Bombshell

by Allan, Barbara

  Eva giggled, muffled from beneath the sheet. She drew the bedding back, just enough to reveal her face. “Good morning, Pluck,” she said with a smile.

  The happiness in the room—unaided by wine, merely a heady mixture of elation and youth—was as clear and obvious as the sunshine lancing through the shutters.

  Jonas leaned on an elbow. “When are we marching?”

  “Right now, you silly goose! Hurry up!”

  And Pluck shut the door.

  “Such language,” Jonas said, and burrowed under the blankets, cupping one of Eva’s firm, round breasts. “Maybe they could do without us today….”

  Her blue eyes held his, her full lips made a kiss that was also a smirk. “Do without the poet king? Stuff and nonsense.”

  “I’m no king, my sweet. Just another student.”

  “And think of what we students have done…. Don’t you even want to know what the student delegation has come up with?” And rather formally, she removed his hand from her small, perfect breast, then gave him a playful smile. “There will be plenty of time for… poetry… later.”

  On Rákóczi Avenue in front of the dormitory building, Jonas bent over and picked up a leaflet dropped by one of the students. Eva, buttoning her dark wool coat against the cold morning wind, leaned against him, peering at the paper.

  “Multi-party democracy….” Jonas was reading. “Freedom of worship, press, and opinions… public ownership of industry… return of the land to the peasants….”

  “This too is poetry,” Eva said. “What about neutrality?”

  Jonas scanned the paper. “… Hungary non-aligned with any other country.”

  Eva’s eyes widened.

  They both knew this was a bold step. By demanding neutrality, the Hungarians would be asking even more from Moscow than the Polish had, daring to demand that the door to the West be pushed open wide.

  Jonas slipped an arm around her and Eva smiled at him, and he at her. He gave her what began as a peck of a kiss and turned into a long, passionate embrace.

  Their lips parted, but their eyes did not. “Let’s catch up with the others,” Eva whispered, touching his mouth with a fingertip as he tried to kiss her again.

  Jubilantly, holding hands, they hurried along the wide street where shopkeepers were already busy cleaning up debris and repairing broken windows. His father in Szeged would be doing the same, as would hers in Miskolc. Here and there lay remnants from the recent battle: a burnt-out Russian tank, sprawled like a dead beetle, an overturned Army truck, its broken headlight eyes looking stunned; in the middle of an intersection stood a life-size statue of Stalin, its arms outstretched as if directing traffic, but its head knocked off, at its feet.

  At this, they looked at each other and laughed.

  Just past Republic Square, they caught sight of the student delegation—nearly one hundred in all—approaching the steps of the Parliament Building, where a de facto government had hurriedly been put into place.

  He and Eva were walking arm-in-arm, with a bounce in their step, when they first heard the brittle mechanical sound, shattering the peaceful morning, and it took several seconds before Jonas recognized it as machine gun fire.

  The crowd of students—at first confused, then yelling and even screaming—tried to scatter, but were cut down by Russian soldiers materializing from all around them like uniformed ghosts. The hand-held machine guns made a terrible drumming, and the students marched to it, the air misted red with blood, the cobblestones streaming with it, crimson battle ribbons of dying surrender.

  Within seconds, they were all dead—all of them—many still clutching the white resolution papers, now speckled and spattered with red.

  Half a block away, Jonas and Eva froze in their tracks—they did not seek cover… they were not in the path of the invaders; like Stalin’s headless statue, they stood there, stunned and horrified, witnessing the massacre like some abstract theater piece, a grotesque ballet of blood.

  But this was nothing abstract—not when their friends were dying. Eva gripped his arm and turned away when a boy fleeing toward them turned out to be Pluck, his eyes wide not with enthusiasm but terror; then his body was riddled with bullets, flung to street like so much refuse.

  The machine guns stopped.

  The street was scattered with puppets whose strings had been snipped; the acrid stench of gun smoke floated on the wind, a ghastly echo of last night’s bonfire.

