Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  Natalya Zelenaya reached up and pulled him close for an embrace that sucked him down, his face buried in the fur wrapped round her shoulders. There was an ancient smell in his nose, from the fur or her. For a few seconds the soft brush of the fox tickled like Ilona’s hair. She released him from his panic.

  ‘Go, darling, go to her. Be gentle.’

  When he went from the embrace, there was wetness on his cheek.

  They walked as sentries walk, in step. They patrolled the city streets, brought out by the rumours that spread like poison gas. We told you so, the cynics said, the Russians weren’t to be trusted, they weren’t really withdrawing. Soviet tanks were crossing the border at Zahony, thousands of them streaming into Hungary according to one report. Soviet armoured units surrounded every airfield. Suslov and Mikoyan had flown in from Moscow to pick the new puppets to replace Imre Nagy. Meanwhile the families of the Soviet mission filed on to boats and steamed down the Danube. See, they truly are going at last, the optimists said. But their voices faltered. Nagy had broadcast again, withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and pledging Hungary’s neutrality. It began to snow.

  Winter came early that year. The snow wasn’t in flakes but in tiny frozen balls like icy sawdust. Then the heavy bank of clouds rolled away and the stars were sharp and only a million light-years out of reach. Istvan and Ilona walked arm in arm, their heels ringing on pavements rimed with frost.

  There was something else that rang in his head. Natalya Zelenaya had called him back before they left to say: ‘I can only give you a Babushka’s advice. You always seem to be fighting the whole world. You should fight the steel, but see the man behind...or the woman. Now go with her.’

  ‘But what are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘No, there are lessons you must learn for yourself. Go.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘Go, darling.’

  Istvan said: ‘If the Russians come back, will we fight them?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ilona said. She seemed surprised. ‘Did you doubt that?’

  Then Istvan didn’t understand Babushka. It had seemed a kind of warning.

  ‘We have to be clean of them,’ Ilona said. We have to start again. How could you doubt I’d think that?’

  An old woman’s doubts, not his.

  ‘You and me and the two Tibors and Lazlo and all the rest,’ she said. ‘All of us, all the people. We’ll be united, won’t we?’ He put his arm round her waist. That was his answer.

  ‘We are the people.’ She wouldn’t finish. ‘What else is there?’

  People were on the streets, walking quickly. It was cold. They saw women with food, a bag of potatoes, sausages in links, strings of red hot peppers. Some loaves-and-fishes miracle had produced the food and people hurried home with it. Men with rifles strapped over their shoulders stood in threes and fours. No tanks, nothing to shoot at. A man with a bottle wanted to share his song but Ilona wouldn’t stop.

  ‘We have to see the city. It’s ours tonight.’

  She led him. She was as sure of her path as a dog. They padded up the length of Rakoczi Street where buildings had their walls smashed into rubble and tanks lay dead and burnt out. At Keleti Station armed men smoked and stamped their feet against the cold. Then they veered north to the broad square beside the City Park where she’d first knelt beside Sandor. That was several lifetimes ago. Someone had taken a paintbrush to the nameplate on a wall, changing Stalin ter to Csizma ter, Boots Square. The boots were all that remained of the giant statue. In them had been placed half a dozen Hungarian flags on sticks, like a bunch of cut flowers.

  Stalin Avenue had been purged. From some storehouse had been unearthed the old nameplates of chipped enamel and so they walked down Andrassy Street. They held hands, their breath clouding in front of them.

  ‘I have been learning French from Babushka,’ Ilona said. ‘J’aime, tu aimes, elle aime. Repeat the lesson please, Istvan.’ Istvan repeated.

  ‘I asked her so now I can tell you,’ Ilona said. ‘Je t’aime, je t’adore.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ Istvan demanded.

  She squeezed his hand. When he tried to swing her round to embrace her, Ilona broke free and ran ahead to the next corner. She bounced up and down and laughed at him.

  ‘Istvan, you’re such a sluggard. Come quickly.’

