Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  Still he hesitated, his mind a jumble of memories. His whole damn life was a jumble, no pattern to it, no purpose, no meaning, no steady heartbeat. Bert Somebody, that features editor had been. Steven had gone to see him after getting back from Beirut. Through luck he happened to have been on the spot when the Israelis had waded ashore. What was the bearded UPI photographer called? Memory shot full of holes today. Something Blackburn? Well, Blackburn had muttered, ‘Jesus, Lebanon must be going critical, the Nikon Kid’s in town.’ And he’d declined the offer of a sweep through some free-fire zone with Steven. ‘Thanks, Kid. I’m just going to sit here and do some research into a bottle of scotch and snatch a shot of you coming back on a stretcher.’

  Steven had gone out alone with his camera slung round his neck like a tourist. He had found children playing with a grenade, a dud. A girl had held the grenade against one cheek and given a gap-toothed grin while he clicked, the shutter. The thing was, Ilona had the same gamine perkiness when she cradled the bananas against her cheek as that Lebanese girl had.

  Was that a significant detail?

  Here was another significant detail. He’d been told that on the wrong side of the Curtain everyone wore the same ill-fitting suits. But if you wanted to tell a KGB man or an WS man or an AVO man, look down at their feet. The security services were a privileged class with access to decent imported shoes.

  They’d come before nine o’clock, which was indecently early for normal diplomats. They’d walked up the hotel steps as if they were on parade, their smart shoes in unison.

  Was that what they were? The long arm of the AVO? Or perhaps they had only come along to wish the boys and girls of MAMITH (did they truly call themselves that?) a happy day’s outing to Oxford.

  Steven could stand no more.

  ‘If he loved you...’ Judit began and stopped, hoping Ilona would carry on and supply some end to the sentence.

  Ilona sat brooding. If, big if.

  ‘If he loved you, what would you do?’

  ‘Scream at him. Cry buckets. Run like hell back to Erno. Go mad.’ Ilona gave a huge shrug. What was the point of impossible ifs? Steven was the silent kind, he would say nothing. So put the reunion down to experience, a scary night, something for the memoirs. But no speculations. She was done in, her cheeks picked clean to the bone by exhaustion.

  ‘You mean, even if Steven swore undying love, you’d go back to Erno?’

  ‘It’s a child’s game, Judit. What if? What if? Listen, I haven’t left Erno so it’s not a question of going back to him.’

  ‘Has Erno telephoned you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you telephoned him? From Amsterdam? From Paris? From here? It’s three weeks now.’

  Ilona sighed.

  ‘Ilo, I’m trying to help you decide.’

  ‘Decide! I’m perfectly capable of deciding. I’m not a trampled-down little woman. I pulled on my socks, didn’t I? Ran, didn’t I? You see? I made up my mind. That’s it. That was the end. Oh God!’

  This last was addressed to the telephone. It warbled, like an electronic bird.

  Hesitating, with her hand above the phone, Judit said: ‘And if it’s Erno?’

  Ilona’s mouth was open. Her face had turned ugly, the first stage to tears. The tendons in her neck stood like ropes. She swallowed and had nothing to say.

  ‘Hello.’ Judit leant against the wall while her gaze rested on the devastated face of her friend. ‘Oh, what a cretin...At once, of course.’ Putting down the phone she said: ‘I completely forgot to tell you: there’s been a change in arrangements. We are to go to Stratford today instead of tomorrow...’

  ‘No-o-o,’ Ilona wailed. ‘Impossible. I’m destroyed, I’m dead, I refuse. Why are you shrugging your shoulders at me? I thought you were my friend.’

  ‘Wait here then. Which one do you think will telephone: Emo or Steven? What will you say? Have you got your speech prepared?’

  Ilona pushed herself to her feet. ‘Judit, I hate you.’

  Judit kissed her cheek again.

  The vestibule, as Steven first saw it, took on the dimensions of a stage. Coming in through the double swing doors was like passing under the proscenium arch. The backdrop to the stage was an elderly lift with a shiny concertina gate, around which curled a staircase. Stage-right was the reception desk which for most of the day remained empty but was now manned by a drooping porter who frowned at this motley troupe who could hardly muster six good words of English between them and displayed a communist disdain for tipping. Stage-left was an arched doorway to the residents’ lounge.

