Something in its tone frightened him anew. Willing his eyes open, he caught sight of the unfocused face looming down into his, inches away, the drifting clouds behind. A hand waved about in front of his face, blurry at first but then the hand came into focus. And then he knew – the misshapen fingers, the crescent-shaped scar above the right eyebrow. The name jumped up from his memory – Jasper Szabo.
‘I just wanted to make sure,’ said Szabo, his eyes fixed on Zoltan.
Zoltan wanted to speak but the pulsating pain in his leg wouldn’t let him. Helplessly, he watched as Jasper Szabo rose to his haunches, made to leave but then, turning round, spat at him. ‘Take him,’ he heard him say, take him, take him – the words echoed through his mind. His time was at an end now and with the realisation, the pain evaporated as the numbness took over. No longer frightened, no longer regretful, the end approached like the night – as inevitable and as final.
The sky disappeared again as Zoltan felt the rope tighten round his ankles.
Chapter 31: Day Twelve – Saturday, 3rd November
The rumbling noise seeped its way into my consciousness, slowly forcing me awake. I lay there for a while wondering if what I could hear was true or if perhaps I was still asleep. Then with sudden clarity I sat bolt upright. ‘Oh my dear Lord, they’re back.’
Josef, next to me, muttered something.
Running to the window, I screamed, ‘They’ve come back.’
‘Who?’
‘The tanks of course, Russians.’ I pulled aside the curtains. It was still dark but above the deep growl of the tanks I could hear screams and shouts. I could smell smoke drifting through the air.
Josef joined me at the window. ‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘God, it’s only five.’
An explosion nearby made me jump. ‘They lied to us.’
‘The Soviets?’ Josef was already pulling on a jumper over his pyjama top. ‘Of course they lied to us; you didn’t expect them not to try again? They’ll kill every fucking one of us before they’re through.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘We’re leaving. Hurry up and get dressed.’ A whole series of explosions shook the apartment block. ‘Goodness sake, Eva, come away from the window.’
‘But where are you going?’
‘Me? Both of us. Out of this city. Out of this country. Austria. That’s where I’m going – Austria.’
‘But... Austria? How will you get there?’
Tying his shoelaces, he spoke without looking at me. ‘I’ve no idea. But we’ll find a way. It’s either that or get killed. As an escaped prisoner, I stand no chance. And there’s no way I’m going back to jail; I’d rather die than go back. Hurry up; put some clothes on.’
‘What do we do about George?’
‘George? He’s not our concern; leave him.’
‘But he is my concern.’
A rattle of machine gun fire sounded in the near distance making us both duck unnecessarily. ‘He doesn’t have to be. You don’t love him.’
‘That’s not the point; I can’t leave without him.’
‘So where’s he now, this friend of yours? He’s not here. He’s out in the streets again still thinking it’s all one big adventure. He could be dead by now.’
‘Then I won’t leave at all.’
‘No, you can’t stay, you have to come. Get some food together. Come on, Eva, I need you.’
I need you. I think perhaps it was the most revealing thing Josef had said in years. Yet I could only shudder at the extent of how much a stranger he’d become to me. For a day or so, I dismissed the squalor around us and tried to re-live the dream of forty-five when we believed we could take on the world, when communism offered us all we’d ever hoped for. But in those three small words, I need you, Josef again had forgotten the other half of the equation – me. Everything in our relationship had been based on what he wanted, on what he needed; never did he stop to think or to ask what I had wanted. Always the assumption that our desires coincided; an invisible harmony of wishes.
‘I can’t leave. I can’t leave Anastasia.’
His mouth gaped open. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
I sat down on a chair. I felt weak. ‘I can’t leave Anastasia.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said as he put on his coat.
‘I’m not leaving.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Eva, she’s dead. She’s always been dead. You’re obsessed.’ He grabbed my arm and tried to yank me to my feet.
I gripped the chair. ‘Leave me alone; let go of me. You never even tried to understand me.’
