Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

What should be done, Istvan? Should they be pardoned? Tomorrow they will recover from their fear and take our magnanimity for weakness, or, worse yet, stupidity. They will muster their forces. Their concern is not the nation or socialism. They want power. They wallow in their sense of immunity. They despise those in whose name they wield authority but whom they consider human dung. Say: what would you do with these judges who condemned the innocent, who began the hearings with the verdicts in their briefcases in accord with instructions received by telephone, with the findings of specialists in interrogation who tore out fingernails, maltreated prisoners physically and psychically — who tortured them into signing depositions in which they confessed to crimes not committed? What would you do with doctors who sentenced political prisoners to confinement in bunkers smaller than coffins, in cellars with water to their knees, cynically attesting, “This is a man, not a horse; he will endure it. And if he should kick the bucket, we will write that the cause of death was influenza, heart failure. The coffin will be sealed and all is done.”

Would you let them go free? Wouldn’t it be better to strangle them while we have them in our hands? While the workers’ fingers are lodged in their beardless, greasy chins so that they shriek with terror?

Today we would revel in the investigation, the trial, the lawful verdict. And tomorrow they would grant them amnesty! They destroyed not only people, but socialism. They ruined the moral fiber of human beings. They frightened and bought off the younger generation. Everything seethes around me. I flail; I do not know whom to believe. There is so much conflicting information, and all from eyewitnesses, shouted angrily, affirmed on oath. People see what they want to see. Istvan, you can be happy that you are far away from this. You will come back, you will return when conditions are right. Desperation forces people to strike blindly. I hear tank patrols thundering around the boulevard; the motors are droning. If only they would let us cleanse ourselves! We ought to do it with our own hands, with no one’s help. The Poles are trying. How much they are spoken of and held up as an example, but they have no conception of how it was with us through all those years. They never went with the Germans. They were not poisoned.

Istvan, the committee deliberates without recess. Day and night lights burn and angry voices spar. Delegates come in armed. Rifles hang in the cloakroom instead of coats. One feels that the earth is trembling under Hungary. Momentous hours. Under the windows a parade passes. Young people cry, “Don’t believe Nagy. He only babbles.” “Power to the committee of the Revolution!” I walk along the street. I go into the crowd. It is a raging river. I entrust myself to its current. I want what is good for this nation. I want what is good for Hungary.

Warmest regards,

Your Bela

P.S. Two more days have passed. It is calm, and that is gratifying. I do not trust the mail; it is still not working properly. I am giving this letter to the correspondent from Vienna, who leaves today, for nothing unusual is happening here. Thank God; I dream only of such bulletins.

November 3rd, 1956. Budapest.

P.S. One word more: believe me, we will emerge whole from this chaos. It is impossible that in our camp two socialist countries, two countries bound to each other by a defense pact, would turn their gun barrels on each other.

Your red Bela

Dazed, he looked blankly at the map of India, at the outline of a triangular land like a dried cheese. Outside the window the sky glowed and a car horn blared. The Austin was open. No doubt Mihaly was sitting behind the wheel.

The next day at dawn, the dreadful memory confronted him again. How could you trust them, Bela? The nation is not the mob that stamps on portraits and roars in the squares, brandishing weapons torn away from soldiers. Yes — it is easy to say that now. And with every day, as the date memory clung to grew more remote, it would be easier to recognize the signs of hate, madness, provocation, and obvious counterrevolution. But they did not want to see, as the comrades who were carried away earlier by airplane from their positions of power did not want to hear the voices of protest, the complaints and calls for justice. Bela is dead. It cannot even be said that he died for the cause. UPI only reported that he had been wounded as he tried to cross the Austrian border. And so you let yourself be swept away by the mob, the outflowing human river, by mindless forces. The suffocation was too much for you. You abandoned Hungary.

Was the letter that dangled from his fingers a call to arms, a testament? Or, now that it had reached him, was it only a warning? Was it a sign that he should not go back? If there were no homeland, to what would he be returning? Or was it wrong to think that way, even at the worst of times?

If the Western newspapers were putting out the news of Bela’s death, they must have buried him in Austria — not even on Hungarian ground. Anyway, was that important? Magical thinking: the ground is the same everywhere. No. No. The ground on which we took our first tottering steps…In that grass I hid my face, I wiped away the tears of my first humiliations. I beat it angrily with my powerless fists. I tugged at it so it would not slip away from me, for it whirled so after the mad chase that my ears rang. The ground I named in the most beautiful of languages, for it was my own: Hungarian. It is waiting for me, I know — not a large place by my standards.

Bela is dead and I am foundering, crumbling. Now there is no one who remembers the enjoyments of childhood: bathing the horses, camping on the island in the Danube that was overgrown with willow when the river rose without warning and nearly drowned us as we slept in the cabin. Bela was the only one I told that I loved Ilona when we were still schoolboys, before we had taken the final examinations. I wanted to beat him to death when he grabbed her photograph from me and laughed as he hopped from bench to bench and held it over his head. Then when I caught him, he threw it to the other boys, and they gave it back with a mustache and beard drawn on her face. I wished he would die. And now he has.

Indeed, I loved him because he knew me. He shared my anxiety; so many times we talked the night away, chatting until dawn. We had bitter mottos for those nights: Fun shall make us free. Revelry revives the nation. A devoted friend. A splendid colleague, full of the joy of life. Always ready for adventures, full of madcap inspirations. Impossible that the air has closed over him like water, without a trace.

Words about a lost friend from childhood…about my own death in the passing of my loved ones. Istvan was ashamed. Was he ready to exchange every motion of the heart for words, calculating unconsciously that he would print them the next day and throw them to the world as one throws seed to birds?

Fervently he set about conjuring up faraway images. The meadows by the Danube loomed before him — the doleful cry of the startled lapwings. Willows: big cats with the downy golden coats of spring. Branches swayed in the wind, jostling tiger-striped bumblebees who protested in bass rumblings. The water was a strident blue; it whirled away into little streams and slowly filled each of the horses’ hoofprints with quicksilver. Suddenly he heard a heavy step in the corridor and noticed that the handle of his door was trembling.

“Come in!” he called, sitting erect and alert.

“I do not want to disturb you. That is why I listened for the sound of the typewriter,” mumbled the caretaker.

“What do you want?”