‘We are winning. It will be Poland next.’
He loved her craziness. Did it really matter what went outside the bedroom where they had established a bad-free zone? ‘Who knows, maybe even the Czechs will do something?’ Jadwiga continued, recounting her day out in the revolution and how she had come to Budapest. On Saturday, the students at Szeged University had held a meeting, as was suddenly the fashion, to discuss the pervasive iniquity of things. ‘It was the first time in my life I’ve seen anything that could even loosely be called democratic. Strange that I had to wait twenty-two years to see someone saying what they thought in public; there was something almost improper about it. So we voted to withdraw from that Communist-guided student union and to set up our own. I told them we had to do it. I remembered what you said about fighting all the way. That pushed me.’
Gyuri strained his memory but he couldn’t recall any such dictum.
The Szeged students had then voted to send a delegation to the university youth of Budapest to urge them to do the same. Jadwiga had arrived in Budapest on Monday night but hadn’t wanted to come and break the back of Gyuri’s sleep by saying hello at four in the morning. She had then been touring the collapse of the Party’s power. While Gyuri had been sheltering behind Stalin, she had been at the Corvin cinema, with one of the best seats in town to watch the fighting. Gyuri related his various encounters with Soviet tanks.
‘Were you afraid?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he lied, choosing a tone of cool indifference to the lethal nature of Soviet armour but not one of scorn, since he didn’t want to overdo it.
‘I wasn’t afraid either,’ she said. Not for the first time, Gyuri registered that Jadwiga was much braver than he was. A soul as firm as her breasts, beauty and fortitude, Venus and Mars in one. And her bravery was a self-fuelling, independent, detached bravery, the sort that would work alone, in the dark, in the gas chamber. What is she doing with me? Gyuri could envision rustling up some bravado if there was an audience or some support, but the sort of solo bravery that exists even though there is no one to witness or mark it was, he knew, beyond him.
Could doing brave things make you brave, as push-ups made you stronger? Was courage bone or muscle? Something that was meted out at birth or something that was up to you?
They vacated the bedroom to merge the food Gyuri had bought into an omelette. After they had eaten, Jadwiga went out of the kitchen and reappeared with a submachine-gun, the classic davai guitar, which she placed on the table. ‘Do you have anything to clean this with?’ she asked. Gyuri caught Elek looking at him with vast amusement.
The only thing that would have been more unlikely than a revolution, thought Gyuri arriving at the British Embassy with a folder full of AVO documents showing that a British diplomat had been spying for the AVO, would have been my arriving at the British Embassy with a folder full of AVO documents showing that a British diplomat had been spying for the AVO.
He rang the bell. After a suitably dignified pause, the door was opened, Gyuri was pleased to see, by Nigel. ‘Good morning,’ said Gyuri in his floweriest pronunciation. ‘How are you, Nigel? Do you know if the Ambassador is free?’
‘Actually, he’s a Minister Plenipotentiary, but don’t let that stop you.’ Gyuri had no idea what Nigel was talking about but didn’t want his status as a star English speaker to be diminished. He had met Nigel three days earlier, during the heaviest of the fighting. The agreement had been that anything moving down the Nádor utca would get it. They had a heavy machine-gun set up ready to rip, which was hogged by a surly, burly coal miner from Tatabánya, who didn’t like anyone coming anywhere near it. ‘I was a gunner in the Army, all right? I know how to use this thing. I don’t want anyone messing around with it, I don’t want anyone fucking it up.’
He didn’t take any breaks and he urinated on the spot, because he didn’t want to let go of the machine-gun or let it out of his sight. When the car appeared, the miner immediately misfired the gun, which was just as well since it gave everyone time to distinguish the Union Jack tied sloppily to the bonnet of the car. The car trundled up respectfully to their position, and as the miner continued to swear, to curse the quality of Soviet manufacturing standards and to eject cartridges left, right and centre, Nigel had got out and said cheerfully, ‘Good afternoon. Is there by any chance anyone here who speaks English and who knows the way to the British Legation?’ Gyuri had earned this conversation.
Nigel had the elegant garb of a top spy, a rising diplomat: someone, in short, well worth getting to know. But in fact he said he was an aspiring opera singer, studying in Vienna. With a friend, he had driven to Budapest to deliver medical supplies. There was no one else who spoke English, but even if there had been they wouldn’t have had a chance. Gyuri took charge, exulting in every well-spent forint of his English lessons. ‘And how do you like Budapest, Nigel? Let me escort you to the Embassy. And do tell me what you think of Viennese women.’
A week after the start of the revolution it was all over, barring the history-writing. To Gyuri’s amazement, to everyone’s amazement, and no doubt most of all, to the Russians’ amazement, the part-timers of Budapest had beaten the Red Army. True, a lot of the Russians hadn’t been very eager to fight, most of them had been based in Hungary for some time and seemed to understand what they were being asked to do and that they weren’t combating international fascism or the Hungarian underworld but the populace of Budapest. Indeed the only Russian Gyuri had seen who was wholly enthusiastic about trigger-pulling had been a Russian deserter he had met at the Corvin who had been fighting his former colleagues.
But the main problem for the Russians, who had been counting on the AVO to pull their weight, had been that, without proper infantry support, their tanks had been bizarrely vulnerable in the streets of Budapest. People simply waited for a tank to pass and then for the price of a good drink, lobbed their petrol bomb on the rear of the tank, where the burning fuel would be sucked in through the ventilation grilles of the T-34s and into the engine, turning the occupants of the tank into charcoal sticks; those fast enough to avoid being burned were shot as they clambered out.
Imre Nagy formed a new new government, one this time with a few people who hadn’t been in the Communist Party. Ceasefire. Exultation. Hungarians had fought their way to paradise.
Along with many other curious folk, Gyuri and Jadwiga had taken a look in the White House, which appropriately enough for a revolution looked as if it had been turned upside down, all the drawers and shelves emptied as people indulged their prurience or just enjoyed themselves making a mess. ‘You always choose the most romantic places for outings, Gyuri,’ she remarked. The first document Gyuri picked up to read was a file detailing the blackmailing of a British diplomat who had been apprehended smuggling gold and then moulded by the AVO. Gyuri grabbed the file and headed for the British Embassy, pleased that he had found a bridge to more civilised parts, leaving Jadwiga to studiously read, slowly and carefully the way she always did, from the vast anthologies of turpitude.
With remarkable speed and ease, perhaps because of a good word from Nigel, perhaps because of the informality of the times, Gyuri was shown in to see the Ambassador, who received the file with courtesy. He puffed on his pipe, manifestly at home in the revolution and pored over the first few pages. ‘Ah. Dawson. Yes,’ he thought out loud.
‘Thank you very much, Mr Fischer. It’s very kind of you to bring this round.’ It took fifty seconds; Gyuri was out almost as fast as he had got in. He hadn’t been expecting anything in particular, though some gold bullion, a British passport, a job offer, something like that would have been quite acceptable. A little excitement and incredulity as a minimum. The Ambassador showed him out as if he had just return a stray button from the Ambassador’s overcoat.