  A man sat on a chair by a charcoal brazier. A wide pan of simmering water stood above the fire, a dozen corn cobs swimming in it. He blew on the fire to make the sparks fly and his cheeks were as round and as polished as apples.

  ‘How much are the cobs?’

  ‘Fifty filler.’

  The cobs lasted them as far as Vorosmarty Square where they had to pick their way between fallen masonry and churned-up cobbles.

  She made a ringing declaration: ‘That was the best corn I have ever eaten.’ There were bits between her teeth and the taste of the coarse salt was still in her mouth. The fact that it was tough maize and more suited to fattening geese was nothing. To every moment of happiness there is a flavour and for Ilona it was of corn.

  They walked up Kossuth Street. With movement had come a new closeness. Now they each had an arm round the other’s waist. Istvan was aware of her hip rubbing against his hip, the length of her leg against his as they walked in step. The touch of her and the darkness and the stars above brought back more of Babushka’s words: ‘She loves you. Quite simply that. She has stopped being a girl and become a woman in order to love you. I’ve seen her watching you. Her face was turned slightly aside so you never suspected her eyes were on you. And now you love her. But a man’s way is different. You love her for the times you live in, the excitement, for your hate of the Russians, for your own developing strength. For her it is simple: it is you she loves. But a man loves for so many reasons and in so many ways.’ Later he recalled some more, for the night seemed to echo with her voice: ‘Don’t you find yourself filled with confusion? Eh bien. That’s it.’

  Ahead of them was the long view up to Keleti Station. Above it hung the moon, a sickle moon.

  ‘No hammer,’ Istvan said.

  ‘No hammer.’

  At the corner of Muzeum Street was the gaunt façade of the Astoria Hotel. Ilona laid her hand on Istvan’s shoulder to check him. The hotel was half-ruined, with gaping holes punched in the walls by Hungarian artillery. There seemed — Istvan could think of no other explanation — to be guests staying there. Journalists, news photographers from the West? In the salon there were lanterns lit and someone had a portable radio on full blast. Ilona and Istvan stood and stared through the partly boarded-up windows, like beggars on the edge of a rich man’s feast. The feast was the music that was broadcast from a West German radio station.

  ‘Well, I saw my baby walking

  With another man today.

  Yes, I saw my baby walking

  With another man today.

  And when I asked her what’s the matter,

  This is what I heard her say.’

  The words meant nothing to either of them. But the music was instantly recognizable, as forbidden fruit always is. As the chorus began, Ilona took Istvan’s hand and started to dance.

  ‘See you later, alligator.

  After a while, crocodile.

  See you later, alligator.

  After a while, crocodile.

  Don’t you know you’re in my way now.

  Can’t you see you cramp my style.’

  ‘Hey, what is this?’ Istvan wanted to know.

  ‘Rock and roll,’ Ilona told him.

  It was a capitalist decadence wholly unknown in Hungary.

  ‘Where did you learn it?’

  ‘Ballet class.’

  ‘They teach you this?’

  ‘No, stupid. One of the older girls has a friend at the American legation. She showed me. Don’t look so worried. Tonight nothing is illegal.’

  ‘I keep kicking my ankle.’

  ‘Clumsy carthorse.’

  When the last chorus died away they collapsed
together, laughing and breathless, and then held each other very tight. There must have been more music on the radio. They didn’t hear it.

  ‘Ilona,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  They were only a block away from Puskin Street. In the garden of the museum there was a recent grave draped in a flag. At its foot a candle guttered in a jam jar. It was the grave of one of the heroes who’d fallen at the radio station on the night of their first meeting. It was late and the city was deserted. Budapest was holding its breath and saying its prayers. There was nobody about in Puskin Street, nobody on the stairs as they climbed towards the apartment.

  In the sitting room Ilona found matches and lit the candle and their shadows were immense on the walls. They were alone in the room for the first time. Matyas and Ferenc had drifted away in the afternoon; Natalya Zelenaya had gone to bed. Istvan stood in front of Ilona, his hands on her shoulders, hers on his hips. He could see a long way into her eyes. Her eyes said yes. She lifted her face as he bent over. For the first time they kissed.

