by Alan Duff
We become what they have made of us, no better than wild animals. Stove a skull in with his own rifle butt. I cut off the fingers of the one who groped Aranka. My friend Pál repositions the Russian’s penis to his dead mouth. And she who was violated by it shoves it violently further into the gaping opening. Pál’s mother stands with hands covering her eyes, no doubt asking God to forgive her, us most of all.
Yet even in our unrestrained savagery, we manage to find practicality, so two bodies are left unmutilated so we can remove their uniforms for — who knows — some later use.
Then we depart, but not without Pál calling back to ears that cannot hear: Unlike your promise to withdraw, Russian vermin, we won’t be back. Leaves his laughter to echo in that room of slaughter. And not one prayer from Margit asking mercy for their souls.
IT IS HOPELESS. Their tanks are too many — thousands of them — they are an overwhelming force, of troops and jet fighters, along with a vengeful Ávós giving us back ten times what we gave them.
Hangings are being announced several times a day, of key revolutionary figures, of politicians who were said to have sided with us. Hungarian Army leaders, including — we are gleefully informed on radio — Pál Maléter, whose Kilián Barracks refused government order to fire on the insurgents and instead fought the Soviets. The bastards have arrested him and he is certain to be hanged.
They are rounding up youths, in a systematic campaign of revenge, throwing them into gaols, executing summarily, marching them at gunpoint to Keleti Station, to make public show of their control and informing over the public-address system that these rebels are going to Siberia as punishment for daring to be involved in an armed uprising against a legitimate government.
We know the resistance has been reduced to small pockets, the Corvin Passage, where we have returned, and Tu´´zoltó Street, where we saw for ourselves the fighting is especially intense. Csepel still puts up a fight. But we know they are closing their circle tighter and tighter.
The invader’s plan has worked — completely. They’ve broken the will of the people and sent most of them indoors, to basement shelters, to destroyed wrecks of homes, restricted movement by a seven p.m. to six a.m. curfew. Queues for bread go several blocks, and the wait can be most of the day for a mere loaf or two. Only the bare staples are obtainable and hardly even that.
Pál’s mother has decided she can do no more and we don’t blame her, but nor do we listen to her entreaties for us to flee the country. There is no reason to stay, we know, but no reason to run like kicked dogs either. Something keeps us here, when all is grey defeat.
Work has ceased. We’re back in time, to World War Two: crowded in basement bomb shelters. The only traffic activity is Soviet, Ávós and government lackeys scurrying back to their positions of power. My mother is about to queue for hours for bread when I next meet with her. I give her smoked sausage brought from outside the city by supporters in other towns.
She wants to make a celebratory feast of it, a mere length of sausage. But feast we do make, if hardly the celebration she wished, since there is an eerie silence hanging in every space of Budapest air, inside and out. What to celebrate?
She wants to know if I still have the hand-embroidered handkerchief Papa bought for my birthday. I have quite forgotten about it and yet how then do I find it in my trouser back pocket? For some reason Mama takes it and kisses it, hands it back. There, she says, with both your parents’ love scent embedded.
There is but one matter left to talk about before I must go, as the Ávós and Soviets are making arbitrary house raids and arresting anyone who even looks like he or she might have fought against them. Béla. Have I seen him? No, not since last time you gave me the key.
Do you think he’s all right?
I’m sure he is.
Then comes Aranka’s coded knock on our door. Time to go again, even if there is nowhere really in mind. Just the streets, somewhere there is fight still left.
THE LORRY WHINES as it roars down the street after the running figures of Pál and Gábor, a Corvin kid who has joined up with us.
I’m on the corner of a sloped roof, three storeys up, my life held by a rope to my ankle, the other end looped around a chimney and held by Aranka. The cold is so bad my teeth ache, I can’t feel my toes, head throbbing and wind-chill must be in the zeroes. My hand has frozen to the grenade, the other hand frozen to the guttering to keep me from slipping on the icy tiles. I start changing positions to see the next street, into where Pál and Gábor are about to turn, when shots fire from the passenger side of the pursuing Ávós lorry.
