Gyuri was very glad that he was there. If he hadn’t been out searching for Jadwiga he probably would have missed this – it was a definite bet that Budapest Radio wouldn’t be broadcasting the news that a once-only performance of idol-toppling would be taking place that night.
It was going to be, indisputably, a historic moment, one of those things that grandchildren would be hearing about whether they felt like it or not. Gyuri had never derived such intense satisfaction from anything before like this; pleasure yes, but nothing that had made his soul throw back its head and just laugh. However, it would be nice, Gyuri reflected, if the historic moment could hurry up and get on with it, because it was really too cold to be standing about even for a once in a lifetime sensation and having patrolled the streets all day he was tired. Gyuri also couldn’t quite suppress the feeling that this was going a bit too far. He had carefully positioned himself to have a good view, but equally should penalties arrive, to have a good exit. It was like that moment of schoolboy exuberance when the teacher was going to walk in and curtail the pranks.
There was nothing to give substance to his unease though. A few policemen were circulating but they looked as if they were rather enjoying it and Gyuri had heard the one with the moustache suggest that an acetylene torch would do the job nicely. Two more senior, fatter policemen had been present an hour ago. The fattest, presumably most senior one had endeavoured to disperse the crowd but after issuing a few warnings, he got tired of being laughed at and vanished with his megaphone to more pressing matters elsewhere.
Whatever the outcome of the day, it had been the most enjoyable day, on all counts, that Gyuri had spent for… well, he couldn’t remember the last time precisely but the reign of boredom had lifted for a day.
A lorry pulled up and two workers who handled the acetylene equipment with practised lightness pulled themselves up onto the plinth to amputate Uncle Joe at the boot tops. A ripple of applause rose as the flame bit into Stalin’s calf, a miniature sun in the night’s darkness. The audience for such a monumental event could have been larger; there couldn’t have been more than three thousand gathered around the statue, a mere fraction of those out on the streets that night who would have undergone a quiver of pleasure at the toppling of the bronze abomination. Still, Gyuri knew, tomorrow everyone would be claiming they had been there.
Gyuri assumed that most people were still back in the centre of the city, around the parliament where Imre Nagy had waved sheepishly to the hundred thousand people assembled there and begun his address to them: ‘Comrades…’ This had exactly the opposite effect to what Nagy had wanted. Despite the fact that the crowd wanted him to take over, his opening malapropism brought boos and a rhythmic chant of ‘There are no comrades.’ Nagy had handled the rest of his speech better, urging coolness and good sense. It wasn’t a brilliant performance, but then, as a Communist, Nagy wasn’t familiar with the concept of an audience that wanted to hear him speak. People weren’t overjoyed, but it had been getting late and most of them, content with a good day’s demonstrating, started to go home. Gyuri had seen nearly everyone he had met in his life at the Parliament Square, but not Jadwiga. He was on his way home to check for her there when he happened upon Stalin about to come a cropper.
With some guided combustion, Stalin was tripped up by the will of the people and came crashing down with a clanging slap that dwarfed the ovation of the souvenir-hunters who closed in to feast on the fallen carcass with sledgehammers and pickaxes. Gyuri quite fancied a piece of Stalin as a sort of talisman, a memento of evil not always having its way, but he settled for making one more trip to the Radio to look for Jadwiga if she wasn’t at the flat. She wasn’t. So he took the tram down to Kalvin Square.
The whole network of streets around the Radio in Sándor Bródy utca was full, packed with people. It was like a replay of the World Cup protest, except this time the number of extras had quadrupled. Gyuri heard that a delegation of students had made its way to the Radio in the late afternoon to politely ask for their points to be read out to the rest of the country. More delegations, more well-wishers of democracy, more politeness had arrived throughout the evening and now by eleven o’ clock, the politeness was being discarded and the student idealism was being replaced by proletarian bellicosity. Gyuri hoped Jadwiga wasn’t around here (though he guessed his presence would produce her absence) since he was adamant that the Radio was where the Party would draw the line. The Stalin statue, that was allowing people to let off steam, since, after all Stalin was rather dead and passé, and it saved them the embarrassment of removing it themselves. But the Radio was real here-and-now power, it could pour the unrest all over the sleepier parts of the capital and the nation…
Gyuri spotted Laci and his gang by the main entrance. He squeezed his way through, earning a great deal of rancour from the people he had to shove and step on to reach them. ‘You haven’t seen Jadwiga?’ he inquired. ‘Yes,’ replied Laci, ‘she was here a minute ago.’ Adding proudly: ‘They’re going to read out the points.’
There was a stir around the entrance way and a suit full of shit started to shout: ‘The points are being read out now. Please go home. The points are being read out as I speak. Please go home.’ He sounded familiar and he had a booming voice; Gyuri assumed that he must be one of the presenters. The radio man stressed that the points were being read out and that people should go home. Then, from a window in one of the flats opposite the Radio entrance, a woman with the look of a harried housewife materialised. Balancing her wireless with some difficulty on the windowsill so that everyone in the street could faintly sample the broadcast, she shouted: ‘You evil liar! There’s nothing but music.’
The tear gas followed swiftly after this. It failed all round. The AVO didn’t have gas masks, most of the gas billowed back onto them, and since the street was so narrow and full, even those people who wanted to leave couldn’t do much about it. There was a lot of coughing and crying but more than anything else, there was a large amount of anger. It was something you could watch growing, like a darkening sky presaging rain. Gyuri dropped back to search for Jadwiga and because he knew it was coming. The Communists might not be good at organising the economy but if there was one thing they knew it was how to organise security.
By the time he had forced his way to the sanctuary of the nearby National Museum, not on a direct bullet line from the Radio entrance and endowed with walls and pillars so thick that gunfire would be no more effective than rain, the shooting started. It was the most sickening sound he had ever heard. His fear was overtaken by nausea at people being shot for standing in the wrong place. The streets, of course, were emptying as fast as possible.
In a doorway opposite, revealed sporadically as people ran past, Gyuri saw a tubby man slumped against the door, his legs straight out in front of him, like a propped up teddy-bear. He had a great red patch on his stomach. A companion was whispering in his ear, perhaps trying to talk him out of bleeding to death. Gyuri could discern two motionless bodies lying in front of the Radio. He was surprised how nauseous the sight made him. He had thought he had seen enough corpses during the war to be immune to queasiness, but obviously you had to keep your hand in when it came to indifference to death. And the anger. He had thought he had wanted to kill people before, but now he knew what the real thing felt like, that he truly wanted to, that it wouldn’t be a problem; the desire that had been unperceived in the wings now made its entrance, ready for action.