by Alan Duff
After that we hardly spoke, she fed me without talking, just sisterly sounds, not a former lover’s. Finally, she touched me all over my face and said she knew I would come. I had a dream you would. And that you would look like this.
How did I look in the dream?
Like you do now. She pauses, for a long moment she just looks. Like someone who got turned into something he mightn’t have become, had life been different.
Turned into what? If you’re referring to fighting Soviets and Ávós, to killing, but of course that’s changed me. It’s changed us all. We’ve all done it and we all had more than justification. What are you saying, Klaudia?
I am saying, Attila Szabó, that you grew into a man before you had time to live as a child.
Then she got up, went out of the room and was a long time away. I became fearful she was betraying me until she came back with a gesture that proved my thoughts were the only betrayal, for she gave me a thick wad of money. Hungarian forints and US dollars.
Enough local currency to pay someone to guide you to the border to Austria. The American cash, for the other side of the fence. Freedom can be costly to a poor Hungarian boy.
Then she gives me a look too knowing and sad, and says: Until you find your feet, kid. You’re going to end up fine. And you always will. You’re a survivor, Attila Szabó.
How can she say this when I don’t expect to get even halfway to the Austrian border? And I tell her so and why, what we’ve done, that they’ll have descriptions of us and every Ávós and Soviet will be looking for us. Klaudia is aghast, she can’t believe it.
Then she says in quite a different voice the same words as earlier: You know … I had a dream about that also … This time her voice is hollow. If I didn’t know better, I’d say afraid — of me.
Klaudia …? I just told you why we did it. I thought you would understand.
Oh, but I do. I do understand. Sure it is unbelievable, and for you so young. Just that it frightens me, you know, of my dreams telling me that I do understand you … She steps closer to me. Perhaps more than you do, Szabó Attila.
Sopron is the town Klaudia came from; she has given us a contact to take us the last few kilometres. It’s been a journey without end, we can hardly stand from exhaustion, trudging endlessly through snow, over fields. Occasionally we sight the main road, where the mass march in the same direction — tens of thousands of fools daring to think they might make it without being plucked out by roving Ávós patrols.
We began with a group, which became the ever-growing mass that it is now, most on the road, but some in the snow-covered fields like us, ready to flee further. Ávós and Soviets have been driving alongside the refugees, matching faces to photographs in their files, and grabbing at people. Their fear of international outcry if they slaughter the refugees is the one merciful constraint.
Klaudia’s contact is a man called Mátyás. He demands his fee up-front. I offer him half, the other when he gets us across, for he looks the untrustworthy type. But he senses we’re more desperate than his other customers and holds out for all but twenty per cent up-front. He has us wait until late afternoon in a fowl-house. We daren’t lie down on the inviting hay for fear of deepest slumber.
The area between Communism and democracy is aptly land-mined on our side. Armed vehicles patrol it day and night, sentry towers go for kilometres with searchlights on the roam, whilst others fix a permanent light on a wide strip of no-man’s land. All along this stretch, people take their chances in the small villages, paying with life savings, begging kind souls to do it for free.
Our guide is not a talker, nor excited about the freedom he will gain us. He just trudges on through deepening snow, as it falls like last tears on two of us.
He chooses a spot just inside the edge of a fir forest; we dig out a hollow in the snow and wait until he decides the time is right for us to head for that tall border fence. It is snowing quite heavily. Huddled up there, lovers apart, in our own necessary worlds, we fight off sleep, too tired even to accept that soon we might be free.
In the dream my father is not happy with me. I’m walking after him asking why, but he won’t answer, keeps making more distance between us. He goes up a hill, breaks into a run, which leaves me standing at the bottom, crying, calling out to him, Oh, Papa, have I not been a good son?
I see him on top of the hill and he is even angrier at me. I can’t make out what he’s saying and he disappears the other side of the hill. And I’m weeping and fighting sleep, my head keeps falling forward, can’t keep eyes open, they feel like they’re forced closed. Sleep, I just want to sleep.