I slide over the corner ridging as the runners turn into this much-narrower lane. We have them. The lorry slows, almost stops to make the turn, and I pull the grenade pin and take all my will to count before I drop it, right on top of the canvas-covered back. Human gore erupts and blends with clothing and canvas and metal splinters. I don’t know how many less Ávós can’t hurt innocents again.
Pál has thrown himself forward onto the ground, whilst Gábor has reached the doorway. The front cab is still battered but intact and raked by tommy-gun fire from other Corvin fighters, the rear is a tangle of human wreckage, moaning, a voice asking for help. The cry comes to a merciful end when I drop another grenade on the top of them.
I have no cry of triumph, no feeling of revenge — virtually no feeling at all. Not for these people and maybe not for life anymore. I could slide right off this edge into eternity for all it matters. It’s so fucking cold and so miserable because it’s so unnecessary, there has to have been a better way than this, to achieve dignity all round, democratic freedom.
Aranka jerks on my rope. I turn and shake head at her, no need to say what my face must be bellowing: our souls are being eaten up, even as we think we’re fighting to preserve them. I’m as close to crying as I’ve been, not for the deaths I’ve just caused, but death within myself and what I see in Aranka, Pál; I tell her of my vow not to cry, but what is happening to us?
She tells me, What is happening is not what you fear, but just the dark part of the road we’re on, my dearest. Which is why we walk it together. Daylight comes, eventually.
So why don’t we join the mass exodus and walk for the Austrian border and freedom? We’re risking our lives to stay alive when no freedom awaits us. There are too many refugees for the government and Soviets to kill them all. Some must be getting across.
A strange look appears on her face, I don’t know if from another dimension of her own troubled and suffering mind. Or unless it’s a light, a burning light of purity — of a kind personal to us. She says, You know why we stay, Attila Szabó.
And I do know. Friss.
I am to meet again with Mama. She is not at home. We, the trio, are stopped twice by Soviet patrols and told to show our papers. They’re false but well made, and we’re well practised at acting how they want, and we get through. Though it’s only a matter of time, we know that.
I figure Mama is either burying fellow citizens, or she’s in a queue at the bakery she always goes to. We find the queue two-hundred metres’ long, and a sight the worse for the collective expression boiled down to a singular one of abject defeat.
I finally find her, only to realise I have nothing to say; nor she, except a mother’s concern for her child who isn’t that anymore, and she quickly irritates me with those maternal noises. So, we’re said out in a short time, and I sneer at her being in a bread queue, since she recreates her life passed and life to come: of lining up like this, like beggars with their bowls for daily food.
She says I have never spoken like this to her, and why do I blame her for the bread shortage, let alone the unrelenting misery of a life? Time to go and I’m about to say goodbye, when two Ávós lorries pull up.
I should feel uneasy, my instincts should be on high alert, they usually are. I must be too tired, though now could not be more awake in seeing men in uniform spill out the rear, and out of one cab a senior officer with a megaphone, colonel�
��s stripes on his shoulders, calling for attention.
He tells the queue to go home, that this bakery is claimed for official purposes and they have one minute to start dispersing. The people, mostly women, start howling and crying their protest, they have children to feed, sick aged parents starving, the usual. The usual to fall on deaf Ávós ears. And eyes blind to the fact two machines are being set up on firing mounts.
Pál says, I don’t think they’re using those machine-guns to scare these people off.
Nor do I or Aranka. There’s snow heaped up along the gutter line, it’s not white but a dirty grey, like soiled washing.
The Ávós colonel’s voice amplified says: Turn around and go home, I ordered! Am I putting meaning where it isn’t for seizing on his saying turn around?
