by Alan Duff
He is not coming, she says like an announcement. At least to me it sounds.
Who, this Tibor?
Yes. Bethlen Tibor, remember his full name?
Now I do.
He sent his wife and children to relatives in another city, just before the fighting started.
How did he know to do that? (I thought he was a bit of an intellectual weakling.)
He was aware of the plans to march on 23 October. So he took precautions.
Yeah, with his own family. And he, did he fight?
The night I brought you here, because he was the only one I knew with a record player, he was not interested in violent overthrow, not even of this government. Too much the civilised man for that. But you made him feel guilty.
Me? You were upset, that’s all I know. My attitude, you said.
I was sticking up for my gentle friend.
So, why isn’t he here?
I’ll tell you soon enough. (Though that doesn’t tell me why we’re here.) I’m reminded I had but a few centimetres of luke-warm bath at home yesterday. The gas pipe for the water heating has gone wrong.
Would he mind if we used his bath?
No. But — she touches my leg — stay. Stay right here with me. Till the wood runs out, as I got the last of it. Stay until the last flames die. His fire heats the water at any rate.
He is dead, she says to the flames.
Used to death these last days I am yet shocked. What happened? The Ávós?
For once no. He was killed in the fighting. We could live in this house if we chose. Though of course we wouldn’t. (We, she said?)
She gives me her face. But that is how life is: one minute you’re relatively safe in your comfortable obscurity like Tibor was. Then along we come, you the youthful stranger full of fire, reeling from young Zsófi’s death and confused as to whether you heard that piano music and I was telling you that you did — when you didn’t. I lied to you.
No you didn’t. I heard it.
I lied. So to give Zsófi’s death your same meaning. Since what does it matter if you thought it was Rachmaninov playing on someone’s radio whilst the heroine Zsófi sacrificed her life? Isn’t the music I played you here the perfect encapsulation of what we witnessed of that little girl patriot?
Aranka, I know I heard it … Or did I? Not so sure now. Nor of what is happening here.
It doesn’t matter. As for Tibor, he sat here and watched us, he took in the state we were in, our agitation, our grief for the girl wanting explanation, definition. Meaning. Playing his music to define an event that he was not part of.
She swings on her buttocks fully facing me, whilst I remain directly at the fire, but she’s close enough I can smell her most subtle of scent: woman.
He kept looking at you — I saw him the whole time — and he was troubled that you, a mere teenage boy, should be fighting for your freedom, our freedom, his freedom, his family’s freedom.
The night is coming back to me now.
You remember he asked to excuse himself and me? He took me outside and started to justify that we all have different parts to play, in ordinary life, in a revolution. I gave him answer enough with my silence. He started changing his tune, going from speaking of how important the intellectuals’ role was in this uprising, to doubting his own words.
Finally I said, Tibor, Tibor, you are a friend who befriended me and my husband when we first came to Budapest. When we walked the streets, seeking out our own kind, middle-class fellows, it was you who responded, who noticed our anguish, of being newly classified, and you invited us to your home where we discussed your relief that they had not yet got you, reclassified you.
I told him, Tibor, you know what you’ve contributed and haven’t. It’s up to you.
And what did he say?
He wanted to know about you. Who you were. Why one so young was willing to give his life for this? In the finish he was weeping. Next, he was promising he will be a true man, a true patriot. And that was the last I saw of him.
I feel bad at judging this man. Yet Aranka, his good friend, says, I made him feel obliged to do his bit in this war. Not sure if I should be proud or ashamed.
We’re silent for some time; just the flames from another chunk of wood I toss on. Knowing this is the last of it, it feels like this last week, a counting down. Somehow Aranka feels closer, physically so; so close I think to myself, I could kiss her.
Which is what happens: we are kissing.
How, I would not remember if I went over it a million times. One moment the flames, then her face with many meanings, then the moistness of her mouth. The warmth of another human body. And the fire still with its last heat.
