Under Budapest (17 page)

Broken glass crackles and crunches under Agi feet. Some­where, windows have shattered. She's in one of the side streets when she hears it: the unmistakable stutter of gunfire.

Wednesday, October 24

In the early morning, Agi sits with her mother, both fastened to their chairs and to each other by the same impossible unknowing. She watches her mother's hands, clenched together on her lap. She watches the movement of her mother's unforgiving mouth as she murmurs prayers or incantations into the air, and Agi closes her eyes because she hates this and she doesn't know where Gyula is and Zsofi hasn't come home so she waits with her mother. The same wait. The same room. The same hands.

Somehow, in the long, chaotic minutes after those first shots into the crowd, the revolutionaries procured weapons. They shot their way into the building. She still doesn't know if Gyula was in there, or if he was captured by the AVO, the Allamvedelmi Osztaly, the secret police. Or if he'd been shot. She fought her way through the crowd moving in the opposite direction and she saw bodies but not his. That wasn't proof he was alive, but at least it wasn't proof that he was dead. She stumbled into the square, desperate. She seized strangers by the arm, “Have you seen…?” Trying to find the words to describe him, receiving in return either compassion or a brutal “How should I know…?” She turned a corner and stumbled into a girl who fell into her arms. Agi helped the girl to the shelter of a doorway where they both collapsed, tucking back into the shallow alcove. How could the night have turned like this? The girl could be no more than fifteen years old, the same age as Agi's students, and she was bleeding from her stomach. Her blonde hair curled bright from underneath a beret. Agi held the girl as fighters and ordinary people clamoured by through air that stank of bitter smoke and filled with the dust of buildings blown apart.

“Hush,” Agi whispered. “What's your name?”

“Eva.” The blood seeped through Eva's shirt and coat, and though Agi pressed her hand to staunch it, the blood kept pumping.

“Eva, that's a pretty name. We're safe here, Eva. Don't worry.”

Not that it mattered.

“I've got a little candy in my pocket,” Eva said before she lost consciousness. “Would you like it?”

When Agi walked in to the apartment shortly before four that morning, her mother had been awake in the dark, sitting in the same stern wooden chair she always sat in to write her letters.

“Anyu?”

Hearing her daughter's voice, Margit said nothing. She did nothing. Not a hug or a “Thank God,” and Agi felt deserted. She stripped off clothes stiff with the stranger's blood and went to bed, but she didn't sleep. Explosions and fear kept her awake, sporadic gunfire ricocheted. Her mother muttered prayers. And now they sit.

Margit twists a piece of string around a ball of string ten years in the making, thankful that one daughter is here, though that's not nearly enough. If she had opened her mouth last night, she would have said nothing kind. If she'd opened her hand, it would have slapped. Such nonchalance. Such easy, careless nonchalance with her love when anyone can see she can't afford to lose any more. No, if Margit could do it, she would put them, her precious daughters, in a box, wrap them up tight, incant prayers over that box to protect them, assign soldiers to guard them with guns and grenades and loyalty as fierce as her own.
Miklos, your daughters take their lives too lightly.

From the street, a loudspeaker crackles and bellows: “Hung­arians, Hungary needs you. Support our heroes of the revolution. We are all on strike. Do not work today.” As if anyone could even think of working after last night. Whatever today might ordinarily have been, it is not and nothing is certain. Ordinary time is over. This is revolutionary time. This? This waiting inside a cold apartment for news? This is his revolution and she doesn't even know if he's still alive, or Zsofi. Agi flings yesterday's bloody cardigan over her dress, remembers that her jacket is still hanging on its hook at the school where she left it yesterday afternoon. She says not a word to her silent mother, and she slams the door on the way out.

Visegradi teems with people. They mill about, they pull toward Szent Istvan Korut. Some walk, some march arm in arm and sing. Many like her just stand in doorways, watching. A car trundles by. It's past ten and there's an air of holiday festivity but purposeful. Someone's singing the national anthem. Flags wave. She pushes through it all. This is impossible. How will she find them if she has no idea where to look? On Szent Istvan, she hears the sound of shooting from somewhere up near the Nyugati train station. Cars burn, a bus rocks, crashes onto its side. The air smells of burning gas and metal. Who will bury the dead? Old men clatter by with guns they must have kept from the war. Teenagers and young people clatter with weapons too. She stops one. “Where did you get the gun?”

