The demands grew more demanding. Imre Nagy in, Soviet troops out. Free elections, free press. Gyuri wondered, Why not throw in a requirement for eternal life and compulsory millionaireships for all Hungarians? There was also a demand for the secret files on everyone to be opened up.
‘Good list,’ he said. ‘Good crowd.’
‘The authorities were against it till we started,’ said Laci, ‘but now we’ve got plenty of gatecrashers from the Party. I suppose they want it to look as if they were behind it.’
The idea of Jadwiga demonstrating against the Party had dismayed Gyuri greatly when he heard about it. Apart from the more physical risks such as beating or death, the threat of deportation had gnawed at his innards. Poland for him, as a member of the passportless masses, was as inaccessible as the South Pole. But he could see the crowd was too big to have problems. It was a crowd so huge you couldn’t shoot at it or try to disperse it. The leaders and speech-makers would doubtless be soon invited in to some subterranean cell for a little chat and damage to their structures. But on the streets, the crowd was too much: like an unwelcome relative coming to call, all you could do was humour it until it decided to go home. Everything would be all right as long as Jadwiga could restrain herself from haranguing the populace or reciting some inflammatory poetry. ‘We’re going off to the parliament now,’ said Laci, ‘we’re going to stay there until they make Imre Nagy Prime Minister again.’ Gyuri watched them walk off along the bridge. Laci was only four, five years younger than him, but his idealism made Gyuri feel like a grandfather. Strange how two brothers could contain so many differences and similarities. Pataki had always harnessed his intelligence to the service of his willy and winding people up as much as possible. Laci was self-effacing, studious; every time Gyuri had been in the Pataki flat Laci had been attached to a book, often extremely dull text-books. Though you didn’t notice him, he was always around. It had been no surprise when he won a scholarship to the University, a considerable achievement for someone whose father wasn’t in the Central Committee. However, his mischief had merely been more undercover, more insidious, biding its time. Laci hadn’t said anything about it but Gyuri was sure he was leading rather than following at the Technical University.
Scanning the crowd, Gyuri tried to catch a fragment of Jadwiga. He was heartened not to see her addressing the demonstrators with a loud-hailer. The people milling around were no longer predominantly students, the demonstration was snowballing: soldiers, old folk, nonentities, water-polo players, housewives, office staff, all those who saw the demonstration and the placards and who realised this wasn’t a stage-managed, Communist-led affair, that it wasn’t an out of season May Day, abandoned their business and joined in with an air of why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-before?
There were dozens of people trying to pull down the statue of Stalin, imps gathered around his boots. There were many more people giving advice on how it should be done. The assays and the advice had been going on for some time. Sledgehammers, hacksaws, chains attached to lorries, as well as copious abuse had all been directed at the eight-metre-high statue. It remained highly indifferent to the flurry around its legs.
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…