Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

With a slight jolt the streetcar came to a stop, the conductor signaled the end of the run by turning off all the lights, and we jumped off; I was there with two of my classmates whom I had very little to do with before (or after) this evening: a tall, strong boy with a beautiful face, István Szentes, who for some reason was always angry and pouting, often hitting out before thinking, and Stark, who kept blinking his sad, deep, dark eyes, and who wanted to be in on everything but was always afraid of retaliation, who seemed to be driven by an unquenchable thirst for experience.

Listen, fellas, he kept repeating now, I think I'll go home, I guess I'll be going home, he said, and then he stayed with us.

But this is what made the situation so wonderful, so great, so extraordinary: the moment we jumped off the streetcar we were caught up by the irresistible force of the crowd and joined a group of young workers who were singing "Red Csepel Island, lead the struggle, Váci Road, jump in the fray!" and their "Váci Road" became a full-throated, tuneless roar, as if they were eager to let everyone know, not just the crowd but, via the dark autumn sky, the whole world, that that is where they were coming from: straight from dingy, industrial Váci Road, in fact straight from the showers, with their hair still wet; now that we were in the thick of things, no longer watching from above or outside, there was no question as to where we were going or why, and it wasn't as if we couldn't extricate ourselves from the crowd, for no familiar force kept us there; of all possible routes we chose the crowd's precisely because in those hours its exhilarating sense of liberation left open all possibilities, allowed for everything, and with all possibilities thus open, one is free to choose anything, even what occurs accidentally, at random, the only condition being to keep moving, and by satisfying this most elemental need, the body's natural impulse to move, I associate myself with everyone around me, I am coming with them just as they are coming with me.

And so it happened that my two classmates, with whom I yielded to the dictates of chance and found myself in this enormous crush, suddenly became very close to me, defined and helped express my own feelings as if discarding all my old inhibitions and resistance, making them useless and laughable, became my friends, lovers, and brothers, as if they, and only they, could make all these other faces familiar, faces that, even without my knowing them, were no longer strange to me.

It was this peculiar, curiously stirring feeling that Stark put into words: he was scared of something he liked, he wanted to run away from feeling good about being there, so Szentes, to let us know that he, too, was in tune with these feelings, and also to stifle Stark's inevitable second thoughts, grinned broadly and slapped Stark on the back, and though it was a hard slap, all three of us acknowledged it with a burst of laughter.

In those early evening hours the crowd had not yet swallowed me up, made me disappear within it, trampled me underfoot, or taken away my personality as it did so often afterward, but generously allowed me to experience — in the most elementary condition of my body's life, in the act of movement — my kinship with others, what is common to us all, let me feel that we were part of one another and that, all things considered, everyone is identical with everyone else, and rather than all this making the crowd faceless, as crowds are usually described, I received my own face from the crowd just as I gave it one myself.

I was neither stupid nor uninformed, knew well where I was and had a good notion of what was happening around me, was so involved that in the next few moments I experienced the movement and emotions of the crowd as something intimate and familial, and thus we were marching and laughing when from the direction of Bajcsy-Zsilinkszky Road the open-hatched turret of a tank appeared, accompanied by the deafening grind and screech of its tracks and the deep rumble of its engine; at first it seemed as if the steel barrel trained on us was being floated above us by the heads in the crowd, though quickly enough bodies pulled aside, cutting a wide path for it; steps slowed down or quickened, and silence prevailed, the ambiguous silence of wary anticipation; yet the tank's approach, like that of a huge wave that might engulf us all, was greeted by a triumphant roar from the crowd, because in the bluish-brown cloud of fumes we saw that unarmed soldiers were standing inside the open turret or sitting around its rim, waving to convey peaceful intentions, and in the overwhelming noise we could pick out individual words, fragments of sentences stumbling over one another: "brothers," "boys," "the army's with us," "Hungarians"; Szentes was also catching some of the words and roared them back so fiercely it was as if for the first time in his life he could tear out his anger by the roots, as if he had been finally liberated, cleansed; "Don't shoot!" he cried, and just a few steps away we saw the soldiers waving and grinning, I didn't shout and had good reason not to, but grinned back just the same, and around us young workers with wet hair responded with similar grins, blaring in unison at the soldiers: "If you're a Magyar, you're with us!" to which unseen heads replied from a distance: "Petőfi's and Kossuth's people, all together, hand in hand!"

In those days Marx Square was still laid out with sparkling dark cobblestones, and as the tank changed direction with a cumbersome yet graceful quarter turn, heading for a space between two stranded streetcars in the middle of the square, the stones threw off sparks under the grating tracks; there was an earsplitting crunch, and then silence, though this time it was the silence of excited anticipation, as when on a soccer field everyone's favorite center forward manages to pull out of a hopeless situation and let loose with a powerful kick, the crowd was holding its breath of collective excitement, for it was unclear whether the space between the two streetcars was big enough for the tank; eyes were involuntarily measuring the gap, both dreading and wishing for the possible clash of the two masses of metal, as if they sensed what was still to come that evening and would surely happen — the inevitable — but as the delicate operation was accomplished successfully, the silence turned into an even more jubilant victory cry, a release of primal joy, and now I found no reason to withhold my own shouts; the tank clattered off toward Váci Road.

We moved on, but after a few steps there was another halt, an unanticipated bottleneck, and we could only shuffle forward, almost in place, progress reduced to barely a crawl; in front of the Album of Smiles photo studio an immovable throng of people was jamming the broad curving sidewalk and the roadway itself was blocked by abandoned streetcars, but the crowd showed no signs of impatience.

In front of the lit-up window of the photo studio, a slight woman in a raincoat was standing on a crate; actually, all that could be seen was the slender silhouette of a female figure rather high up, because only her feet were blocked by the bobbing heads of her listeners, straining to hear; her immobile body seemed tense with anger, she was throwing her head back, shaking it, turning and thrusting it in all directions, piercing the air as with a dagger, as if she were yanking all her movements out of her chest and belly; her long hair streamed, collapsed, floated around her, and she didn't fly away only because her stubborn defiance kept her feet glued to the crate. Szentes jabbed my leg with his wooden drawing board, urging me to look: he was taller than I and noticed the woman first, but just then Stark began reading off a list of demands from a handbill he had fished out from under a forest of feet: "Five: away with obstructionists; six: down with Stalinist economics; seven: long live fraternal Poland; eight: workers councils in factories; nine: agricultural recovery, voluntary cooperatives; ten: a constructive plan of action for the nation" — we could barely hear the woman's voice, but Stark interrupted his reading and, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, joined the woman by mouthing the words along with her, "… as they sink into hell, with mast and sail broken, in tatters hang.." and it did not surprise me, on the contrary, it filled me with warm waves of satisfaction that the patriotic poem so well known to all of us was being recited by a relative of mine— the woman on the crate was my cousin Albert's ex-wife, from the town of Győr — to whom about a year and a half earlier I had wanted to run away, somewhat foolishly but with a confidence in her that had no real basis, just to escape from my own home and my parents.