by Alan Duff
And I am hovering above looking amongst this gruesome mess of bloodied gore for the girl, her head, her face, her final triumphant smile.
What we do the rest of that day and well into the night is in homage to the nameless girl who made the first sacrifice.
I kill a Russian tank crewman, who made the mistake of believing he was invincible and rode his open turret, smirking, sneering like a conqueror. I hit him with a burst of tommy-gun fire, I heard his language cried out, the Russian tongue I refused to learn at school. He pitched violently to the side, as if cut in half, while I heard myself yelling, claiming his assumed role of conqueror. And I see the girl, her puny form clambering over the tank, defeating might.
The clarity I had expected, as in physical fights, is not there; rather it is a blur — despite clear-headedness — of a series of actions required to achieve a specific goal. The eyes see: tank. Then where best to disable it, a chance to get underneath at the fuel tanks, the air vents, or close enough to thrust ripped-up tram rails into its tracks.
Throughout this endless, furious day I see my fellows fall, killed or wounded, run over by tanks, blasted out of existence by tank fire, killed by snipers, in every state of hurt or fatality. Yet it does not matter, we know this, that life could not have got worse. And even death is better.
The girl, her briefest of smiles, lighting up all of this great city, all of our fraught nation.
THEY’VE RIGGED UP an artillery cannon in the front of the Corvin Theatre foyer. A man with a wooden-leg and a suitably piratical roaring laugh has taken the task of yanking on the rope attached to the trigger mechanism to fire at the next tank appearing in the sliver of Ferenc József Boulevard. The cannon is an army one, purloined or given by soldiers come to our side.
Behind the theatre we hand-pump petrol to make our Molotov cocktails. We peer, more or less, at what the cannon aimer sees of the boulevard, as tanks roll into view, like fairground ducks at a shooting gallery. The cannon has been set at a fixed aim, and men stationed on roofs tell the wooden-legged man when to yank on the rope. Every hit sends us into a delirium. Each destroyed tank is another step closer to a free country.
György Horváth gives the orders, but we have free rein to make battle action of our own deciding. I keep seeing the girl. She has given me understanding, taken me to a place I know gives advantage in adversity — if you are prepared to give your life. Before this, I have only paid lip service to that promise. Now the girl has led me by the hand to the place where truest courage dwells, and I have come out of it as though a hand has been shoved under my chin to jerk my head to a position it ought to take, of a young man telling the world he is prepared to die for his freedom.
We, the young people, are the same: willing to die, even eager to die. Youngsters with old hearts and world-weary spirits fighting for freedom.
I have found out the girl’s name, she was called Zsófi. After she had sacrificed her life for her country, and we had attacked the same enemy, Aranka gathered us — our group and the three boys who’d followed Zsófi — down this lane, this stench-ridden alley, reeking of sewerage. We grumbled that she chose this of all places to give us a history lesson, the tale of King István, who in 997 had succeeded his father, Géza, as ruler of the confederation of Hungarian tribes. István found himself in a struggle with his own uncle, Chief Koppány, who did not like the changes initiated by Géza and laid siege to Géza’s castle in Veszprém. If Koppány had triumphed, he would have claimed Géza’s widow and forced her to marry him. But Stephen, the son of the father and mother, triumphed.
In this stinking lane we are told this history lesson by the beautiful widow Pálfia Aranka. Not one minds the ending, young and full of blood-lust that we are, of our ancient king ordering the corpse of Koppány be quartered.
I ask her, Why this history lesson in the midst of battle, why when this whole thing started but three days ago?
It is not midst, she answers. It is pause. To consider who we are and why we are. And what is being made of us. (She said the last with eyes directed at me, challenging me to ask myself the question — when, to hell with it, I know what this is making of me: it’s setting me free, and handing me a role of being but one of tens of thousands trying to set their nation free. Why did she linger that gaze at me? There we are, breathing filthy, reeking air, where wretched, homeless drunks vacate their infected bowels in the same place as they sleep, and a woman of extraordinary beauty asks if we are like the men who live here? Unable ever to lift ourselves again?)
