The old papers had changed, they had received editorial transplants and new ones were springing up like mushrooms. They weren’t much good but you did have the novel sensation of wanting to read what they had to say. You couldn’t tell before you read the paper what would be in it; now you got all those things that hadn’t been there for nearly ten years, opinions that weren’t the Party’s. Casting his eye over The Truth, Gyuri read some soggy new poetry, some exhausted old poetry and some articles about the 23rd which hardly counted as news. It was still a pleasure to read.
After the fighting, the tidying up. Everywhere, shattered glass, masonry and martial litter was being victoriously swept up by the city-proud populace. Soviet wreckage was being pushed out of roads so that traffic could circulate properly. Everyone was on their best behaviour as if the Revolution was an honoured guest they wanted to impress with their hospitality and civility. A bubble of decency had risen out of the earth’s core and burst in Budapest. Peasants were driving in from the countryside with their carts to distribute food to whoever they came across, dishing out sacks of potatoes, apples, marrows, some late melons. In a broken jewellers’ window Gyuri saw a note explaining that the contents had been taken to the flat above for safe-keeping. There were cardboard boxes on pavements marked ‘for the fallen’, overflowing with banknotes contributed for the dependents of the dead.
The worst fighting or the best fighting depending on how you felt about it had all been around the Corvin Cinema. The Corvin Cinema was not a very salubrious or comfortable cinema, as a cinema it wasn’t much to brag about, but as if with astonishing forethought, it couldn’t have been better designed for street fighting. The circular cinema was surrounded by a ring of flats with lots of convenient alleyways in and out.
But the Corvin had not been the only streetfighting club. All over Budapest they had jack-in-the-boxed. Even around the Corvin, there had been stiff competition: the Prater utca school, just behind the Corvin, and, just across the road, on the other side of the Űllői út, the Kilián Barracks, the home of a ‘C’ battalion, a collection of soldiers considered by the authorities to have no commitment to the cause of Communism, who had been down for even more than the usual excessive ditch-digging and road-laying and who generally had a menial, unpaid, unfed time and who had been particularly interested to hear about the Revolution.
As if that wasn’t enough, running parallel to the Űllői út which had been the major route into Budapest for the Soviet troops, was the Túzoltó út, a ludicrously narrow street which had sired its own warriors, known locally reasonably enough, as the Túzoltó boys, who had pulled off one of the neatest coups of the fighting, known locally as the Túzoltó massacre. Seeing that his comrades were having nasty, mainly fatal, accidents on the Űllői út as they came to look for hooligans and reactionaries, a Soviet tank commander had made the decision to go down Túzoltó út. Five tanks had gone in, but none had come out.
‘We got the first tank and we got the last tank,’ one of the participants (a leading water-polo player) had related to Gyuri. ‘So the other three were stuck there. They weren’t going anywhere. We had a break for lunch and then we finished them off.’ So gorged was Túzoltó út with bits of Soviet tanks that the boys had to move their operations to another street.
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.