When Gyuri arrived at the Corvin, as always there were lots of groups congregated outside the cinema; the necessity to be out on the street hadn’t diminished. People wanted to see history with their own eyes. The anti-tank gun was still out by the entrance with a sign ‘retained by popular demand’ propped up on the barrel; people were still carrying their weapons, despite the call for people to start handing them in. Jankó, the commander of the Corvin’s single anti-tank battery, was hobbling about on his wooden leg and didn’t look as if he would be paying heed. He had a rifle in his hand, a greatly-prized AK-47, the latest Soviet assault rifle, slung over his back, a holstered pistol and a bayonet peeking out of the top of the boot on his good foot. Indisputably a man who was afraid of missing an opportunity of killing some Russians, Jankó had certainly done a faultless job on the anti-tank gun, six tanks burst open like popcorn, one shot apiece. Not surprisingly in a man with such homicidal proficiency and a knack for the gadgets of death, he had a mean set to his face. Gyuri could imagine him working as a rat-catcher, getting a kick out of killing small mammals, until larger, more Soviet ones came along.
Jadwiga, true to form, was nowhere to be seen where she should have been seen. Gyuri glanced in at a few of the meetings that were taking place, but he couldn’t see her. Now the fighting was over, people were doing one of two things, either holding meetings or painting the old national insignia on everything. The meetings, initially bracing and euphoric, were lurching towards tedium. The absence of free association had been wearing, but it was like not reading a book for five years and then trying to read five at the same time to make up. Creedal orgies, nationwide.
All sorts of organisations were coming into existence; the old political parties carrying on from mid-sentence where they stopped in 1947 and all sorts of societies for political prisoners, for students, for office workers, for economists, for revolutionary water-polo players. The old joke about two Hungarians on a desert island resulting in three political parties had been enacted in earnest. There was probably already an association of one-legged freedom-fighters for Jankó to join.
Gyuri sauntered around the Corvin yard. The faces of the fighters were young, most of them not out of their teens (he again felt somewhat obsolete); they were working-class generally and well, most of them not too bright. But then would anyone intelligent spend their leisure time taunting Soviet tanks? No, the educated, intelligent people chiefly stayed at home producing pamphlets and let the poor and stupid do the dying for them, coming out to wave the flags at appropriate moments.
The Corvin was in the sort of district that appreciated a good fight, whether it was with rival football supporters or the Red Army. Gyuri kept expecting to see Tamás; the Corvin was his sort of event, and there could be no doubt that if Tamás were alive, Russians would be dying. But there were so many other thriving locations apart from the Corvin to choose from. Still, familiar faces were at the Corvin; he had seen Noughts, arguing with two girls kitted out with submachine-guns. Gyuri had said hello but suspected that Noughts hadn’t placed him, Noughts having played a larger role as Gyuri’s cellmate, than Gyuri with his walk-on part on Noughts’s stage.
Gyuri kept expecting to see Pataki as well. Backs, profiles, haircuts, overcoats, remote forms would imitate Pataki or give off Patakiness. He imagined Pataki might be on his way back to Hungary, he wouldn’t want to miss this. One man coming out of the parliament resembled Pataki so closely, moved so much like him, that Gyuri was getting the joy and the greetings ready and only the absence of any recognition in the irises of the impostor gave him away at the last moment…
In the end, far down the Űllői út by some scenic rubble, Gyuri found Jadwiga having her picture taken by a couple of Western photographers. They seemed to have a fondness for attractive women with weapons. Gyuri didn’t like this at all. Jadwiga was merely handing out one of her polite smiles, her toothy calling card, but they weren’t to know that.
Gyuri came up to glower at the photographers at close quarters but they had already finished and were on the move to their next snap. Viktor the Soviet deserter and another Pole, whom Gyuri thought was called Witold, were leaning on the husk of a tank, where they had been watching the photo session.
Jadwiga was wearing her quilted Soviet jacket, the pelt of a dead Soviet soldier, Gyuri thought bleakly. He had taken weapons from the dead internationalists, but weapons were somehow faithless, they didn’t belong to anyone, they were just carried. Jadwiga’s blue jacket, approximately a third of her small wardrobe, had got ripped to shreds on the 26th as they were crawling along under Soviet fire at the Corvin. The noise of the tanks, more than anything else, had been terrifying. It was no more dangerous, rationally, than being shot at by infantry but it sounded more dangerous. When Jankó fired the anti-tank gun in reply, Gyuri had believed he was going to die of fear. As he lay on the ground, using muscles he had been unaware of to propel himself into the pavement, impressed more forcefully than if an elephant had been standing on him, he pondered how it would only take one of the hundreds of bullets zooming through the Corvin to unanchor him from the continuum, and wondered why everybody didn’t just run away, Jadwiga was only upset by her jacket failing her in combat conditions, and tattering during her sniping. During one of her shopping expeditions in the lulls to collect ammunition and weapons from inoperative Soviets, she had returned with the tough jacket.
‘So how is the great optimist?’ she said to Gyuri. Jadwiga had sided of course with Elek in the morning, insisting that the Red Army had had enough and that Gyuri didn’t want to face up to the fact that he was now free to do whatever he wanted since he could no longer reach for the handy excuse of an inane, dictatorial regime preventing him from being a great success.
‘ Budapest today, Warsaw next week. Right, Witold?’ Witold nodded in agreement. Then she added in Russian: ‘ Moscow, let’s be realistic, one month.’ Viktor grinned in approval.
‘That’s why they have to stop it here,’ said Gyuri. ‘This can’t go on much longer’
‘You’re so miserable,’ Jadwiga remonstrated. ‘I hope our children will have none of that. When I will tell them how stupid their father was, they’ll laugh.’
Having secured a promise from her that she would return home soon, Gyuri started back for Damjanich utca. Passing by a bookshop that had puked out its contents into the street, it occurred to him the household was short of paper, and because he wanted to carry out a scientific experiment, Gyuri gathered up a few volumes that hadn’t been burned or only just nibbled by the flames.
At home, relaxed on the loo, he tried out the books. Revai, the Party ideologue, was disappointing. It was an imposing volume, We Knew How to Use Freedom (684pp), but the paper was too shiny to merit the diploma of bottom-wiping. Meray, the journalist who had fearlessly invented and then exposed American atrocities in Korea in his illustrated Testimony (213 pp) looked promising. Gyuri had no idea what had really happened in Korea but he was quite willing to stake his life that the only things in the book that weren’t downright lies were the author’s name and the commas. Nevertheless, Meray afforded a greater degree of absorbency. Coming to Rákosi’s Selected Speeches and Articles (559pp), there was still a perceptible failure to carry out the work in hand. The most effective nether napkin was Rákosi’s The Turning Point (359pp), an earlier offering, from 1946, on coarse paper which almost worked.
Gyuri was trying to enjoy his sojourn at the hindquarters’ headquarters with extracts from these books but although the idea had been highly pleasing, the reality wasn’t as satisfactory. The Communists couldn’t even hack it as toilet paper. You could imagine Rákosi, forecasting that people might well one day seize his books with a hankering to convert them into arse-fodder, ordering that his works should be printed on the most unaccommodating of paper. Still, it would make an amusing paragraph when he wrote to Pataki.