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.
Where were Revai, Rákosi and the others? Gyuri wondered. Where were all those bastards, the beloved favourite sons of the people? The Russians probably had them tucked away in the basement of their Embassy, in storage for future necessity, labelled ‘spare dictators’.
The last book Gyuri turned to was in English, Eastern Europe in the Socialist World by Hewlett Johnson who was supposed to be the Dean of Canterbury. The book was a paean to the Socialist order. Either the book was a forgery, or else the Dean must have been caught wanking off small boys in Warsaw and blackmailed into writing this, thought Gyuri, because no one could be stupid enough to write things like this of their own volition.
It was the largest park in Hamburg, full of ducks, but he still couldn’t manage to catch one. Ducks were brainier and faster than they looked and Pataki was disadvantaged by having to keep looking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t arrested. He was sure there would be some by-law protecting German ducks from hungry refugees. He tried improvising traps with string and dry bread, he tried netting them with his overcoat, he tried a straight grab and wring. As it got dark, Pataki resigned himself to dining on boiled eggs again. He had explored all the options for cooking eggs and somehow boiled seemed the least dispiriting. Eggs were far better than nothing but after months of unrelenting eggs, non-egg edibles had deployed an unprecedented fascination.
But, as he strolled past an off-licence, Pataki snapped and resolved to blow a little money. Two beers to celebrate the Revolution. There was one pinguid German in front of him at the counter who stupidly seemed to be buying more beer than he could possibly carry. As the man struggled to find a way of managing his impossible load, Pataki was about to ask for two bottles of beer, when a hand landed on his shoulder. He turned to see a long-haired figure behind him say in German: ‘I’m a Hungarian, let me buy you a drink.’ Insane? Drunk? Uncontrollably gregarious? Just Hungarian?
‘I’m Hungarian too, and I’ll let you buy me a drink,’ Pataki responded in the mother tongue. His host was called Kineses and he was evidently a man used to going to great lengths for company. His room was virtually above the boozery, so they repaired there to drink. Kineses was very pleased he didn’t need to employ his appallingly accented German and that he could really get loquacious. Kineses had been in West Germany for over three years. He had done some work as an artist’s model, but a vogue for abstract expressionism had dried up most of his employment and he was now working as factotum in one of the liveliest brothels. ‘It was all very German. There was an interview. They asked whether I had any previous experience of working in a knocking-shop. They were perfectly serious; they were terrified of taking on unqualified help. What do you do?’
‘I’m the head of the postage-stamp acquisition department in a bank,’ replied Pataki. ‘I’m the one they send down to the post-office.’ They drank to the revolution.
‘I tried to go back yesterday. Got as far as the Austrian border,’ said Kineses. ‘But the Austrians wouldn’t let me in. They were convinced there were enough Hungarians in Hungary. Mind you, I don’t know why I wanted to go back so badly when I think of the trouble I had getting out. I had to waltz through the minefields. What about you?’
‘My personalised railwagon. You must have wanted to get out quite badly to go out that way.’
‘I didn’t have much choice really. That always makes things easier. You see, I’d walked out of a place called Recsk, a labour camp.’ Kineses outlined the inspiration behind Recsk. ‘Lots of people helped with my escape. It took us months to scrape together a guard’s uniform. It was very cheeky, very dramatic. A big brass neck, a dark winter evening, bored, dim guards and I was out. I just walked out. There was no hope of staying at liberty in Hungary so I knew I had to leave.
‘We all thought it important that the world should know about Recsk. I memorised everyone’s name, their date of birth, occupation and the city they lived in. I was working on the addresses when the uniform was completed.’