Here to Stay

by John Hersey

  FLIGHT

  Journey Toward a Sense of Being Treated Well

  FLIGHT

  ONE MEANS of surviving is to run away. The act of flight does not always connote a lack of courage, and in the case of the Feketes, whose story is told next, it manifestly did not, for the risks of departure from Hungary, after the suppression of the revolt of 1956, were barely out of balance with the horror that staying would have been for this man and his wife and daughters. Vilmos Fekete not only made a dangerous election of a life in freedom; he took all the chances of starting an entirely new life in an unknown world.

  I became acquainted with the Fekete family in Austria, at a teeming refugee camp, a few days after the family’s eruption from its homeland, and it was there that the gaunt paterfamilias told me most of this story; I lived parts of its last chapters with him.

  Journey Toward a Sense of Being Treated Well

  AT ABOUT eight o’clock in the evening of Monday, November 19, 1956, there appeared at the door of a small apartment on the rise of Buda, above the right bank of the Danube at Budapest, a man in a thin, faded blue raincoat, who had an extraordinarily haggard face—all bones, hair, and wires, it seemed. The face had no cheeks—only scoops on either side of a black mustache—and its sharp cheekbones shelved back to conical bumps of bone just in front of big ears, and the ears seemed to have been pulled forward by the wirelike steel bows of a pair of delicate, twisted spectacles. The wire bridge of these glasses had found a resting place a quarter of the way down the man’s straight nose, so that the pupils of his sad brown sunken eyes looked out just under the wirelike upper rims; the lenses were tilted up and out at two different angles, making the glasses seem an apparatus for ventilation, or perhaps shelter, rather than for clear examination of the world. Above the eyes were black brows, taut over the bone, and now and then the man shot up these brows, as if to demonstrate that they were not, as they appeared, rooted in his skull, and when he did this, his enormous forehead was gathered up toward his thick black hair in terrible arching creases that told a lot about the years just past. The man was forty, but he looked ageless—simply out of connection with any time of life at all. At that moment, he also looked cold and tired, and, in fact, he was, for it had taken him two hours to walk home from the food-canning plant on the outskirts of Budapest where he worked as a lawyer. As soon as he had opened the door, he said to his wife, who had been waiting for him, “We can go tomorrow.”

  There were three rooms in the apartment, which the man, whose name was Vilmos Fekete, had rented for twelve years; now he shared them with his wife, his two daughters, his brother-in-law, and his father-in-law. His own father and mother, two brothers, and a sister lived elsewhere in the city. After the family had had some supper, Fekete and his wife, Elvira, prepared for the journey that they, together with their daughters—Klara, who was twelve, and Magdalena, who was nine—planned to take. They told the girls merely that they were all going to a city called Veszprém, near Lake Balaton, to visit some friends—the truth, though only part of the whole truth, for the Feketes intended to make Veszprém their first stop on a longer journey westward. Fekete did not know how dangerous the trip might be. He had learned caution at a high cost during the children’s lifetime, and he felt sure that if the Avo, the Hungarian secret police, were to take him and his family into custody along the way, they would question the children separately, and in case that unthinkable thing should happen, he wanted the children to have the strength of truth-telling on their side. The girls were thrilled, because in the past they had had carefree vacations at Lake Balaton.

  There was really almost nothing to be done to get ready for the trip. Packing anything was out of the question. Fekete knew that it would be impossible to take any baggage, because parts of the trip would have to be made on foot. Elvira baked some biscuits and wrapped them up, along with a crucifix on which she had given her wedding oath fourteen years before, and some toilet articles, into a small parcel. Fekete put in a box his most important documents, such as his school and university diplomas and his favorite photographs of his family. He next called on the superintendent of the apartment building, who kept the official register of tenants, and told him that because of the disorganization of life in Budapest since the October uprising, he and his family were going to live in Veszprém, and that a friend and his family, who had been shelled out of their home during the Russian counterattack, would move into the flat in the Feketes’ places, if the authorities approved. Then Fekete took the box of papers to this same friend, for later delivery to Fekete’s father.

  Fekete borrowed some money from his friend. His salary from the factory had been a thousand forints a month. At the official rate of exchange, this was about ninety dollars; at the black-market rate, it was only twenty dollars. Fekete had no savings. On the previous day, he had drawn his salary for the second half of November, and he actually had about a hundred forints left over from the first half, because it had been impossible to buy anything during the worst of the fighting; his factory director had given him and the other employees four pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, and a pound of salt to tide them over while the shops were closed. Altogether, counting his own money and some that he had been able to borrow from his father and what he now borrowed from his friend, he found himself with about two thousand forints for his journey. Fekete returned home and went to bed at about ten o’clock.

