After breakfast I was bustled out of the kitchen and into my clothes. His daughters and their children then guided Alajos and me out to the car, holding our hands, asking more questions, helping him into the passenger seat. The oldest child asked how Britain and the US coped with the waves of crime committed by immigrants. When I told her that no such thing was happening, she pulled up a fictitious news story on her phone. As we drove away, I told Alajos that her question had reminded me of the pre-war anti-Semitic myths and hoaxes that had ended in genocide.
‘Und so weiter. Und so weiter,’ he said again.
Together we drove south from Tokaj, following another familiar road along the Tisza. Mosaics of light fell across our path, filtered through the poplars. Fens of reed and willow flanked the roadside. Once more I asked him about his son Sandor but he wouldn’t be drawn.
‘Gone, gone,’ he simply replied.
When a great body of water opened before us, Alajos began to repeat himself. I let him go on not out of tolerance of an old man’s forgetfulness, but because the story needed to be told again.
‘The dam was built by Hungarian and German prisoners in the 1950s,’ he said, lifting his cane to point at the wide sweep of concrete.
‘I was working not far from here in Tiszalöki,’ he explained, gesturing away to the west. ‘One of the engineer’s wives wanted built-in cupboards. They were popular in Budapest at the time and no functionary’s wife could be without them. I agreed to make her a wardrobe of beech with walnut inlay and – when I was taking the measurements – she told me about the riot.’
Fifteen hundred POWs had been treated no better than slaves, building the hydroelectric dam. Beneath Soviet statues of valiant workers brandishing lightning bolts, they lived on water roots and horseflesh, surviving on 200 calories a day. The suffering was terrible, but there was a worse crime – the lie.
‘This stretch of the river had been sealed off. No one could get near the site. It was isolated from the world. The men had been brought from Kiev at night in sealed cattle wagons. Their guards spoke Russian. Their letters to their wives were taken to the Soviet Union to be posted to Hungary. The prisoners thought they were in Russia, as they were supposed to think.’
‘But they knew that the war was long over and they demanded to be returned home, home to Hungary, not knowing that they were home, here in Hungary, all the time. Permission was refused so they went on strike, four men were killed, another executed, but one man broke free.’
Alajos then said, ‘One morning on my way to work – I’d nearly finished the wardrobe – I found an old friend. We thought he had died at Stalingrad, but he’d survived the war. He was the prisoner who had escaped from the dam. But he had become lost in the woods and, not knowing how close to home he was, he had given up hope. After walking for days he had hung himself from a tree not five miles from his village.’ He paused for breath. ‘I found his body, hanging, but I walked away. I told no one. I did nothing.’
Alajos looked at me, his eyes wide and round in confession. ‘I knew. I said nothing. I lied.’
I felt the shame rise in him, realised that this dear, moral man – shaped by ethical integrity – would be forever haunted by his silence, humiliated by his acquiescence.
The Tiszalök dam, built by forced labour, had been owned by the state until last year when Nemzeti Vagyonkezelő Zrt. – the ‘National Wealth Management Company’ – quietly transferred its ownership to a private concern.
Once again no one objected, no one complained.
As we stood together in the cool sunshine by the Tisza, a sudden shiver ran through me, as if spring had not yet reached the country.
‘My generation had not one day of peace,’ Alajos confessed, his silhouette rimmed by the cold morning light. ‘And when in 1989 peace finally came, when the chance to make a better life fell into our laps, when we could finally speak, everyone – even my own children – lost their voice.’ He steadied himself on his cane, touched his tricolour lapel ribbon and asked, ‘Was hättest du getan?’
What would you have done?
26
Altogether Now
Steam, dense and opaque, rose with the voices. Bodies veiled in vapour glided through the heated air. Half-heard words evolved into intangible sounds, dropping into my ears like the beads of condensation off the vaulted ceiling. Half-seen bathers moved as if in a dream, stirring themselves from the tiled benches, looming out of the scalding, sulphurous clouds.
When I could stand it no longer, I plunged out of the steam room and into the cold bath, then back into the thermal pools. Around me skin blushed rosy red or glowed nebulous black. Sweat rolled down their arms, between breasts, dropped onto the octopus mosaic floor. The half-glimpsed bodies became talking heads, submersed to the neck, soothed into conversation. Tension shivered away as the medicinal waters tickled my upper lip. I let go, lay back and floated with so many others between the beams of light that fell from the hammam’s copper dome.
Budapest had remained a city of curves, of underground springs, colonnades and crescents: the arc of the Kiraly baths, the bow of Chain Bridge, the Danube itself that rolled around the mock-medieval parliament building. Yet for all its soft curves it was not a feminine city, instead something hard and unforgiving still shaped it.
Terrorhaza, or the House of Terror, is a museum of horrors. On Andrássy Avenue – across the river from the hammam and up the road from the Hungarian State Opera – stands the former headquarters of both the fascist Arrow Cross and the communist secret police. These iniquitous opponents condemned thousands to death in this haunted villa. Now the place has become one of Budapest’s most popular destinations, with an ominous stencilled steel blade projecting from its roof, and the shadow of the word ‘TERROR’ creeping across its elegant facade.
In the grey entrance hall visitors queue by the thousands in front of two massive tombstones – one black, one red. In front of them a Hungarian everyman, Mozés Mihály, pleads in an ever-looping video: ‘So many people hanged. Why? Why? For what reason?’ He is weeping over a grave. ‘Young people whose thinking was different were sent to the hangman, the executioner. This was their socialism.’
On the monitor flash three words:
Fascism.
Communism.
Socialism.
In disbelief, I stepped into the deceitful museum, into a torrent of Death Metal techno pounding like gunfire. Banks of screens unleashed a staccato volley of advancing armies and armour, jumbling Hitler and Stalin, bombarding visitors with newsreel images of carnage and despair.
Budapest is devastated. Bulldozers clear away the dead. Outsiders are to blame. No mention is made that Hungary chose to ally itself with the Nazis as early as 1932, barely any suggestion that the Arrow Cross had been home-grown murderers.
In the next room, in a demonic Chaplinesque pantomime, a fascist manikin changes into a communist uniform, depicting an entire society forced to be turncoats. In the dead of night thousands of victims are rounded up to the sound of a haunting spy thriller score. In a political sleight of hand, Hungarians are absolved of responsibility for both holocaust and gulag.
The Terrorhaza mesmerises like a hi-tech movie, designed as it was by Attila Kovács, a talented set designer-cum-court-artist. Its heart-thumping soundtrack was composed by alt-right pop star Ákos. In its final scene visitors ride an elevator down to the prison cells and underground gallows, immersed in the vivid narration of a janitor who’d cleaned up after executions.