  The constant flow of people was like the movement of a stage army, creating the illusion of plenty. His photographer’s eye isolated them into groups: a threesome strolling from the lift, four by the rack of postcards, a man waving a greeting as he joined them, a pretty bouncing girl reaching up to plant a kiss on the worried forehead of an older man — the director, by his wrinkles and distracted eyes. These were the cast, seen on stage four nights ago, playing their part on this stage now. For costumes they had donned the glad rags of capitalism, their chests shouting out for Coca-Cola, Carnaby Street and Elvis. Two or three faces turned because Steven wore his camera round his neck and carried his aluminium case, and instinct told them to show their best profile.

  Amongst this bright plumage stood the two embassy men in sombre suits and expensive shoes. They looked up to a bigger man. Steven recognized him. Wasn’t his name Gyorgy? His role on stage had been to strut like a bully and rip the clothes from Ilona’s body. Steven advanced with cautious steps. Don’t draw attention to yourself, a voice whispered inside. Even this slow progress towards the reception desk faltered as he drew level with the door to the lounge.

  In front of the darkened television sat a grotesque person. A woman, from the evidence of the dress which was straining at the seams. She was knitting; a tricoteuse maintaining a vigil for the tumbrils. Her gaze lifted. Steven was almost at a standstill as a quarter of a century rolled aside and he was struck by an echo of Budapest’s mad times. Tibor Bihari, whose spiky hair and blurting speech betray youth, had told of facing just such a woman.

  That had been the director of Radio Budapest, whose manner had constantly threatened big battalions. This tricoteuse had puffed cheeks and two dark eyes sunk in flesh like buttons sewn into a doll’s face. It took an effort for Steven to move on.

  ‘Good morning,’ the porter said. ‘Or bonjour as this lot say.’

  Steven felt a little stab in his chest. She must have been talking to this sad sack.

  ‘Miss Ilona Kisfaludy. I have an appointment with her for nine.’

  Steven swung the shiny camera case up on the desk. ‘Would you tell me her room number please.’

  The porter’s eyes, reddened from a night on duty and a lifetime in the public bar, dropped a moment to the camera case. One of Steven’s hands rested on the rim. Between the knuckles jutted a pound note. He had a veteran’s experience of porters, doormen, waiters — anyone susceptible to accepting money for doing nothing — that stretched from Ibadan to Chiang Mai. The money fluttered down on the desk. The bloodshot eyes lifted again.

  ‘Who shall I say is calling?’

  Steven simply shook his head. The porter hesitated and then the money disappeared under a crabbed hand. His voice was a hoarse whisper now.

  ‘Room twenty-eight. Second floor left. If she screams, I’ve told you nothing.’

  Steven rejected the lift. He climbed the stairs, aware of the clamour in the vestibule, wondering how many pairs of eyes bored into his back, and then conscious of footsteps descending and a woman’s voice — just round the bend she was, hidden by the wall of the lift — saying: ‘Why have you stopped?’

  Steven froze. He heard the reply floating above the hubbub: ‘I feel hideous and debauched. Lend me your lipstick.’

  For the second time in five minutes, Steven was struck forcibly by memories of storming the radio building in Budapest. He had been climbing a staircase
and a noise like a dog’s whimper had reduced him to terror. It was the same now, his heart going like a wild thing in his chest. Gripping the banister he hauled himself round the corner and his eyes travelled up her black cord slacks to her face as she held the lipstick to her mouth, a lipstick like a blood red ice-cream cone. Ilona was staring into a vanity mirror. Her eyes shifted and she saw Steven four steps below.

  ‘Oh no. Dieu!’ The little mirror dropped and cracked on the wooden tread where the carpet didn’t reach. The lipstick she held in front of her, as if it was a cross with miraculous powers of warding off evil. ‘Judit, Judit, don’t abandon me, promise.’

  ‘I’ve come for you, Ilona,’ Steven said, the very simplest words he could think of, for he doubted she was capable of taking in anything more.

  Ilona’s eyes were locked on his. A hand reached out blindly for the support of her friend. ‘Judit...’