  Some of the soldiers prowled the perimeter, while others—snouts of their machine guns curling smoke—began climbing, two-at-a-time, the steps of the Parliament building—to assassinate the renegade government inside. Jonas and Eva were taking this in when, over the top of the building, a Soviet MiG fighter came streaking down.

  Jonas grabbed Eva’s hand, spun her around, and pulled her roughly back down the street.

  “Truck!” he said, meaning the overturned truck could provide a barrier from bullets.

  He wasn’t sure she had heard him, though she kept pace at his side; he could hear the plane bearing down on them. Behind them, bullets chewed up the street and spat up powdered cement, spraying their feet. The bullets were stitching the street at their back as they dove behind the truck, Jonas throwing his body over hers.

  “Oh, God… Oh, Jesus…” he moaned, on top of her, like last night. “Where did the hell did they come from….”

  But the body beneath him was so motionless, not even trembling with fear, that he knew. He knew.

  He raised himself up enough to look down at Eva, who was on her back, blue eyes staring and empty and, yes, she was dead. Then before he could even sob, much less cry out in anguish, he felt his head explode, or seem to—the butt of a Russian rifle had come down on the back of his skull, to put him temporarily out of his misery, and he lay on her one last time.

  When Jonas regained consciousness, he was on his side on a flatbed truck, arms and legs bound, face encrusted with dried blood, like the crisp sugary surface of a pudding. He wasn’t alone: the back of the truck was filled with other boys, some of them very young, all of them bruised and bloodied.

  Jonas’s tongue was so dry he couldn’t speak, but a youth next to him, who was similarly bound, answered the question he could not pose.

  “They’re taking us to Russia,” the boy whispered, his eyes large and frightened. “For rehabilitation.”

  A burly Soviet guard near the cab stirred and moved toward them.

  “Shut up down there,” the guard snarled in Russian, pointing his rifle threateningly at them. His eyes were as black as Pluck’s and as dead as Eva’s.

  Jonas lay his throbbing head back down and closed his eyes. When he awoke again, it was dark. He was still in the truck, bouncing along a rutted dirt road. He soon realized, due to his position, that he could probably throw himself off the truck—his first thought was to try this, not to escape, but to die. Something else deep inside, burning like some foul food that refused digestion, pushed him instead toward escape and survival; he did not know it yet, but his life had a new engine now—not history, not poetry, not freedom, not Eva… revenge.

  Slowly, inch by inch, he moved his bound body toward the edge of the flatbed, and when the guard wasn’t looking, took a deep breath and rolled off.

  A peasant woman found him along the roadside the next day, took him in, and dressed his wounds. After a few days, he set out on foot for Austria. There, the American Embassy helped him—along with hundreds of others like him—get to the United States, where he remained in New York, working at various menial jobs, his childhood baking skills proving helpful….

  But with each passing day he became more restless; America was a great country—they had freedom, though they did not seem to appreciate it—and, anyway, it wasn’t his country. And the language was hard to learn.

  He hopped a train, sharing a boxcar with hoboes, fitting in fine, eventually landing in Los Angeles because that was as far as the rails could take him. Then the Holy Cross Mission helped him put down
some roots—an apartment, a bakery job—which gave him some semblance of peace. But at twenty-three Jonas could never really see himself finding a wife better than Eva, or raising a family, or even becoming an American citizen. No matter how hard he tried, these universal visions, once precious to him, would never materialize. Something had died with Eva; the only thing still alive in him was that hot coal of revenge, which never went out… cold as the rest of him might be, it always glowed hatefully at his core.

  No, his notion to kill Khrushchev had not come slowly; it came in one swift instant… like the instant it had taken for the MiG bullets to kill Eva. It was a reflex—a doctor’s hammer to a patient’s knee. When his co-workers in the bakery began to talk of “that fat commie fucker,” “that Red bastard,” Jonas perked up.

  Khrushchev is coming, they said.

  All right, then.

  Khrushchev is coming… Khrushchev will die.

