Train to Budapest (29 page)

‘In my opinion he’s a swindler.’

‘I think so too.’

No one has any confidence in the self-proclaimed Emanuele Orenstein. Particularly Amara whose senses refuse in the most categorical manner possible to recognise him. It isn’t him, she says
firmly, it absolutely can’t be him. A person may change, but only up to a certain point. Something must always remain of what he was before, even if he was a child then and is now a man.

Yet she still harbours a doubt and every now and then wakes in the night with her heart in her mouth, thinking she has got it all wrong. What if it really is Emanuele? And if he is hiding simply because he is afraid he will not be accepted? Can affection depend so much on appearances? What if someone can be so completely transformed by painful experiences that they even destroy the memory of the person they once were? Is it a particular body one loves, or a being undergoing transformation?

They argue it out, four men and one woman, in that tiny apartment in Budapest, unaware of the deadly wave about to burst on their heads. The city sleeps and wakes again with steady, laborious rhythms. Everything seems calm. Their home on Magdolna utca is certainly a mess but friendly and peaceful; it only becomes noisy when all five sit round the table to eat a dish concocted by Tadeusz. They see themselves as part of an unchanging story, in the mysterious epoch that has followed an atrocious war, struggling with the same shortages as all the other inhabitants of this sad and subdued city.

Instead, without suspecting it in the least, they are on the lid of a boiling saucepan. A pan about to explode as day by day they wait for visas for Poland, write articles on the tedium and restrictions of communism, cook pork and potato pies, down tankards of Soproni beer and chatter about this and that, while they think up unrealistic schemes for discovering a child swallowed up by history.

‘There’s an electric atmosphere in the city,’ repeats old Tadeusz. But no one is listening.

‘What did you find at the market today,’ Horvath asks him.

‘Some nuts. Some rice. A hectogram of butter for eighty-three forints. I even found a piece of soap and that’s a miracle because for months there’s been no soap anywhere in Budapest.’

‘Bread?’

‘No bread. Hard-tack biscuits.’

‘What, like yesterday? They’re disgusting.’

‘That’s all there is.’

‘You should have got to the market earlier.’

‘Then why don’t you go? It’s always me that has to do the searching.’

‘I can’t, you know that.’

‘Because you’re asleep, that’s why.’

‘Stop squabbling, Father. Did you buy a paper?’

‘No one buys newspapers here. Just to read the voice of the Party always saying the same things? It’s not worth a penny.’

‘There must be something about the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’

‘Not a thing. All secret.’

‘But it was on the radio: the secret text of Khruschev’s speech has even been published in the
New York Times
.’

‘Nonsense. When the Russians say secret, they mean secret. They have a sort of diabolical, maniacal, obsessive passion for secrets. So many secrets they don’t even know what they think themselves because they’ve lost the key to their own thoughts.’

‘A secret mother who gives birth to a secret son who in his turn marries a very secret bride, who after nine months gives birth to a top secret son, and so on.’

‘But this time something has leaked out. The secret has gone into circulation and flown all the way to New York. Isn’t that extraordinary?’

‘If true, it would be the beginning of the end for communism. You can’t have communism without secrets.’

‘Enough secrets to make a tomb.’

‘Enough tombs to make a cemetery.’

The men laugh. Amara watches them tenderly. She asks herself how she can have ended up in this strange city, in the sole company of men, in a foreign country, in such a tiny home that they constantly stumble over one another. Yet they get on well, despite the scarce food cooked in the most extraordinary ways because of the lack of butter and oil, listening to the radio in a language of which she is only now beginning to understand an occasional word.

‘We must get hold of a copy of the American paper.’

‘It’s the only thing they were talking about yesterday at the Petőfi Circle.’

‘You went to the Petőfi Circle without telling me.’

‘Just happened to be passing by.’

‘What were they saying?’

‘The place was packed as tight as an egg. You couldn’t even stand against the walls.’

‘Were they discussing the Khrushchev report?’

‘The Khrushchev report, just that. Which according to the Party should have remained secret. And instead, there it was all over the biggest of the capitalist newspapers, completely mad!’

‘But what does this report say? Anything we don’t already know?’

‘Perhaps we did know, but when one of them says it, it all adds up.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that Stalin falsified the trials, that he forced his enemies to make confessions under torture, that he had them shot for no reason. First his opponents, then his friends and collaborators, and on and on, the friends of his friends and those who collaborated with his collaborators.’