Then my father bellows: Édes fiam, you must awaken! You should not be sleeping! Wake up! Wake up!
When in the dream a sweet darkness is descending, a heavy curtain is being drawn finally closed; a play’s last act is over. Except the audience has all gone home. Only my executioners are left. Now I’m sinking, in a deep pool, so warm. Then this tiny point of light, and it has my father’s face in it.
I wake up bursting through the wet of snow on my face. Look around, Mátyás has disappeared and Aranka is asleep — she might be dead, she is so still.
Shaking doesn’t work, so I slap her and hard, can feel neither my hand nor the face it connects with. Daylight has little left to go. Aranka struggles awake, confused; her head keeps falling onto her chest, I have to pull her up by the chin. Please, Aranka. Please be strong.
She sees our paid guide has deserted us, starts shaking her head in despair. Hungarian against Hungarian, true betrayers to the end, she says.
So I know she is near the end of her bearing. The cold of a thousand knives is attacking, together with this sadness so exquisite it feels like a mad joy, a kind of happy delirium. And when I look back into the dream, I know two things: my father is still with me, his spirit. But since my mother was not in the dream, then perhaps she is alive, somehow, somewhere back in our broken city.
Just as it is a dead man, alive only in my mind, who tells me now: You must go and urgently, urgently.
I HAVE DREAMT this, too, heaving a frantic passage through soft snow that sucks in every footstep, defies the lift of your next foot. Behind us the forest is silent, drooped evergreen limbs sagging heavier with snowfall. We have this final stretch to freedom, the dully glinting border fence ahead, to ourselves, and I do not understand why my father’s spirit was so urgent with alarm. Don’t know if desperation is creating illusion, but the snow seems to be suddenly harder, progress quicker, less grabbing. My male strength, perhaps greater desire to be on the other side, takes me ahead of my companion. And I don’t realise it until she calls.
I am so tired …
I turn back to help her. She has the pallor of death. I tell her of the life awaiting us. This is beyond what we dreamed of late, is it not?
Then to make lie of my words, I see why my father woke me from the deep, dangerous slumber I was in. I see now why our guide deserted us and why my father’s image appeared back there, in the hollows and holes of hugely draining progress we have made. Three men, in greatcoats and fur hats, have rifles aimed at us.
I flatten myself in the snow, which immediately soaks my clothing, and soon the wind will freeze me, too.
Aranka is up and staggering on, until I shout the name she said she knew we’d hear: Ávós! (It is the fucking Ávós.)
The shots have no ricochet whine to them, not even thuds. They’re just cracks that echo over the white landscape and roll into one another. We’ll do the last on our bellies, I tell her.
And we drag ourselves through this endless white sea, swimming, grabbing, clutching for our lives. Again my strength has gained metres on Aranka and I wait for her to catch up, I see her face with such clarity now it could be under brilliant sunlight. (Oh, woman, woman, you have given me such privilege.)
Then my vision changes to soft candlelight, the air is around just her: all her beauty has returned and then some.
Look, freedom is right there, it’s ri
ght there, Pálfia Péterné Aranka, I think summoning her husband’s ghost will assist. (Freedom is right there, a few score metres and then the thickness of wire away.) I have a pair of small bolt cutters. We cannot lose now. Those Ávós fools plunging after us, they will have their turn in the soft snow.
From within she finds a surge of belly-scrambling progress. And, if desperation is not kidding my mind, if I’m not just delirious with cold, I think we’ve increased the distance between us and our pursuers.
No, it’s not delirium deluding me: we’ve gained. So I shout at them, Fuck you! Fuck you, Ávós! And I see her break out in a smile, not a rebel’s glee but written with love, as if parting her lips lets light escape, light shine. I’m about to give them some return fire, but just then her head pitches forward, like a sudden decision to sleep.
I call her name but she doesn’t move. I slither back to her, get that face up out of the snow. I’m yelling one word at her: Szabad! Szabad! Free. The last few metres.
But a change of light, a change of colour, when all was white but not bleak. Now it’s not white, it’s pink. And when I get closer, a dark crimson where she has one cheek on the snow.
