Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  The boos and hisses drowned the rest of his opening sentence. ‘Don’t call us comrades,’ a no-nonsense voice lifted above the mass of people, ‘call us Hungarians.’

  The Palomino had her hand on Istvan’s shoulder now. From time to time she leaned her cheek against the rough cloth of his coat.

  Istvan could not understand by what subtlety she had progressed to this point. He found her closeness disturbing, and the feeling she roused in him was hopelessly entangled with the emotions he sensed all round. He had a simple urge to sweep everything out of existence: the Parliament building, the government, the rats in their uniforms. Maybe the Palomino too. He couldn’t make sense of the tumult inside him.

  There was no warning. The lamps in Kossuth Square were switched out. Shouts greeted this, one or two cries of alarm. The AVO always preferred the conspiracy of darkness to snatch people for their own ends.

  A voice in the distance was heard shouting something. It was repeated and repeated, a wave surging through the crowd. It reached Istvan and the Palomino and they joined a chorus: ‘We’ve lived in darkness long enough. We’ve lived in darkness...’

  Look again and there were torches all over the square. People had rolled up newspapers, set light to them and held them aloft, a thousand Statues of Liberty. The torches had a fitful life. Istvan was aware of sparks of light everywhere and laughter. It was a game. They’d won a little victory.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ the Palomino confided. ‘Something from a fairy tale.’

  ‘We must do something,’ Istvan decided.

  ‘What?’ She had her head to one side and a wild eye on him. ‘We must get away.’ She squeezed his shoulder.

  He turned and she followed. The crowd had thinned in this quarter and they learnt the reason.

  ‘The radio station is under siege.’

  The arteries of the city were clotting. People spilled from the pavements into the roads. Groups stood arguing and shouting with delight. There was pleasure to be found in the simple defiance of authority. People had been cowed for a decade by the whips and the boots, and tonight they were standing up straight.

  Down Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Avenue the buses and trams still ran, though half-full. At every stop they emptied further. Between the talking gesticulating knots of people Istvan and the Palomino made erratic progress. The Palomino held back by each fevered discussion, Istvan pressed on; she snapped back to him like something on elastic.

  They were passing the gaunt and long deserted synagogue at the end of Dohany Street. That was where Istvan first heard it.

  The sound was thinned by distance and mixed up with shouts and traffic and other noises. They hurried on, the Palomino having to trot to keep up as they crossed the broad avenue and plunged down the canyon of Puskin Street. It had become full-throated, a roar between the echoing walls of the narrow street. Others were running with them now until they cleared the alley, reached the square and were brought up sharp by the wall of people surrounding the radio station.

  Here were gaslamps on ornate standards throwing pools of light on faces. No laughter or simple delight showed. The temper had turned. The adrenalin that Istvan had felt had also pumped into the blood of these people, demanding action. Their faces showed determination, their eyes were edged with anger. Chanting swept through the square, as summer wind would raise the dust on the plains; it was furious for a few moments and died.

  ‘Broadcast the manifesto,’ passed through the crowd.

  ‘Sixteen demands,’ came back the other way.

  ‘Put Rakosi on trial,’ was the answering cry.

  Istvan knew this place — Mihaly Pollack Square — from childhood days, only two or three winters ago. He and another boy had scraped snow off the cobbles and looped snowballs over a parked car and for their pains they’d been chased by a man with a red face and a torn voice who abused them as hooligans. ‘Utonallo,’ had been his roar. Istvan had been betrayed by the icy cobbles, tumbling in an undignified slither, and gathering several clouts round his ears.

  He was faced now by the AVO. They had set themselves up on the roof of the radio building. There were machine guns on the corners. Down a sidestreet there were trucks. The radio building itself was defiant with lighted windows. It was constructed of grey stone in wedding cake style, ornamented by balconies and balustrades and extravagant drainpipes. Glimpsed through leafy branches on a summer afternoon it had a romantic appeal. Tonight headstrong demonstrators were battering at the wooden gate that led to the main entrance doors.

  The Palomino had temporarily deserted him. She’d pushed ahead into the crowd and he saw her jumping about with wild energy. At some point she’d corralled her long blonde hair with red, green and white ribbons and now it bobbed up and down in a patriotic pony-tail.