“Technical University,” he shouts. “It's the armoury now. Lots left if you want one.”

The university an armoury? In one night, an entire city has turned itself inside out. Hungarians have become loud. Russian books have become flares. She, Agi, has become a revolutionary, and tanks have blown new holes in the city centre. She can't imagine Gyula with a gun, but then yesterday she wouldn't have imagined last night, and tomorrow,
tomorrow
, they are supposed to leave for the border. Skirting Szabadsag Ter, she hears someone shout that the Csepel munitions factory has gone out on strike and the workers are sending arms, truckloads of them. “Death to the AVO,” shouts a woman in a faded housewife's dress. Her face shines with justice as she walks with purpose, locking arms with the woman next to her. “Now or never!” the women shout, and others join them. Agi hurries. The Technical University is on the other side of the river, at least ten kilometres from here, and streetcars stand, stalled and abandoned on their tracks. Still, it's good to have a destination. Her feet hurt already on the cobbles and she wishes for Zsofi's thick-soled, ugly shoes. Tomorrow's shoes. Approaching Jozsef Atilla Utca, a knot of people tangles round a lamppost. As she passes, they hoist a man from his ankles up the post. AVO. His car burns on the road. Calmly, an older woman in battered, once-stylish high heels walks to the burning car, dips a rolled paper into the fire, returns to the dangling, bloody man, and touches the flame to his left shoulder, his right, his hair. He screams as he ignites. Agi runs.

She runs until her chest hurts and stops, finally, on the corner of a street where a high wall hides a garden. She realizes she's sobbing: “I can't. I can't. I can't.” I can't. What does this even mean? This can't be my life. I can't lose him. I can't run. She crouches like a small animal against the stone wall. She shudders and she rocks. “I can't.”

Enough. The voice in her head is her own: as bossy and abrupt as she is with Zsofi sometimes. Get to your feet, hulye. Are you dead? No. Are you hurt? No. So stop your crying. Find Gyula. There is still time to escape. This is the best time to escape.

By the time she gets to the university it's three hours since she left home. A truck's parked out front. Students form a line, passing rifles from one hand to the next, loading the truck. Everyone is wearing an armband of red, white, and green to indicate their allegiance; they are fighting for Hungary. “Gyula Farkas?” she asks. “Zsofi Teglas?” She makes her way from one revolutionary to the next. No one knows. She follows the line back to the gymnasium, where hundreds and hundreds of crates are spread about the floor bearing Rakosi's stamp. So, Csepel's munitions have arrived already, arms stolen from the enemy. In the corner, a radio blasts. Martial law has been declared. No surprise, Hungary's most devoted Stalinist, Matyas Rakosi, is calling the revolutionaries
counter
-revolutionaries and fascists, traitors who threaten Hungary. He swears he will cut them off, like so many slices of salami. Soviet reinforcements are on their way. A boy jangling with bandoliers dashes into the gymnasium: “The soldiers have joined us,” he shouts, and the old wooden auditorium resounds with cheers and stomps.

Agi wanders into the hall. An older man who looks like he'd be comfortable selling cabbages and turnips assumes she's here to enlist and directs her to Room Nine, on the second floor, where they're dispensing armbands.

“I'm looking for Zsofi Teglas and Gyula Farkas,” she says.

“Farkas? I just saw him. Try that way.” He nods toward a hallway lined with portraits of principals, some now slashed or dashed to the floor.

She passes three doorways, and as she approaches the last, she hears his voice. Gyula. “We must establish a radio transmitter somewhere in Buda. Who can do this?” At the open door, she pauses. He's sitting on the teacher's desk, surrounded by six fighters. Grenades hang from his waist. A gun is slung from his shoulder, sleeves rolled up. Three days ago, he was an ordinary student of engineering, awkward and gangly as he ran toward her on Margit.

“I could likely figure it out. If we can take a transmitter from the radio building, bring it up to the top of Harmashatar, maybe?” says one of the men.

“Good. We need to be in touch with Gyor, and with other student groups. There's no organization, no com­munication between our groups, an enormous weakness. We have to rectify it.”

It hardly sounds like Gyula—so abrupt and decisive. He glances up, sees Agi by the open door.

