Shooting Star
David Brierley
© David Brierley 1983
David Brierley has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1983 by William Collins Sons & Co.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
1 - London, now
2 - London, now
3 - London, now
4 - London, now
5 - London, now
6 - Budapest, then
7 - London, now
8 - Budapest, then
9 - London, now
10 - Budapest, then
11 - London, now
12 - Budapest, then
13 - London, now
14 Budapest, then
15 - London, now
16 - Budapest, then
17 - London, now
18 - Budapest, then
19 - London, now
20 - London, now
21 - London, now
22 - Budapest, now
1 - London, now
This, then, was the prelude to war.
The drumbeats were the muffled thunder of distant guns. Steven understood that.
At his side crouched the man who had stolen forward in the dark. He shifted in his lumpy coat, restless and edgy. Steven stared and stared and made out nothing of his face. All around was the blackness of the hour before dawn when men are too tired for fear and feel only despair. There was tension everywhere. Steven was aware of dampness under his shirt and in the palms of his hands and it was because of the heat, he told himself, because of the heat.
Someone in front turned sharply and at the same instant Steven saw it too: a figure coming forward on tiptoe, head ducked low, a moment’s silhouette in front of some dim light. Then another figure and a third. Had there been a signal, had Steven missed it? The man at his side grunted as he slipped off his coat. He was gripping a large pistol in his hand, a Luger possibly, that had been concealed under its folds. Now he was creeping forward, the wavy pattern of his combat jacket fading into the night.
There were half a dozen figures together now and that is how the searchlight caught them, frozen in a group with stark twisted faces and pistols in their hands. The searchlight had stabbed out from behind and raced across in a high arc and down on to this huddle of soldiers. It seemed to know just where to find them.
Steven forgot to breathe. One soldier raised his gun to shoot out the searchlight. Dazzled and confused, as if he knew the position was hopeless, his arm dropped again. Steven’s attention was riveted on the little group when new figures erupted, racing down the aisle to confront the soldiers: the new ones were girls. Other lights came on and showed them dressed in hugging blue jeans and tight yellow tee-shirts.
There was no warning. The music crashed out with a thudding beat and overwhelming sound. At the back of the stage something like a huge electronic billboard pulsed in time to the music, flashing words and images and starbursts. The girls seduced — there was no other word for it — seduced the soldiers from militarism. One moment the soldiers were angry and defiant and dangerous; the next the girls had flung aside the guns, touched the men’s faces, stroked their chests, taken their hands and started to dance, making good use of their bodies under the skin-tight clothes.
The theatre was filled with rock music. ‘Heavy metal’ a younger critic described it later. There was no discernible melody. It was urgent, explosive with energy, blotting out every thought. Except for this one discovery that roared inside Steven’s head: of the six girls who danced on stage, one had a lithe body and flawless face that looked no older than the others; but she was his age. He knew her from long ago.
Stunned by this, Steven missed the entrance of the big man on stage. One moment the dancers had been celebrating peace and love and youth and other ideals; the next they stood still in the big man’s presence. The music simply fell away and the silence was absolute, like the aftermath of an avalanche. The dancers had stopped in a line. The big man faced them with the disdain of a Junker officer inspecting a rabble of recruits. His chest puffed out his uniform, the medals winking in the stage lighting. A cane was lodged in his armpit. No one uttered a word. The big man felt no need to announce his identity. American? Russian? Nazi? It didn’t matter. He was all the soldiers, all the tyrants, all the bullies who have ever strutted the world’s stage.
He took a pace forward and with the cane he attacked the dancers. He strode down the line of them, slashing at boys and girls, sending them reeling, staggering under the blows. Until he came to the last in line.
‘Ilona,’ Steven whispered under his breath. ‘Ilona Kisfaludy.’
