning of itself. Aranka passes comment: The cold, it comes sweeping down from Russia.

  On another fetching mission in this district of curved buildings and narrow lane-like residential streets, we hear
tanks headed our way. As if we strangers have rehearsed as one for this time in our lives, every person slips into recesses, behind friendly doors, down alleys; my group racing up some exterior stairs to clamber onto the tile roof of a small ground-floor workshop.

  We see the enormous tank barrel, sticking out of the fog before the rest of its shape appears. My tommy-gun feels less than useless against such thickly armoured steel. Though not so my will.

  Then we see that the tank flies a Hungarian flag — with the Soviet emblem cut out of it. Our own soldiers appear out of the turret hatch, waving triumphantly that they are with us and we can at last hope to match tank against tank.

  Several score of us emerge at the same time, yelling and cheering for our soldiers, who we know are committing an act of treason for siding with us. I lead our group by hitching a ride on this metal monster; feel its vibrations as if my father is grabbing me by the shirt front in a final warning that I had better be with eyes out for the lights that go on. Or mine shall extinguish.

  I hear a tank shell exploding in the not-so-far distance, his warning going out to everyone. We leap off the tank at Corvin Theatre and are immediately handed beer bottles filled with glycerine, the leader there — György — reminds us in his booming voice that we are true Magyar heroes, revelling that he is in this theatre of war set at a picture theatre.

  How ironic that the Soviet propaganda films we have seen over the years at this very theatre should have shown us how to use Molotov cocktails against tanks, when depicting their own battles against the German attempt at invasion of Russia in the Second World War.

  György is in charge here, pointing to different small groups of mainly boys, some younger than myself, and plenty of girls, too, to go to the side-streets to Ferenc József Boulevard. Like ants, we act on his instructions, hurrying with our volatile loads of glycerine, our inner vessels overflowing with murderous intent.

  Now it has truly started, this war. It shall maketh, and taketh, of us what it shall.

  I am no longer with thought, not in words, just feelings and set instructions to myself — to fight. That is all.

  We are accompanied by another group of four, one girl and three teenage boys, sixteen the oldest, the girl hardly more than thirteen. They’re yelling with excitement. We don’t even know each other’s names.

  We will roast Soviet flesh! Cook them alive! the girl says, and we laugh in admiration, at one so young so fierce.

  Aranka has come alongside the rapidly striding girl and is saying something in her ear. The girl frowns, shakes her head. Aranka speaks more. The girl turns, and she is another Magyar beauty, though not yet even of consenting age. Not to love. But this is killing she is hell-bent on.

  Aranka, I hear her now, is trying to dissuade the girl from being with our group, Stay behind and let the boys — only because they’re stronger, kid — do this job.

  The girl’s voice is so young in note yet mature in content when she responds, Why should my life deserve more protection than the boys? Haven’t we all suffered the same? And why are you in the front of your group?

  Taken aback Aranka replies, Because I have less reason to live than you.

  She and the girl exchange. With even more fierce expression, the girl asks, And what do I have to live for? Food scraps, food queues, whilst they, who tell us they are for us, feast and enjoy life? What’s the point? Now looking Aranka up and down, seeing she does not look the typical working-class woman of these Corvin parts, whom she tells: I don’t know about you, but I have had no choice in my life. My future is set, it is fixed in concrete by a government that owns me. And controls them — the Soviets, whose tanks are now rolling through our streets, like bully boys burst into our own home.

  She looks at Aranka with hard, maybe judging eyes now. But shakes her head, so small a head it is. So large in her talk. No. I see suffering in even your beautiful face, lady. You’ll play your part in this fight, too. The girl turns away.

  What did you just say? I grab Aranka’s arm.

  It was not for your ears. Let me go, Tilla. You don’t know your own strength.

  Less reason to live … than she, the girl?

  You know why.

  No, I do not. (I understand, but it is not reason enough.)

  I loved my husband.

  So you die and he comes back, does he? My reaction starts with that, the rest is internal, a tiny trickling of jealous liquid. I hope it remains only that, for this is not a time to be showing my infatuation. Soviet tanks are heading our way and here I am in this pause in imminent battle with eyes of love for a woman who can never love me.

  He is dead. Like my father is. And soon, Russians. Next, more Ávós. But we have reason even more to live, do we not? Aranka, do we not?

