As I tried to quell my anger, the train emerged from its tunnel and I caught a glimpse of the old Sandor, smelling a shrivelled apple in the fading daylight. He’d bought it for half price at the Lehel market, outside which he’d filched bags of rotten fruit from a skip. I remembered him whistling with pride as he opened his little shop thirty years earlier, fussing over a display of fresh oranges and peppers, wanting it to be just right.
Budapest’s M3 metro line ended at Kőbánya-Kispest. At Köki Terminál mall, Sandor liberated a shopping trolley to haul the fruit through the housing estates and into a large belt of scrubland. In 1956 Soviet tanks had rumbled along Üllői Avenue to crush the Hungarian uprising. But suburban Kispest – literally ‘Little Pest’ – no longer worried about real invaders. Today Üllői Avenue had been cast into shadow by the ruling party’s lying billboards.
‘Did you know? The London and Paris terror attacks were carried out by immigrants?’ shrieked their xenophobic propaganda. ‘Did you know? Brussels plans to settle a whole town’s worth of illegal immigrants in Hungary.’
I helped to hump the bags of fruit into the scrubland, the last few metres of the path being too rutted for the trolley. After a few steps we came upon a clearing and a rough encampment. Abandoned tents and torn tarpaulins had been cobbled together into half a dozen makeshift hovels. Within their rough circle, a clutch of six or seven middle-aged men – dressed in layers of hand-me-down clothes, warming their hands around a fire – called out in greeting. I held back but Sandor gestured me forward. His hut was a more substantial affair, held together by plastic sheets and a howling guard dog. As he released the padlock, the caged animal went crazy. He pushed the dog back with the slapdash plywood door to reveal tables, stoppered glass jugs and a mess of frothing buckets. A coil of copper tubing rose from a rusted kettle set on a wood burner. The air was filled with the smell of damp and yeast.
‘Here I make best vodka in Köki,’ Sandor said with pride, unpacking the fruit that would infuse the alcohol with flavour. ‘Apples good. Chilli pepper too. One week must leave but sometimes I no wait so long.’
Sandor, who used to sell fresh fruit in the cheerful new age, had turned his expertise to blotting out its memory. He told me he’d found his way to Kispest’s corrugated haven after a night in jail. Another down-and-out, also arrested on vagrancy charges, had waxed lyrical about the place, spinning a yarn about a green and pleasant community beyond the city limits. Of course it was nothing of the sort, but Sandor – after a few days sleeping rough beside its open rubbish tip, gagging for a drink – had hit on a way to survive; boiling up potatoes, adding mash, siphoning off the wash and earning a kind of living by bootlegging booze. He’d managed not to blind his undiscerning clients (more by luck than by design) and through his efforts had brought a hazy happiness to the encampment, helping its residents to avoid both clear thinking and sobriety.
I’d have expected to feel myself a complete outsider, in danger of being beaten up or robbed, but Sandor’s welcome seemed sincere, and this was no clichéd vagrants’ camp. Two of the men spoke English, the others had a smattering of German. One of the drinkers had been a primary school teacher in Pécs, until the government had handed his school over to the Church. Another said that as a student he’d once hitched all the way to Portugal’s Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point of continental Europe.
As I found a place in the circle, they asked me about my journey and the UK, but I turned the conversation back to them.
‘Migrants steal jobs,’ I was told.
‘Turkey will join Europe. We must save ourselves.’
On their island, Sandor and the other men talked, sharing stories, prejudice and tins of cheap food. Jam jars clinked together and Sandor’s dog mauled a squirrel to death. I learned that the hitchhiker had earned a crust by repairing old fridges, until a new law made it illegal to collect appliances discarded in public places. Now only odd construction work came his way. Another man tightened a blanket around his shoulders and told me he’d been a bookkeeper at a Miskolc steel mill until he was laid off, fell into debt and lost his house. He made his money by unloading sacks of soil at a Kispest garden centre.
As the dark came, the men huddled closer together, bonded by sadness, alcohol and defeat. Around the fire they began to amplify each other’s fears and fantasies, convincing themselves that they were not adrift in the world.
‘All foreigners who threaten Hungary must be named as enemies.’
I have a calm nature. I like to settle, not to spark disputes. Once again I tried to be invisible. I went with the flow for an hour, hearing out their arguments, even at the cost of wreaking irrevocable damage to my liver. But I kept looking at Sandor, unable to fathom how the son of a lifelong freethinker could have surrendered himself to racist rhetoric. Finally I could no longer contain myself, due perhaps to his chilli-flavoured hooch.
‘What does it mean? To take back your country?’ I snapped at them. ‘To take back the right to hate? To forget history?’
Silence fell between us, apart from the sound of the hound ripping off the squirrel’s head. The men stared at me, sideways, bemused by my outburst. One of them reached out to pat my arm, as if to humour my faith in the future. Another refilled my jar. The moment was strangely touching and tender and I went wild. I yelled at the drunks in words they didn’t understand, saying that lies had to be exposed and evil held at bay. I tried to draw a line between civic patriotism and xenophobic nationalism. I shouted out that Orbán was ‘a showboat playing to the home crowd and no help in addressing the continent’s broader problems’ (or words to that effect, in the heat of the moment I was misquoting Albright again). Had they asked themselves why young Hungarians were now moving abroad in numbers greater than after the 1956 uprising? I bellowed.
I should have saved my breath.
At the end of my outburst only Sandor and the school teacher hadn’t turned their backs on me. The teacher was the first to speak again. He’d maintained a tenuous hold on current affairs and – although his facts were out of date – ventured something about Britain distancing itself from Europe and congratulated me. I pointed out that Brexit had been a grotesque farce, dividing and diminishing the country, and that public opinion had been inflamed by reckless zealots, press barons and Russian bloggers.
‘Then you say thank you to them all,’ said Sandor, once again sunken-eyed and numb as he finished another jar of vodka. He blinked his watery eyes in an attempt to focus and looked across the fire at me. ‘Europe is dead.’
POLAND
28
Independence Day
‘I have never been so frightened in my life,’ said Kryśka. ‘They kicked us and spat on us and dragged us to the side of the bridge. Of course we didn’t stop the march. Of course our protest was symbolic. But we proved that the neo-fascists had stolen Independence Day.’
Thirty years had passed since our first and last meeting. Back then Kryśka had been a young medical student with spiky red hair and a dream fulfilled, grateful that Poland had at last the chance to become ‘a boring country where people work hard and grow old in peace’. Thirty years on she was heavier around the jowls, her waist was a little thicker, but she remained as defiant as ever.
‘Today something horrible is happening in Poland,’ she told me when we met in Warsaw, her voice exact and crystal clear. We’d shaken hands and then embraced, thinking of the shared values that had set our journeys in motion. ‘The government has awoken our demons. People are not ashamed to show their hatred of strangers, of immigrants, of Jews. This is the last moment to act, before it’s too late.’