Ilona stood without cringing and that made the military bully pause. There was no fear in her face. Her eyes blazed defiance. He delivered a stinging blow to one cheek and she never flinched. The pain was nothing, his hot glare was nothing. Infuriated he reached out and ripped her costume so that she was naked to the waist. He bunched the torn tee-shirt in his fist and hurled it aside. And still she stood upright, with her dark hair shorn like one of the condemned at Auschwitz. Her face and neck were thin but her breasts were full, with shadows from the cross-lighting accentuating the valley between.
The quality of light was changing while the braggart glared at Ilona. It became tinged with orange and deepened to red, suggesting a growing blood-lust. The audience sat spellbound by the colour and the silence and the nakedness. Deliberately the big man stretched out and prodded with the tip of his cane at a nipple. Then the thread of self-control snapped and he started to slash at her. A wild beast, hungry for flesh, will tear at a body and he was like that. He was a sadist, a sexual chauvinist, a warmonger, a rapist, a feudal landlord, a profiteer. Take your pick, or the whole bloody lot. He was an all-purpose hate figure.
This was the signal for the counter-attack. The group came to Ilona’s rescue like a task force of revolutionary guards, charging the military bully, dashing to right and left of him, fists high, shouts loud, faces determined. It was all done in unison. The old braggart tried to fight, but his cane was snatched away. He tried to hide, tried to run. He faced implacable adversaries whichever way he turned. With lights pulsing and music thundering, he grovelled in defeat.
The audience loved it. To see the overthrow of Evil on the London stage was a novelty and they roared approval. Steven was deaf to the cheers. He sat stiff and upright, his eyes staring into the past. He saw a boy and a girl, he conjured up the intensity of her face, her flashing glance, the light of her smile. The waves of memories and emotions washed over him. He was still in a feverish sweat, feeling hot and cold in turns. Ilona! He had come alone as if performing some obscure ritual, paying homage to the country of his birth. Instead he had discovered Ilona. It gave her name in the programme. He wouldn’t have recognized her otherwise.
‘Ilona Kisfaludy,’ the meagre biography ran, ‘was born in Eger in north-east Hungary in 1941. After training in Budapest, she played in repertory in Debrecen for a number of years. She re-turned to Budapest to become a founding member of MAMITH, The Magyar Mime Theatre. She is also well known to children all over Hungary for her work on television.’
He knew the sentences by heart. They were dry bones with no nourishment on them. She was well known for children’s television — did she have children of her own? What on earth — he meant who — had persuaded her to go to Debrecen? Who did she found the Magyar Mime Theatre with?
There was more to the show. Steven barely took it in. It was, in any case, a bizarre mixture. It would have been more appropriate to some political café in Berlin, Isherwood days. There was loud music and angular dancing and much play
with the huge electronic billboard. There were mimes with a high political and social content. Bureaucrats, generals, international capitalists and overweening politicians were disapproved of. So were spies, prurient censors, sexual bigots and exploiters of all kinds. There were no surprises. For reasons of language there were few speeches, though Ilona was given a song to sing in English. It was a number of great power and driving energy. She sang with the attack of a twenty-year old:
‘We all wear a uniform under our clothes:
It’s called skin.
And under the skin we’re all the same:
Blood, muscle and bone.’
‘They were delirious, ecstatic!’
‘It was very encouraging.’
‘Very encouraging? Dis-donc! They went absolutely wild! They were cheering, waving their programmes over their heads so we could see.’
Ilona’s face was flushed, exultant, forgetting now the agony of the early morning grind in cold theatres and the screaming boredom of dance rehearsals.
‘There were five curtain calls,’ Eva said. ‘Maybe six.’
‘Liar! Spoilsport! It was more like ten.’
‘Ilona, you exaggerate.’
‘I’m full of enthusiasm, that’s all. Ten curtain calls at least.’
‘Anyway, Ilona, you know you can’t count.’
‘I! Not count!’ Ilona was incensed. ‘It was a dozen curtain calls, Eva, I swear it.’
