Tibor stared and stared and shook his hand all over again. ‘Yes, that is how it will be.’
Before Istvan had gone a dozen steps, Tibor had caught him up again. In his palm was the chess piece he’d pocketed two days before. ‘Do you still have your black king? We’ll exchange pieces. Your king will bring me luck.’
With the white knight in his pocket Istvan turned the corner. He swore he could hear Tibor calling after him once more but he wouldn’t turn back.
The city had turned to winter. There is an autumn sparkle that bathes Budapest with gaiety and light and even hope, against all the weight of history. It is a trick and has everything to do with the sweep of the river and the sun catching the bright rock of Gellert Hill. In a single night it changes, the sun sinks lower, the Buda Hills cut off the city from the west, the streets turn ugly. It is the winter of central Europe, hard as slate.
The Soviet army had brought winter with it. The streets had changed in the couple of days that Istvan had been fighting round Kisfaludy Passage and Kilian Barracks. There was the muted air of a city under siege. It hadn’t been conquered. Stopping at the very broadest part of Baross Street and wondering how he was to reach the other side, pausing and not thinking about her waiting for him, he saw it clearly in his mind. For a few moments he was not the centre of the world, as a child imagines himself, and instead saw the whole complexity of it. He saw the tanks couldn’t conquer the city, they could only destroy it. For all the tanks and the soldiers, he saw the city was still under siege because the buildings weren’t captured. Nor were the people. He saw shadows at some of the windows and felt the sullenness that wouldn’t admit defeat. He no longer noticed the destruction and debris of war. Instead he saw that there were, in fact, ordinary people about, even if not many, and that they ignored the invaders. Simply, the Russians were invisible. Oh, they would rule the country or put in their puppets. But a whole people would deny their presence. They would face a tank and it wouldn’t be there. They would live under the system but behave quite differently. Let the Russians congratulate themselves on crushing a revolution. The truth was otherwise: the Russians, their rulers, their party, their police, their dogma, their boasts, their certainties, all had vanished. Because the people had never surrendered. Only forty-four had surrendered and Istvan had witnessed the meaning of that. The rest of the nation would rather die or slip away in the dark or tunnel its way to freedom. Inside each one was a centre of resistance that would last for a generation, two generations, however long it took. Each person would be under siege but wouldn’t submit.
Touched? Like my father? He wondered and rubbed his eyes and felt the weariness that ached in every bone of his body.
When he looked again, the history and the future and the notions had vanished. There were buildings and alien uniforms and a wide street to cross. He waited until a tank had passed, as one might wait for a gap in the traffic, and stepped out to walk across the road. Ignore the interlopers, he told himself, they have forfeited the right to exist.
He didn’t see, or didn’t acknowledge, the next tank approaching. Or the truck with its open back and hedgehog of rifles. He saw the opposite pavement and the dwindling distance to it, and then the narrow street beyond. Each footstep took him closer to her. The city had the silence of the grave, except for the harsh roar of the tanks. Ignore it. But now some trick of acoustics in the narrow street brought him the sound of rifle shots and the explosion of a grenade and screaming from somewhere out of sight. Then he was terrified, not for himself, but because of what might have been happening to her.
He started to run and it was like running through deep water. He had the high knee action of the sprinter, and the prizes to prove it, but there was no strength left in him. At the first corner he stopped abruptly. Across the road was the breadshop his mother had used and it was destroyed, its window blown out, its wall fire-blackened. Further down to his right he could make out the bare branches of a tree in Matyas Square. That was where he had lived with his parents.