‘But they can’t say such things about our great and valiant father Stalin,’ says Tadeusz, pretending to wipe away tears. A pantomime. The others laugh.

‘And what are they saying about Hungary?’

‘That the country’s dead.’

‘The Petőfi Circle doesn’t seem in the least bit dead. You should have heard them!’

‘Were they shouting?’

‘No, not in the least. But you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. And some were saying straight out it’s time we declared our independence.’

‘Well, today there’s to be a demonstration at the university. Let’s go there.’

‘To look for trouble?’

‘I’m going.’

‘Me too.’

‘And me.’

‘And me.’

36

A hall with long windows at the university. The doors have been thrown open, but it is impossible to get in or out because so many people are crowded together there. Even on the stone balustrades there are youngsters crouching to listen with their heads thrust through the iron grilles. But it is difficult to hear much. There are no microphones, and even though the speakers are shouting, their voices are easily lost in the mass of bodies. Yet poorly dressed girls and boys, wearing high boots for protection from the universal mud on this day of autumnal rain, are listening with great seriousness to whoever gets up to speak on the platform. Some voices penetrate the hum of the crowd, others don’t. Confusion. Meanwhile more people crowd in from the surrounding streets, from Baross, from József körút, from Üllői.

At last a megaphone is passed from hand to hand over the heads of the assembled students and citizens to reach the platform. Now, amplified by the megaphone, the clear and resonant voice of a young man manages to reach even beyond the large crowded hall.

‘Soviets out of Hungary!’ he yells to universal applause. Some whistle, but happily. Some stamp their feet and raise both arms in a gesture of defiance. ‘Soviets out of Hungary!’ The shout spreads round the hall. Meanwhile there is movement near the door. The crowd squeezes up silently to make room for a boy to move forward dragging his feet in shoes that are too big for him. He holds a flag on a heavy pole resting on his narrow shoulder. Everyone turns towards the flag; there is something new and amazing about it. In place of the red star and hammer and sickle it has a hole in it through which the frescoed ceiling of the hall can be seen. Never before has the Hungarian flag been stripped of a symbol so cumbersome yet at the same time in everyone’s view so lethal.

The effect of this mutilated symbol is extraordinary. Some
cheer. Some shout and raise their hands towards the flag. Others weep openly, without shame.

‘But aren’t those two policemen?’ asks Tadeusz, turning to his son’s friends. Hans sees two police officers standing quietly smiling as they watch the crowd yelling against the Soviets. Something unthinkable before. What has happened to the Brother Party and the Father Country and all their pretensions and crude suggestions?

Now the man with the gazelles translates the speaker’s words for Amara: ‘One: Autonomy for Our Country. Two: Free Elections. Three: Restoration of political parties. Four: Formation of a new government under Comrade Imre Nagy. Five: Exit from the Warsaw Pact. Six: Revision of the economic and political relations between Hungary and the Soviet Union. Seven: Freedom for all political prisoners. Eight: Abolition of the ÁVH secret police. Nine: Restoration of free trade. Ten: All criminal officials of the Stalin and Rákosi eras to face a tribunal. Eleven: An end to compulsory kolkhozisation …’

The voice ends in a shout. Someone else snatches the megaphone and yells something incomprehensible. Many people whistle. Some raise their hands and shout ‘Go, go.’ Others form a chorus that chants: ‘One, Autonomy. Two, Free Elections. Three, Free Franchise. Four, Nagy and New Government. Five, Out of Warsaw Pact. Six, Public Trial for ÁVH officials …’

‘What’s the ÁVH?’ asks Amara.

‘Rákosi’s secret police. Terrible. Ferocious. Spying on people every moment of their lives. Anyone could be denounced at any moment, thrown into jail for nothing. Tortured, executed by shooting. Dissidents sent to concentration camps to die of privation. Rákosi worked through them too. He introduced Stalin’s pronouncements in the schools. Even saying the word liberty became treason.’

A rapid movement in the crush of bodies forces them back dangerously towards the wall. A group of students is trying to leave the hall, pushing back all those standing in the doorway, forming a wave that hurls the latest arrivals down the stairs, among them Amara and Hans. Where’s Horvath? asks Hans. He’s vanished; goodness knows where he is. But Tadeusz and the violinist have disappeared too, thrust aside by the overflowing crowd.