“Agi.” He bounds across the room and plants an exuberant kiss on her lips. Agi feels her cheeks light up. Is this part of the rev­olution too? Everything coming out of hiding, including love?

“Farkas, what did General Kovacs have to say?” This was a different young man, but they all looked the same to Agi—too young, too fired up.

“That's what I'm telling you, Marton. Next time, be quicker about it and you won't miss the information.” Holding fast to her one hand, he speaks louder, tenser, faster than she's ever heard him. “Every minute matters. Feri's got his hands on an armoured vehicle. He can drive it. Can someone else manage the defence?”

The rattle of machine-gun fire is constant, if distant. Explosions blast, but everyone here ignores them. She tries to follow the conversation, but it's obvious she has nothing to add. The others have forgotten her. His hand lets go. She stands, purposeless and awkward, beside the revolutionary.

Finally the group breaks, and Gyula turns back to her. “Did you see how organized we are already? Did you see what's in the gymnasium?”

“Thank God you're safe, Gyula. Last night, I thought maybe you were at the Radio and—”

“From Csepel. Rakosi's own weapons, turned against him. And you know what General Kovacs said to me today? ‘The most faithful allies of the army are the students and the workers in the city, and the peasants in the country. Together, we have risen against Soviet domination.' It's happening, Agi. You see? Just like I told you. Soon, we will be Hungarians on Hungarian soil again.”

He's talking at her, face shining with fervour, his black eyes bright with it. All the apologies she'd wanted to make dry on her tongue.

“Gyula, they're burning men alive out there—”

“AVO men, Agi.”

She can't even begin to answer this. “There's talk the border guards have left their posts. It would be so easy, Gyula. We'd just have to walk—”

He looks at her in confusion. “I'm fighting for my country.”

He's lived through one war already, as she has. He knows what Russian tanks can do as well as she does. He knows the terror of hiding in a cellar for days, weeks on end. He had to clean Russian boots, bring them cigarettes and goose fat and beer. “But you will
lose
, Gyula.”

His face goes smooth, mercenary. “Get out of my way.”

“Gyula.”

“I have things to do, Agi. Now let me go.”

She'd grasped his sleeve without realizing. He strides away, shoulders set, grenades rattling loose around his waist.

When Agi leaves, the apartment walls close in. The fighting's not many streets away. Margit hears the ricochet of bullets, the shouts. What is Miklos thinking, where he dwells, down below? Can he hear the guns, the jubilation that fills the air? Is he tempted by that jubilation to hope? Don't you dare hope, Miklos, thinks Margit. Don't you dare. But before she even has a name for what she's doing, she's putting down the ball of string. She's standing, getting her coat on, wrapping a scarf about her head. With a key, she's opening the cabinet beside her bed and she's taking out the gift Miklos gave her after he came back last time and she told him what the Russians did and he couldn't have stopped them. It's only a pistol, but she has a full carton of bullets. She puts the box of bullets in one coat pocket and the gun in the other. If there has to be a revolution, then fine, let there be a revolution.

She walks with the long pistol in her pocket. She looks like any ordinary mother with a scarf tied round her head, with her little net shopping bag at her wrist. She moves not quickly, not nimbly, but steadfastly, one dogged foot in front of the other. People run from corner to corner. They duck and dodge. The noise and the fighting intensify as she nears Koztarsasag Ter. With every block, the screaming and the shouting get louder; bloodstained people run for their lives or are dragged out of the way or walk dazedly with their arms around friends. There's a pretty, ringletted girl holding a gun as if it were a dolly in the alcove doorway of a shop. She's dead. There's a man sprawled face down on the street, his back blown open. He's dead. There's an elderly woman, just like Margit, still holding her shopping bag in her left hand, splayed on her back. She's dead. Where will these dead be buried? Who will dig their graves and mark them? Who even knows who they are, these dead-in-the-street, these accidents and fighters, these corpses.

On the square itself, there's no fighting. A standoff. The Soviet tanks sit, with Russian soldiers inside them, guarding Communist Party Headquarters. The revolutionaries stand in front of them, jeering, daring, but not shooting. Margit walks bravely—she doesn't feel brave, but this is how she must seem to anyone watching—to her usual sewer grate close to the centre of the square, between the revolutionaries and the tanks. She takes the pistol out of her pocket and she lies face down on her belly.