Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  ‘No use,’ she whispered. It was like the blood of Christ on your hands and you couldn’t wash that off.

  Her body began to tremble. When he looked in her face there were no tears to kiss away. Her shoulders shook and her chest fought for air.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, Ilona. That’s another of their tricks. They use you, make you take the guilt while all the time their own evil is responsible.’

  ‘This is the finger that pointed him out. This is the finger that pulled the trigger. No one wept over his body. No one screamed. They stood silent. They’d been cheated of revenge because he’d been too quick for them. We could have said: there’s got to be a new beginning, things have gone all wrong, the people will show the way forward, the future will be different. Instead a man with a daughter my age chose to kill himself.’

  ‘Drink this.’

  The glass chattered against her teeth and he steadied her hand, standing very close. There was something in the air and he breathed it in, some perfume she wore or the warmth and secret smells of her body. The hair that lay in a point on her forehead had been messed to one side. He smoothed it with his finger, straightening it. She drank again. The champagne was warm and flat. She drained the glass.

  ‘You’ve seen too much blood,’ she said. ‘Asia and Africa. A human life has stopped being precious to you.’

  She moved aside and put down the glass. She was throwing up defences round herself because she had allowed him in too close. Her very own Iron Curtain and Steven didn’t approach.

  ‘Don’t blame me for what happened. Don’t blame yourself either. He was a senior AVO officer. One of the mob who came up the stairs recognized him from the interrogation cells at Andrassy Street. He said he sat back in the shadows and let the juniors turn the thumbscrews. They were sadists, the lot of them. They got drunk and laughed when they tortured Cardinal Mindszenty. They slapped each other on the back and fell over at the joke of it all. They had norms: so many confessions to be extracted, so many ‘enemies of the people’ brought to account. Great day, comrade, you have overfulfilled your norm. Have another drink, have a gold watch, have a good time. Pull out another fingernail, bring world revolution closer. A toast to our brave comrade who has never flinched from his duty. Give him a medal, send him for a fortnight’s rest and recuperation at Lake Balaton. He’s given the bastinado to ten agents of imperialism — poor chap must be exhausted. It’s no cause for sorrow when someone of that kind comes to a sudden end.’

  ‘You feel no pity?’

  ‘None at all. Only loathing. There wasn’t a family that hadn’t had the shadow of the AVO over them. That kind of evil corrupts a whole society, works its way into politics, education, industry, art. It sinks into the language. You have to invent words to describe the evil. Csengdfrasz. What other language needs a word to describe it? Can you imagine one Londoner saying to another: ‘I suffered from terrible bell-fever last night.’ The word only becomes necessary when it happens again and again: waiting at home, dreading the doorbell in the middle of the night.’

  Steven’s voice wouldn’t stop. She heard the familiar indictment, and thought of something else. He’d kissed her hand. More, his tongue had touched her palm, licking as if a wound had to be cleaned. His tongue had been alive. It had a message to pass on, one it couldn’t speak.

  ‘...had years in stinking cells,’ he was saying. ‘When they unlocked the gates at Recsk and Kitarsca it was ghosts who crept out. Some had been ten years behind bars and never knew why. Perhaps the AVO had forgotten why too. Perhaps they had a norm to fulfil: every prisoner is worth an extra kilo of butter, an imperialist spy is worth a whole ham, a Cardinal will be rewarded with a fine dinner at Gundel’s. While the rest of us went to bed hungry.’

  It was no wonder to Steven that she had wanted to fill her belly tonight. Food is an obsession to anyone who has starved. They’d had a childhood of hunger. In a city at war, it grew worse.

  She could still feel the imprint of his mouth on the palm of her hand. It was her right hand, the one he’d held while they walked the rubble-strewn streets and looked for food.

  16 - Budapest, then

  The gaps in a language also say a lot about a people. The French have no ‘home’ to go to. The Germans cannot conceive of ‘muddling through’. As for the Russians, they enjoy no ‘privacy’.