‘Ilona, you know you can only count as high as ten by using all your fingers.’
‘So you simply couldn’t have counted higher than five because one of your hands was holding Gyorgy’s.’ Judit said this and gave a sweet smile.
‘You have a bourgeois meanness with numbers, both of you. I naturally take an artiste’s view of numbers. I say there were more curtain calls than I have fingers. There! I shall listen to no more of this. I have had enough, enough, enough. Do you hear me? Instead I shall eat. Oh, I’m famished.’
She ate several forkfuls of dealer kebab. The three of them sat at the window table of the Turkish restaurant in Rupert Street. The paprika and raw onion and chopped tomato were reminders of restaurants back in Budapest: Fekete Hollo perhaps, with bot-des of Pinot Noir and overflowing platters of cevapcici.
Then, with her mouth full, Ilona returned to the attack.
‘Anyway, dear Judit, I take Gyorgy’s hand to prevent it exploring on its own. That hand is a mole, I tell you, burrowing and nosing its way down.’
‘He’s unclothed you so often,’ Judit said, ‘perhaps he feels he has a right.’
‘I don’t know why he bothers. Explain it to me. Everyone in the Group sees me naked on stage every night, so why does it have to be Gyorgy whose hand develops an itch? He’s seen all there is to see a hundred times, so why bother?’
‘Not all, he hasn’t seen it all,’ Judit pointed out. And then, with an actress’s timing, added: ‘At least, not on stage.’
A mournful Turkish waiter looked on, not understanding a single word of the Hungarian talk, just worrying that the woman with the strange haircut like a village boy’s was suddenly kicking at one of her companions and pulling at her lovely long hair. They were all shrieking at once, in the way of women, and he was afraid of broken china and a clawing fight, over some tom-cat of a man no doubt, and the police coming again. The last time the police had demanded to see his papers, though he’d been the one who’d telephoned them. That had taken some smoothing over; he’d never known such hungry and thirsty police. But she had a good figure, the one with the sandpaper haircut. You could see she was naked under the sweater from the way she moved. Then the storm passed, and they were calling for more wine, and they were all smiles and bright eyes and kisses. And yes, he enjoyed watching women kiss each other.
‘To MAMITH!’ Ilona raised her glass and clinked it first against Eva’s and then against Judit’s.
‘MAMITH!’ they chorused.
‘To the success of our first night!’
They echoed that one too.
‘To the wonderful British audiences!’ Ilona made their glasses pause every time before they could reach their lips.
‘To Gyorgy’s hand,’ Judit slipped in slyly.
They drank to that amid roars and giggles. Long after midnight they left the restaurant to return to their hotel where the first night party would be going strong. The reviews they craved would be in the final editions coming out soon. They would be celebrating success, they knew it. There would be more wine, more toasts.
‘And Judit,’ Ilona insisted, ‘as you are my friend and sister in the struggle and comrade in MAMITH, I have the right to ask you this: make sure that both Gyorgy’s hands are occupied with wine glasses.’
Rupert Street, swept clean of its daytime market, offered only its night-time trade: the neon of porno cinemas and strip clubs. Their laughter, joyous and free, dimmed the tawdry lights of Soho.
Flowers were everywhere. Just the roses had exhausted the hotel’s scant supply of vases and the dahlias had been thrust into milk bottles. Also there were those strange bouquets of gladioli and carnations and eucalyptus branches wrapped in cellophane that theatre managements offer the leading lady on opening night. Because of the collective nature of MAMITH, the management had felt obliged to offer six bouquets. They lay on a table in the corner, forgotten, like invalids taking the air on a sanatorium lawn.
The wine provided a tour through Hungary’s vineyards. There was Egri Leanyka and Egri Bikaver which the British (had any been present) would have known as Bull’s Blood. Both these wines were grown near Eger, where Ilona had been born, yet for some obscure reason she searched for something else to drink. There were wines from Somlo and Balaton and Sebro. They had been brought by two men from the embassy. One of the men was something cultural; the other didn’t say. Gyorgy stood in the centre of the room, surrounded by people, but in a party all of his own.
