The Last Frontier (6 page)

'It's quite simple. That photograph is not of Julia but of my wife.'
'Your wife! Good lord, what a quite extraordinary resemblance.' Reynolds broke off, hurriedly searched his past sentences for any unfortunate gaffes, decided he had made none. 'She is here just now?'
'No, not here.' Jansci put his glass down and turned it round and round between his fingers. 'I'm afraid we do not know where she is.'
'I'm sorry.' It was all Reynolds could think of to say.
'Do not misunderstand me,' Jansci said gently. 'We know what happened to her, I'm afraid. The brown lorries -- you know what I mean?'
"The Secret Police.'
'Yes.' Jansci nodded heavily. "The same lorries that took away a million in Poland, the same in Romania and half a million in Bulgaria, all to slavery and death. The same lorries that wiped out the middle classes of the Baltic States, that have taken a hundred thousand Hungarians, they came also for Catherine. What is one person among so many million Who have suffered and died?'
'That was in the summer of '51?' It was all Reynolds could think to say: it was then, he knew, that the mass deportations from Budapest had taken place.
'We were not living here then, it was just two and a half years ago, less than a month after we had come. Julia, thank God, was staying with friends in the country. I was away that night, I had left about midnight, and when she went to make herself coffee after I had gone, the gas had been turned off and she did not know what that meant. So they took her away.'
'The gas? I'm afraid -- '
'You don't understand? A chink in your armour the AVO would soon have prised open, Mr. Reynolds. Everybody else in Budapest understands. It is the practice of the AVO to turn off the gas supply to a block of houses or flats before serving deportation notices there: a pillow on the bottom shelf of a gas oven is comfortable enough, and there is no pain. They stopped the sale of poisons in all chemists, they even tried to ban the sale of razor blades. They found it difficult, however, to prevent people from jumping from top story flats....'
'She had no warning?'
'No warning. A blue slip of paper thrust in her hand, a small suitcase, the brown lorry and then the locked cattle trucks of the railway.'
'But she may yet be alive. You have heard nothing?'
'Nothing, nothing at all. We can only hope she lives. But so many died in these trucks, stifling or freezing to death, and the work in the fields, the factories or mines is brutal, killing, even for one fit and well: she had just been discharged from hospital after a serious operation. Chest-surgery -- she had tuberculosis: her convalescence had not even begun.'
Reynolds swore softly. How often one read, one heard about this sort of thing, how easily, how casually, almost callously, one dismissed it -- and how different when one was confronted with reality.
'You have looked for her -- for your wife?' Reynolds asked harshly. He hadn't meant to speak that way, it was just the way the words came out.
'I have looked for her. I cannot find her.'
Reynolds felt the stirring of anger. Jansci seemed to take it all so easily, he was to calm, too unaffected.
'The AVO must know where she is,' Reynolds persisted. They have lists, files. Colonel Szendro -- '
'He has no access to top secret files,' Jansci interrupted. He smiled. 'And his rank is only equivalent to that of major. The promotion was self-awarded and for Tonight only. So was the name.... I think I heard him coming now.'
But it was the youngster with the dark hair who entered -- or partially entered. He poked his head round the door, reported that everything was clear and vanished. But even in that brief moment Reynolds had had time to notice the pronounced nervous tic on the left cheek, just below the darting black eyes. Jansci must have seen the expression on Reynolds' face, and when he spoke his voice was apologetic.
'Poor Imre! He was not always like this, Mr. Reynolds, not always so restless, so disturbed.'
'Restless! I shouldn't say it, but because my safety and plans are involved too, I must: he's a neurotic of the first order.' Reynolds looked hard at Jansci, but Jansci was his usual mild and gentle self. 'A man like that in a set-up like this! To say he's a potential danger is the understatement of the month.'
'I know, don't think I don't know.' Jansci sighed. 'You should have seen him just over two years ago, Mr. Reynolds, fighting the Russian tanks on Castle Hill, just north of Gellert. He hadn't a nerve in his entire body. When it came to spreading liquid soap at the corners -- and the steep, dangerous slopes of the Hill saw to the rest as far as the tanks were concerned -- or prising up loose cobbles, filling the holes with petrol and touching it off as a tank passed across, Imre had no equal. But he became too rash, and one night one of the big T-54 tanks, slipping backwards down a hill with all the crew dead inside, pinned him, kneeling on all fours, against the wall of a house. He was there for thirty-six hours before anyone noticed him -- and twice during that time the tank had been hit by high-explosive rockets from Russian fighter planes -- they didn't want their own tanks used against them.'