Oh, but then she is talking, if in a whisper, though they’re not words issuing, but air passing over a liquid obstacle. I ask where she’s been hit.
And she’s saying, Don’t let them take me. Please don’t let them take me.
As if I would allow such a thing. I go to lift her, but she is suddenly heavy; Hungarian ground asserting its greater claim over the Austrian ground she is trying to reach. But won’t reach, I hear a voice inside say. So my strength is doubled and I drag her. Thirty metres, I’ll cut through that fence in no time.
But then I hear incomprehensible words, and yet with meaning that could not be clearer. I put my face to hers, for she has rolled onto her back again and falling snow keeps making her blink. I think the bleeding is from the back of her head. Our pursuers will soon reach the harder packed snow and then we are finished.
Nor do I ask what she said, for I will remember that until I die — whether right now or in old age. I just urge her to keep going, when I know they’re just words that mean nothing. Inside, I know that. I know it.
She says it again: Don’t let them take me, Tilla. Don’t let them take me.
And I tell her yet again, I’d never allow that. I find my pistol, but a hand, fingers, so numb I fear I’ll not even know if I have finger on the trigger. Yet shots do come from it, and the Ávós trio flatten themselves at my firing.
Now her eyes are the clearest green — emeralds they are. Green glows against the jet black spilled from the discarded scarf. I could kiss her right here and gladly die with lips attached to hers. I could kill a hundred men in revenge.
Take me … You must end me, Attila Árpád …
And I pretend I don’t know what she’s saying, when I do. I couldn’t be more knowing. Me, take your life? A Magyar heroine, from the hand of her lover? Please Aranka. We’re so close.
You are not killing me, édes. You are immortalising me. Tedd meg, she says. Do it. Tedd meg, do it, do it. Then run for your freedom.
Numb fingers have found the handkerchief bought by my father for my thirteenth birthday, all he could afford. I will not do as she asks, I will wipe away the blood, I will heal her with the joined love of my father to me to her, just you watch good widow, love of mine.
The stitched edging extends its scarlet over the cream linen centre, soaking up the blood from her head. There, now she is healed. It has turned out all right, my dearest.
My fingers fill with their own blood from somewhere in my frozen regions, warming and feeling the trigger. Ávós murderers of good people, all things good (including you, Attila Szabó? Including you?) she is right: you’ll not have her, you have not taken her — I will.
And I fire. I fire. I fire at what they will never make suffer again. I fire with love, for love. I have set her free. She has set me free. Soon I will know the same. The fence is too far. You shouldn’t strive for what you can’t have: the fall is too great. The cost too high. (Aranka, I truly loved you.)
EIGHT YEARS, A world away, I still think of her, still dream of her. Last night I dreamed she did not approve of me and we were not talking. I was close to shooting her, but this was because she wouldn’t listen to me and it felt like injustice. She broke the silence by asking if this is what my dream was, to have a life like this? It was so real I woke up thinking she was right there, beside me, and I was ready to argue the point to make her see it from my view, but I felt bad about wanting to shoot her, even if it was only a dream. (Dreams tell a certain truth, don’t they?)
This morning I got a phone call, telling me that one of our two pubs was about to be hit. I started a dialogue with Aranka again right after I put the phone down: Now do you understand what kind of business I’m in, Aranka? Why your disapproval? They’re trying to hurt me — and you’d appreciate I’d want to defend myself, what self-respecting person wouldn’t?
This is Australia, these are tough people, in my world especially. You apply the ten-times rule in every situation, without exception. Sometimes you can’t afford even to wait until they hit you first. That’s why I’ve survived.
The typical Aussie male is good though, he loves three things: beer, gambling and sport. I haven’t figured an angle on the sport yet, but we, Johno Ryan and I, have the first two. For as well as the normal pub operation, Johno and I run a book in both. We make good money from selling these ordinary worker blokes their daily healthy dose of beer. But it’s the betting where the excitement is.