  So it was in the old Russian woman’s apartment: birth, copulation and death had no private places. They used her sitting room, kitchen and bathroom. Tibor Kassack had already rifled her bedroom. They ate her food, if there was any, and drank her tea if there wasn’t. The air was thick from Tibor Kassack’s little cigars. Tibor Bihari thought to add to his age by taking up smoking: cheap, loosely-packed cigarettes of sour tobacco. When he coughed too much, Lazlo finished the cigarette for him. They gossiped and argued. They sat on the floor playing three-handed taricot, or lay down and slept. The first exhilarating hours of revolution had gone; the business of fighting had passed into the older and tougher hands of workers from the factories on Csepel Island. They had become their own family, quarrels and toleration and all.

  Ilona, who needed privacy at this moment in her life more than any, could find none on the evening the AVO shot himself. The crowd stared down at his body and she would have no further part in it. She lay on the floor against the wall and withdrew into herself. Sounds reached her from a great distance. These were the people: violence had been done to them and they were exacting violent revenge. There was the roughness of anger in their voices. She kept the sounds at a distance so she didn’t have to hear the words. But Tibor Kassack’s voice defeated her. It rose in volume and dragged out certain words in emphasis, tricks of the debating societies, and these phrases floated above the uproar. The AVO had been ‘an ugly, cowardly villain’. The hubbub continued until Tibor Kassack’s voice swelled again in a devastating phrase: ‘...he sucked a lead lolly and did the job for us...’

  There were strange sights now, a puppet show of shadows thrown by the candle on the wall. The floorboards trembled. There was a crowd in the room, she knew, and she couldn’t withdraw any further. There were crowd noises and above them a piercing croak from Babushka: ‘Barbarians, you can’t...Oh you peasants.’ And a scream that brought Ilona convulsing round to face the room.

  ‘Oh God.’

  A dozen or more people had come in from the landing. They carried the AVO’s body between them, gripping his suit or an arm or a shoe or a fistful of blood-spattered hair. In the face of Natalya Zelenaya’s desperate protests they heaved the body out of the window and launched it to drop two storeys to the street.

  Tibor Kassack’s voice rose above the uproar: ‘He pushed enough Hungarians into eternity; let him follow.’

  Ilona retreated into stillness. But now there were images in her mind that wouldn’t fade: the AVO’s arm jerking to a stiff salute as it dragged over the windowsill, the crowd craning out to look down into the street, the smirk of satisfaction on an unknown face at having killed the AVO a second time.

  The crowd departed. Babushka retired to her bedroom. The rest of them settled down. Istvan lay beside her and touched her shoulder and called her name. She swore she’d never sleep again but her mind blanked out quickly.

  Twice in the night she woke. The first time was to certain noises from across the room and an eventual cry of encouragement as Tibor Kassack rode the Palomino. The second time was because of rifle fire, very close in the street, a man’s voice shouting, then peace.

  In the morning the AVO’s body had vanished. The army had it, the people took it for a third death hanging from a tree, dogs ate it, God knew.

  Ilona came awake with the thought: It’s a new day; I have experienced the worst; from here it must get better.

  ‘Hold it slung over your left shoulder,’ Istvan instructed, ‘so you can grab it quickly with your right hand and bring it up to the firing position.’

  ‘But I’m not going to shoot,’ Ilona told him.

  ‘Then why do you
insist on carrying the rifle?’

  ‘To show solidarity with the people,’ Ilona answered with great promptness. Her face was aglow with her smile; show fault in my reasoning she dared him. He took hold of her free hand and squeezed it.

  ‘So what if we meet a Soviet patrol?’

  ‘I shall bid them be still while I hand you the rifle.’

  He had only seen her like this during their first brief encounter at the radio station. Her face had the look of spring on this last day of October. Her smile was wide, her eyes sparkled and she skipped ahead, dragging him after her. It was a matter of wonder to Istvan for last night she had lain as dead, silent and unresponsive.

  ‘Allons-y,’ she said in a phrase borrowed from Babushka and tugged him round a pile of fallen masonry. They wore one glove each against the morning frost, woollen gloves knitted by Istvan’s mother, scratchy to the skin. But the hands they held were bare and Istvan marvelled at the strange pressures of her fingers and the intimate warmth of her palm and the gentle rubbing of her wrist.

  It was exactly a week since he’d seen her first. This seemed so remarkable when the thought came to him that Istvan said to Ilona: ‘It’s been one week.’