'Thirty-six hours!' Reynolds stared at Jansci. 'And he lived?'
'He he didn't a mark on him, he still hasn't. It was Sandor who got him out -- that was how they met for the first time. He got a crowbar and broke down the wall of the house from the inside -- I saw him do it, and he was flinging 200-pound blocks of masonry around as if they were pebbles. We took him into a nearby house, left him, and when we returned the house was a huge pile of rubble: some resistance fighters had taken up position there and a Mongolian tank commander had pulverised the bottom story until the whole house fell down. But we got him out again, still without a scratch. He was very ill for a long time -- for months -- but he's much better now.'
'Sandor and yourself both fought in the rising?'
'Sandor did. He was foreman electrician in the Dunapentele steel works, and he put his knowledge to good use. To see him handling high-tension wires with nothing but a couple of wooden battens held in his bare hands would make your blood freeze, Mr. Reynolds.'
'Against the tanks?'
'Electrocution,' Jansci nodded. 'The crews of three tanks. And I've been told he destroyed even more down in Csepel. He killed an infantryman, stole his flame-thrower, sprayed through the driver's visor then dropped a Molotov cocktail -- just bottles of ordinary petrol with bits of burning cotton stuffed into the necks -- through the hatch when they opened it to get some air. Then he would shut the hatch, and when Sandor shuts a hatch and sits on it, the hatch stays shut.'
'I can imagine,' Reynolds said dryly. Unconsciously, almost, he rubbed his still aching arms, then a sudden thought occurred to him. 'Sandor took part, you said. And yourself?'
'Nothing.' Jansci spread his scarred, misshapen hands, palms upwards, and now Reynolds could see that the crucifixion marks indeed went right through. 'I took no part in it. I tried all I could to stop it.'
Reynolds looked at him in silence, trying to read the expression of the faded grey eyes enmeshed in those spider webs of wrinkles. Finally he said, 'I'm afraid I don't believe you.'
'I'm afraid you must.'
Silence fell on the room, a long, cold silence: Reynolds could hear the far-off tinkle of dishes in a distant kitchen as the girl prepared the meal. Finally, he looked directly at Jansci.
'You let the others fight; fight for you?' He made no attempt to conceal his disappointment, the near-hostility in his tone. 'But why? Why did you not help, not do something!'
'Why? I'll tell you Why.' Jansci smiled faintly and reached up and touched his white hair. 'I am not as old as the snow on my head would have you think, my boy, but I am still far too old for the suicidal, the futile act of the grand but empty gesture. I leave that for the children of this world, the reckless and the unthinking, the romanticists who do not stop to count the cost; I leave it to the righteous indignation that cannot see beyond the justice of its cause, to the splendid anger that is blinded by its own shining splendour. I leave it to the poets and the dreamers, to those who look back to the glorious gallantry, the imperishable chivalry of a bygone world, to those whose vision carries them forward to the golden age that lies beyond tomorrow. But I can only see today.' He shrugged. 'The charge of the Light Brigade -- my father's father fought in that -- you remember the charge of the Light Brigade and the famous commentary on that charge? "It's magnificent, but it's not war." So it was with our October Revolution.'
'Fine words,' Reynolds said coldly. 'These are fine words. I'm sure a Hungarian boy with a Russian bayonet in his stomach would have taken great comfort from them.'
'I am also too old to take offence,' Jansci said sadly. 'I am also too old to believe in violence, except as a last resort, the final fling of desperation when every hope is gone, and even then it is only a resort to hopelessness: besides, Mr. Reynolds, besides the uselessness of violence, of killing, what right have I to take the life of any man? We are all our Father's children, and I cannot but think that fratricide must be repugnant to our God.'
'You talk like a pacifist,' Reynolds said roughly. 'Like a pacifist before he lies down and lets the jackboot tramp him into the mud, him and his wife and his children.'
'Not quite, Mr. Reynolds, not quite,' Jansci said softly. 'I am not what I would like to be, not all. The man who lays a finger on my Julia dies even as he does it.'