Why am I inside, asking, as though on these people’s behalf: What homes, Ávós colonel? Home is where an open fire goes and a happy family sit warmed by it and each other. With food enough and love surplus. Home is your choice of dwelling place and style. What fucking home should they go to?
He said: Turn around. What about those who must turn their way? Pál looks at me and he knows the same that I do: those mounted machine-guns are aimed at a length of humanity two-hundred metres’ long.
Pál says, Stay where you are, get ready to run in a second, and he steps out of the line we’d melted into and goes up to the Ávós officer, with raised arms, asking permission to put his hand in his pocket for his papers that will show he is on their side.
Pál Pogány is sacrificing himself to give us precious moments as he’s telling the officer — who said, No, keep your hands up — that he’s no insurgent, I’m just a young man not much younger than you, sir.
Pál thrusts violently into his coat and pulls out his pistol and is shooting at the Ávós, at all of them, in this repeated stabbing act of firing shot after shot.
I think he was yelling, You were going to start it first, Ávós pigs! All is mayhem and we’re being fired upon and we’re firing back and we’re running and innocents are sure to be falling to that endless statement of death, chattering a continuous scream — no, not scream, it’s more a clattering, a calamitous clattering. Like precious objects falling off shelves. Ruptured, precious objects that spill blood, spill life.
I can’t find her in the chaos. Nor see sign of Pál whether he fights on or has been mown down. Bodies, bodies, from a farm slaughter scene, not surely a civilised European city of own killing own?
We can’t go back and find out if I am orphan. We know we’ve lost a friend who gave his life for us, for many of these people fleeing with us. Yet I do not hear screamed vows of revenge from them, unlike what is screaming in Aranka’s eyes mirroring mine. That we’ll make them pay — ten times over, we’ll make them pay.
SHE LEADS AND I follow at her first instructions, not to ask, not to say. Just follow. I am so tired I can hardly think. She pushes a pram, as a front.
We’re well within the Soviet-imposed curfew hours, though nonetheless go a complicated way, wherever it is we’re going. It’s after three o’clock, it’s snowed during the night, I think it is 9 November. The pram wheels squeak and it keeps setting its own direction in the wet of melted snow on the pavement.
Armed citizens are no longer a common sight, they’ve gone home, they’re dead, fled the city, gone into the basement shelters, whilst the Soviets mop up the last of the resistance and the Ávós use their licence to be officially sanctioned murderers again.
Four times Aranka visited our building to see if Mother was alive. She dared not ask neighbours, and probably they were not any the wiser, not with every citizen struggling just to survive, not with hundreds and hundreds of bodies on the streets, frozen stiff, none with the will or the means, being shovels to dig a grave, or energy even if they had them. My mother must be dead, I have to accept that. In that dull, resigned way that all deaths now register to a hardened soul. Or could be I’m all worn out with my survival, by the hour.
We go into a building; she conceals the pram beneath the stairs, throwing cleaning rags over it. Up to the second floor, a landing that has taken a hit from a tank shell, blasted out a hole in the wall, with rubble to clamber over. I ask her if this is a secret arms cache, but she is not talking.
The place is deserted, a ruin of tank-shell destruction, bullet holes in the ceiling from the angle they’ve been fired from. I sniff expectedly for stench of rotting corpses. She leads through an unlocked door into a flat, emptied of personal items, just a table with no chairs, and in the bedroom a bed without mattress. A wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a picture print of Jesus Christ on the wall, a pile of clothing in a corner. For some reason she grabs a couple of garments.
She checks the bathroom, the bath for running water and there is a supply. I would wish for too much for it to be hot, she says in a weary voice, but more cheerful than I feel. The water is cold.
She asks to excuse her while she washes. I look around the flat that could be our home, or Aranka’s, of little possessions and meaning.
Aranka comes out with hair wet, smelling of soap, the same bar of which she hands me and suggests I forget about the cold and pretend the shallow bath is a hot spa at the Gellért Hotel. Sing, if you feel the urge, she laughs.