‘What are you looking for?’ Gyorgy caught her arm.
‘A drink.’
‘Here, I have some Somloi Furmint. It is excellent. As fine and spicy as you.’
At another time, with another man, Ilona would have smiled or patted his cheek or flirted. But Gyorgy was the big man — very big for a Hungarian — who ripped off her tee-shirt on stage. Tonight he would confuse business with pleasure; it was written on his face. Telling Judit to keep his hands occupied with glasses was unnecessary; he carried bottles.
‘Gyorgy...’
‘Where have you been?’ he interrupted.
‘Gyorgy, be an absolute angel and get me a slice of that gâteau.’
He glowered a moment before he stamped off as if his lady had ordered him to fetch the holy grail. All round was the swirl of the party. There were some forty of them in the lounge of the Bayswater Terrace Hotel: MAMITH, their hangers-on, the embassy people. There was talk and high laughter and quick movements, for the adrenalin still pumped out. Later, if the reviews were good, there would be music and perhaps dancing. That was the time Ilona dreaded, when Gyorgy would insist on holding her.
Then the desk clerk stood at the door calling out her name, or something near to it: ‘Miss Kisfaludy, Miss Kisfaludy.’
‘Yes.’
‘A message for you.’
The envelope was addressed to Kisfaludy Kisasszony, in formal style, and she was puzzled. The desk clerk volunteered it was brought by a gentleman (all men were gentlemen, according to his training, except tradesmen). He had brought it personal, like, about the same time as the others had got back in the coach from the theatre. Indeed he walked through the hotel entrance right after them as though they’d done the journey together. He was most particular the message was given to Miss Kisfaludy — and she definitely was staying here? he had probed — well then, given to her the moment she got in.
Ilona tore open the envelope as someone stumbled through the door brandishing the London editions of the morning papers. There was jostling and shouting as the newspapers were snatched. There followed the problem of transl
ation, for the MAMITH players were no better than the British as linguists. The cultural embassy man had the Telegraph. But Eva had the Guardian in her hand and cried out for Ilona to put them out of their misery.
‘Ilona, Ilona, are we famous? Or do the hateful critics hate us? Do they even understand our fierce Hungarian spirit? But Ilona, what is the matter? Is the letter bad news? Ilona!’
Like any actress Ilona imagined she was in control of her expressions. It didn’t matter what inner turmoil she felt, her face would never betray her. Afterwards she had no idea what emotion her mouth and eyes had shown. But it wasn’t horror or fear or unhappiness. Surely not. It was just that the room and all the people and their voices became very remote as she read the brief note.
‘Dear Ilona,
I saw your performance this evening and found it stunning. When I knew you all those years ago in Budapest — you haven’t forgotten? — you dreamed of becoming a famous dancer or actress. Congratulations on your magnificent success! Could we meet again while you are in London? I see you have no show on Sunday. Are you free then?
Your old friend, Istvan Ketesc.’
‘Ilona, quick, what does the review say?’
‘Ilona, here is your cake. And you look as if you badly need more wine.’
‘Ilona, are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes.’ It was just that she had the sensation, could physically experience it she would swear, of falling helplessly through time and space to a long-ago part of her past. She shook her head as if that would clear her mind of some dream. ‘I’m all right. What do the reviews say? Do the critics adore us, take us to their hearts?’
Eva mumbled: ‘I don’t understand a word. English is a crazy language.’
‘Let me see this instant. Judit, will you please dance with Gyorgy or something, for heaven’s sake. I simply cannot concentrate when he keeps doing that. Oh glory, someone bring me a glass. We’re famous, famous, famous!’ She made a face at the newspaper. think.’
Shooting Star Page 1
