John Wray - The Right Hand of Sleep

Very, I said. I looked at his thick sheepskin vest. Would you like to trade?

Not bad for you, smiled the son. He took off the vest and passed it over to me. He was smaller than I was and my jacket hung tentlike from his bony shoulders. That’ll keep you warm in winter, I said.

Or in prison, said Jan. The others laughed.

When we reached the center of town the streets were already full to overflowing. Police and Civil Guardsmen were running around in a panic, trying to coax the massed crowds back against the houses. Half a mile from the river we were forced to tie up the carts and continue on foot. Everywhere people were shouting and drinking and acting as if the war really were over, drumming against streetlamps and house doors and passing carriages, dancing with arms linked on the curbs. I moved forward as if in a trance, watching the people on all sides laughing, howling, bellowing, jeering openly at policemen and files of soldiers as they crowded past, writing insults to the Kaiser and the Crown of Hungary in school chalk on the walls and pavements. For the first time, moving cautious as an ant through the crowds, hidden in them and a part of them at once, it dawned on me that I might actually get away. More than that — I began to think for myself again, crushed and jostled into consciousness by the massing bodies. The idea came to me then, calmly and quietly at first, of the thing that I was going to do.

Closer to the square the crowds grew even denser. The march had already begun and as we crossed Theresien Avenue a huge roar went up in front of us. The farmer and his sons elbowed their way forward, calling out the name of the uncle’s factory like a marching hymn: Sol-ya. . Sol-ya. . Sol-ya. . Another roar went up, booming back over our heads. Things were happening close by but we could see next to nothing. People were climbing onto each other’s backs, but the sway of the crowd threw them down again just as quickly. The farmer and his eldest son were wide-shouldered and bullet-headed and they pressed ahead ruthlessly, the rest of us falling meekly in behind them. All at once we were heaved forward into the linked arms of a row of terrified policemen. Through their shoulders I could see the wide empty square with the river behind it, slow and austere, and on the far bank the city of Buda curving down on its yellow hill. Across from our street at each corner of the square, identical cordons of police held identical masses restrained. Without warning a shout would erupt from one street or another, often a lone man’s voice, and the other five streets would immediately thunder back in answer. In the middle of the square a battalion of K&K cavalry sat in orderly, expectant rows.

For a brief moment the crowd behind us fell back a little and grew still. In those few calm, deliberate seconds it was quiet enough to hear the horses shifting uneasily and shuddering under the riders. Then a new sound began on the opposite side of the square, building and carrying to us over the tops of the trees, and the crowds there pushed forward to each side in blind confusion. Gradually they flattened back against the houses to admit the marchers, who were pouring out now from all of the downtown avenues onto the square. The roaring to every side grew immeasurably louder. The police on the street hesitated a moment, looking over their shoulders at the cavalry, then simply broke rank and let us through.

It was clear from the very first that no one, not even the marchers, had expected such an awesome show of numbers. I was later to hear that it was the largest assembly in the history of the capital. A few minutes after the entrance of the first columns of workers, the square was so filled by the crush of bodies that it became impossible to tell the marchers from the spectators who had broken everywhere through the laughable restraining lines of the police. The noise was deafening, like no sound I’d yet heard; the cavalry unit had all but vanished in the tumult. Occasionally single riders could be seen swaying helplessly over the profusion of heads and fists, shrieking at their horses. The marchers were moving now in a ring around the square, droning one workers’ anthem after another, and a song over and over again that I didn’t yet recognize as the Internationale. Now and then the whole crowd would join in, monstrously out of key, most of them simply bellowing along with the prevailing din. I looked about me at one point and noticed Jan standing a few paces to my left. Is everyone in this city a Bolshevik? I shouted to him.

Opportunists, Oskar! Opportunists! he called back. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. We laughed for a moment across the sea of lowing faces at each other.

Somewhere in the maelstrom a man was crashing a pair of cymbals together. Two isolated shots rang out, one after the other, but no one paid any attention to them. Suddenly the crowd surged forward and heaved us flat onto the pavement. I barely had time to get on my feet before a second surge sent me stumbling out into the street. Marchers and onlookers milled together on every side, the wide-eyed policemen pressed too closely into them even to raise their blackjacks. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Jan’s face falling away from me. I’m going east! I called to him. East! He waved once more, shouted something happily and was gone.

The cavalry were now gathered into a ring and huddled defensively on their mounts at the far edge of the park, firing shots into the air. The tide and current of the crowd had grown more violent, falling back from the riders grudgingly at each report and closing in again after only a few seconds. The entire scene was like nothing so much as a wide field of mud shifting in a heavy rain. Panic began to build in earnest now around the square, rocking and funneling the crowds, and in another instant I was thrown back from the cavalry as inexorably as I’d been carried toward them a few moments before. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one rider tilt and fall slowly sideways with his mount into the field of pitching heads. An instant or two later I was rushing down a narrow sloping street with a thousand others, all of us somehow one body and one brain, a column of state police and King’s cavalry just behind us. And you thought you’d left the war behind, I thought, grinning stupidly to myself as I ran.

That same night I boarded a K&K train east from Luzni station to Czernowitz and the border. Everything everywhere was in the same state of witless confusion. There were rumors that the Kaiser was offering all of Hungary as a sop to the Bolsheviks. No one asked to see my ticket.

As we crept rattlingly up into the Carpathians I sounded out the merchants and retired officers in my carriage for news about the October Revolution and the armistice. All I could gather was that the Bolsheviks had formed an alliance with the Russian navy and simply declared the war with Germany to be over. A group of tsarist generals, Commander in Chief Dukonin among them, had refused to give up their armies and continued to fight German forces throughout Poland and Silesia, living in the woods like war-lords. I had no idea how much of this could be believed. One old man, a retired taps lieutenant from Graz, swore the Tsar was in northern Hungary. He stuttered as he spoke and twisted the corners of his ash-gray muttonchops excitedly. He was convinced that I was an emissary of some kind until I confessed that I was in fact a deserter.

Well. . he stuttered, adjusting himself in his seat uneasily. Perhaps you could petition the Tsar for some manner of asylum?

I don’t think so, uncle, I answered. It wasn’t his army I deserted from.

All the same, said a matronly woman in French-cut silks across the aisle. You can’t very well run to the Bolshevists, can you, child?