  She smiled at him and her face shone because she knew just what he meant. Seven days had seen astonishing changes. What had happened in this single week would in normal times have filled a year and an extraordinary year too; the foundations and myths of a whole society had been overturned; people had rediscovered the will to do things themselves; people had died and passed their courage on to others; strangers had grown into love. The schoolgirl who’d waited with her dancing shoes at the bus stop belonged to a different age.

  She said to him: ‘It’s an anniversary, isn’t it?’

  Exactly. They understood one another. It was a matter of enormous surprise to Istvan that another person could share your thoughts.

  He said: ‘Our first.’

  To every anniversary belongs its celebration. The style of this one was dictated by a city at war. There was a narrow shop in a narrow street — if it had a name, Istvan didn’t know it — that sold a little of everything when there was anything to sell. It was kept by an old man with a light fall of snow on his head and polished cheeks that bloomed unexpectedly red like a carnation.

  ‘We need to buy food,’ Istvan said.

  ‘Oooh,’ and the man sucked in his breath.

  ‘We had noodles yesterday,’ Ilona told him, ‘but Babushka finished the last of them.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked, or possibly he just sucked in his breath again.

  ‘The old woman,’ Ilona explained. ‘We’re living in her apartment.’

  ‘She’s an exile really,’ Istvan said. ‘Comes from a long way off.’

  ‘But she’s for the people.’

  ‘It’s best we stay with her because her hip troubles her. She can’t get out much.’

  ‘And she’d be frightened on her own.’

  ‘But she’s all right at the moment because Ferenc and Matyas are with her.’

  ‘They said they’d stay while the rest of us went out.’

  ‘The others are the two Tibors and the Palomino — we call her that though her name is really Anna, and sometimes Babushka calls her Minochka. Also there’s Sandor, though he’s got his own place.’

  They both stopped. The man was blinking. ‘I can help you,’ he said. He gave them two kilos of potatoes and an onion. ‘Wait a minute.’ He returned from a back room with three peppers so pale they were the colour of the ivory elephants in Babushka’s sitting room.

  ‘Can you spare them?’

  ‘You’re carrying the rifle,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘You need the strength. I heard Imre Nagy broadcast and he said the Russians are leaving, they’ve given their word. He’s a good man, an honest man, but if the Russians are going why did they attack Kilian Barracks again this morning?’

  From the baker’s in Jozsef Avenue came a loaf of bread, though they had to queue half the morning for it. There were nearly a hundred people. They talked of Nagy and the reforms: there were to be free political parties and free elections and neutrality and a new treaty with the Soviet Union. But three times discussion dwindled to silence while Soviet tanks ground their way over the cobbles. On the third occasion there were no fewer than nine tanks in a line, their turrets closed for business, heading towards Kilian Barracks. As they drew abreast someone broke the silence to sing and within seconds the chorus swelled the national anthem.

  ‘They can’t hear inside the tanks, can they?’ Ilona said.

  Istvan shook his head. The tank crews were deafened by the engine noise and the track roar, sweating with heat and nerves, cursing at the ‘pig-machinery’, as Lazlo had described it, that required ‘a bloody sledgehammer to knock it into gear’.

  In Blaha Luga Square there were peasant women with buckets of white chrysanthemums. They had come into the city before All Saints Day when the graves were decorated. Istvan found pink dahlias and handed a bunch to Ilona. She held them to her face as if they had a scent. She’d never been given flowers before. Istvan knew that flowers were as necessary to a girl as food was to celebrate an anniversary.

  There was no meat, no eggs, no cheese.

  ‘Shoot a pigeon.’

  ‘With a rifle there’d be nothing left to...’ But when he looked at her she was wrinkling her nose at him.

  Walking back down Rakoczi Street, only a block from Puskin Street, a man stopped his farm cart. The horse dropped its head in hope of grass. The farmer asked: ‘Do you want milk?’

  Oh yes, Ilona’s eyes wanted milk. He ladled from a churn into a metal cup. The milk was thick and as yellow as an egg-yolk.

  ‘It’s as the cow made it,’ the farmer said. ‘None of the cream has gone to make butter.’ They drank two cups each.

