The students surrounding me grew louder and more excited, making up new chants every few minutes—the most recent one: “A microphone in the streets. A microphone in the streets.” They were agitating to read their sixteen demands over the state radio. Above us, the police paced across the rooftops, their gate quickening. They looked nervous and determined at the same time—a truly lethal combination. I noticed a copy of Realitás on the ground, Nagy’s face muddied and ripped by the torrent of footsteps. I picked it up and handed it to one of the students next to me, shouting over the chaos that we should chant for Nagy. I was already planning my next move, which was pressuring Nagy into assuming the leadership role, whether he wanted it or not—I still didn’t have direct confirmation that he would do the job.
Major General Hegyi, head of the army’s training wing, appeared on the balcony of the building. We all knew Hegyi—he wasn’t a diehard Stalinist by any means, and it appeared the students would allow him to speak. I hoped Hegyi would say what the students wanted to hear. I had a feeling their excitement could morph into something else entirely at any second.
Hegyi stepped up to the microphone, his age more evident as he strained to straighten his back and stand completely erect.
“Please,” he said to the crowd, now completely silent. “Disperse and return to your homes.”
At first, the students didn’t make a sound. Nearby, I heard quiet laughter. Through the silence, it grew louder and louder, until it was next to me, and next to the person next to me, and once it reached the entire crowd, a ripple of booing tore through us. The booing turned into a gigantic wave that gave into yelling as students shouted and cursed Hegyi.
Hegyi disappeared, but the crowd surged forward, ramming its collective mass into the gates of the radio building. The police trained their machine guns on us. One fired a warning shot into the air, but the students didn’t stop. A second warning shot went off. The students pushed forward even harder. A collection of knees and elbows jabbed into the back of my body. The police let out another warning shot, then another. My ears began screaming. They felt like they would explode, and I looked around, and everyone’s mouths were open. They were screaming too. My lungs filled with air, but nothing came out. Some people ran. Others tripped and fell to the ground.
Next to me, one of the students yelled, “Death to the police!” I couldn’t hear his next words because a puff of smoke erupted between us, forcing an antagonizing gas into my lungs. As I coughed, I squinted through the mist, only to realize I was staring at a neck without a head. The body still stood, packed in so tight with the crowd, but his head… the tear gas canister must have exploded on the boy’s face.
Clamping my eyes shut and holding my breath tight, I managed to wriggle my way out of the gas plumes and into another crowded space, where teenagers were ramming an old car into the building’s wooden gates, cursing as they splintered the wood that would not give.
Tiny, almost imperceptible gaps began opening up in the crowd. Beneath them were the fallen, either bleeding or dead. I searched the crowd, trying to find someone, anyone, who could help, when I locked eyes with one of the policemen pointing the long nose of his rifle at me. He smirked, opened his mouth wide, and burst into laughter. I ducked as the shots punctured the air above me.
My hands and legs shook, and I felt my legs bending toward the ground, but my mind refused to give in. My thoughts started to have clear beginnings, middles, and ends. I knew what I had to do. I had to help the students secure arms.
I grabbed the shoulder of the girl shielding herself next to me, her long hair thick and grimy underneath my trembling fingers.
“Go to Csepel. Now. You can get guns there.” I yelled at her. When she turned to face me, she looked like a mousy teenager who belonged in a physics lab.
“Where?” she shouted.
“The factories at Csepel!” I screamed.
“Who are you?”
I showed her Realitás. “I wrote this. Take this to them. It will tell you where the guns are.”
“I can’t hear you.”
I started shoving copies of Realitás into the opening of her coat, but she shook her head and, stepping only a foot away from me, was lost.
A trio of ambulances sped toward the crowd, swerving through the random clumps of people to try to reach the injured and dying. I couldn’t believe the regime was actually going to help us. Perhaps they did have some shred of humanity. Out of the back jumped men in white coats, one after the other. There had to be forty of them. But, they seemed too nimble for doctors, leaping from the ambulances like athletes clearing hurdles. That’s when I noticed instead of stretchers or medical kits, the doctors’ shoulders sagged beneath the straps of submachine guns. They ripped off their coats to reveal the uniform of the secret police.
Before we could run away or attack them, they sprayed the crowd with bullets. I ducked again, this time trying to shuffle sideways out of the crowd. A little boy drifted by me. The students were, miraculously, stepping around him and letting him wander through the mayhem. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. Dollops of blood clung to him in random patches, though he didn’t look injured himself. What was he doing here? He looked like he could be seven or eight. When he saw me, his yellowish eyes grew to the size of small apricots. They went directly to the space between us where a small gun lay on the ground.
“This isn’t yours. Go home,” I shouted.
The boy came up next me, enveloping me in his little pocket of protection. I could smell the baby powder his mom must have applied to his skin the night before mixed with the dried blood that wasn’t his own.
“No, I can’t. I can’t.” He started crying. “Just around the corner!”
“What’s around the corner?”
“Please, just follow me.” He grabbed my hand with his tiny, snot-encased fingers. “It’s just right here.”
“Okay, you have one minute.”
He led us through the crowd, unscathed, and I felt a greater appreciation for the students, who showed concern for this little boy’s safety. We both wanted nothing more than to make this country better for him, and the other children.
When we rounded the corner, I smelled gunpowder evaporating in the air. Crumpled on the ground lay a body, disfigured and bleeding, in the alley off Wesselényi út. As I crept closer, I recognized the man’s tattered white shirt, his silver hair, and his ink-stained fingers. It was Antal. He must have left the office to join the efforts and somehow ended up here, destroyed. I felt like I was the one who had been beaten up, so stricken by his battered state. Thin streams of blood trickled from his mouth, and his eyes, puffy and bruised, were swollen shut.
“Is he going to be okay?” the little boy pleaded amidst the thud of tanks rolling toward the fighting.
Ignoring him, I swooped over Antal. When I asked him what happened, he choked and coughed up bloody saliva. He called me babushka over and over again. Turning to the boy, in the most sweet voice I could muster, I asked him what happened. He stammered, and with each attempt at a word, tears tumbled out of his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I just came around the corner because I heard kicking and screaming. And then there was this big group of men, and they looked normal but then they were beating this other man and saying he had to do it. He had to do it.” The boy collapsed into a fit of crying.