Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

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!’

‘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.

Suddenly shots are heard. Amara starts. Hans pulls her towards the wall. The shots continue but luckily move further off. People are running. ‘What’s happening?’ shouts a woman hurrying behind a group of youngsters. No one answers. But two girls appear, pushing through the crowd in the opposite direction, their faces distraught and one of them weeping desperately. ‘The ÁVH are firing at unarmed people.’ ‘Where?’ ‘At the occupied radio station.’ ‘Shooting at demonstrators in the street.’ ‘My brother,’ cries the weeping girl, ‘they’ve hit my brother.’ Her friend pulls her in the direction of the nearby hospital. The crowd seems less eager to head for the radio. Some stop in small groups to argue vigorously. Others decide despite everything to press on. A man advances down the middle of the road brandishing a pole with a card nailed at the top. Hans translates: ‘Nagy will address the Hungarian people, nine p.m., in front of parliament.’

‘But it’s half-past nine already,’ says Amara looking at her watch. Is it possible they’ve already been so long on the move!

‘Let’s run. Maybe he’s still speaking.’

Others, like them, hurry after the man with the placard in the direction of Kossuth tér. It’s difficult to understand what’s happening in the city. A turmoil of actions succeeding one another in rapid improvisation from Buda to Pest. Someone reports furious shooting from the area of the Kilian barracks. Someone else says Russian tanks have been called in, and someone else that Mikoyan and Suslov have passed in a diplomatic car with darkened windows, while yet another person swears that Khrushchev himself has been seen peeping out of an enormous silver limousine. But no one believes this. There is laughter. Even so, things are getting serious.