  At first, Jonas thought he might have to return to New York to assassinate Khrushchev; he had enough money saved to take a bus—hopping trains would not be necessary, this time. But soon the American press was thoughtful enough to provide the premier’s travel schedule, which included a stop in Los Angeles.

  How wonderful freedom of the press was!

  His parents had been Roman Catholic, but when Jonas went off to the university, he had abandoned the church; like so many students he found notions of existentialism interesting, and considered himself an agnostic.

  Now, in America, and for the first time in many years, Jonas went to a Catholic Church and prayed—thanked God for this gift. He did not, however, take confession.

  Jonas watched the hearse-like black limousines pull away from in front of the hangar at the airport in Los Angeles. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his flour-soiled chinos, fingering the press-pass card he’d lifted off a Newsweek reporter. His fellow reporters had been nice enough to mention among themselves that Khrushchev was going to a luncheon at Fox Studios later, and that a civic dinner would follow at the Ambassador Hotel that evening.

  Getting into Fox Studios would be hard—they had a gate, and guards, and everyone knew everybody. But the hotel? That was a public place; so much was unguarded in a free country. The hotel would be easy, with so many guests and restaurant patrons….

  Jonas caught a bus at the airport that took him downtown, boarding another one going to West Los Angeles, where he lived on the fifth story of a rundown brick apartment building in which only a few less languages were spoken than at the United Nations.

  In his tiny kitchenette, he placed the stolen press badge that read, “John Davis, Newsweek” on the table next to a black Kodak camera with silver flash attachment. He opened the camera and inserted a small revolver in its hollowed-out interior. The pistol didn’t look very threatening—like a starter’s gun at a track meet—but pressed against Khrushchev’s temple, it would be up to the noble task.

  Then, taking a piece of butcher paper, Jonas printed a note for the authorities to find. He didn’t want his adoptive American country to bear the brunt of his actions.

  Satisfied, Jonas went into his bedroom where a new brown serge suit, white shirt, diamond-patterned beige tie, and tan hat awaited, spread out like a sartorial feast on the threadbare bedspread. The outfit had taken much of his savings, except for the change in his pocket. But that was all right; after tonight he would have no further need for money.

  He’d studied the photos in the recent Life magazine of the pressmen covering the dictator’s trip… of what they wore… and newsreels at second-run movie houses and news programs on televisions in store windows… of how they acted, these American reporters. He practiced their brash stance and obnoxious smirk in the bathroom mirror, until he thought he’d gotten it right. He was no actor, but he had been in the arts; he was creative.

  Jonas pulled out the loose change in his pocket. There was more than enough for him to call a taxi, and arrive at the Ambassador in style.

  But that would be later.

  He checked his watch.

  There was plenty of time for a long, refreshing nap.

  And, sunlight creeping in the shuttered windows, Jonas slept better than he had since that night with Eva, who entered his dreams and kissed him and called him a poet and a warrior.

  So few poets, after all, can make history.

  Chapter Four

  A SELF-MADE MAN

  BOILING WITH RAGE, flesh white as dead skin, Nikita Khrushchev sulked in the back seat of the limousine, seated between his wife Nina and translator Oleg Troyanovsky, as if they were indulgent parents on either side of their fat little boy, a spoiled brat denied a toy. The perpetually pleasant Nina remained placid, despite the rude treatment the Russian entourage had just endured at their arrival in Los Angeles; Oleg, who had a cynical streak, accepted this fate with typically cool detachment.

  The sleek, black Lincoln sedan transporting the Khrushchevs and their translator—followed by four other limousines—traveled swiftly out of the airport, heading into the city and a luncheon that had been scheduled at some motion-picture facility. Nikita had prepared a gracious, amiable speech that he’d intended to grant the crowd that would greet him when he came off the Air Force plane…. He would have told these citizens how happy he was to be in Los Angeles, and the positive things he hoped to accomplish in their sunny city. He was going to say—quite cleverly, Nikita thought, a peasant delighted by his own poetry—that the city’s smog was like the cold war: both must be abolished if the two countries were to continue breathing….