I can hear music as Aranka speaks, though not the piano music of the Russian, but crude accordion, not played well, by a man who stands at the entrance to this alley. He’s pumping this battered instrument, coaxing bad chords from it, and he’s all hostile expression, yet not deranged. Drunk, I’m sure.
I don’t know why all these bizarre happenings are taking place, from hearing music that surely wasn’t there in Zsófi’s last few minutes, to Aranka choosing this place to give us history lesson, to now this bedraggled man with wild beard and wildly staring eyes playing an accordion badly.
He is telling us we are invaders, too, of his territory, Aranka enlightens as she leads us out of here, past the man to whom she says sorry, though I cannot bring myself to say the same, not to a defeated creature such as this. Though I do get it, that each person is entitled to have claim over some fiefdom, minuscule and ignoble though it might be. Just as we all understand that the human spirit must never allow itself to fall too far or it can never rise again.
So we go to defend our territory, our tiny piece of this troubled earth. My gun takes another life, this time an Ávós sniper whose form I have found, in a second-floor window. He has taken lives. I take his.
From a young age this sight entered my dreams: my city in ruins, from vague childhood memories when the Red Army was besieging our city, occupied by the Nazis. The Russians offered peace negotiations, but the Germans refused. So the Russians laid waste to Budapest, and we children could not understand what was happening, but the destruction imprinted, and now the sight repeats itself, if on a lesser scale so far.
We’ve come to know the smell of burnt humans, that it is no different to burnt meat cooked too long at home. The enemies’ dead bodies mean no more than evidence of our advancement. The bodies of our own are also a familiar sight, except we turn every park into a cemetery, and the older ones pray over them and we younger ones take more anger from them.
Everywhere mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, grandparents, friends wail for their dead. Bodies are taken away by old, barely going vehicles, and by the fourth day horse-drawn carts are used. We bury our dead and give them a dignified farewell; while we pour disinfectant over the enemy so they don’t spread disease or let their charred bodies rot in their tanks.
Many park trees are hanging with lynched Ávós, like bizarre art works. Lamposts are gallows, too. We march other Ávós up several floors and hurl them to their deaths, or execute them on sight, on foot, in their vehicles. Some Ávós homes are torched.
We, the youths, have become men overnight. The many girls among us our equals. We rest where sleep takes us, anywhere will do, but a few hours, then fight on. Each of us with the same rank smell, so it means nothing. Our turn for bathing will come.
We are winning this fight.
Ugly rumour races around the city like a simultaneous telegram, that the Ávós have massacred possibly a hundred citizens at a gathering in Parliament Square. They opened fire with machine-guns from positions in top-floor buildings. Witnesses saw numerous windows puffing the smoke of automatic fire and bodies fallen in stacks. It seems a Soviet tank then turned its gun on the Ávós killers, thinking they themselves had come under rebel fire.
As if we are not of hatred enough for this police force, we take this news like fuel for our patriotic fires. Our trio joins an attack on the Communist Party Headquarters in Köztársaság Square. It is 30 October, one week after our unimaginable revolt began, and here we are
in the very heart of our oppressors’ offices.
There is chaotic fury of citizens let loose in the very place our suffering has been systematically planned. Hundreds of us storm the passageways, murdering whoever we come across, male or female. Throats are slit and blood pools turn the corridors slippery and ghoulish crimson. We step over bodies like they are mere animal carcasses, confront terrified men and women in the offices they thought were a sanctuary, and kill them there or throw them from the windows.
We go from room to room, some freedom fighters more interested in checking the filing cabinets; shouts of enlightenment coming from everywhere as our comrades discover names on files they recognise. I, though, with Pál and our possessed female leader, am intent on finding the filers.