  ‘How much do we owe you, uncle?’

  He would take no money. ‘All I want is to shake your hands. You’re too young to remember but to me there is a smell of 1945 in the air. So much pain, so much destruction, but that same smell of victory and a new beginning.’

  Climbing the stairs in the damp old building she suddenly said: ‘Do you know, you’ve got a haughty bottom.’

  ‘What does that mean? Ilona?’

  But she had already squirmed past him, giggling.

  The dahlias stood stiffly in a vase that was rather too narrow for them (‘Wedgwood, a little keepsake from Sir Peter. An English gentleman, darling, quite wasted in Cairo’). They were the centrepiece of the dining table, flanked by a candle on each side. Ilona had polished the wood so that the two candles became four. There was silverware, heavy knives and forks that were unwrapped from the yellowed newspaper that had protected them since 28th June 1948. Damned odd coincidence, it struck Istvan, for the newspaper headlines were all about the Soviet blockade of Berlin. Glasses caught the gleam of candlelight. There was wine too. Tibor Kassack had fetched that. ‘An elegant woman needs the sparkle of wine,’ he said, which brought a dismissive wave from Natalya Zelenaya but a flash to her eyes nonetheless before she tasted a drop.

  To Tibor Kassack’s superior foraging they also owed the meat. There were links of paprika-flavoured sausage that he cooked himself. He fried the sausages with the onion and peppers until the fat ran as red as blood. The whole lot was arranged on a bed of sliced boiled potato. He presented this dish as if it were an airy creation of old Gundel himself.

  Tibor Kassack poured the wine and stood to propose the toast: ‘To our country, to our martyrs and heroes, to our victory, to peace and plenty, to freedom and glory.’ In the manner of a ceremony he raised the glass as high as his forehead after each phrase. Finally he drained and refilled the glass. Tibor Bihari, Matyas, Ferenc, the Palomino, Ilona and Istvan, all standing, drank more circumspectly. Natalya Zelenaya, seated, dipped her lips to the wine and made a discreet move. It was, Tibor Kassack had said, a wine for quaffing, a wine for rash deeds, a wine for vows and pledges; none of your nosing and rolling it round the tong
ue or precious sipping.

  ‘Where is Sandor?’ Tibor Kassack wanted to know. ‘Why is he never with us?’

  Because of jealousy, because he was ill at ease. But Ferenc said: ‘They have formed a workers’ militia at his factory.’

  ‘Then I drink to Sandor.’ Tibor Kassack remained seated for the absent Sandor, only raising his glass. ‘May he shoot straight. And Lazlo?’

  It’s quite absurd, Ilona thought, he’s taken us over. We could already be staying at his feudal estate and be in his debt for a week’s gracious hospitality.

  ‘Lazlo has gone to listen to Nagy broadcast. He’s upstairs. He says the reception is clearer in the attic.’

  ‘So he finds favour with that pair. A toast to our rude soldier boy. Long may he stand to attention. You’re not drinking.’

  They were eating, all bar Tibor Kassack. He crossed the knife and fork over his clean plate and pushed back in his chair. Except for lifting his glass, he sat with arms folded across his chest in the manner of someone resisting temptation. He was rewarded with a croak from Babushka, concerned that one of her daredevils might be ailing.

  ‘No food, dear Countess,’ he announced. ‘Minn knows why.’

  ‘It was extraordinary,’ the Palomino said, and indeed so extraordinary that she put down her fork to leave both hands free for emphasis. ‘This morning we met a group of fighters...’

  ‘Patriots, my girl.’

  ‘A group of patriots. They had built a fire at the side of the Petöfi statue and had a pot simmering on it.’

  ‘Feed half an army from the size of it.’

  ‘An enormous gulyas, meat and potatoes and vegetables. They were giving a plateful to anyone who asked for it. I had a helping and Tibor refused. He got down on his knees — can you picture it — on his knees right there behind Pete& where there’s a little bed of shrubs. Then he scooped up a handful of earth and said, “A man who truly loves his country can live on its earth.” And he ate it, I swear he did, ate the handful of soil, while everyone gaped and felt foolish with their plates of gulyas.’