To conclude, he was asked to stand and make any additional mitigation. ‘I’d like to apologise, gentlemen, for wasting your valuable time and I can assure you this will be the last time you will see me in such circumstances- ’ The tribunal could endure no more. They were paid to sit, not to listen. It was lunch time and Gyuri was cut off by the man in the middle. ‘Fine of fifty forints’ was the verdict. Gyuri, overwhelmed by the modesty of the fine, had a rash impulse to offer to round it up to a hundred if he could punch Matasits in the mouth.
‘Aren’t you going to the demonstration?’ Hepp asked outside. ‘Everyone else seems to be.’
‘If I thought it could make the slightest difference, I’d be leading it.’
Gyuri debated whether to go to work. It was a short debate. The Feather Processing Enterprise could do without him for an afternoon. It had done pretty well without him in the two months he had been there. Hepp had fixed a job for him there; as a good amateur basketball player, Gyuri needed a job. Once he had qualified as an accountant he resolved he should have a position with more status, more prospects and more pay than knocking out the occasional morse code for the railways.
The post of planner had been wangled for him at the Feather Processing Enterprise. Obviously, one didn’t want a job where there was a danger of work but it would have been nice to have had stimulating or glamorous surroundings in which to collect one’s wages.
All Gyuri had done in his two months of employment, out of curiosity, was to take the figures supplied by the Ministry stipulating the amounts the factory should be producing according to the Five Year Plan, and divide these totals by the number of units in the factory. Then, having discovered the unit production figures he added it all up again to get the production figure desired by the Plan. What was actually happening in the factory, he didn’t know. Gyuri doubted that anyone knew or even wanted to know. Most of the little time that he was in his office, his fellow economist, Zalan, and he, would flick matches (fired from the abrasive strip on the matchbox) at each other’s desks, taking bets on which stacks of paper would ignite.
He had only got the Plan details by accident after he encountered Fekete, the director of the Feather Processing Enterprise, as he was belting down a corridor with a couple of fishing-rods. He recognised Fekete because he had been a celebrated all-in wrestler before the war, known as ‘The Fat Boa’. The rumour was he had lent money to members of the Central Committee in the days of their illegality, when they shared the same boarding-house.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Fekete had said, shaking his hand warmly and giving the rippling-biceped smile of a former showman. ‘I’m in a terrible rush, but a copy of the Plan is in my office. Do help yourself.’ That was the only time Gyuri saw Fekete mainly because Fekete only came into the office when he needed was a convenient site for his extramarital ventures, and also because there wasn’t anything to discuss.
Gyuri went to Fekete’s office and with the aid of one of his secretaries who had come in that day to water the plants, searched it thoroughly. No sign of the Plan. Because he was new to the job, feeling inquisitive, and slightly intoxicated by his responsibility, Gyuri decided to phone the Ministry to get some information.
He talked to three people before he realised that simply finding out what he was supposed to be doing would exhaust him and would be going well beyond the call of duty. Gyuri counted, for his own amusement, that he explained twenty-two times that he was phoning from the Feather Processing Enterprise and he wished to obtain correct and up-to-date figures for the Plan, finally, he was connected to a voice whose hostility and reticence convinced him that he had at last reached the right person in the right department.
‘You expect me to tell you all this on the phone?’ reiterated the irate voice. ‘How do I know you’re not an American spy?’
‘Look at it this way,’ said Gyuri, chewing over this epistemological doubt, ‘would an American spy tell you to fuck your mother?’
Ashamed of having tried to do his job, Gyuri had sauntered out of the plant. Passing through the guard’s lodge at the entrance, his eye had been drawn to the vigilant defender of proletarian power vivisecting some dog-ends on his table to frankenstein together a new cigarette. Gyuri noticed that the guard was tearing off a leaf of paper from a document entitled, The Hungarian Feather Processing Enterprise: Revised Five-Year Plan Figures, 1955.
When in doubt, go home, go to bed, Gyuri thought. He had had a restless night fretting over the prospect of the disciplinary session and elaborating his defence, reckoning the tribunal would be the occasion for a backlog of overdue bad luck to unload on him. He opted to go home and file himself between the sheets.
He found Elek trying to persuade some used ground coffee to do an encore and produce more black soup. ‘You’ve just missed Jadwiga,’ he said. ‘She’s come up to Budapest for the demonstration.’ Gyuri swivelled on his heel and went out.
From the other side of the river, he saw the crowd around the Bern statue as he started to cross the Margit Bridge. Bern had been the Polish General who was confused about which revolution he was in, and zealously led the Hungarian Army of Independence in 1848 against the Habsburgs and led it very successfully, until the Russians were called in and the Army of Independence proved how Hungarian it was by getting wiped out. But at least it went down to vastly superior forces, though, apocryphally, when he heard that the ten-times-greater Russian force was attacking, Bern had remarked: ‘Good, I was worried they’d get away.’
The students had chosen to gather around Bern, since one of the goals of the demonstration was to express their approval of the political changes in Poland (Jadwiga had gone on about them with great enthusiasm) which were the sort of changes they wanted in Hungary: a friendly, ideology-next-door, happy-go-lucky sort of Communism. They didn’t seem alone in this wish.
Not only was the Bern square a lawn of heads but the entire embankment around it was one huge dollop of humanity. Thirty, forty thousand people and more drifting in at the edges. It was a vomiting up of an indigestible system. It had all the makings of uncontrollability.
‘Gyuri!’ He turned around to see Laci with two friends who were carrying a huge Hungarian flag. It was the first occasion Gyuri could recall that he had experienced the sensation of feeling old, gazing enviously on those younger than himself, those who hadn’t expended their optimism and could believe that carrying a flag around could change things.
‘Jadwiga’s here somewhere,’ said Laci, looking back at the crowd. ‘She’s here with some friends from Szeged.’ Gyuri surveyed the throng. It could take him the rest of the day to find her if their destinies weren’t synchronised.
‘I must congratulate you. I never thought I’d ever see anything like this’ commented Gyuri, taken aback by the scale of the protest. ‘Have you seen the sixteen points?’ asked Laci, unfolding a sheet of paper and passing it to Gyuri. ‘We started drawing them up yesterday at the University and we just kept going.’
The first demand that Gyuri read was for a change in the leadership of the Hungarian Working People’s Party. That was the sort of thing that, say in 1950, just thinking about it would have got you a ten-year stretch in an unlit cellar with swollen kidneys and icy water up to your knees. Now, what with Stalin smelling the violets by their roots, and Uncle Nikita rubbishing all his predecessors, that sort of thing was negotiable if you were accompanied by a very, very large crowd. The Communist movement, in the best tradition of bankrupt capitalists, was highly adept at changing name and premises and continuing to trade under a new veneer.