At the end of a long corridor, we’ve been beaten to a group of Communist Party bureaucrats by a band of older fighters. One of whom keeps his tommy-gun pointed at us for longer than my temper can tolerate.
That how you treat all your friends, pal?
Then I see what it is he is protecting: a pending mass execution.
Without so much as one word of introduction, Aranka pulls out her pistol and marches up to one of about a dozen officials and fires at his head. His skull explodes, sprays brain matter all over the place.
For a few moments it is chaotic, as the first group screams at us, at Aranka for crashing their party, and she’s yelling back at them that they who hesitate can die. And she shoots another Ávós at point-blank range.
I lose all thought myself then. I’m helping push these prisoners in their own government palace outside to the balcony, a wide one in keeping with the larger premises their seniority commands. Likewise have my mates lost their minds, we’re just one seething objective, to rid this earth of these dozen or so men.
So, we hurl them to the concrete forecourt, and each body hits the ground with a wet thud; while down below more citizens turned freedom fighters roar joyous approval. It is as if we have showered them in victory ticker tape, not splashed them with human blood.
One after the other they are thrown. Below they’re mutilating the bodies, since death is not enough. Not near enough.
Back out in another corridor and Aranka has us pause to give, what else, another of her history lessons. General Bem, she says, at whose monument all this began a week ago, said at the Battle of Piski in 1849: I will re-occupy the bridge, or I die. If there is no bridge, there is no country.
Now she strides down to the end of the corridor and turns to us, back against a closed door. She’s grinning.
My two dear friends, I think the good General Bem would say that we have re-occupied the bridge, and so we have our country back!
Our cheers reverberate down the hall, the same that knew only those officials talking in low voices, plotting our misery on a vast scale.
Then she says she wants to search the files. Both myself and Pál are exhausted, we need sleep. A hot bath if we should be so lucky.
As we leave, there is excited yelling that Imre Nagy has been installed as our Prime Minister and that he is negotiating for an immediate withdrawal of Soviet military. Once more these corridors echo with the unimaginable, of men shouting glee at victory. Pál and I’ll sleep a whole twenty-four hours.
SO, WE HAVE won, every voice on every street is crying. The Soviets are withdrawing. Imre Nagy himself announces this on radio, speaks to the masses in the square from the first-floor balcony of Parliament, to confirm Soviet’s withdrawal of all military presence.
It is like a story, an epic tale being broken off just when it got interesting. A battle royal denied its chance to become war triumphant, that is how many of us feel.
So, we go between dancing on the street to huddled discussions, asking how we are to trust this pronouncement, even if from Nagy. How do we know he is not held hostage and forced to say this?
Well, we see for ourselves the Soviet tanks rolling in staggered formation because of their collective weight, over the bridges, along the wide boulevards, accompanied by military lorries, by endless convoys of their military vehicles, the generals’ staff cars. And we stand there, armed to the teeth, as our invaders, our Communist allies who never were, make ignominious departure.
In our still distrusting hearts, it is not yet quite a victory, despite the people celebrating, the drunken revelry in the streets, in every house, no one afraid to proclaim loyalty to the freedom-fighter cause.
The second day, though, machines are out, starting to clean up, and large groups of people labour to help with clearing the mess: broken buildings, pavements and streets of shattered glass, like sparkling white lawns. A few trams begin to run again; there is talk of going back to work once the last negotiations are completed with the authorities. And, finally, on the third day, 1 November, we believe. Believe that we have indeed done the impossible, taken on the Russian giant, the murderous Ávós machine, and beaten them.
By 2 November the celebrations have gone right through the night, we are all drunk, on wine, on any alcohol we can lay hands on, but mostly on victory. Victory that belongs to youth most of all, as it always has in this country. For it is our futures, our potential hopes that successive regimes have stolen. And each time — not necessarily every generation as sometimes it’s taken three, four, before the suffering dam burst — the waters have turned into the oppressor’s blood.