‘Home.’ He spoke it out loud, tentatively, trying the word out. For one moment he understood just how far he’d travelled — that he no longer felt the place as home — and then he was running again. These were all streets he had known as a child and known differently during the fighting. There was Jozsef Avenue — how many times had he crossed and recrossed that in the past fortnight — and a shout from someone. He didn’t stop, didn’t even look. He checked himself at Sandor Brody Street because he could see the tanks parked ahead by the radio station. He detoured to kakoczi Street, slowing to a walk, begrudging the lost time; past St Rokus, the mustard church of Natalya Zelenaya, and at last was in Puskin Street. It was narrow and not quite straight — funny, he didn’t remember that. As he approached the slight kink in it and the rest of the street down to Pollack Square was revealed, he saw the signs of bitter fighting: broken glass and splinters of metal gleaming among the heaps of rubble. The heaps were like fresh-dug graves, and his heart was beating warning drums.
Abandoned in the street there were everyday objects made meaningless by war: an army boot without the foot to go in it, a framed family photograph, a china jug perfectly whole standing on the kerb, a potted fern in the gutter. And nobody about, no shadows in the windows. He could feel it, like a stone in his belly, the emptiness. The tide of war had gone out and just these few things were left on the beach.
He was shouting her name now and pounding up the stairs. Doors stood open and he had confusing glimpses of shadowed rooms, with their contents spilt. The air he drank in great drafts had a strange smell, of staleness, of human life abandoned. And there was only the sound of his feet and his voice. It was a place deserted, a village in no-man’s-land.
And what will she be doing when I see her? He couldn’t imagine. He would open the door and...what? Nothing filled the vacuum in his mind. He found he’d even forgotten what her face looked like.
The last landing, the last stairs.
He could picture the silver of the skin of her breasts and the dark curtain of her hair, but not her face.
‘Ilona.’
He banged open the door and stopped just inside the sitting room, knowing at once she wasn’t there. There was no point in looking but he looked, it was what you did. The room was empty of her presence. He couldn’t feel her. He couldn’t smell her. Instead, seated at the window, was Natalya Zelenaya. She’d deserted the chaise longue. She used a straight-backed wooden chair hauled from the dining room.
‘Where’s Ilona?’
She didn’t answer. Her back was turned to him and she was peering down into the street. She was a sentry posted to warn of the approach of the enemy. Leaning against a jutting crippled hip she held a rifle, its butt resting on the floor. The glass of the window was smashed, as if she found it distorted her view and put the rifle butt through it.
‘Have you seen Ilona? Babushka, where is she?’
Her head was tipped forward to watch who came from the direction of the radio station. She continued to ignore him. ‘Babushka, is she here in the apartment? Asleep?’
Had she been deafened by gunfire? Fallen asleep at her post? ‘For God’s sake, where is she? Has she gone out?’
He crossed to the window and shook her shoulder with a soldier’s roughness, impatient at the old fool. The rifle slipped from her grasp and clattered to the floor. He snatched his hand back and she toppled slowly sideways from the chair. On the floor, as if she could relax from her vigil at last, her body settled itself to lie on its back. Her eyes stared past Istvan, stared into an eternity of distance. There was a bullet wound in her chest but not much blood. Someone had told Istvan that there was little bleeding once a bullet has smashed the pump that is a human heart.
Istvan took a step back and another and hit a table and set a vase crashing and kept going backwards through the pieces. There was horror welling up inside him and sweat breaking loose. The look on her face was of surprise. The moment of death had puzzled her. Perhaps she�
��d even seen the approaching bullet for a tiny fraction of a second.
She was dead and Istvan was more struck by her death than by the thousands of others. Ilona had vanished. The country was occupied. Freedom was suffocated once more. Everything he had held on to during the hours of danger had disappeared. He raced down the stairs knowing there was nothing left, nothing.
19 - London, now
‘She told me to go but I wouldn’t.’
It was Natalya Zelenaya she was talking about. Steven understood that.
Ilona stood with her hands clasped in front and her head down: a penitent’s stance. But she’d done no wrong, Steven amended, she was just exhausted. It had been a night of high seas and storms.