  The family arose at five in the morning, drank some tea, and started out. As they left, Fekete turned on the landing and looked back into the apartment. This was the only home he and his wife had ever had, and in abandoning it he felt a sense of loss, not over the possessions he was leaving behind—the threadbare furniture his godfather had given him, a Telefunken radio with a short-wave band he had bought after saving for many months—but over the words said and the things done in these rooms in twelve years of the prime of his life. The one material thing he hated to leave was his stamp collection, which represented thousands of hours of deep absorption scattered over twenty-six years. Elvira, seeing tears behind the tilted spectacles, stood on the landing silently waiting, her close-set eyes hooded and dry. She had always been a more practical person than Vilmos; a question she often asked was “For what?” To her this small apartment had been a center of hard work and crowded living.

  It was barely getting light as the Fekete family walked down the hill toward the railroad station. It was a ghostly hour in an exhausted city. Signs of bombardment were plentiful; the streets were cluttered with fallen bricks. The day was going to be gray, and it was cold. There was no traffic at all. A general strike was in progress, and few people were out. In Szena Place, the family walked past two railroad cars that the Freedom Fighters had rolled up from the station on streetcar tracks and overturned for barricades; in Moscow Place there was a similar barricade. Half an hour’s walk took the Feketes to the station.

  Trains had started running from Budapest the day before, for the first time in a month, but, as Fekete had explained to his wife, he had wanted to wait one day before leaving, to make sure that the tracks out in the countryside had not been mined by Freedom Fighters to inhibit deportations to the Soviet Union. The previous afternoon, he had sent a friend to scout the station for him, and this explorer had reported that the trains had gone through safely and that the Avo did not seem to be watching the station.

  Fekete walked up to a window and bought four third-class tickets to Veszprém, for eighty-four forints. At a few minutes before seven, the family boarded their train. Nobody asked any questions. The Feketes made their way to a section of a third-class coach that was partly cut off from the rest of the car—a coupé, with wooden benches for about ten passengers. Shortly after they had entered, two young couples joined them in the coupé. The Feketes inspected the newcomers; the newcomers glanced at them. These people, Fekete observed, were warmly dressed, carried no luggage, and had small parcels under their arms. He said with his eyes to his wife, “
Their destination is the same as ours.”

  That train went only about thirty miles, to a place called Sźekesfehérvár, and there, in a station jammed with warmly clad people who had no baggage, the Feketes bought tea and bread. In the afternoon, a train was announced for Veszprém. The Feketes, on boarding it, found places on benches; the aisles were soon crowded with standees. The travellers were silent until a conductor, entering the car as the train started, said in a loud voice, “Nobody remains in Budapest? Everyone comes out?” This seemed to be a joke, and all the people laughed.

  As the cars went through a cold countryside of low hills and eroded scarps of limestone, Fekete sat still and looked out, enjoying the swift motion of the train. He had long dreamed of this journey. He had lived the four decades of his life under a warring Emperor, a Communist leader who established his reforms by bathing the country in blood, a ruthless Fascist regent who called himself an admiral in a landlocked country, a German dictator who regarded Hungary as a pawn, and another Communist regime, this one sustained by Russian-controlled secret police. For a brief, dreamlike moment between the last two of these political numbings, he had experienced democratic parliamentary government—at first hand, for he himself had been elected a member of the Hungarian Parliament in 1947. He had quickly paid, and expensively, for this honor, and the payment was the nightmare memory of his life. Yes, he had long wished for the sensation of momentum this crowded train gave him.

  * * *

  —

  Late in the afternoon, Fekete saw the forested mound of Mount Bakony off to the right, and at its foot a number of bauxite mines and factories; then the train arrived in Veszprém. Fekete led his wife and children to the home of an old friend, a lady schoolteacher, and because she had no spare food, she took the Feketes to a hotel to eat. There two other families, friends of the teacher, joined the group—among them a physician and a member of the local county council. At first, Fekete, who wanted to find out how best to go forward on his journey, felt impatient at having strangers at the table. For a long time, he had made it a practice to speak not a word to people he did not know. But he trusted the teacher’s judgment, and the waiter who came for their order took Fekete’s breath away by saying quite openly, “You can talk about anything you want. The people at the next table are all right.”

  At once, the guests began asking Fekete questions about the revolt in Budapest. Was it true, one asked, that though shop windows had been broken in the fighting there had been no looting?

  Feketes said that one day he had passed a shop with a smashed window, and inside, on the broken fragments of glass, within easy reach of the sidewalk, he had seen a box heaped with coins and paper money, with a sign on it reading, “We are praying for money for the relatives of those dead in the revolution. In this revolution we can leave this box here, and tonight we will get it.”

  Another guest asked: What of the assertion by the Kádár regime that the revolution had been the work of Fascists?

  Fekete, a Catholic, said he considered anti-Semitism the worst manifestation of the kind of Fascism that Hungary had had under Admiral Horthy before the war; for him anti-Semitism was the badge of Fascism. One day early in the revolt, he said, while walking home from his factory, he had heard a man on a street corner make a remark about the Jews. Two young men with rifles who were standing nearby had turned on the man, and one had slapped him in the face and said that the Freedom Fighters would not stand for that kind of talk.