The idea of returning to school — as schoolboys and girls — is now untenable. I for one shall never return. Though what I’ll do I am too tired to give thought.
We are all so tired, hardly slept this last week. I have not seen my mother for most of it, though find her at home, ready with her own battle stories.
Aranka has woken me; stands right by my bed with finger pressed to her lips and I am up immediately, and dressed as quickly as her urgent expression demands.
It is dark. I have the tommy-gun underneath my bed within grabbing distance, aware that sleep has been so deep she could have been an enemy and I would be dead. Following her up the stairs, I ask what is going on, it’s three a.m.
She’s come up to get the pistol we bought before this short war started, she’s dressed for the cold outside, that beauty half-hidden behind a tightly wound scarf, tosses me a thick full-length coat, obviously her late husband’s.
Where are we going? I want to know when we step out and are hit by the cold of November two days old. I forgot my pistol and go to get it, check Mama too, find her awake, tell her I can’t sleep I’m going out walking, leave before she can boss me around. I’m a full-blown man now.
Where we’re going is her architect friend’s house up in the Buda hills. Last time listening to that scratchy Rachmaninov 78 record, the composer playing his own piano compositions. She has a key to the house and clearly her friend is not awake, as there are no lights, nor would you expect any at this hour, going on four a.m.
It smells of leather and books, serene, quiet like a library; at peace with itself. The gun in the pocket of a murdered man’s coat does not feel right in this house. Even in the dark I feel its quality, of good thinking, books, paintings, fine furniture. Though I have no desire to possess any of it; it just feels good.
Aranka finds a light switch, goes over to turn on a desk lamp, then back to turn off the first. She asks me to get the fire going, there being a box of wood and neatly stacked newspapers. She leaves the room, I assume to wake her architect friend. I light the fire and get to thinking, in seeing family photographs in frames everywhere, that this middle-class family’s turn must have been coming for the same reclassification as Aranka and her husband. I wonder if he took part in the revolution. Likely not. He doesn’t look like a fighting man, which is what my whole attitude implied to him last time. Which upset Aranka for my being so overtly hostile to her friend. I couldn’t help myself, the state I was in after Zsófi’s death.
She returns with an armful of firewood. I ask if her friend is still asleep.
No, she says and gestures I sit down on the rug in front o
f the fire.
Flames have been stared into by humans since they first discovered fire. When Béla and I used to visit our grandparents in the country in the cold months, what I remember most and best is sitting in front of their open fire, and how it softened the talk, lightened the load we knew even at a young age the adults were carrying. So Aranka starts off the talk with remembering her own childhood days of sitting with siblings and parents in front of the fire, and what I expect her to say.
I like her voice: it has the quality of a lullaby, when she’s calm and in a mood like this. We’re flushed with victory after all.
Firelight does good things to faces, gives features a different definition. She’s removed her scarf and the hair has fallen down and it’s bled of even its blackness from the firelight at the front, behind it is a darker shade than the low light of desk-lamp on her back. Even her basic trousers she gives a quality to.
I like her in profile when she talks like this, to the fire not me; and yet we’re sharing something fundamental, basic. And good. I keep on expecting the door to open soon and the owner of this house walk in — spoil things. Not that I dare give even my suppressed thoughts so much as a hope.
The talk dries up. We’ve spent a lot of time together, this last intense week especially. We stare into the flames, enjoy the soft splutter of wood burning. The smell. Then she turns to me. I see a younger woman, a vulnerable girl, and this girl asks if we should really dare to have hope, to believe?
Our roles reverse briefly. For I tell her no, we should wait and see what develops next, even though it could not look better, this hitherto futureless void we used to stare into.
She agrees with me. Most of the woman returns at that point, I think. Though she is of almost downcast expression and stays like that for some considerable moments, thankfully filled by the crackling and whoosh of the fire. I like what the firelight does to her features, too.