The words came pouring from Ilona: ‘She said I should go to my aunt and uncle. I refused. I told her it was dangerous to go through the streets when there was so much fighting. She became very French, hunching her shoulders and muttering, “Dangerous? Dangerous?” And then, you know how the French do, jutting out her bottom lip and dragging down her cheeks to show disapproval. “Dangerous, child? Why do you imagine I insist you go? Because of the dangers here. We’re a hundred metres from the radio station and those peasants might just decide to get out of their tanks and saunter down here to see if there’s a nice young chicken to amuse them. Me they will not touch. If they put one finger on me I shall tell them about their mothers who never knew their fathers and their disgusting habits and their smell which is degoutant and their faces which resemble the ground a pig wallows in and the size of their manhood which is as undernourished as the matter which keeps their ears from touching. I shall tell them. But if they see you, my tongue cannot stop them. So go.” She was determined.’
She delivered this tirade with her eyes closed. Yes, Babushka could have spoken like that. But the whole manner of speech was also Ilona’s. She stood with her eyes screwed up to recall the scene, or create the fantasy, better.
‘I wasn’t going. That was final. I knew my aunt and uncle. They would give me money for a ticket and take me to Keleti Station and wait for the first train to Eger. They wouldn’t want a girl with them while the soldiers were everywhere, and there was no food and no heat. So I’d be five hours in a filthy train and back to the filthy house with the filthy chickens and my filthy father.
‘“I must stay to defend you,” I protested. “The others have all run out and left you defenceless.” She adjusted that dreadful foxskin round her shoulders as if it was a suit of magic armour. “Bring me a dining chair. Load me a rifle. I’ll teach the first kulak to come through the door a lesson.” I tried another angle: “My aunt and uncle live quite close. It’ll be just as dangerous there as here. More dangerous — I lied — because they live on the ground floor.”
‘“Imbecile,” she says, “babouine, to fail des bêtises, toujours. Ilona, you have already told me of the view you have down to the yard where the babies are put in the sun. Oh never mind. I shall give you an address in Obuda. These are old friends of mine, fallen on hard times, as we all have. You will go to them. They will look after you.”’
Ilona had opened her eyes by the end of this. Her eyes were black pools, very still and clear. Steven didn’t speak, didn’t ask whether she really remembered all this. He supposed the gist was true and the words were her own. Then he saw her hands. They fought with each other, or twined like lovers. No difference, Steven thought in confusion.
‘I didn’t want to go,’ Ilona insisted. ‘But she went on and on until I simply ran out of reasons for staying. My last objection to going was the true one.’
Steven waited. Truth was slow in coming. ‘And?’
‘Oh, I forget what we said now. I just knew I didn’t want to be sent back to Eger, to have my father pretend his kiss was for a daughter. Perhaps he wasn’t my father. Perhaps my mother stole a weekend...’
The rambling stopped. Her eyes were drugged with exhaustion. ‘Ilona, you cannot remember everything else and forget what was said at the end.’
‘All right. I told her I wanted to be there when you returned.’ Ilona began with the dullness of someone giving evidence.
‘She said something like: “Why do you think he’ll come back? Did he say so?”
‘“No, but I feel it.”
‘“Feel it? How feel it? Where feel it?”
‘“In here.”’ And Ilona laid her actress’s hand on her chest. ‘Babushka said: “So your heart tells you. And he loves you also? Is that it? Has he told you?”
‘“No, not in words.”
‘“You may not believe an old woman but at least remember what I say and see if it doesn’t come true: If he lives and if he loves you, he will find you later. Don’t worry about that. Worry about staying alive during the next hours.”’
Steven asked: ‘So?’
Too much confessing had dried up the spring. She answered shortly: ‘So I went.’
Which is how people’s fate is decided, Steven thought. Tibor Kassack calls me away, Natalya Zelenaya sends her away. The consequence is we’re apart for twenty-five years, physically apart. Though in the tumult of the Russians’ second assault, she’d been with him the whole time: in the Corvin Cinema, in the alley of her name, in the barracks, in the tunnel. She had been the air he breathed, filled the spaces all round his body, beckoned in the dream that led him out alive.
But he said nothing.