The pain stung my cheek. I put my hand to where he’d made contact.
‘OK, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to do that. But, Eva, I beg you – we have to go now.’
‘You go.’
The apartment door swung open with a flourish. George charged in. ‘It’s murder out there,’ he said, catching his breath. ‘The Soviets are everywhere. They’re storming Parliament and shooting at everything in sight.’
‘What about the government?’ asked Josef.
‘No one knows for sure but it’s over. They say Nagy is going to take refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. What... what’s been going on here?’
‘Josef thinks we should leave.’
‘He’s right. Why’s your cheek so red?’
‘No,’ said Josef. ‘I’m not going with him. Two jailbirds together – we’d be a liability to each other.’ He was pacing frantically, desperate to leave. ‘You have to decide, Eva.’
‘Decide?’ There was nothing to decide.
‘You can’t stay with him to die in this shithole; you’re my wife.’ Again, he took my hand in a pounding grip, pulling me towards him.
‘Let go of her,’ yelled George, trying to prise his fingers from mine.
‘Josef, stop,’ I cried. ‘Just stop.’ I thought I was yelling but the words emerged as barely a whisper.
I heard the dulled thud. Josef was on the floor, sitting upright as if he chosen to sit there, looking slightly bemused, rubbing his jaw. He jumped to his feet, his whole face distorted with panic and anger. ‘You stupid, stupid –’
‘Get out,’ seethed George through clenched teeth.
‘I’m going; I’m going, all right.’ He caught his breath, his eyes darting from George to me, his mind whirling for something suitably final to say. ‘This time tomorrow, I’ll be in Austria. This country can die for all I care.’ He spun round with a melodramatic twist and headed for the door. There, he paused, turned and looked at me one final time. ‘You never did deserve that baby.’
And then he was gone.
*
Despite the roar outside, inside the silence descended on the apartment like a blanket. George put an arm round me, squeezed my shoulder. How strange, I thought, that one’s whole relationship with a person can change with the utterance of one sentence; years of knowledge falls apart in seconds. I hated him with a rage that left me feeling enervated. I thought that prison had changed him but I was wrong – Josef was still the same man, nothing had altered.
I stared at the door, George’s arm still round me. ‘You’ll need a wash, George; I’ll boil up some water,’ I said, trying not to let my voice betray the shame simmering inside me.
‘You would’ve made a wonderful mother.’
I tried to smile. ‘Thank you, George.’
‘She’s buried here, in Budapest, isn’t she, and you don’t want to leave her?’
I nodded many times, unable to speak. I thought of the wooden cross, the name barely visible now in the weathered wood. Of course I couldn’t leave her, my poor little girl, my darling girl.
‘But you have to move on.’
‘I can’t do it; I can’t do it to her.’
George took my hand. How small it felt in his. ‘You sound like a communist but you know better than that.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘If the communists are right and there is no God, then it
is only the mortal remains that matter. They can’t allow for the soul, for our souls are the one things they can’t control. But we know them to be wrong. There is a God, we do have souls, and what remains in the soil is neither here or there. It is what’s here, in our hearts, that matters. And wherever you go in this life, your daughter’s soul will be within you. If you stay you’re letting them win, you’re allowing them to beat you down with their indoctrination. Don’t let them beat you, Eva. Come with me now. We’ll build a new life out there somewhere away from all this and then you’ll see I was right. Anastasia will be with you and always will because you did deserve her and you still do.’
I felt weak. My hand almost disappeared into his strength. Yes, I thought, it was that simple. Yet it took a simple man to provide the answer I’d been looking for all along. A simple and lovely man.
Chapter 32: Day Thirteen – Sunday, 4th November
1.
Petra felt as if she was walking into Armageddon. Fires raging, the ceaseless noise, the chaos of panic. Fighting the urge to go straight back home, she took Roza’s hand and with a suitcase in the other, pushed herself on. She convinced herself that being at home was no safer than dodging the shells outdoors. Roza trembled next to her, repeatedly asking where they were going. Petra had no idea but it made sense to her to head for the western outskirts of Buda, the side nearest the Austrian border.
