Szabad

by Alan Duff

  Twisting again the lane straightens, and there are parked vehicles all along and large lighted windows, with different toning, which we see at first is candlelight, and inside revellers; their noise has anyway reached us before sight of them.

  It is an obscenity, to see men — and women — drinking, feasting, celebrating, whilst all around the people starve, some die for want of food.

  But then comes a calmness, a serenity if it weren’t for the sick feeling in my gut; the only outside sound is our squeaking baby carriage and our footsteps on wet snow. Now and then a vehicle catches us in headlights from behind, since this is one-way, and we are in practised postures of just another pair of confounded citizens on the move.

  Snow is piled at the kerb and spills over onto the pavement. Light snow falls and Aranka reaches forward to make a false touch to her baby under the cover, when it could not be less a living child and nor would stand scrutiny for one moment.

  A big car pulls up in front of us, the rear door opens and out climb three Russians in greatcoats, with the countenance of officers, supercilious, haughty. One stops, stares at us approaching. We stop as one. The man asks a question in Russian. Aranka answers back in his tongue.

  Now he ambles forward, speaks again to Aranka. This time she shakes her head vigorously, but the Russian only grins. He starts to reach into the pram, but Aranka grabs his hand, scolds him in Russian. I presume she is trying to bluff by saying he will wake her baby.

  The bluff works. Except now the Russian is with eyes for this beauty, and he calls back to his comrades. They walk over and share his lecherous interest. I want to punch them.

  She turns to me. They ask for identification papers. We pull out our false documents, printed on the Corvin Passage underground press. The officers fall into the universal pose of official men feeling even more important whenever they check someone’s papers.

  Our papers are in order. Then another goes to check inside the pram, underneath that hood shaped like a baby’s bonnet.

  Please, my child is not well, she says in Hungarian, which I realise is for my sake, for she says it then in Russian.

  As the man’s hand keeps reaching into the carriage, she speaks in Russian, then in our tongue: She is so sick, she could die at any moment.

  The trio of Russians have moved around so they can see into the pram, even if a gloomy view. One wipes at snow gathered on the blanket covering, I think the more to feel for body shape. He nods. But another lifts the blanket this end and comes out holding my little bouquet of flowers. He asks Aranka something and she replies only in his language. He shrugs, they all shrug, and move off.

  We watch them head for one of those places where the glowing candles beckon only them, and traitorous waiters await to serve, and Hungarian whores enjoy the good life of revelling with the victor.

  I’m shaking all over. What did he say last? I ask.

  He said, It sure doesn’t feel too well, lovely lady. And she is also trembling. A few more steps into heaven, eh Tilla? Her tone almost breezy now. Yet a face deadly serious.

  Heaven or hell, it’s all the same after a certain while, ugye?

  Yes, she throws a grin at me.

  Through one window, then the next, in this hidden haven for the privileged, we see the same revelling: Ávós, Hungarian officials, out on the town with their Russian cohorts. At the second restaurant she’s with doubts, Are we sure? There are so many women with them.

  Women? They are the enemy not women.

  He would be in the very last window of this exclusive street. The celebrations are more formal in his place of preference; he’s not in the company of his own Ávós officers, but with a Russian, ordinary innocuous — like him. He also has a woman companion with him, though not nearly as beautiful as the one I have told to drop behind me, the one whom he thinks he has had but has never. Not as her husband has, nor I. You don’t own them, Friss, you only enjoy the privilege to experience them.

  The pram is mine and I make my assessments, change what we had roughly planned, since I don’t think we truly believed we would find him, not like this. Yet where else and what else would he have been doing, with a city taken back, his power restored, and soon our bodies strung from city trees or lamposts? Every prison’s gallows will be worked round the clock in reprisals against us.

  Now I am every freedom-fighter hero, my neck hereafter can be theirs to put the noose around and my forced weight shift the ending of me. I shall cry out my mama’s name, Ilona, and my papa, Sándor. Aranka’s and Pál’s and poor János’s in Siberia. But now it is not enough, not from this distance; I might miss, it could go wrong.