  A little later, Magdalena, the Feketes’ nine-year-old, a restless child with a broad face and huge eyes, announced with satisfaction, “There is a big shell hole in our school.”

  The teacher asked Fekete what the schools in Budapest had been like during the last couple of years.

  Not too bad, Fekete said. One day, a friend of his, the director of an elementary school, had said to him, “I’m very glad that among the teachers in my school are some members of the Party but no Communists.” Such teachers, Fekete said, had joined the Party only for food cards. They had taught the children how to answer questions on dialectics when the inspector came around, but they had made it clear that all those things were only for the inspector.

  One of the men asked: Had Fekete seen any actual fighting?

  Fekete was now experiencing for the first time in several years the pleasurable sensation of a loose tongue in his mouth. He had, he said. On the third day of the revolution, October 25th, in the afternoon, while he was dodging along the streets on his way home from the factory, he had seen a boy not more than fourteen years old jump on a tank and open the lid and drop in a bottle full of benzine. And very near his factory were situated the Kilian Barracks, where General Pál Maléter, the commander of the Freedom Fighters in the city, had held out for several days with nine hundred men. And on October 26th and the two days following, when there was fighting around his home and his wife wouldn’t let him go to the factory, he had looked down on the square below their windows and had seen the young men hiding in doorways and shooting, and he had seen a barricade being made of two railway cars.

  He had been only a witness, he said. This had been a young people’s fight.

  It had all started, he said, on October 23rd, in the evening, when the man who was then Premier, Ernö Gerö, announced on the radio that the students’ demonstration that afternoon, in favor of the Gomulka liberalization in Poland, had been staged by Fascists and criminals. Fekete said that he had heard the speech, and that it had made him angry. The students had been very angry, and they had marched to the radio station to demand time to answer Gerö, and the guards had become excited and at ten o’clock in the evening had fired shots into the crowd of young people. That was the first thing that had made it a real revolution, Fekete said. He had heard shots during that night. The next morning, the twenty-fourth, he had started out for his office and had found the streets practically deserted. He had walked all the way to the factory both that day and the next, in order that he might be where he could telephone his father and find out how he was.

  In the very first days of the revolution, Fekete had begun to hear that Hungarians who lived near the Austrian border were going into exile, and he talked over with his wife the question of whether they should try to go, too. Maybe they could even get to the United States, he said.

  On the twenty-ninth, the fighting had died down. Imre Nagy was Premier, and in his Cabinet was a member of the non-Communist Smallholders’ Party, Béla Kovács, whom Fekete had known since the time when he himself was a Smallholder. On the thirty-first—a day of great illusory joy in Budapest, as Soviet tanks withdrew from the city and it seemed that a few boys with rifles and bottles of flammables had set back a great military power—Fekete had gone to see Kovács and had talked with him about a possible rejuvenation of the Smallholders’ Party.

  Then, on the following days, there were ominous rumors of Russian reinforcements. Fekete heard on the radio that Nagy had taken Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact and had proclaimed the nation’s neutrality, and that he had appealed to the United Nations for protection.

  On the morning of Sunday, November 4th, at five o’clock, the Feketes awoke to sounds of heavy bombardment. Hundreds of Russian tanks were pouring into the city. Nagy took asylum in the Yugoslav Embassy, and the Feketes took refuge in the cellar of their apartment house. There the family stayed, off and on, for a full week, and there, for the first time, they made the acquaintance of the people who had been living in the same building with them for years. The rule of Fekete’s life had been: Tranquillity lies in isolation, in saying nothing, in living like a wild beast in the love and protection of one’s immediate family. At the factory, everyone had known who the tiny handful of hard-core Communists were, and everyone had kept them, as the expression went, “three steps of air away.” No one had taken seriously the pathetic group of food-card Communists, who were pushed into all the front positions and given all the titles. But in the apartment buil
ding there had been no way of knowing who thought what; the Avo penetrated everywhere. Now, in the cellar, where someone had set up a radio, it was a staggering revelation to see tears in every eye when, on November 6th, the rebel radio said farewell to the world in defeat. All those in the building whom Fekete had feared had felt the same way as he!

  For an hour or so each day, during lulls in the fighting, the Feketes went up to their apartment, and had a meal. They carried a sofa down to the cellar for the girls; the parents slept on the basement floor. Twice that week, Fekete risked going out into the streets, in order to visit his father and make sure he was all right. The wreckage along the streets was appalling.

  By Sunday, November 11th, most of the fighting was over. The next day, Fekete walked to the factory. He felt obliged to do this, because he was running low on money and food for his family. He was given his emergency rations that day. He walked to the plant all that week. Everyone there was deeply depressed. The Kádár government was announcing repressive measures; the hopes of late October had proved false; there were reports of wholesale deportations of young men to the Soviet Union; the wreckage in the city was far greater than it had been during the entire war; people had no energy, no desire for work. The official radio and the papers were saying that Soviet troops were guarding the border with Austria, and that the people who had fled to that country were being held as prisoners in camps or made to work in mines, and were given but one piece of bread a day.