  A hurricane of chanting came again: ‘Broadcast our demands.’

  Dear God, Istvan uttered a brief unbeliever’s prayer, how do you demand anything with those metal teeth waiting to tear you apart?

  Tibor Bihari was an eager volunteer. He reassured Ilona: ‘I’m small and light. My weight won’t bring it down. Don’t worry.’

  Ilona did worry, principally that the spindly Tibor had jumped at the chance of being a hero in her eyes. It seemed a girl didn’t have to do anything, a girl just had to be to cause an effect.

  If such a thought ever came to the Palomino, it would have thrilled her.

  On the first floor was the salon. This was old Budapest, spacious, exceptionally handsome. It had been turned into an office, not just any functionary’s office but the holy of holies, the office of the director of Radio Budapest, a certain Valeria Benke.

  With that surety of touch shown by bureaucracies everywhere, the beauty of the room had been destroyed. To be sure Benke had reserved to herself an Empire period desk. As for the rest: two ugly conference tables had been jammed together to accommodate a small army of stiff chairs. There were metal filing cabinets and a wooden closet with disgraceful rose-patterned wallpaper on its sides. The long drapes of royal blue with the tasselled edging had been replaced by net curtains. On the floor, greenish lino. On the wall, an inspiring portrait of Stalin.

  For Benke was a Stalinist. Krushchev had already lifted a corner of the carpet and shown the dirt swept under. Gomulka, promising reform, had come to power in Poland. Tito had wandered off on his own eccentric path. But Stalin continued to rule in this office.

  Benke had hair that was severely pulled back into a bun, showing the discipline of the comb even at this evening hour. Nothing was untidy about her, except possibly the lagging under her eyes. She had a strictness more Prussian than Hungarian. Emotion was unconstitutional. Men (and women were men in her view) should march in step to the tune of the Internationale; stragglers would be shot.

  The windows were closed but the chorus outside was in full cry. Benke was filled with such violent contempt it amounted to hatred: the radio did not belong to the people, the radio belonged to the government, or more to the point, to her. What she had, she intended to hold. The crowd outside was matched by the tumult in her office as section heads and security men crowded in, tempers flared, and Benke issued commands.

  ‘Send for more AVO reinforcements.’

  ‘Turn the firehoses on them in Sandor Brody Street.’

  ‘Order the transmission staff to broadcast nothing subversive, whatever happens.’

  ‘I want an open line to the Defence Ministry. I want the army on standby. I don’t give a damn if they use tanks.’

  So on. She used the telephone, speaking to the Central Committee in session at the Akademia Street headquarters. She got to her feet to confront some milksop department head, threatening him with furnace eyes. She paced the room, unable to keep still, the adrenalin high in her too.

  There was a suggestion — no one actually owned to it — that Benke should see a deputation from the crowd.

  ‘What sniveller suggested opening the doors? You’d have five thousand swarming through the studios.’


  Perhaps a small group could be allowed to shin up a drainpipe and on to her balcony and in through the windows, a voice on the far side of the bearpit suggested.

  She glowered and then, like some medieval despot exercising reluctant clemency, barked out: ‘Granted.’ In this manner they came, nearly two dozen of them, dishevelled and happy and daring, and at the end overawed by the heat and the noise and the tension and by the formidable relentless machine who stood in a towering rage by the pretty desk.

  Afterwards, days afterwards, Tibor Bihari gave his first shocked impression: ‘She had a face like a gaol door.’ He’d no more seen a gaol door than Ilona or Istvan had set eyes on the sea. This was a time when everyone’s imagination ran riot. He was the smallest and the last to clamber up the drainpipe and over the balcony. He stumbled through the window and she fixed on his face as he straightened.

  ‘What’s your name, boy?’

  The chaos in the room resolved itself and a forest of eyes turned on him.

  ‘Tibor.’

  ‘Tibor what?’

  ‘Tibor Bihari,’ his heart thumping out each syllable.

  ‘Boy, Tibor Bihari boy, how old are you?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Fifteen?’ She spat bullets for words.