  I get only a shrug for answer. Anyway, the tanks call us, our destiny awaits but metres away. And the girl has raced to the front to claim hers first.

  I DON’T KNOW this girl. Yet what is happening to her is happening to me, so I’m being torn apart. My sense of self, my life’s meaning to this point, it’s being torn apart, or peeled open for closer, different inspection. Again. When I had thought my father’s death could not have been more shattering.

  She’s run forward, aiming for the sliver of boulevard we can see. Into which rolls a tank, with the Soviet star painted on the turret. A symbol that is the more offensive on such a formidable weapon.

  And the girl looks ludicrous — we, our group, turn to look at each other and agree this in silence — believing she is a force to match this great metallic beast.

  Engine-rumble louder than it deserves means it must be but the first of a convoy. Voices are effectively drowned, unless you shout. But there is no place nor need here for words, since words are useless. And so, it surely seems, is the girl’s hurtling existence.

  I must not mix this up, this recall, when I am huddled into myself later, shivering and trying to go to the next stage of thinking, of my mind’s state. But from whence did and could the piano music have come that played in exact sequence to the girl’s headlong flight?

  Aranka, with her background, knows it is Rachmaninov’s Elegie (a Russian composer’s music, though he fled his native country when the Communists took over). But how could I have heard any kind of music, let alone as summary of this girl’s life? But I did, I did hear it.

  When Aranka takes me the same evening to her friend’s house with a record player, and puts on the vinyl disc and it comes at me in scratching re-enactment, it is indeed the girl’s life. The one she lived a few minutes’ long in this narrow side street of … somewhere poor, somewhere suffering, it could be anywhere in our city, our accursed country. Just happened to be Corvin.

  And nor does Aranka know if she heard the music then or soon after, or if we had had the same imaginary emotional experience, the same minds unable to cope with what our eyes were seeing. Or if we heard the piece later and made it the girl’s eulogy, ascribed it the meaning of her.

  The girl … she is striding forward, fearless and noble and kind of street-urchin savage all at once. Draped around that slender neck, weighted against the top of those breasts hardly budded, against her smooth Magyar throat, a necklace of five beer bottles filled with glycerine. Between each are plastic containers to stop the loaded bottles hitting against one another.

  Now she breaks into a run and is soon at a crouch. And into that frame, this piece of real drama at the Corvin movie theatre, has entered the Soviet tank, and over its rumble and the combined noise of the following convoy, she screams one word: Szabad! Free. Again: Szabad!

  Now she halts, to take the deadly necklace from her soft-skinned throat and the music indicates that this is the most noble moment, for it is a moment of decision and a decision that means, absolutely, death.

  So, she looks back not at us but her boy companions with whom she has likely grown up, one may be a brother, perhaps two, or they are her dearest friends who know and love her better than a sister, since it is knowing and loving by cho
ice. And she’s smiling at them, in farewell, what else can it be? The piano has slowed down to help bid the girl child her farewell, and to tell us others, our group, that this is war now, it is war, it is war.

  Then she turns back and, with the Molotov necklace in one hand, leaps at the tank. She is jolted by the impact and almost falls under its track, but somehow finds a hand-hold and the strength to pull her small weight, burdened by bottled liquid, onto the moving monster’s flank.

  Now she is upon it, being borne by a Soviet mammoth, with its single straight tusk uselessly pointed frontward, and she peers frantically around the beast’s back looking for its weak spot (the air intakes, girl, remember?). None is sure she does remember, for she looks confused and once more back at her comrades, who are also racing with their own weaponry at the tanks that follow. The girl (what is your name, what is your name?) now ducks down in a crouch on the tank, its turret twists one way then back the other, like a head straining to see what irritation is upon it. The girl, the girl is upon you, hateful monster.

  The notes pound and they are the girl’s final, triumphant heartbeats, and that is all. The pounding that proclaims life, suddenly ceases and becomes not death but another form of life. I do not know which or what new life form it is, only that my life has changed even more than when I witnessed my dear papa murdered. The girl-stranger’s life ended up meaning more because it gave more.

  In this flat of Aranka’s architect friend, walls lined from floor to ceiling with books and filled with the sound of this music, I realise the notes define an elevation. A lifting of me, the boy not of enough years to wholly understand, so I am taken above it, to look down on the scene of carnage, of Soviet tank blown apart and the parts of the heroine responsible scattered all around as just pieces of her flesh either stripped of garment or adorned with torn-off material.