  ‘It’s him?’ Judit asked, but Ilona didn’t reply.

  ‘We’re going away,’ Steven said. ‘Just you and me.’

  ‘No,’ Ilona said. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘We’ll make a fresh start,’ he persisted. Not in the studio, that’s burnt to the ground. The Dead Room, all the past went up in flames. We’ll start out again, the two of us, in our own place. Remember our first home, under the ikon in Babushka’s apartment?’

  He’s mad, Ilona thought. There were dark bruises under his eyes like a boxer who’d gone fifteen rounds. They gave him the staring look of a maniac. The thread of her self-control snapped and she screamed, a full-blooded curse against him and his demands and his persecution of her, screamed to be let alone. She pushed past and fled headlong down the flight of stairs into the vestibule where every eye was riveted on her. She ran, with no thought in her head but to make her escape. There came a time when you had to run, like she had run from his studio. There was no shame in it. It was self-preservation. She had to escape from his madness before she caught it. But it was his hand that caught her arm and dragged her to a halt.

  ‘Let me go. I warn you...’

  The iron trap of his fingers was another reminder of their wild night. She found the lipstick still in her hand and lunged at his face. It left a long red wound across one cheek before he knocked it aside.

  ‘What do you want?’ The words were hardly more than a sigh.

  ‘You.’

  ‘Steven, twenty-five years have passed.’ She spoke simple words back to him. ‘I’ve built my own career, I’ve married, I’ve got my own home...’ She came to a stop. The phrases had an uncomfortable echo of Erno’s glib talk.

  ‘Listen,’ Steven said. He let go of her arm because he needed both his hands to talk. She found herself mesmerized by those hands, clenched with determination, open in appeal, clawed in anger. The words were tumbling out of him, like a politician making his pitch. She tried desperately to concentrate, wanting to hear some hint of love and not mere obsession. She heard him say, ‘We’re both refugees from the past.’ He was saying something else, about his life in past years, but she could hardly hear him. She was absorbed in the language of his hands, orators they were. Barren those hands said was his life, empty, lonely like a prisoner behind bars. ‘I’ve been all over the world,’ she heard the words, ‘and I’ve never found anyone for more than a night.’ Despair, said his hands. She couldn’t allow herself to show pity because wasn’t the fault in him? If he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge love, how could he expect love to be shown to him? Those hands, which had been so eloquent, abruptly stopped. Ilona realized that events in the vestibule which had been frozen were now developing a momentum of their own.

  The Cultural Secretary was the first to break the ranks of the watchers. He advanced like a dancer in his neat shoes, puffed with a sense of his own dignity. ‘As an accredited member of the Hungarian diplomatic mission I protest in the strongest possible terms. I insist that you stop this persecution of a citizen of the Hungarian People’s Republic.’

  Steven’s eyes had been only for Ilona. He became aware of the score of other people hemming them in. The embassy man had a very undiplomatic hand on Ilona’s shoulder and was propelling her out of Steven’s reach. She was resisting, it seemed to Steven. It was a snatch squad. He’d witnessed that in Guatemala, recorded it for the world’s press. That was what he had to do now: evidence of coercion. He lifted the camera that hung round his neck and the shot was perfectly framed in the viewfinder: the diplomat with his head twisting toward him, frowning; his hand gripping the prisoner; Ilona’s mouth gaping, her head shaking in protest. The shutter clicked.

  Shambling forward into his line of vision came a grotesque figure. The tricoteuse he’d named her; the one known to Ilona and Judit as the Grim Hulk. She still grasped her knitting, the steel needles flashing with gleams of lamplight.

  ‘Ilona!’

  Her head jerked at his cry. He snapped Ilona’s anguished face peering round the bulk of the tricoteuse, her needles wicked as daggers.

  But then even her heavy figure was shouldered aside. It was the bully Gyorgy, who came with a gust of swearing. Steven switched his aim to Gyorgy’s fury. Casting round for a weapon and finding only a vase of roses, Gyorgy snatched this up in one big paw and laid it flatly across the top of Steven’s skull.

  Violence brought the scene to a standstill.