I have the dream now of her in my arms, kissing me, pulling me to her, and yet it’s not what I imagined. This, it feels right and yet it feels as though, like the death of Zsófi, it has to have some extra meaning, some definition given to it, or else I will not go through with it. I will not.
Funny how the most fervent and impossible of dreams coming true is the one you can control with the most self-discipline.
Of course, I do not bring to a halt this enmeshing of bodies. Just inside I want something to happen, anything, even for the fire to explode suddenly with a seam of resin. Or the power to go off to indicate we can never escape the authorities, even in this, for me quite possibly my greatest moment — if it is to be loving with this woman.
Or whatever it will be, I don’t care — yes, I do care. I very much care. But it has to be more than this. Someone has to state it for me.
Well, she starts calling out a name in her close-eyed, kissing, pulling-away state and hands grabbing me all over, her late husband’s name, Péter, Péter, Péter.
I understand. But at this very time?
Yet she calls him again, Péter, Péter, I do this … I do this willingly. With thought of you, then not of you.
So then I have it. Or I have the start to define this.
Taking her quite firmly, maybe harder than that, at arm’s length, I ask her, Willingly? What is willingly?
It explains itself, Attila, she answers. And she tries to move back within the distance of my rigidly extended arm.
Please, I need to know.
Know what? What more is there to know?
Those eyes stare at me. The mouth moves mutely, cocks a quizzical look, but I do not flinch. I cannot. Almost as if I let my father down if I succumb to this, the greatest temptation of the flesh any young man could wish for, let alone the wishing I have had the past few years.
Then she starts taking off her pullover; I lose temporary sight of her. Then shirt, through which I can see her outlined by the firelight. To a white winter vest, the promising shapes heaving ever so slightly beneath.
Bare breasts now, more beautiful than my vocabulary and breathless inexperience could describe. Even more, it is her hair, the way it rests against those bare shoulders and partly brushes her throat, and how she looks out from within its surrounds, as if she is on safe ground, territory that belongs to her. But she may invite certain honoured ones there.
Then she’s standing up and my restraining arm flops uselessly to the floor as her weight is released. And I’m looking up at — I don’t know what I look at, surely more than human.
Hands move to her trouser front, and she is stepping out of them, out of underpants. Firelight against her skin, a reddish-golden bathing; firelight defines her outline better than an artist’s brush. It lights up yet cannot illuminate the dark triangle, at once voluminous, a magnificent place blacker than a beautiful balmy night.
Whilst I, the beholder, sit fully clothed on a dead man’s rug in the overcoat of another, this one’s widow. I stand slowly, as if dignity is all I have left. And I had better have that.
She helps me remove my clothing. Now we’re the same. Yet not the same. I urge, I beg with my eyes that she must give this the meaning I need. And if she at first looks in frowning question, it isn’t long before understanding softens t
hose features again.
I see only her mouth now, as the only possible source for the definition I seek. Finally, finally, they come.
A tied vagyok … A tied vagyok, she says. Takes a step closer. I cannot speak now, only ask with my eyes to hear it again.
My mouth smothers the repeat. I have heard what I wanted. She said, I am yours. I am yours.
We are each other’s. We are one.
MY FATHER HAS woken me with messages, not warning, or none that I have heeded. I thought he must mean father to son that I should love this woman sleeping beside me in her former marital bed.
I find she is awake and with full trusting eyes at me. And she mouths those words again that she is mine, no need to sound them now, we are known of one another, two endless days and nights of victory joined with love.
We love and it is good, but my father’s image, his face, or maybe it’s his voice, won’t go away. He could almost be singing to me, except it’s the saddest of songs, like at a funeral. Maybe I’m thinking more of him since this event has happened between Aranka and me, wishing he were here to be glad for me, for us both. Maybe I think of my sweet Apa out of grief that he cannot see what his sacrificed life ultimately gave the people. Or maybe I am worn out with loving and celebrations and doing my bit to help clean up the mess of a short but most bloody, destructive war. My watch says it is early, going on four a.m. I hear her sigh. We win but are still to put food on the table. I am so hungry. We’ll look for food. Fate attracts us to these early hours.
