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.
‘The Germans, what a cultured people when they’re not invading your country,’ Miklós explained. Miklós had done a stint in the anti-Nazi resistance. Caught, the Hungarians were too lazy to execute him and passed him to the Germans who put him in Dachau where he had been dying of cholera when the Americans arrived. He got better. ‘It seemed a bit pointless to die when you’d just been liberated.’
He came back to Hungary. ‘Talk about being stupid.’ Where he worked for the Smallholders’ Party. ‘Talk about asking for it.’ Then he got a free ride in a black car which led to him being imprisoned in Recsk. The concept of Recsk was that you went in but you didn’t come out. ‘Its scope was modest compared to the Soviet or German models, I suppose,’ Miklós conceded, ‘but we’re a small country, after alclass="underline" there were only fifteen hundred of us.’ For three years Miklós and the others had no news from outside. ‘The only news we got was from shitty newspaper we filched from the guards’ latrine and let’s be honest, the papers aren’t much to talk about in the first place. We only found out about Stalin’s death when one of us noticed a black border around his picture in the main office.’
Miklós was very talkative despite the discomfort of his position, pinioned by a first division basketball player. ‘You know what the worst thing was? It’s all crap about how important freedom, friendship all that abstract stuff is. You know what matters? Sleep and food. The hunger was unimaginable. You thought it was bad during the War? I tell you, a few weeks, a couple of months of going hungry – it’s nothing, nothing. A doddle. A year… two years…three years without enough to eat,’ he was now shouting, ‘it’s beyond human belief. Ever since I got out, I always carry this.’ With some difficulty, he unwrapped a cloth containing a piece of cheese, a hunk of bread and some radishes. ‘I have to carry supplies with me all the time. I hardly ever use it. I just have to have it with me.’ He offered Gyuri a tired-looking radish.
‘No. Thanks. So are you going to be looking up your old guards while you have a chance to express your gratitude?’
‘That’s an interesting question. We used to discuss that a lot at Recsk. What sort of people could beat someone to death just for the hell of it? There was disagreement about this in the camp, as there’s always disagreement when you get two Hungarians together. You know how the 23rd of October is going to be described in the history books? The day the Hungarians agreed.
‘Anyway, my view was that the guards at Recsk were basically very ordinary, if not too bright lads. They’d been told we were the scum of the earth, the most evil, degenerate, child-murdering, odious, verminous parasites to be found in creation: in short the sort of people who would run concentration camps. What use was it us trying to explain we were there because we h ad voted the wrong way?
‘The other thing is that, you know, someone who is jailed falsely for a long time, not a year or two, but three or more, tends to go to one extreme or the other. Judging from my experience you either become excessively forgiving or excessively vengeful. I feel we should remember Recsk. People should know what happened. But we should also forget about it and get on with other things. When the tanks go.’
A moving-off rumble came. Having made its point and intimidated the vicinity, the tank moved off. When Gyuri saw people emerging from the buffet he knew he could safely stand again. His clothes were soaked with sweat, the nostril-curling stench of fear. ‘Nice meeting you,’ he said, shaking Miklós’s hand, ‘hope you like the revolution.’
He bought some food. It was after seven, and because he had made eight the rendezvous time with Jadwiga and because his luck was sorely depleted, Gyuri was very keen to get home. Moving up to the Keleti Station he was annoyed to see the revolution strengthening. Dead Russian soldiers were lying in gutters and against buildings like inebriated vagrants. While Gyuri had no objection to dead Russian soldiers, it suggested that he was moving closer to the fighting rather than away from it as he desired. His hands were still shaking from his time out on the target range. His stomach would be mulling over the terror for weeks. Ridiculously, in the middle of the shooting he had had the impulse to shout at the tank crew: ‘Stop! You don’t understand. I’m a coward. This isn’t fair. Find some brave people to shoot at.’