  Steven knew nothing of Ilona’s scream, of the frozen attitudes of the supporting cast, of Gyorgy’s blinking puzzlement, of Comrade Revesz’s dark frown, of the porter’s muttered talk into a telephone, of Judit’s squawks, of the diplomats’ uneasy exchange of glances.

  Silence.

  When Steven recovered consciousness he saw a new world entirely. It pulsed, dark and light, to the throb in his head. There was wetness on his brow; when he touched it he found it was water. It had drenched one shoulder of his jacket. Around his head were scattered the shards of the china vase. The roses lay strewn like war casualties. Several blooms had broken off and the headless stems irresistibly brought to his mind Ilona’s rebuff to an unkind critic.

  Ilona.

  He felt fingers on his wrist. Turning his head he saw her, kneeling. Tears were in her eyes. Her lips moved in the manner of someone praying but it was only a whisper: ‘Steven? Steven?’ He felt rather than heard the distant grumble of traffic.

  ‘You cannot go with them,’ were his first words. ‘You must stay.’

  Perhaps she didn’t hear. She went on repeating his name.

  ‘Look at them.’ When she still stared in his eyes he reached up to grasp her chin. Gently he forced her head round. Above them loomed Gyorgy, the disapproving glower of Comrade Revesz, the diplomats, a chorus line of engrossed faces.

  ‘You pretend you are building a new world but it isn’t real. Look at them. You can’t return to that.’

  Ilona looked. She saw colleagues whose triumphs and tears she had shared, the loves, the jealousies, the frictions of a theatrical family, yet who’d had the spirit to come at once to her protection. She could not discern any of the menace that Steven seemed to sense. Slowly she loosed his grip from her chin.

  ‘What do you want of me?’

  ‘Stay.’

  It was true what she had said during that long night: he had the soul of an exile, believing nothing had changed in quarter of a century. He was finding it a struggle to get to his feet. Comrade Revesz was hissing, calling him an agent provocateur, a fascist. Ilona began: ‘But...’ and faltered. This was no time to try to change his view of her world. ‘Why should I stay with you? Why you, Steven? Do you love me?’

  Steven’s face was pulsing with a blue light. He opened his mouth but no words would come.

  ‘Do you?’

  He stared at her face. There were tears on her cheeks and he knew he had put them there. Steven understood nothing any more, least of all the churning inside him. The pain in his head was thanks to the bully; but the pain in his chest? He had always dismissed it as romantic drivel — the very idea of a broken heart. But this was a real
physical pain, the prospect that he might lose Ilona.

  ‘Steven, is it so terrible to love?’

  Of all the faces, one seemed to offer encouragement. It was the woman who’d been coming down the stairs with Ilona. She was crying too. But through her tears she was smiling, willing him on.

  The double doors swung open. Just inside, the newcomer stopped. He was a policeman. He was slow and deliberate, as good coppers are, sizing up the situation, the smashed vase, the extraordinary vivid mark across Steven’s cheek, the tears.

  ‘What seems to be the trouble here?’

  Bona’s gaze never wavered from Steven’s face. ‘You think it’s weak to admit love?’ she asked. ‘Is it so difficult?’

  It was difficult. No words would come. Twenty-five years ago he would have found his voice. Now it was impossible.

  ‘Do you love me?’

  Love her...For twenty-five years he hadn’t been certain. The pain in his heart told him. If only he could nod his head. But nodding was an action requiring monumental effort. He willed his muscles to move. The first slight movement broke the tension in him. He nodded. His mouth curved upwards, widening, widening. The smile was a whole speech of passion and devotion and love. Ilona moved beside him, taking possession of his arm. ‘You’re crying, miss. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and gripped Steven’s arm. On an impulse Ilona stretched up and selected a place on the policeman’s cheek to plant a kiss. ‘Oh yes, merci.’

  22 - Budapest, now

  On the day before All Saints the woman came alone to Kerepesi cemetery. She was dressed in black and moved with the slowness of the very old. In the crook of one arm she carried a bunch of white chrysanthemums, the damp ends enclosed in a plastic bag. Kneeling she placed the flowers in the metal vase at the base of a cross that was marked: Tibor Kassack 1933-56. Dead leaves had drifted on the patch of gravel and, still kneeling, she cleared them away.