We’re hardly out of our building when we feel something ominous in the air, since we stop in the snow and look at each other at the same time, with the same asking frown, did you feel, hear something?
Yet the streets are quiet, deep slumbering quiet.
I keep seeing my father’s face — and it is just his face, disem-bodied and without voice — and it looks at me with those most sad eyes. Papa? I ask of him in my head. But he keeps staring.
Now I see him under a lamplight, in the swirl of fog, and I think perhaps he tells me he is not sure it is right to be with a woman widowed by the same Ávós who took him from us. I start answering this question in my head up to that image in the streetlight, but it does not reply back and soon he, my father, has passed. Swallowed by the gloom between streetlights, and looking ahead I see only two more are going, the rest are out.
Shivering less from the cold than this image that has come back, now moved to the right in front of me, I glance at Aranka to see if it shows on my face, my agitation. But she looks only ahead, at the corner we are turning to go down to the river. It is 4 November and cold. The river will have chunks of ice, flowed from who knows where? We will not be able to see the other side, although when we get to the embankment we find the fog has not quite claimed the Duna’s full width; still the faintest outline of the Buda hills is visible, though the statue of the Lady of Liberation is disappointingly lost.
Where are we going to find a bakery open at this hour? In a city not remotely back to even Communist normality. I hear myself asking Aranka: Do you see something …?
See what?
(How do I put this?) I think I see my father. I cannot rid my eyes of his face. He’s right here in front of me. I could touch him. (I want to touch him, to run a finger down one of those cheek indentations, to touch again the cheeks I last felt had the cold of death, now warm again.)
Talk to him then, she says. Don’t be embarrassed.
Except I am embarrassed, sure I am. Ghosts don’t exist. Though I do mutter, Papa, why do you haunt me like this? Of course there is no answer.
So why do I continue? Papa, we won. We beat them. You were at my side all the way. And the girl, you would have seen her heroic sacrifice, her name was Zsófi, she was with us, too.
I turn and face Aranka, and Papa comes with me. He blocks out her face completely, and he remains with that saddest of expressions.
Ask him to tell you what is wrong, I hear her voice instruct behind his image.
Just then he disappears; confused, I turn a full slow circle, Aranka in my sweep, the adjacent street swirling with low-hanging fog, the lightless buildings like giant headstones, the river a broad dark smudge, and there the thinnest pencil-line stroke of Buda hills, now starting with the glow of sunrise. Sunrise? At this hour, in November?
No, not sunrise. Not a dawning, not a new day. Several hours too early. This is not the sun coming up on newly won freedom — hell, no. It could not be less that.
They could be celebrations, they could be our fellow freedom fighters up there on the Buda hills all night preparing to give us a sweet surprise of a fireworks display in the free skies. Except they are not.
Our words are but drowned-out questions of each other. Is that what we sensed earlier?
Her face is as if the sun has illuminated it, or that fireside light at Tibor’s house, of such memorable definition, declaring her beauty. Right across our vision the sky is a roaring orange-red, the hills have caught alight. With that comes conjoined whistling, a massive collective hurtling that our ears can yet pick out as individual flights, propelled projections of these more dull, shimmering lights that become explosions, which become realisation, the only possible realisation: the fucking Soviets have come back. Maybe they never really left, just went off to wait. And seethe.
Behind us the buildings are being struck with this deadly rain all the way back from Moscow, on Moscow’s orders. My lover and I cannot talk for words wouldn’t be heard. Nor anyway would they suffice. This is not the time and place, nor moment for words. It is not even for action. It is just two people in all this fine old city, knowing that something terrible, even if so familiar, has again been done us.