  But then that vyesh brakovanaya Mayor Poulson had insulted Khrushchev—the premier of Russia!—by dismissing him with a paltry, one-sentence introduction. This was a slap in the face, missed by no one—not a personal affront, no—this was not a matter of Nikita’s ego being bruised; rather, a display of public disrespect to Russia itself.

  With some satisfaction, Nikita had noted the embarrassment on the faces of the American dignitaries, and of that fellow Harrigan, the agent in charge of protecting the premier and his family. The State Department man’s eyes had tightened and so had his hands, clenching as if he wanted to punch the mayor right in the zhiloudak.

  Now the sedan sped along streets in the bright California sunlight, which shimmered on the leaves of palm trees and other exotic plants, winking off the windows of tidy little houses; it seemed an automobile sat in every driveway, and toys no child in Russia could ever afford lay discarded on sidewalks and in yards, like so much trash. Not one iota of this decadence escaped Nikita’s view, though even Nina and Oleg might never have guessed just how much his peripheral vision was reporting to him, as Nikita remained motionless as he rode, a statue of himself, seemingly staring straight ahead.

  As he had on the entire American trip, Nikita steadfastly refused to acknowledge the abundance of riches around him. To do so would be to admit that Russians didn’t have such material things, and—though the Russian people were of course above such degenerate consumerism—this could be taken as a sign of weakness.

  Besides, Nikita Khrushchev was not a stupid man—he was no fool. He knew very well that this was all just a show that the Americans had put on, along pre-selected routes, carefully orchestrated to impress and deceive him; no country on earth was really so wealthy.

  Unfortunately, his two daughters and son—sitting opposite him in the limo—were leaning forward with bright eyes, children at the circus, pointing at the sights, whispering excitedly, all but drooling on the car’s bullet-proof windows. Nikita shot Sergei a stern, reproachful look, and the young man glanced meaningfully at first Rada, then Julia, and all three then sat back, hands folded in their laps. Good children all (and though they were in their twenties and thirties, they were to him children), the trio followed their father’s example.

  Nikita sat staring forward—and yet missed nothing, out of the corners of his eyes… like the strange sight of a little girl rotating a plastic hoop around her waist. Of this he made a mental note; the toy
looked affordable, although why any child—American or Russian—would want such an object he could not fathom.

  More than anything, the premier was painfully aware of the absence of any crowds along their route. Poulson must have banished the well-wishers inside, Nikita felt certain, no doubt under threat of being shot should they show the visitors any hospitality whatsoever. Or was it that even a string of shiny limousines zipping through the streets could not attract any attention here—not in this city of decadence, where a gross indulgence like a limousine was apparently a common sight.

  For the most part, Nikita had felt buoyed by the welcome the Russian party had encountered previously on the American trip—the crowds had been numerous and receptive, some even cheering. People were people, after all—the press insisted on referring to the Russians as “communists” but Nikita did not look at Americans and think of them as “capitalists.” He saw people, only people, of flesh and blood, of hopes and dreams, weak and strong, kind and… sometimes… unkind. As the Russian saying went, no apple was safe from worms, like the maggots in Chicago with their signs condemning him for his action in Hungary.

  The invasion of that satellite country—a necessary but unfortunate foray to crush the counter-revolution—was not his decision alone, and had caused Nikita great anguish.

  When word reached him in Moscow that the Hungarian Communist Party had fallen in Budapest at the hands of the students and intelligentsia, Nikita’s first reaction had been not to meddle, but to monitor the crisis… he hoped to follow a similar tactic to the one he had taken, the year before, with Poland. Nikita believed that the cream—that is, the communist party—had a way of always rising to the top.

  And if truth be told—although telling such a truth would have been political suicide—the premier could certainly understand how the Hungarians could be gripped by unrest and unhappiness, subjected as they’d been for years to the harsh rule of Stalin, and that foul henchman of his, Rákosi.