  I am going inside, I inform her and grab what I require from the pram.

  It is not hell I enter. For it is suffused all over with soft glowing candlelight, and happy, smiling faces, even if they are changing in demanding question of who I am, how dare I?

  There are those who are reddening, faces fattening with fury at my entry, my intrusion on their celebration. Though clearly I am no danger to them, not when I carry a small bouquet of flowers. I know my parents are with me in giving courage and presence of mind not only to hold the flowers aloft for proffered sale but to move towards one particular table. With heart pounding, of course it pounds. I like it excited like that. I want to be scared. I want to be trembling all over like this. For I know what happens next.

  But a waiter rushes to block me, tells me to get out.

  This is my mama’s voice, answering him ever so firmly but without threat. Sir, I have procured these flowers as my only means to feed my family. Please let me make the sale.

  No, this boot-licking shit won’t, and he starts to put hands on me. Rage has come unprepared, for I am without weapons. Except my level head. I must keep a level head. Or I hand it to them — early — on one of their silver platters, adorned with good food.

  So I step around him, with smile as I can manage and put the tiny arrangement of petals — kept fresh under the carriage blanket — on his table. Though it is his female companion I tempt, not him. I do not even look at the colour of his eyes.

  Madam … So nervous I fear no more words will come out. Have to cough — twice. Madam, how much are these flowers worth when outside it snows? The words come out seamlessly now. I knew they would. I have just stepped past another marking stone on this highway.

  She smiles, his slut, her best dazzling one, which she throws from me to him, her lover, without question. Shall I? she asks. A tiny bunch, but cute, don’t you think?

  In my peripheral vision, Friss shrugs. Indifferent, hardly giving me glance. Sighing, he reaches into his pocket to fish out some coins. Here. Now go away. Take a bath. You smell.

  I turn and head for the door out. With my flowers.

  Hey you! Come back here!

  I keep walking. His reflection is before me in the big glass pane. I see him get up. Hear the rattle of his chair go back, quiet coming over the rest of the diners, though I can be no more than a mild distraction, a curiosity of no account. In no time they would have forgotten I existed, returned to their champagne, wine, food and women to complete the night.

  Right on out that door I walk — no, stride. For that is what he is doing, he’s striding to catch up to me. I notice the reflections in here throw inwards, so Aranka is a shape that only I can pick out, if only for that odd shape of cane carriage she stands before. Just another vanquished citizen huddled into her coat.

  Out on the street it feels like our territory again. I say to her: Here he comes. I have brought him to you.

  I have stepped off the kerb onto the road to give her a clear view.

  Colonel Friss. Zoltán Friss. Her voice is clear on this night; how I wish it was out with stars. On our last night free, our last night alive, there should have been stars.

  A man used to toting a gun is no man at all, though he forces through a semblance of it. Why it is Aranka … What on earth do you think you’re doing? There’s a whole restaurant of people …

&
nbsp; No, Friss. Just you. Me. And him …

  It is like my re-introduction to the Rage I have felt all this time since I saw this face, those hands wiping at my papa’s blood, soiling his fancy trench coat as he was driven away.

  You’re mad. (What else can he say?)

  Of course she is mad, of course I am. That’s why we are here. Because we are mad.

  He’s turning violently to get back to the safety of his friends, the guns they’d have in jacket uniforms, handed in to the cloak attendant. My nerves have all melted away.

  She brings him up short, in a pose of arms akimbo, body askew, she should have shot him in the genitals, like we dreamed and planned of doing.

  I’ve grabbed the tommy-gun from under the carriage mattress, nearly sending it over — have to stop it from toppling over with the other hand.

  The window is all those faces, caught as if in hunter’s headlights, or some last comprehension of life not having been lived quite right, or not at all right. But mostly they are poses of disbelief, that it shouldn’t be and can’t be happening like this and yet it is. Like death of someone you love: it is. It very much is and cannot be otherwise. Not now.