How, we don’t know, but out of the fog someone’s voice is being split and sabred repeatedly by tank cannon projectiles. A woman’s voice manages to pierce this almighty, overwhelming crescendo of noise, The Ruskies lied! The Russians have come back!
We turn every direction to find her but cannot. When she screams out again, Woe, woe is the Magyar people! She may as well be a ghost, but her message is more real.
Then my father’s face appears. And his sadness is more pronounced but now it turns to the hard man I knew, saying by expression alone that life could not be more in danger.
Still, what my father imparts is not yet enough, and I ignore Aranka tugging at me to leave this place of deadly raining sky, waiting for him to say more. There’s a direct hit on a building right behind us, sending stone ricocheting around us. But I am only with eyes for my father’s, knowing that maybe this is the last time I shall see him like this.
The sky is alight, on fire; and the hills are a volcano blast of pure red, like blood — what else? But he is gone. And the Soviets are back, this time to annihilate us.
ALONE WITH MY mother, I see her face is a reflection of all our city: not so much dumbstruck as with the saddest knowing. Even in here, our apartment, the noise from outside can be nothing else but catastrophe. We hear men bellowing in outrage, the profoundest betrayal done them.
This is different to two weeks ago, when war was raging, for we fought with hope. Now on the radio we hear the voice of Imre Nagy tell the world: Today at daybreak Soviet troops attacked our capital. But it was well before daybreak, it was four-thirty, when innocents were fast asleep, assured by promises made, a political agreement of honour, between nations of the same ideology.
Our Prime Minister beseeches the world — the international fraternity he calls it — to come and help us. Why, when we can fight them again, no matter they’ve returned with thousands of tanks? We did it once and we’ll do it again.
I must leave my mother to her own, less-dangerous devices and say farewell, but this time with a sense it might be our last. We arrange to meet here at our flat in four days’ time. If either does not show up, then come back at twelve-hourly intervals for another two days, then consider it lost.
It is different, this war, to the short last. The numbers have changed gr
eatly. Our will to do battle hasn’t diminished, but the Soviets are back a hundred-fold in force. Our Prime Minister is said to have sought refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy, only to be turned over by them to the Russians. We know he’ll be executed, it is how they operate: like ruthless gangsters. They’ve put in a new Prime Minister, János Kádár, and demanded all citizens, whom they describe as counter-revolutionaries, to give up arms and we will come to no harm. The liars, the murderers, make promises again.
This time MiG Jets scream over us and drop bombs. Convoys of Soviet tanks are so huge in number they drown out talk of stunned witnesses. We walk the streets strewn with bodies, this time with none to give them dignity of burial, tears of farewell to freedom-fighter heroes.
Down at the river, as close to Chain Bridge as we dare, we face scores of tanks sending a bombardment at the Royal Palace on Castle Hill. Every reloading or re-positioning pause in the Soviet salvoes is filled by the preposterous chatter of small-arms return fire from atop that rocky upthrust of the Royal Palace. On that besieged Castle Hill, the fighting is led by a Franciscan monk, one Végvári.
Aranka says: When moral men fight bodily against you, your regime is surely wrong.
Those leaving the city in haste seem to be those who enjoyed privileged jobs — foreign diplomats, envoys, journalists and our privileged class — escaping until the dust settles, in case any specks might fall on their immaculately clothed persons.
Fighting has erupted all over, far more extensively than before. As if both sides have agreed that this is the real thing, the first only a dress rehearsal. Except we know we’re running out of what to fight with — both ammunition and food — and we’re overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers and armed might.
The first day we are simply reacting with fury and outrage, destroying their tanks, killing them; the youth taunting these foreign invaders at every opportunity: Kill us if you can, but don’t make a mistake, Ruskie arseholes. We have to obtain food supplies and safe places to store them, but there is simply not enough to go around — not nearly enough. They’re going to starve us into defeat, if they don’t blast us out of existence first.