For a moment Reynolds caught a glimpse, a glimpse that might almost have been imagination, of the fire smouldering in the depths of those faded eyes, remembered all that Colonel Mackintosh had told of this fantastic man before him and felt more confused than ever.
'But you said -- you told me that -- '
'I was only telling you why I didn't take part in the rising.'
Jansci was his gentle self again. 'I don't believe in violence if any other way will serve. Again, the time could not have been more badly chosen.-And I do not hate the Russians, I even like them. Do not forget, Mr. Reynolds, that I am a Russian myself. A Ukranian, but still a Russian, despite what many of my countrymen would say.'
'You like the Russians. Even the Russian is your brother?' Mask it as he tried with politeness, Reynolds could not quite conceal the incredulity in his question. 'After what they have done to you and your family?'
'A monster, and I stand condemned. Love for our enemies should be confined to Where it belongs -- between the covers of the Bible -- and only the insane would have the courage, or the arrogance or the stupidity, to open the pages and turn the principles into practice. Madmen, only madmen would do it -- but without these madmen our Armageddon will surely come.' Jansci's tone changed. 'I like the Russian people, Mr. Reynolds. They're likeable, cheerful and gay when you get to know them, and there are no more friendly people on earth. But they are young, they are very young, like children. And like children they are full of whims, they're arbitrary and primitive and a little cruel, as are all little children, forgetful and not greatly moved by suffering. But for all their youth, do not forget that they have a great love of poetry, of music and dancing, and singing and folk-tales, of ballet and the opera that would make the average westerner, in comparison, seem culturally dead.'
'They're also brutal and barbarous and human life doesn't matter a damn to them,' Reynolds interjected.
'Who can deny it? But do not forget, so also was the western world when it was politically as young as the peoples of Russia are now. They're backward, primitive and easily swayed. They hate and fear the west because they're told to hate and fear the west. But your democracies, too, can act the same way.'
'For heaven's sake!' Reynolds crushed out his cigarette in a gesture of irritation. 'Are you trying to say -- '
'Don't be so naive, young man, and listen to me.' Jansci's smile robbed his words of any offence. 'All I'm trying to say is that unreasoning, emotionally-conditioned attitudes are as possible in the west as in the east. Look, for instance, at your country's attitude to Russia in the past twenty years.
At the beginning of the last war Russia's popularity ran high. Then came the Moscow-Berlin pact, and you were actually ready, remember, to send an army of 50,000 to fight the Russians in Finland. Then came Hitler's assault in the east, your national press full of paeans of praise for "Good old Joe" and all the world loved a moujik. Now the wheel has come full circle again and the holocaust only awaits the one rash or panic-stricken move. Who knows, in five years' time, all will be smiles again. You are weathercocks, just as the Russians are weathercocks, but I blame neither people; it is not the weathercock that turns, it is the wind that turns the weathercock.'
'Our governments?'
'Your governments,' Jansci! nodded. 'And, of course, the national press that always conditions the thinking of a people. But primarily the governments.'
'We in the west have bad governments, often very bad governments,' Reynolds said slowly. 'They stumble, they miscalculate, they make foolish decisions, they even have their quota of opportunists, careerists and plain downright power-seekers. But all these things are only because they are human. They mean well, they try hard for the good and not even a child fears them.' He looked speculatively at the older man. 'You yourself said recently that the Russian leaders have sent literally millions in the past few years to imprisonment and slavery and death. If, as you say, the peoples are the same, why are the governments so utterly different? Communism is the only answer.'
Jansci shook his head. 'Communism is gone, and gone for ever. today it remains only as a myth, an empty lip-service catchword in the name of which the cynical, ruthless realists of the Kremlin find sufficient excuse and justification for whatever barbarities their policies demand. A few of the old guard still in power may cherish the dream of world communism, but just a few: only a global war could now achieve their aims, and these same hard-headed realists in the Kremlin can see no point or sense or future in pursuing a policy that carries with it the seed of their own destruction. They are essentially businessmen, Mr. Reynolds, and letting off a time-bomb under your own factory is no way to run a business.'
'Their barbarities, their enslavement's and their massacres don't stem from world conquest?" The fractional lift of Reynolds' eyebrows was its own sceptical comment. 'You tell me that?'