  ‘Fifteen and a quarter.’

  ‘Is that the case? Then your father should beat you till you whimper and send you to bed.’

  She swivelled her attention away from him to one of the students. But Tibor’s heart wouldn’t rest, his heart was frantic from the climb, his ears still roared from the crowd outside, the blood rushed to his head and reddened his face. Perhaps he embellished the scene; for the story was told and told again in the time to come as they all relived their moments on the stage.

  Benke demanded of the next in line: ‘And your name? I want all your names. Who are you?’

  ‘Magyar,’ the student spoke out.

  ‘Your name is Magyar?’

  ‘No, I am a Magyar,’ he said, meaning simply I am Hungarian.

  ‘How dare you call yourself a Magyar. The lot of you are hooligans.’ She used that same old-fashioned utonallo that Istvan had once been called and it struck a chord when Tibor came to repeat the night’s drama.

  ‘You are mistaken. I am a third year medical student, training to be a doctor. And look...’ He drew a card from inside his jacket. ‘I’m a Party member.’

  He held the card towards her. There was high colour in Valeria Benke’s face, in Tibor’s telling of it, though she avoided rouge and all cosmetics.

  ‘Then you of all people should know better than to outrage the office of the Director of the radio.’

  ‘The radio belongs to the people.’

  He repeated what the chant outside said.

  ‘That rabble? How can the radio belong to the people? Where are your experts? Show me your technicians.’

  ‘Give us the equipment. Give us the technicians. In the name of the people is that too much to ask?’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘To broadcast our sixteen demands.’

  There was a solidity about Benke that constantly threatened heavy battalions. She held herself straight and glared at the student. To Tibor’s mind she was trying to stare him out, as children do. She gave a very curt nod.

  ‘Granted. Give me your so-called manifesto and it will be broadcast. Not by a mob of snotty schoolboys. A regular announcer will do it. I shall go and arrange it. You will hear it and then the lot of you will get out and disperse.’

  It was Valeria Benke who got out, in Tibor’s words, like a carthorse, not even slamming the door after her.

  There was wild talk of shooting by the river, a police car over-turned and set on fire in Lenin Avenue. They should have put the hoses on that, not on the people in Sandor Brody Street at the side of the radio building. Benke had wanted to flush them out; now they dripped fury. The crowd took these sopping ones into its embrace, an arm round a shoulder, a scarf to rub down a face, a coat against the bitter night. Ilona observed the crowd’s easy comradeship (if she could be allowed the word). She felt it herself: the closeness of people, the touching, the talk. In the generous idealism of the fifteen-year-old, ‘the people’ had been the centre round which the universe revolved. But they had still been ‘the people’, an abstract idea; tonight she had become part of the people, the reality.

  And what of Tibor Bihari, she wondered. There was restlessness in the crowd about the score of youngsters who’d clambered up the drainpipe, grasped the friendly cherub and swung onto the balcony. They’d been swallowed inside the enemy fortress. There were shouts directed up at those blank but bright windows.

  Now there was activity to hold their interest. Electricians stepped through the french windows and unreeled flex on the balcony; loudspeakers were balanced next to the cherubs (cherubim, Ilona corrected herself). A bizarre figure shuffled forward and Ilona was amazed by the power of radio to conceal reality. Here was this man, this apparition like a Puli, the shepherd’s dog from the steppes, with twisted strings of long hair all over the place, his face nearly hidden behind a curtain of sandy-grey hair. But his voice was beautiful, a baritone with power and passion. Listening to him on the radio at home you would picture Prince Charming.

  First he held the microphone up before him using both hands, a sacrament to the crowd. Then a sheet of paper was handed over by a figure behind and he angled it to catch the light streaming from the windows.

  ‘The directorate of Radio Budapest has agreed, as an exceptional gesture, to the transmission of the following manifesto of certain elements among the students of our universities. As clear evidence of this, the manifesto will now be broadcast in full view...’

  A surge of cheering drowned his last words. There was the familiar call sign of Radio Budapest, just audible to Ilona, and the announcer was shaking the locks out of his eyes and reading the text as the cheers subsided.