The wreckage left in the wake of the tanks shocked her, and she realised the previous onslaught had been nothing but a warm-up in comparison. Bodies lay where they fell, the wounded yelled out for help that never came. The stench of blood and dust from shattered stones was tangible; the thunderous noise intensifying, clouds of black smoke blocking out the sky. Buildings, already damaged, now collapsed or destroyed by flames, burying or burning whole families in the process. Above them, planes skimmed across the rooftops so low Petra felt the urge to duck, huge shadows following in their wake. The bombs dropped only a few streets away from her, more explosions, more slaughter.
After twenty minutes, she took a wild chance and asked two complete strangers, white with dust, cowering in a doorway, if they might know someone willing to take her and her daughter across the border. She asked a couple because she didn’t think a women would know and she was too worried to ask a man by himself. But they didn’t know and if they did, they yelled back, they’d be heading that way themselves. Petra kept going, the suitcase heavy, the burden of Roza heavier still.
She came across a row of bodies outside a bakery, torsos cut in half by canon fire, a lagoon of blood, the stink of death. She tried to cover Roza’s eyes but she’d already looked away, her hand clasped over her mouth. In the hand of an elderly victim, half a loaf of bread, now splattered with blood.
As they edged away from the centre, away from Buda and beyond Rose Mount, the damage receded, the devastation became less marked. They sat on a doorstep half way up a steep hill and caught their breaths. Above them, a Russian helicopter hovered as the skies darkened. She looked back on the view and felt sickened by the inferno of fire destroying their beautiful city and its people. She wanted to feel something akin to anger but exhaustion defeated all else within her.
Roza leant against her, the eyes still wet, her skin deathly pale. When she spoke, her voice quivered with shock. ‘We’ll never find Papa now.’
Petra wondered whether to continue lying, promising Zoltan’s imminent return. ‘We might see him,’ she said feebly.
‘Yes.’ Both absorbed the other’s attempt to placate. Petra stroked her hair. What a horrible way to grow up, she thought.
It’d been two days since Zoltan left in order to find them transport. As those first hours passed, she expected him to come back any moment, successful in his mission. She carried on saying it to Roza long after she stopped believing it herself. But as she fell asleep that night, a flicker of hope remained. It’d been the quietest night since the start of the uprising – the lull before the storm. Next morning, the flicker was extinguished; she knew him to be dead. She only prayed that his end had come quickly, that he’d been spared the humiliating ritual so relished by the mob. Did she miss him? She didn’t know, every moment was too wrought with dread to think about it but she missed him for Roza’s sake.
A man in his thirties came jogging up the hill towards them. By the time he reached them, he’d slowed down to a walk. Petra asked him quickly, before she lost her nerve, ‘Where can I find someone who’ll take my daughter across the border?’ She realised she’d said “my daughter”, and realised she’d be happy to send Roza on alone if it meant saving her.
The man looked at Roza. ‘You can follow me if you... like,’ he said breathlessly.
She knew he was about to say ‘if you trust me’ but that might have sounded too threatening. It was his hesitation that decided her. ‘I’d be so grateful. How far is it?’
He pointed up the hill. ‘Five minutes. But hurry.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ she said, rising to her feet with her suitcase. ‘Come on, Roza.’
‘No, I can’t, not yet.’
‘Roza, we must, please, the man’s waiting.’
Another helicopter passed overhead. Not too far in the distance the noise of destruction continued with increasing ferocity. A slight drizzle began to fall. The man took Petra’s case and smiled encouragingly at Roza. ‘It’s not far, I assure you.’
As they followed the man up the hill, he turned and asked, ‘Forgive me but I have to ask this, how much cash you got on you?’
Petra hesitated a moment, wondering whether to downplay her last pool of money. ‘Two hundred florins,’ she said, surprising herself with her honestly.