  17 - London, now

  Her lips felt his lips, the press of them, the slip of his tongue that touched and was gone.

  ‘Twenty-five years,’ Steven said. It was a long time between kisses.

  These were the serpent hours of the night. Ilona opened her eyes and saw his face close to hers, his eyes intent on hers, and the smudges under his eyes were the dark stains of tiredness and memory. She put a finger to her mouth and ran it along her lips. It wasn’t to erase the kiss. It was to touch where his lips had been.

  She felt the kiss still. For a moment she even played with the idea she felt it from that candle-lit night in Budapest, then.

  He moved back. ‘And is that something else you’ve tried to forget? Do you think you can rub out your past?’

  There had been magic in their first kiss. She remembered the intensity, the ache of young love. It was a period when people spoke of electricity. Now it was ascribed to chemistry. Chemical reactions, test tubes, repulsive smells, you could keep them. She much preferred the idea of a spark between two people. Images and sensations returned to her from the long ago past: their shadows wavering in a watery gloom, the shiver down her spine that didn’t come from an open window, drumbeats that didn’t come from outside either but inside her, the joy of his arms round her. He had leaned down to kiss her again and he had blundered with the strange newness of it, not knowing how to fit his nose in with hers. She hadn’t forgotten the past, no. It was just that each year more dead leaves drifted down to bury it.

  ‘Steven,’ she said, ‘I’m married.’

  ‘I know you are. That’s nothing to sigh about. Or is it?’

  ‘I didn’t sigh.’ Had she?

  ‘What did the old Russian woman say? If you do enough in life, then you don’t regret any one experience. Perhaps you haven’t done enough. That husband you see as a mistake and you regret him. Oh, I could tell you were married. It showed in the way you looked round this room, comparing it with your own. The way you looked at my work, comparing it. The way you looked at me, comparing. And after comparing you decided he was a mistake — the other one you had married. Don’t tell me about him. I don’t want to know because he is nothing, a zero, irrelevant to you and me. We were together first and we’re together again.’ And, Steven added to himself, that husband was no more than the hole in the middle of the record.

  She was standing by the table. He came closer to kiss her a second time and she pushed him back and had to push harder and harder.

  ‘Don’t, Steven. Stop it.’

  His face loomed close to hers. When she stared in his eyes, she saw a kind of anger there. And the stains underneath were of more than memory and tiredness; she shied away from the word ‘madness’ but it had lodged in her mind.

  ‘Steven...’

  She twisted and broke free. She stumbled away and put the table between them. She was disturbed, anxious, because that forbidden word kept coming back. Didn’t people say the mad possessed superhuman strength? She felt the bruises of his fingers on her shoulders.

  ‘It’s very late and I’m exhausted. I want to go, Steven.’

  He glared across the table. ‘Stay here. You must. Don’t you see?’

  ‘Please. Tomorrow — this morning, I mean — the Group is going...’

  ‘Don’t talk about your Group. You can’t go with them. And you’re not tired. You’re frightened; it’s in your eyes. I’ll tell you precisely what it is you’re frightened of: of the past, of now, of your emotions, of what you want to do. You’re frightened of being a woman, frightened of freedom. You’re used to discipline and obedience. You’ve forgotten how to choose. It shows in your face and the way you stand with your arms hugging your chest.’

  ‘You hurt me.’

  ‘The truth hurts.’

  She saw the obsession in his face and the fear in her grew. Steven started to come towards her. She dodged round the table, jumped over dishes piled on the floor, swung round the doorjamb, darted across the gallery that led down to the studio. She knew he was after her; the sweat on her back, the ache of her breathing, the race of her pulse told her. Where the steps made a turn she saw him just behind, his legs long and bent like a spider’s. And then he was past her, leaping from the steps to the floor below, tumbling forward and righting himself, whirling round to catch her as she scrambled towards the door to the yard.