  ‘...dated October 23rd, 1956, as follows: One. We demand the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet troops, in conformity with the provisions of the Peace Treaty. Two. We demand the election by secret ballot...’

  Each demand was greeted by a roar of approval. A truce with the people, Ilona decided.

  ‘We’ve triumphed,’ Istvan gloated to the Palomino, and was rewarded with a special squeeze of his arm.

  The man up there was a buffoon, in Istvan’s judgement, working his way through the sixteen points as if he were Moses down from the Mount.

  ‘Seven. We demand the complete reorganization of the Hungarian economy under the direction of experts. The entire economic system...’

  It was growing harder to hear the announcer. There was a rising swell of angry muttering. Looking over his shoulder, Istvan was startled to see people hanging from the windows of the block of flats, beating the air with their fists, bawling at the tops of their voices. The truth bounced through the square and it was the Palomino who caught it first. She swung on Istvan, her hair like a fairground roundabout, spitting it out as if Istvan was to blame:

  ‘It’s a trick. They’re not broadcasting him. There’s just music on the radio.’

  ‘We demand precise...precise and exact information on...’

  Abuse was hurled at the announcer followed by the traditional ammunition of Europe’s barricades: cobbles from the street. This sheepdog of a man bounded inside and the french windows were slammed behind him. They shattered at once. Shadowy figures could be seen through the net curtains, and they looked to be holding rifles. Istvan saw them and saw the crowd shoulder-charging the wooden gates and two or three people swinging from drainpipes and all the while the Palomino was tugging at him in high excitement. She was gripping his hand now.

  ‘Come on, let’s use the staff entrance.’

  She said it with such an air of knowingness, as one who’d been smuggled in under the protective eye of some Adonis of the air waves. She was pulling Istvan against the flow of the crowd into Sandor Brody Street where the gutters were still awash
from the firehoses. Here there was a gap, a sort of no-man’s-land, until they reached the fringe of another mob, frustrated and resentful. The Palomino, with her shining face and luscious hair, carved a way through to the front row. She found herself face-to-face with the army. It was her movement as she pressed herself in close that made a rifle barrel swing until it pointed at her chest. Thirty or more soldiers blocked this narrow street, more trucks of them were tucked away within hailing distance.

  In the folklore of those days, Palomino’s action now was worth a tiny footnote. She had no hesitation. Her face was on fire with elation as she accepted the challenge. She’d read a poem once that said a soldier was a man with three dark eyes. She never once glanced at the one that had swung round to focus on her chest. She unfastened the buttons of her coat and then of her blouse, not feeling the cut of the freezing air on her skin. She swept the clothes back and stood with her hands on her hips. Her breasts rose and fell under a plain cotton slip.

  She spoke in ringing tones: ‘Are you going to shoot me? Do you really believe we are enemies? Aren’t you ashamed to point your rifle at a Hungarian woman?’

  She held his eyes until, disconcerted, he faltered and lowered his rifle.

  If there was a cheer, the Palomino never heard it. She was soaring in her moment of triumph.

  On an impulse someone begged the soldiers to hand over their weapons. They had to free their friends who were held prisoner inside the building. The indecision and muttering were finished by the lieutenant who ordered gruffly: ‘Hand over your rifles, lads.’

  Ilona stared at her hands and couldn’t understand it. All day she’d toted round the satchel of schoolbooks and dancing shoes and now she was empty-handed. In the flush of anger at the trickery of that string-headed Puli on the balcony, she must have hurled the thing. It was an act of defiance, spontaneous and unregistered. She had simply done what all the people round her were doing. The truce had ended in a shower of cobblestones.

  A loud volley of rifle fire exploded in the night and the crowd rocked on its feet. High on the roof, black against a black sky, stood a line of AVO. Their rifles were to their shoulders, pointing at the stars. The duckshooters at Balaton had that stance. For an instant there was no other sound in the square; but part of Ilona’s mind heard shouts from a distant quarter of the city while the rest of her mind absorbed the terrible truth that those figures on the roof were preparing to fire again. She heard the click of the bolts coming back and sliding shut on new rounds. The first volley had been a warning.