‘We’ll say a hundred and fifty. Fifty to pay my cousin to get you out of the city, and a hundred for the ride to the border. That leaves you with fifty for negotiation.’
Ten minutes later, Petra and Roza found themselves leaning against a Skoda in a dark shed lit only by torches. What a relief to have avoided the bombs, the tanks and the impending rain. Their guide talked to another man, an older man with a trimmed beard and glasses. The sound of bombs persisted in the distance.
‘Antony, my cousin, can take you to a village three miles from the border now but it will cost you fifty florins.’ He winked at her, acknowledging that the haggle over money had worked.
‘That’ll be fine, thank you.’ She squeezed Roza’s hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said to the cousin who also winked at her.
2.
Some kind of animal instinct had taken over. It was different to before; they felt different – more primeval, more basic. During the moments when his mind reached out into civility, Valentin recognised it for what it was, but mostly, he too became swallowed up in the mindset of an automaton, brutal and merciless.
Perhaps because they’d so expected to be quartered out and back home, or perhaps because they’d believed the lie that any further duties would only concern escorting Soviet citizens out of the country and nothing else. They hadn’t expected to be thrown back into the battle under orders to ‘conquer and exterminate’. Vladimir especially had regressed into an all-out assassin of the innocent. Hunger too played its part – one daily slice of black bread and a rasher of bacon each hardly sufficed for hard-working, hard-killing men.
Valentin was astonished at how the Hungarians kept going – the elderly determinedly queuing for food, motivated more by the certainty of hunger than the mere possibility of death; the youngsters still sniping and throwing petrol bombs. But this time the insurgents were fighting against the tide. The sheer number of Soviet tanks and Soviet manpower was proving impossible for the street fighters. A solitary shot from a building and the tank would throw everything at it until nothing but a pile of rubble remained.
Everywhere fires raged, buildings collapsed and all the time the corpses mounted up.
Three p.m., the sky was black with smoke. Valentin and the crew had just destroyed a huge milk lorry parked outside the hospital on Bela Bartok Street. As the milk
flowed like a stream into the drains, they pulled away; Vladimir punching the air with delight that they’d managed to deprive the hospital patients their supply of milk. They swung off the main road and poked their noses into a narrower side street. Valentin wanted to turn back but Vladimir, pulling rank, ordered the tank forward. Valentin felt uneasy; this was too much like the first days when solitary tanks ventured down these tight alleyways and found themselves surrounded and pounced on by homicidal kids. But not much was left of this street; not one building remained unscathed.
It was then he saw her again – the blaze of red hair, the purposeful walk. He couldn’t see her face but he knew it was her. This time he knew. ‘Stop,’ he shouted at Petrov at the wheel.
‘Why, what’s up?’ said Petrov.
Vladimir barked at him. ‘We can’t stop now.’
‘I take full responsibility for my actions but give me a couple of minutes, there’s someone out there I know.’
‘What – here? You mad? You’ll get sniped.’
For a moment Valentin hesitated; Vladimir was right, it’d be a stupidly risky thing to do. ‘I’ll take that chance.’
‘You’re fucking mad.’
‘Please. One minute.’
With a sigh, Vladimir ordered Petrov to stop.
Valentin unbolted the hatch as the tank slowed down. The cold, fresh air hit him. He could still see her, no more than a hundred yards away. He shouted, ‘Eva,’ but knew she’d never hear him over the cacophony of noise coming from all around. Half expecting each moment to be his last, he jumped down from the tank and ran steadily towards her. Flashes of Budapest ’49 skimmed across his mind; a left-footed shot, a goal, a café, an old man with a walrus moustache, a bedroom, the longing eyes of a woman he knew he’d love forever. ‘Eva, Eva!’ Still, she didn’t hear.
He could almost touch her. ‘Eva,’ he shouted again. ‘Eva, it’s me, Valentin. Valentin Ivanov, Eva.’
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