I don’t feel like singing, I don’t feel like doing anything except lie in a warm bed and sleep and wake up in another country — which will never happen — so I enjoy the freezing wash as best I can. My sense of smell is quick to tell me I stink. The washing doesn’t feel so cold then. I dry myself on a man’s discarded shirt; she has used as a towel a woman’s woollen dress.
We make love, availing us of the remaining pile of discarded clothing that she has turned into a bed. She says it was too cold to call it joy, but still, better than not loving. Her skin is cold all over and so must mine be. She says it might be our last time, a thought to get dressed on.
We’re back out on the streets that used to feel they belonged to us, more than any in the city. But this could be another country, a foreign city, a people hostile to us. It’s all changed.
Mothers must have the fear all the time, of losing a child and not being able to find it. Mothers must have dreams of frantically searching their town, their city, looking for a child who has either wandered innocently off or their innocent has been forcefully taken. Mothers must live a nightmare when they lose a child, let alone to a violent end. Now I, the child, must accept I’ll never find my mother. Yet still I look.
Our strange procession — teenage lover, beautiful widow, and pram with wheels sounding like weeping — is moving against the pedestrian flow, which we know is headed for Keleti Station to catch trains out of here, anywhere. As long as their papers are in order, the powers are glad their vast logistical task of cleaning up this mess is lessened.
I tell Aranka I want to find Béla, he’ll be in his flat or the government department where he works. Though when she asks which department, I do not know, though I’m sure it’s not one of the sinister ones. He is too much the coward to be working for those institutionalised killers. I am going to see him, to ask of our mother, if he has heard anything; maybe he can use his government contacts to do a search for her name; there must be a file on even an innocent, cold-bloodedly murdered in a bread queue by government employees.
Aranka is not happy. Why add to our risk, when every moment now is counting down our lives?
That is, since we are not quite ready to join the exodus streaming out of our city. But I need to know.
Béla is at work. It is not a pleasant meeting, could not be further from it. He even wears a slight mocking smile, and at one stage, says, See? This is where cowards like me end up, warm and safe and with a good job with quite a good future, if I work hard enough.
You mean slavishly, big brother. Which is not life.
He laughs openly then, unable to hold it to that faint smile. And you call what you are living life? Like a hunted prey, who any moment, at most any day, will be run down and s
hot?
I came to ask about our mother.
He does not know. Though I see he is shaken that she might be dead, and the manner of that possible death. I leave him with the words: You stay and play with murderers. Me, your big brother — yes, big brother — I’ll take my chances. And I wave to his unknowing eyes our father’s handkerchief, my father’s legacy to me. Rather be shot dead than live like you.
ALL AFTERNOON WE have searched. So tired, we keep getting staggers in our walk, and our eyes weigh like heavy doors just wanting to close. Our city is in confusion, the invaders and our Secret Police have complete control, perhaps that’s why they are being more selective in who they stop to question and take away in lorries. They can take time about it now.
We know the pram saves us, but for how long? If an Ávós or Soviet looks inside, then how do we explain? But we keep walking and searching.
It becomes dark just after four, and we feel a little safer. The squeaky pram wheels are louder in protest at the endless kilometres of pavement covered, with a load it is not designed to carry. Let alone dreamed of.
The curfew hour of seven comes, but still we walk. Energy has entered me from somewhere, maybe because we notice they, the victors, are coming out; in staff cars, private vehicles, passing in Zis limousines, glimpsing the rear-seated occupants in laughter, the indifference of the victors to the world outside they have so comprehensively defeated.
Now it’s a lane, not a street, twisting unconventionally, flanked by joined houses, centuries old, a historic part of our city less known. Some houses are close to falling down with age, some unoccupied; here and there one has lights on, which we can see are converted to office use. There, a cluster of public servants under a desk lamp are no doubt making up more files on the citizens, deciding the fates of more innocents. This is not our territory, definitely not ours. But still we push on.