She was watching him in silence. She had declared herself and now she waited for him to share his heart. Steven hesitated. There was no sense to be made out of his emotions. They had spent die long night bobbing on a sea of uncertain memories. Memory turned actions and feelings into myths. Perhaps it was all a distortion and he’d been sustained by myths: the corner of the room with the ikon on the wall hadn’t been their home, just a trick of memory; the same with the ash of Babushka’s cigarettes drifting over her hideous fox while she croaked out her beliefs; or his making war on a tank with a jar of jam. His remembered love for Ilona: just a fantasy?
While he hesitated, Ilona’s eyes changed. There had been a light in them and he saw it had faded. Her whole body shuddered and she jerked round to the clock on the shelf.
‘Four-zero-six precisely. Digital of course. No margin for error. Digital clocks are inhuman, aren’t they? My brain has died. Three o’clock is still night and has its own reasons for being awake: a new love, a new play you’re straining to get right. When it gets to four o’clock that’s the beginning of another day, the drunks have all gone home and the lights have come on in the flats where the early shift bus drivers live. I’ve walked back from the Vidam Theatre — rewrites, tantrums, disasters in my mind — and seen those first lights come on in bedroom windows. Crazy to get up at four o’clock, that’s what I said. Crazy to be going home to bed at four o’clock, that’s what he said.’
Steven kept very still.
‘Four-zero-seven. The naked truth. Is there coffee? Can you make some?’
She’d said ‘he’. Hadn’t said ‘my husband’, hadn’t given a name. Somebody else then? He was so drained he didn’t know whether to feel jealousy or hope or scorn. From the kitchen he could hear her moving in the living room.
She called out: ‘Do you play chess much? I don’t see a board.’
‘Chess?’
‘There’s a piece by the clock. Four-bloody-eleven.’
The white knight. Others had come out with a suitcase of clothes or a silver coffee pot or a rifle.
‘That’s all I brought out. Perhaps I’ll run into Tibor Kassack one day in a hotel bar. I’ll tell him I have his white knight still. It was my lucky charm. I got out between the border patrols near Hegyeshalom. Others weren’t so lucky. I saw a whole family gunned down. What a system that drives people to leave and shoots them for trying. It’s not enough to say everything’s changed and the past is swept away and you’ve made a fresh beginning.’
There was no change, to Steven’s way of thinking. Nothing changed except that every year Russia added another country to it
s empire.
‘You cannot go back with your Group. You see that, don’t you?’
She didn’t answer. He busied himself with the filter paper and the coffee and pouring the boiling water. Still she kept silent. It occurred to Steven that at long last she was considering, really considering, the wisdom of staying in the West. But when he carried the tray with the jug and cups and sugar into the living room, she wasn’t there.
‘Ilona? Ilona?’
The gallery was empty too.
‘Ilona?’
Leaning over the balustrade his eyes darted to the front door on the far side of the studio. She must have been quick. She had made her decision, planned her moves, done it swiftly. Is there coffee? Can you make some? She’d got him out of the way, let him talk on, while she left on silent feet. What had he done wrong? Why had she run away? What had he said to make her eyes go opaque — he’d noticed the change — as if they were winter ponds freezing over?
‘Ilona?’
But she’d gone.
The door stood open. It framed a rectangle of darkness with just the highlights of a streetlamp reflected off wet stones. The studio was a hundred contrasts, of brilliant light that leapt up at him and secret shadows. She could be crouching in a shadow; what was the point of even checking with the door wide open.
She’d gone.
He walked to the Dead Room. From the door he surveyed the smashed and scattered mementoes and the flag like a hastily abandoned dress on the floor. He peered round with renewed intentness. He sensed something vanished, a shadow, a personal emptiness, he couldn’t pin it down.
He still carried the tray. He noticed it with surprise. He opened his hands and simply dropped it, letting the smashed crockery and steaming coffee join the rest of the debris on the floor.
The brooding menace of the Dead Room overwhelmed him. He felt a sense of unbearable loss. He wandered back to the living room with its empty bottles and dirty plates.
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