  With glass shattering before their wide eyes, hit by projectiles fired at such speed and with such rapidity. Lord, they’re just bodily forms in different contortions of writhing, keeling, twisting to escape, twisting in struck pain, in last mortal agony. They are not people dying, they’re an ending, a conclusion they failed to take into consideration.

  The whore, who wanted my flowers, but could not know he was never going to offer cash enough to pay for them, not the flowers, has been hit. Clutching her breasts, a figure in jagged-edge glass falling off her chair.

  And her lover, the State employer given blanket permission to kill whomever he wishes, he’s crabbing and crawling along the ground, a believer now I bet, in God saving him, in anyone or anything saving him.

  Whose right it is can be argued, but I take mine first and run to him and put the gun to his genitals, neither smiling nor saying anything, nor feeling glad or encrazed with grief for my father — I just see symbolism, meaning, and meaning taken and murder and rape violation symbolised. That’s what I see. I fire.

  I see, next, his head tear apart, a rupture in his forehead, when he’d been clutching at his exploded manhood, and her, a good woman’s, an innocent’s form, causing his brains to spill onto these cobbles, old Buda cobbles, known of more blood than any; and soon its trickle will fill the joining grooves of stone, as it’s always done.

  I am hearing my father’s voice now and he tells me this. The innocents are you, the pair outside. So do it, édes fiam. Do it.

  So, doing it comes without guilt, it’s just another grenade I’ve thrown at the enemy, who happen to be dining and in company of their whores. They’re not lives ending. They’re lives suffering the consequences of their immoral actions. It’s an enormous whoosh of air, another explosion, just more shattering and breaking of men and their sluts. I did not hear a single sound of human voice in that final act, not one cry.

  Then we’re rushing from this scene of carnage, Aranka still with the pram, and I can understand why. We ditch our weapons, except for two pistols and a grenade up under the far end of the pram. If stopped and the pram investigated, then we are done for. But we were done for long before this.

  We’re experienced enough to know the shortcuts and anyway guided by good stars, even if they aren’t all visible in that black emptiness, fluttering down with snow flakes; we make good distance from the scene.

  I suggest the pram is hindering us, but she won’t hear it and asks please trust her instincts. What the hell; running is different when you’ve accepted death. It’s like being told something is not possible. And you know it is and yet act as if it isn’t, at least knowing you’ve tried.

  Far away from old Buda, we are starting to feel there might be a chance and are re-living what happened. I recall how those bodies looked like a macabre dance, how astonished they were and slow to react. And she is remembering Friss in excruciating pain from being shot by me in the genitals and his look as he stared at her; a complete reversal where he had no dignity in his suffering, whilst she had nothing else but in hers.

  We start laughing because we might not have long to enjoy it. But more, I think we know we’ve committed an act beyond even our rationalising. I’m feeling elated, though guilty of the same diabolical crimes as done against us.

  The wheels of baby carriage down our streets are our sound: breaking, worn out, about to collapse. Most of the streetlights are out, shot out, broken by acts of battle, more symbolism of these moments, these times.

  We pass Soviet tanks parked in long convoys. Clusters of crew and soldiers in conversational, cigarette-smoking huddles look at us with the lazy indifference of victors; the pram surely helping our cause. We’ll try to make it to Austria, but we’ll never make it, no we won’t. What happened to our dreams of freedom? Slowly killed. Now we’re like old dying folk, tidying up our affairs, as she tells me she has one matter, private, to which she must attend. I also have one last matter, to see Klaudia.

  Next moment we’re in the glare of headlights. The hunters have us now. Gears whine down, the vehicle slows to a deliberate crawling pace, engine claiming the whole street, like a quiet but ominous drum roll.