Hans takes Amara’s hand to pull her away from the mob. The streets have become crowded. A spontaneous demonstration is spreading from Múzeum körút, led by women in coats with headscarves tied under their chins. Followed by men in hats and raincoats with threadbare elbows. An air of dignified poverty and a powerful will to protest. All are holding up their with two fingers extended and the others folded down. V for victory? Amara moves close to Hans. The crowd frightens her a little. She is afraid of being squashed at any moment. But the bodies have a miraculous capacity to move very close, as if glued together, without getting hurt. They carry the smell of their homes wherever they go. A smell of pickled cabbage and of cheap meat boiled many times to make it tender and extract a broth to last a week, of onions cooked in ashes, of lye, of cheap cigarettes, of unwashed hair because there is no shampoo or soap, of rotten teeth, garlic and paprika. ‘The smell of freedom,’ says Hans, sniffing the air, ‘I have not smelled it for such a long time.’

Hans and Amara let the crowd, noisy and compact, carry them on. Who could have imagined this the morning they first arrived in the muffled and stifling silence of a city that seemed asleep! Who could have known that these people were just waiting for a sign to come into the streets! At Kálvin Square where the crowd divides before joining together again in Üllői utca. A bustling group of young men are carrying hammers, saws, chisels and picks. Some ten of them have a long ladder which they lean up against a wall. Then, very quickly, a child in a red hat runs up it with a hammer and defaces the Soviet emblem, a plaster hammer and sickle over the main entrance to a building. People collect the pieces of plaster that fly off and throw them happily into the air as if playing a game. Further on some men in ties and long coats are smashing the window of a shop that sells Soviet records and books. A young man with fine gipsy features squeezes into the shop through the broken glass and brings out armfuls of records and books. He throws them to his friends outside who pile them on the ground where someone has already started a bonfire. The young man goes in and out of the hole in the window and throws out records with the official symbol on their sleeves and books whose covers proclaim in gold letters Stalin, Stalin, Lenin, Stalin, and so on. More people swell the crowd. Two boys head for a grocer’s shop only
to be immediately warned: ‘No looting! No stealing! There’ll be trouble if you take anything!’

‘Let’s go,’ murmurs Amara, afraid of the mob. Still holding her wrist, Hans pulls her towards Jòzsef körút. But wherever they go they still find snaking crowds of seemingly aimless people on the move; pushing, shouting, raising their hands and waving flags. By now nearly all the flags have a hole in the middle. Hungarian flags minus the red star.

Now the crowd pushes them towards Erzsébet körút and from there along Andrássy ut as far as György dózsa, towards Felvonulasi Square. Exhausted, they arrive with the great snake right under the flight of steps leading to the gigantic statue of Stalin. But by the time they reach the square the statue has already been torn down. All that remains to cast defiance at the sky are its two empty dark bronze boots. Into one of them someone has thrust the pole of a Hungarian flag with a hole in it.

‘The dictator’s gone. But he’s left his boots behind. A bad sign. It shows he means to come back.’

‘Where have they taken the statue?’

‘To the centre, to Blaha Lujza Square,’ answers a voice from the crowd.

‘Shall we go there?’ says a woman with a child in her arms.

‘I don’t give a damn about Stalin. He’s dead and buried,’ says a man with a cigarette glued to his lips, as he sucks in smoke and blows it out again without using his fingers.

‘Where then?’

‘Why not Party headquarters? I’d like to see what they’re up to there!’

37

‘But where are they running?’

‘No idea.’

Some people are moving rapidly in one direction, while others are hurrying in the opposite direction. Here and there a crowd forms. A bonfire has been lit in front of Communist Party headquarters, where the door has been broken down and burned. On the fire have been thrown cardboard portraits of the hated ‘comrade’ Rákosi. In Köztársaság Square a young man with a worried expression leans out from a first-floor balcony to throw into the street some rolled-up red flags. Two girls with short hair collect them and throw them with theatrical gestures onto a pyre that has just been lit. The red flags burn quickly. A lad with trousers held up by a string round his waist and no coat tries to keep the fire burning by stirring up the dying flames with a long pole of uncertain origin. A man in a blue hat, legs wide apart, is taking a stream of photographs with a large camera. Two soldiers in ankle-length greatcoats and high belts pose for their picture. A child is crying desperately. To comfort him his mother hoists him up on her bicycle which she is holding by the handlebars. The child, no longer obstructed by long coats, looks around in astonishment. His mother strokes his head with a smoke-stained hand.