‘So what did the world say?’ asked Pataki.
‘Nothing much. Walk out of a labour camp, that’s heroic; walk out of a labour camp and walk through an Iron Curtain and you’ll find you’ve walked round the moral globe and it’s not heroic, but extremely suspicious. Everyone was very polite, but I had the impression they thought I was on a payroll somewhere in Moscow.’ (Pataki remembered his debriefers: ‘Ach, Herr Pataki, we understand you are saying you were sent out by the AVO but we have been told by people who were sent out by the AVO that people who are sent out by the AVO are told to say that they have been sent out by the AVO.’ The meeting had been a stalemate; he was staying in the country but without a generous salary from the security services.)
‘Are you going to go back?’ Kineses inquired.
‘When I leave, I leave.’
‘You don’t think I should tell him?’ Jadwiga asked.
‘No. Best not to interfere in that sort of emotional traffic,’ Elek answered.
‘But there can’t be any doubt; the documents were very clear.’
Elek looked unhappy. ‘The documents might have been very clear. But you didn’t really know Pataki. He was as fast off the court as on. His sun-bathing stunt outside their front door would have been a hard one to talk his way out of but he’s slippery. The AVO might have thought he was working for them, but he probably agreed just to get out.’ He lit a long-saved cigarette. ‘And I bet he got an advance out of them.’
It was the artillery that woke them up. Faraway, but forceful. Gyuri looked out of the window. Darkness, stillness. No sign of dawn or the Russians but both were coming. Switching on the radio, they heard Imre Nagy announce the obvious attack by the Russians and state that Hungarian forces were fighting. This was followed by an appeal for help from abroad. He got dressed, since misfortune had to be faced in trousers, the juices in his stomach can-canning.
‘We must go to the Corvin,’ said Jadwiga. Gyuri really didn’t want to go to the Corvin. He wasn’t at all pleased at being right. Being right, he discovered, doesn’t necessarily do any more good than being wrong. He had thought he had been angry before but he realised his previous rages had only been false starts compared to his present anger. Thanks to the Red Army, he was going to explode, but he didn’t want to fight. He was trembling from a mixture of ninety per cent fury and ten per cent fright. He wanted to suggest going to the border, but he knew Jadwiga wouldn’t listen. He suggested it anyway, knowing he would regret it more if he didn’t. ‘Let’s go to Austria,’ he said.
‘You don’t mean that,’ she retorted.
They ran out into the streets, Jadwiga carrying her favourite gun. There were few people, and those that were out, whether armed or unarmed, didn’t seem to know what to do. He tried to keep the thoughts submerged because he didn’t want them to come into the world because they wouldn’t help but he couldn’t keep them down; they floated up to the surface. We’re going to lose. We’re going to be killed. They bobbed around in his mind. The other people looked to Gyuri as if they were holding down the same prompts. Stealthily, they reached the Körút, which Gyuri suddenly recognised as the street where he was going to die. ‘I feel safe with you,’ said Jadwiga cocking her weapon, which was intriguing because Gyuri certainly didn’t feel safe with himself.
Kurucz was also making his way along the Körút, slithering along the doorways, a couple of grenades in his belt, carrying his gun ready to use it; Kurucz was one of the professional soldiers who had ended up at the Corvin. The sight of Kurucz cheered Gyuri up; Kurucz was a close personal friend of surviving.
Clever. Lucky. Kurucz didn’t make mistakes and would take a lot of killing. Being close to him might cast some protection on them. Gyuri noticed his pullover was on back to front.
‘You heard about Maleter?’ Kurucz asked. Gyuri shook his head. Colonel Maleter had been appointed Minister of Defence a few days earlier on the strength of his activities at the Kilián Barracks. ‘Went to have supper last night with the Soviet High Command, didn’t come back.’ More good news, thought Gyuri, deafened by the voice that was shouting you’re going to die in his ear.
‘Well, military leadership was never this country’s strong point,’ observed Kurucz. It was stupid, but Gyuri couldn’t help thinking things would have been different if Pataki had stayed. Pataki wouldn’t have let this happen. Pataki wouldn’t have been conned by a load of fat Soviet generals. He wouldn’t have let them shit all over the country. Gyuri couldn’t see how but somehow Pataki would have foxed them, or at least not lost the match before the start.
‘If only Pataki were here…’ he said, trying to think what to do.
‘If you were better read you wouldn’t say such things,’ snapped Jadwiga. Gyuri didn’t understand what she meant but she was always having bouts of Slav mysticism.
The Corvin seemed to be getting the brunt of the attack, the price of celebrity, a murderous tribute to its teenage army. Aircraft, artillery and new, larger tanks were all in action. They inched down the Körút but it looked suicidal trying to get any closer. They were behind a pile of sandbags, remnants of the earlier round of fighting, when one of the tanks, hundreds of yards away, opened fire.
Half the building behind them disappeared. It took Gyuri a while to convince himself he was still alive and that all the components of his body were in the right places and still working. Jadwiga was next to him, covered in dust and debris. When he saw her wound two thoughts raced through him, the axiom that stomach wounds were always fatal, and the other that his sanity couldn’t cope with this. Holding her as if that would help, he tried to keep the horror from his face, the knowledge that he was about to see the last thing anyone wanted to see, the death of the one he loved.
She knew anyway. ‘You won’t forget me,’ she said.
Nigel was whiling away the time before the start of World War Three by polishing all the shoes he could lay his hands on in the Legation.
The phone was ringing. Nigel had answered it once.’Hello, British Legation,’ he had said.
‘We are trapped. We are going to die,’ a voice had said. It was a rich, deep, calm voice that spoke fluent English with only enough of a Hungarian accent to give a pleasing colour; you could imagine the voice belonging to a professor of English literature. Nigel didn’t know what to say. Clearly commiserations were in order, but there was nothing at hand in his immediate etiquette to cover a situation like this. The voice carried on though, fortunately, without giving Nigel a chance to participate. ‘Our building is completely surrounded by Russians. We will fight to the last bullet, but we will die. We don’t matter, but you must help our country. Hungary must be free- ’ The line had gone dead.
Everyone was chipping in, running things in the Legation but Nigel wasn’t going to answer the phone any more. The building was a refuge for a strange mixture of Britons, well-wishing students, adventurers, journalists, holidaymakers and two businessmen whose unflinching devotion to marketing their brand of razor-blade in the face of history was remarkable. No one talked about it but there was an unspoken assumption that war was going to break out and they would be well behind enemy lines; whatever was going to happen it wouldn’t be pleasant. Everyone had been presented with a copy of their own death.
Nigel had opted to clean shoes since it gave him something to do and as he joked, ‘We want to look good when the Russians capture us. My old housemaster would never forgive me if I met my end with dulled footwear.’ The BBC journalist was roaming up and down the building, clutching a bottle of vodka, and repeatedly accosting any female on sight with ‘Anybody for a fuck?’ Nigel could see the Minister would be making representations to the BBC when this was over, if he were in a position to do so. The Minister took a dim view of journalists; the correspondent of the Daily Worker had almost been barred by him. ‘Shouldn’t you be outside with your Communist friends?’