  His hands were on her shoulders again, as they had been when he squeezed until it hurt, as they had been when he kissed her, even when he kissed her all those years ago. She remembered that distinctly. She wrenched her body and he held her firm. Her lungs struggled with huge breaths. She swallowed as if that would quench the breathing. Still her lungs pumped and her breasts seemed to rise to meet him. Oh God, he’s noticed where the nipples are pointing the material of the blouse. She crossed her arms again.

  ‘Do you know why you’re running?’ Steven was breathing hard too. ‘Freedom terrifies you. At heart you’ve become bourgeois.’

  He spoke as if this was the most terrible insult. She stopped struggling and he let his arms fall away from her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘bourgeois.’

  ‘Then we were young and it was all different. Fifteen-year-old girls learning to shoot rifles from windows, fifteen-year-old boys throwing Molotov cocktails from roofs. People have always had to fight for freedom against the men of steel. So the children fought, kids they’d call us now, while our parents stayed at home and prayed or cried. Kids aren’t bourgeois; there’s too much anarchy in their blood. Fighting together brings you together. Comrades in arms, Ilona. We became one. Don’t you feel it?’

  Steven clenched his fist. The knuckles were hard and white. A pulse throbbed in his wrist.

  ‘That’s twenty-five years ago,’ Ilona protested. He stared as if a quarter of a century meant nothing. She said: ‘That doesn’t mean that now, tonight, we take up the dance again as if nothing had happened in between.’

  They searched each other’s faces. She saw him relax into a memory. ‘Listen,’ he said. He began to whistle, a certain gypsy rhythm and bravado to the tune.

  ‘Countess Maritsa,’ she whispered. Nothing haunts the memory more than the music of long ago.

  ‘You wanted to dance and the old woman had a musicbox. We were alone, your head on my chest, your hair shining with the light of the candle. When I started to undo your buttons, you blew out the candle. Babushka said we grew up fast during a revolution, but it was the fifteen-year-old girl who blew out the light. Then you turned up your face and pulled me down.’

  She was staring up. He leant down to kiss her mouth.

  ‘God damn it, leave me alone!’

  She broke free and ran half a dozen steps. She whirled round, her hands together as if there were manacles on her wrists.

  ‘Let me go, let me go, let me go! I don’t want to be locked up in your memories. Just let me get away.’

  ‘You can’t escape
the past. You know that, Ilona. Your past is what you are.’

  A room was a stage for Ilona, even this studio. The night had taken on the dimensions of a play: melodrama, farce, tragedy. There was no telling the end. There were lines to deliver and stage directions to follow. She came a step or two back to plead in a low voice: ‘Please, Steven. Let me go. Stop reminding me.’

  But he went on. He picked his words with care: ‘The candle-light, the music, the dance with our bodies close together. Our first night as lovers.’ He wouldn’t let her forget that. ‘Our first night, taken from us.’

  Stop twisting the knife. She wanted to say that to him but couldn’t get any words out.

  ‘We were kissing when...’ He hesitated. Her face showed such pain. But she was an actress, wasn’t she, with emotions always on the surface. ‘Can you hear? The sound of steel on cobbles, the roar of engines, the gunfire. Can you hear?’

  But she’d clapped her hands over her ears to blot out his voice and screamed and screamed. Sometimes she screamed pleas for him to stop; mostly it was the screaming of someone in the grip of a nightmare. It took all his strength to jerk her hands from her ears. She closed her mouth abruptly, as if he’d struck her.

  ‘Tanks, Ilona. Russian tanks. Lines of tanks. We leaned out of Babushka’s window and saw them roaring up Rakoczi Street at the end of the block. Hundreds of tanks.’

  Her eyes tore themselves away from Steven’s face and turned away to the left.

  ‘Are they there?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Then they surrounded the radio building.’

  Her head jerked to the right.

  ‘Everywhere, tanks. They ripped apart our night. A thousand tanks, two thousand tanks, four thousand tanks. How do you fight four thousand tanks? With your bare fists?’

  She bunched her hands. She beat on his chest with small angry fists.