  This is it. And need it be said, I love you and you love me? It’s not how it was supposed to be, you the older widow and I so young and besotted with what I could never have. Words, who needs words? And we walk on, Aranka pushing that battered cane carriage, with its dying wheel bearings. Me with hardly a thought, when I’d always assumed the mind would be recalling a whole life.

  Tilla? I’m okay, are you?

  Sure I am. We sound the same, smile the same, we are the same. Doomed, as likely.

  The vehicle stops. It’s a lorry. Doors open. Men get out. Ávós. Unlike the Soviets, unforgiving, as if this has been a personal war. Yet one in which we did not get to throw a stone till the evening of 23 October.

  A torch beam falls on her, on me, flicks between us. It rolls over the pram, the covered end facing them, joined by two more beams, which flick up and down us, finishes on our faces, with that familiar curt demand: Papers. Loaded like a gun with expectation — our worst, their best.

  Our papers receive a long scrutiny. They are not handed back. The leader Ávós points at the pram.

  Cold out for a baby.

  God decides the cold, Aranka says. A mother can do her best to provide warmth, and medicine, if she’s lucky.

  God and mothers, on the wrong side, have not much luck at all. And I can tell you, you’re not lucky. Not if it’s medicine you want.

  Can we not hope?

  Keep hoping till you die, lady. My, but you’re a good looker. Why wouldn’t you be on our side? Run with the winners.

  Sir, if our papers are satisfactory, please may we have them back.

  We know he’ll take his time deciding, this is part of their joy. He stares and stares, but finally hands us each our papers in turn. Then another of them looks at Aranka, at the pram, and says, Oh, the baby in the pram trick.

  She says, It is no trick. But don’t you dare touch my child.

  As if these oafs will listen.

  Two step around, shoving me away, looking down into the pram. Let me see, says the leader. If we find grenades, we will rip out your eyes before we kill you both. Guns will earn your ears torn off, before execution. And a baby, well, we’re about to know that …

  From being tentative, the Ávós man suddenly yanks the blanket back. Peers. Does not believe. Looks closer. Then at Aranka.

  You stupid woman, your child is dead.

  And when she says nothing in response, he asks, Did you know it was dead?

  She draws herself up. I did.

  And you push a dead child around the city streets still under curfew — whatever for, woman?

  Whatever for, sir? I’ll tell you whatever for: because every chil
d has a mother who loves it — in case you have children of your own. Now leave us to our grieving or do what you will with us. I’ve had enough.

  But they haven’t. One points at me. He is the father?

  For some reason I want her to answer in the affirmative, though of course the child is not either of ours. Then again, it is our child, the orphan child of Hungary claimed gladly by us.

  He is my lover. I am a widow. My husband was killed. By the same people for the same empty reasons as the rest are killed.

  Lady, if you didn’t have such a burden as that dead child, I swear we’d have you keep your husband company. Bury it fast. It stinks.

  The carriage wheels squeak into the night, now a slowed funeral cortège. For the child we have used in death to make more death. And ours to come any moment soon.

  SHE’S RETURNED FROM her private mission, and I know foul deed done when I see it, on this face I do. For she’s come back missing all her beauty. Like it’s been washed out, or flown temporarily, and I shouldn’t be seeing her like this, when normally she would have stayed alone until her mind justified whatever it was she did. Unless it’s a heartbreaking farewell she had to make, but then I would know of such a close friend, since her relatives live in Debrecen, when not in prison.

  The deed is there in the way she asks for the cartridges for her pistol, the measured way she loads the ammunition clip.

  It’s not my place to ask what she has done, though instinct tells me it is murder no less.

  I have gone on my own mission, to see not the whore by the name of Izabella, but Klaudia; Klaudia of her christened name, who gave me all of her best self, the angel not whore. And though I smelled a Russian presence recently departed from her boudoir, it was nonetheless Klaudia who greeted me like a true friend and fed me thick vegetable soup that had been simmering on her stove. When I said I had female company I was running with, she handed me a bread loaf and said it was for our journey.