The race will blare around the pub, raising the punters’ hopes, their fists punch the air, teeth grit; frozen on the spot, they’ll yell their usually losing horse to the finishing post, and order another beer whether they win or not. And soon they’re putting more money on the next sure-fire certainty. The bookie can’t lose; sure we can have bad days, but there’s a law of dynamics says the bookmaker must end up on top. Aranka, what winning guarantee did we ever have in our miserable lives? What say did we ever get in our own destinies?
Sometimes the whole pub will get onto a horse, a hot tip. But then we ourselves send out false hot tips that end up colder than our beer. And that’s cold. I’ve come to know that men act on emotion and hope, so the odds are further against them.
It’s illegal, OK. But then the law protects us, understand? We pay the cops to leave us alone. No, they’re not like our Secret Police — hell, these guys you can have a beer with. It’s more, what’s the word, a fusion. Of cops and robbers. Well, hardly robbers, if it’s two willing parties of punters and bookmakers.
But she won’t leave me alone, not even in my waking hours as I prepare to meet this threat on my livelihood. (My life, Greek arseholes. You’ll find out who you’re taking on. You picked the wrong person.)
I asked Aranka where she had gone that last day in Budapest, when I said goodbye to Klaudia. Aranka gave me a letter, in oil-skin wrap. Last time I had a proper conversation with Aranka — a living one — was, of all places, while we waited in that stinking fowl-house in Sopron, surrounded by fowls and a territorial rooster. Said she’d read it to me once we got safely over the border. Except I got to read it alone, some weeks afterwards, in a Red Cross refugee centre in Vienna, and I cried when I read it. Me, Attila Szabó, who’d vowed never to weep again, I was bawling my eyes out. I didn’t even weep when I shot her, nor afterwards. But this letter — oh, it was some letter …
From his side, the safe side of the closed door, she would have heard him ask, timorously: Who is this? His heart would have been pounding. Not that she wrote those words, not that she mentioned any of the detail. But I can imagine it as if I were there, too. When she told him who it was, he still would not have opened the door immediately, mind fast trying to figure why, and thinking that I had sent her to demand he join us in our last fight against injustice.
So he would have made sure: Are you alone? Why have you come here? Is i
t my brother, has he been hurt? Killed?
Being told that I was fine would not have pleased but nor displeased him, for I don’t think he ever came to hate me, for it was I who passed the judgement on him. He’d have opened the door then and, on seeing her, like any man, would have hoped. It is you, Aranka, please come in. Unlike me, his own brother, whom he did not invite across his front-door boundary.
He would not have been nervous, he was always comfortable around people; just the situations that presented danger or physical hurt he avoided. Indeed, he probably welcomed a chance to show how much more sophisticated he was than me, his rough younger brother. Never would he have thought he’d just invited danger into his home. Not of such beauty.
Her letter said she did not do it with cruelty or hatred, she simply did the job, rather than await the day I would find out myself and likely not be in a position to mete out justice.
She’d found his name in the files on the day of our raid on the Interior Ministry’s office, which was also the office of the Secret Police, after I’d gone home to sleep. She found vast quantities of tapes, of secretly recorded telephone conversations, of citizens spied on, files on informants. She went through one filing cabinet after another, astonished that seemingly the entire population had something on them. She said you could fill lorries all day, there were that many. Hours and hours her letter said she looked up names of people she suspected as informers, including four in our tenement.
Her letter apologised that she’d found herself looking up Szabó. Being a common Hungarian name, she found scores. Among them was a Béla and his former address was one and the same as hers. His change of address was recorded, too, the same we had visited to enquire after Mama.
She did not say how Béla faced his death, of course she wouldn’t. She simply wrote: I killed him with a single shot to the head. Another to his heart, just in case.
The letter ended with but few words on us, what we had shared. It did say she always knew she was not destined to enjoy another life — not of freedom — but was glad she had known the one first with Péter and then me; describing me as an old head on young shoulders, with the advice to live out more of my stolen childhood. Which took me a while to grasp the meaning of.