Gyuri had thought the disturbances would be over by now, that the flirtation with liberty would be a one-night stand. But clearly, people were still doing whatever they felt like. What were the Russians up to?
In the centre of the city, closer to the University, Gyuri saw Russian tanks parked menacingly here and there, trying to look aggressive and unobtrusive at the same time but he didn’t witness any fighting.
Immediately, at the university, Gyuri found Laci, with a tricolour band around his arm and sporting a pistol in a holster. Clearly he was in Laci’s orbit just as he was out of Jadwiga’s. In the main hallway of the University the standard fashion accessory seemed to be a firearm, either a davai guitar, or as a minimum, a revolver. Gyuri was expecting Laci to tell him that Jadwiga had just been looking for him, but he hadn’t seen her at all.
Laci was shaken: ‘We were attacked this morning. Some AVO men in a car drove past, they opened up, killed one of us. I had a machine gun, I had them in my sights… Gyuri, I simply couldn’t pull the trigger.’
So there it was. The shock of being an idealist. Some people can’t tell jokes or touch their toes. Laci can’t pull a trigger. It was funny, his brother would have been trotting around with extra magazines. As Gyuri commiserated with him, another student joined them. ‘Hey, Gyuri, are you enjoying the revolution? Do you want to see our AVO collection?’
The chemistry lecture hall contained twelve predictably miserable AVO employees who had been acquired by student patrols. They were being tortured by a student who was outlining their prospects under the principles of international law and natural justice; how they would be formally, correctly and legally investigated by a properly constituted body and if they had committed any illegal acts they would have to stand trial. Surveying the hunched figures, surrounded by half-eaten plates of spinach casserole (which even starving students found hard work), Gyuri thought how lucky they were to be captured by students, and not walking non-existent planks.
Someone called his name. It was, Gyuri realised, Elemér, the dog-catching mailed-fist of the proletariat. ‘Gyuri, Gyuri, why don’t you explain to everyone who I am? Tell them I only worked in the stationery and office supplies department. They don’t understand I’m no one important.’
Gyuri was so taken aback that he was left fumbling for emotions and responses. Later on, he would wonder whether Elemér’s consummate invertebratery wasn’t in some senses admirable, such a remarkable absence of moral backbone being as worthy of attention as a circus contortionist. The ability to survive surely being a laudable thing. Elemér’s tone would have been apt for greeting a long unseen friend at a party. Gyuri settled for staring at him, aghast that he wasn’t standing between a Radio building and a loaded submachine gun. It was a case of either beating him to death or doing nothing. Since he knew the students would be upset at his tarnishing the propriety and decorum of their AVO reservation, giving Elemér a look that he knew would affect his digestion, Gyuri left.
Outside, he could still hear a muted battle raging, like the muffled argument of a domestic dispute a wall away. Trams had become a rare species, hardly glimpsed, but a tram appeared to take Gyuri across the Zsigmond Moricz Square, where he had a good, close-up view of two Soviet tanks shelling what he assumed were freedom-fighter strongholds. Once the tram was over the bridge track in Pest, things were quieter, a few streetsweepers were brushing the pavements clean with their customary sluggish swishes; their union evidently hadn’t called them out.
While keeping a look-out for any discharging tanks, Gyuri reflected on the corpse of the student killed that morning, now laid out in state in front of the University by some trees, surrounded by impromptu wreathes and flowers, and table-clothed by a national flag that had been draped over him. It was one of the old fashioned tricolours that must have been stored away somewhere, not one of the new-style flags that everyone was parading around, minus the centre where the Communist coat-of-arms had been cut out.
The makeshift catafalque had been moving but didn’t even start to make up for the death. A whole lifetime poured down the drain. The person gone, and a lifesize effigy, a livid, well-observed caricature left. All those beliefs, emotions, memories carefully stored up over twenty-three years junked. Twenty-three years. What? 200,000 hours, a Hungarian Second Army of tooth brushing, cleaning behind the ears, blackhead squeezing, small talk, waiting for public transport, wiped out. An identity, spring-cleaned out. A whole being just left as a resume in a few memories, until those repositories were disposed of as well. Abridged away. Nothing like death, thought Gyuri climbing out of the morbidity, for making life look good.
He got off the tram at the Körút. Although most of the shops were closed, he remembered that the day-and-night people’s buffet (a delicatessen short on the delicacies) had been open earlier, and he decided to investigate what was going in the way of edibles.
Near the buffet, lying in the middle of the road like a giant’s abandoned football, was the head from Stalin’s statue, dragged there by a jubilant public as a mark of their triumph, displaying the traitor’s head on a gargantuan scale. A gentleman was seeking to knock off a chunk with the aid of a pickaxe, and it occurred to Gyuri that he should take a souvenir as well. He queued up patiently behind the man, when the Soviet tank appeared.
It roared into the middle of the Körút and opened fire on Gyuri.
Sheltering behind Stalin’s head with the other souvenir-hunter, the first and only thing that occurred to Gyuri as the bullets smashed into the shops and cut down tree branches, was how much he wanted to live. He had never been aware of how enormous, how global this desire was deep down, a desire that was in no way smaller than the universe – how he would do anything, absolutely anything to live, to live for even a few more seconds. If life meant huddling up to Stalin’s head for the next forty years or so, that would be quite satisfactory as long as he could stay alive. Rolled up tighter than a foetus, he closed his eyes not questioning whether that could be of any use.
The shooting stopped, and there was no movement apart from some shards of glass keeling over; those who had taken up assorted positions on the ground were evidently quite happy with them and were in no rush to move. Gyuri could still hear the rumbling of the tank engine unpleasantly close. An old man embracing the pavement next to a tree, with his bag of shopping beside him, yards away from Gyuri, was protesting with amazing persistence and volume: ‘Two world Wars. Two world wars and now this.’ Gyuri considered whether it might be a wiser investment in self-preservation to run to a more secure and spacious sanctuary but while he had faith in his speed, the notion of having only air between himself and the barrel of the heavy machine gun on the tank was too disturbing. Unless the tank closed in, he was going to sweat it out behind Stalin. The rumbling of the tank continued at the same remove; Gyuri became curious as to what they were up to but he wasn’t going to have a look
‘I never thought I’d be grateful to Stalin,’ commented Gyuri’s companion whom Gyuri was half-crushing. They were there for what may or may not have been a long time but certainly felt like it. Gyuri didn’t mind waiting; it was one of those activities you could only do alive. His co-huddler had been in Recsk, the labour camp that had been set up as an extermination centre in the middle of the Hungarian countryside. Gyuri knew nothing about it except that it had existed and been shut down under Nagy; one of István’s friends had been an inmate but had given him only the most elliptical of accounts.
Normally, Gyuri avoided the offers of life stories offered in the traditional Hungarian style of expanded self-history, the vocal autobiographies that all Hungarians seemed to be working on continually but he didn’t have much choice and besides, Miklós’s extracts were quite gripping. Gyuri had always rated himself unlucky but now he realised he was only a weekend player in misfortune.