Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘Let’s hurry. I can hear the loudspeaker! He’s definitely still there.’

But when they come within sight of parliament, Nagy has gone. Thousands of people are slowly dispersing down the side streets.

‘Well then?’

‘Shall we go home?’

Amara is getting very hungry. But where to find anything to eat? The bars are closed. The shops bolted shut. Every Hungarian is out in the street this day of 23 October 1956. Ignoring the cold, the fierce wind that fans the fires and the continual threat of rain. Flags with a hole cut in the middle are everywhere, like the one at the university.

Suddenly Amara flinches with shock. A few metres in front of her is a man in dark clothes, boots and a black jacket, tied by the waist to a lamp post with his head hanging down.

‘An ÁVH man,’ whispers Hans in her ear. Amara looks with disgust at the purplish blood leaking from the corpse’s nostrils. The light of the street lamps flickering in the wind makes shadows dance on his face so that he seems to be moving and breathing.

‘He’s still alive. We must untie him!’

‘Dead as a doornail. Anyway, someone he’d tortured must have recognised him and killed him. They spied for the Russians and were brutally cruel to poor innocent people. He’s not worth your pity.’

‘But it does upset me,’ insists Amara, unable to tear her eyes away from the white face of the young man with his smart moustache, and highly polished boots, the showy watch on his wrist and the dark blood draining from his dead nostrils. She wishes she could staunch his wounds. But Hans takes her elbow and pulls her far away from Party headquarters, along Luther Street.

Now the crowd opens and divides. Before them, in the greyness of a square strewn with papers and stones and dimly lit by weak street lamps, a Soviet tank appears. Hans guides Amara by the arm towards a side street. But astonishingly the tank has lost its usual air of menace, and about thirty young men are standing on it, prancing about and shouting and holding up a Hungarian flag.

‘Look, they’ve hijacked the tank! They’ve hijacked it. How can it go forward with all those people on top of it.’ Hans laughs happily. Even he is surprised. A Soviet tank reduced to a people-carrier for partygoers celebrating a rather easily achieved freedom.

‘Don’t you think it’s time to go home?’

‘Why?’

‘We don’t know anything about the others. What if Horvath got hurt?’

‘He’ll be as happy as a sandboy. This is a great day, Amara. We must make the most of it. After years of submission, of obedience, fear, terror and repressed hatred, here we are living a day when people are saying no, breaking their silence, joyfully being themselves without pretence, loving their own country and at last feeling independent without being spied on, controlled and obstructed … A great day, Amara, and I’m so happy I’ve been able to live it on the streets together with the Hungarian people.’

‘Who’s that?’

Hans turns and sees a man standing near them. Not tall but majestic in manner. A loaded bandolier over one shoulder, hat pulled down low on his forehead and a loaded rifle in his hand. But the most surprising thing is that under his trousers, instead of an ankle one leg is a piece of wood that ends on the stone pavement like a broken branch.

‘János Mesz, the man with the wooden leg. Everyone knows him. Famous for his courage.’

But the man, who looks as if he has been posing for a photograph in the ardour of his courage, now limps off quickly towards Corvin Lane.

‘Let’s go and see what’s happening,’ says Hans, still gripping Amara’s wrist.

Round the corner are the hospital gardens. They see Tadeusz approaching with the violinist, and behind them Horvath too. Tadeusz has an ancient rifle on his shoulder. Ferenc is busily munching a perec or pretzel, a twisted ring-shaped roll encrusted with salt. Horvath follows, paler than ever. He has lost his beret and seems tired, but is smiling happily.

‘We meet again at last. Where have you come from?’

‘The Corvin cinema. That’s where the hardliners are. They’ve formed a group. And captured two armoured cars. They’re saying the Russians are coming. That seems unlikely to me. But we’re arming ourselves for all eventualities.’

‘Did they give you that rifle?’

‘Can we go on letting ourselves be shot at like unprotected pigeons? The ÁVH have been firing into the crowd, hundreds are dead.’

‘And we’ve forced open the doors of the arms depots.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Us, them, the citizens.’

‘And now they’re handing everyone rifles.’

‘Even to those who don’t know how to fire them?’

‘Even to them.’

‘I’ve never fired a gun in my life,’ says Tadeusz, ‘but if I have to …’ He laughs, snatching a piece of perec from Ferenc, who protests.

‘Would you like one too?’

‘I don’t know how to shoot.’

‘Nor me.’

They laugh. They pass pieces of perec among themselves, breaking in many pieces the circular salt-encrusted bread, the only thing to be found in the streets today. ‘There’s a woman with an enormous backside selling them by the kilo in Kisfaludy utca. Shall I go and get two more?’

A smiling girl goes up to a man who is leaning against a main entrance right beside them. She has a bandage on her forehead, and two bandoliers full of bullets over her chest. She has wound a black scarf three times round her neck. She talks intimately to the man and laughs. Then they kiss, unaware of everything and everyone else. A kiss right in the middle of a popular uprising. A deliberate exhibition? Someone claps. But the two still cling together. They go on kissing as if they were alone. Four children are unscrewing the wheels of what must have been an ÁVH car: it is large and shiny and has a dozen hammers and sickles stuck on its windows. A woman walking down the middle of the road is kicking an empty tin that is making a hellish noise. Someone shouts ‘Stop that, you cow!’ but she takes no notice and goes on kicking the blackened empty tin. An elegant man in a cream-coloured raincoat is sketching a coat of arms on the side of a lorry with a small brush dipped in white paint.

‘The republican arms of Kossuth,’ explains Tadeusz.

Now they have reached József Boulevard, and sit down on the entrance steps to a large closed building to rest their tired and muddy feet.

A man in a tattered shirt passes clasping two loaves of French bread.

‘Where did you get those?’

‘They’re distributing them at the Corvin cinema. If you hurry you might be in time to get some.’

‘But I thought they were handing out arms?’

‘The arms are finished. Now they’re giving out bread.’

So the friends make their way to the Corvin cinema, a large circular building with its doors open to hungry people going in and out with armfuls of white French loaves.

‘Where are you from?’

To pass the time as they queue, Amara studies two posters on the wall by the cinema entrance. The title of the first film, displayed in huge letters, is In Perfect Rhythm . A very handsome worker bends over an assembly line brandishing a monkey wrench, while the haloed head of Stalin smiles paternally behind him. As Amara gazes at this enormous poster an egg flies past and smashes on the face of the Great Father. Turning quickly, she just manages to dodge a second egg that cracks against an immense photograph advertising a Romanian film called Life Always Wins , on which two female peasants with round faces rise up to indicate with outstretched arms the horizon from which a red ball is approaching. The two women have bunches of carrots under their arms. Their mouths embellished with gold teeth are stretched in smiles that are presumably intended to be reassuring but are in fact menacing. It might not be a bad idea to sit there in the dark resting your eyes on one of those films the posters are promoting.