Lunch with the Stationmaster

by Derek Hansen

  Istvan’s disappointment that the guards had captured me and not Tibor was tempered by the fact that he now had evidence to offer Major Bogati which justified his actions. He ordered the guards to take me to the hospital in Satoraljaujhely. A dead Milos was no use to anyone. A live Milos would save his career. Two weeks later, with my shoulder strapped and the fragments of bone and bullet removed, I was taken under guard to Budapest. My old schoolfriend Istvan gave me the tour of the torture chambers downstairs at Andrassy Street but it really wasn’t necessary; I’d already decided to cooperate. I told Major Bogati everything I knew, lying only to protect Aunt Klari and Andras. When the major asked me where Tibor had gone to recover after being shot I denied all knowledge and emphatically denied sheltering him. I told them Tibor had only approached me in early spring with an offer to help us escape to the West.

  Whether they believed me or not was academic. They weren’t interested so much in where he’d been but where he was going. I told them Tibor wanted to go to America, which was what I believed. They charged me with helping a known criminal to leave the country illegally, with attempting to leave the country illegally, with subversion, black-marketeering, disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda and as many other charges as Istvan could think up. I readily admitted guilt, knowing they’d extract confessions one way or another anyway. I expected them to shoot me or gas me so what did it matter what I confessed to? But again I underestimated my old schoolfriend. Istvan Kiraly had other plans. He wasn’t interested in me but in revenge.

  One day when I was taken from my cell to be interrogated I found myself alone with him.

  ‘Major Bogati has no further use for you,’ said Istvan. ‘He suggests I take you downstairs. In two days you will confess to raping your own mother.’

  ‘I confess now. What’s the point?’

  ‘What is the point?’ Istvan never raised his voice. He didn’t need to. The hatred I saw in his eyes turned my legs to jelly. ‘You ask what is the point? Your brother murdered my brother. That is the point! Do you think I care what you confess to? One hour downstairs and you will be begging for death. After two days you will crave it. But your death will not come quickly, Milos Heyman, and your pleas will fall on deaf ears. If our interrogators are skilful and patient, you could last four days. What do you say to that?’

  I couldn’t respond. I was speechless with fear. I had seen what they could do to me down there and it took all my strength not to empty my bowels. Istvan just watched me, enjoying every moment.

  ‘Do you love your brother?’ he asked suddenly.

  I stared back at him blankly. My mind couldn’t adjust to this shift in his questioning.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Y-yes. Of course I love him.’

  ‘Good,’ said Istvan. ‘So you should. You would have been picked clean by worms years ago but for your brother. He looked after you like I looked after Sandor. I protected Sandor like Tibor protects you. He must love you a lot, your brother.’

  ‘I believe he does.’

  ‘He would risk his life for you?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Good. Do you know anything about India, Milos Heyman?’

  ‘India? No.’

  ‘They have tigers in India and sometimes these tigers steal into villages and kill people.’

  He looked at me for a reaction but I couldn’t follow his thoughts. Mine were still locked on the basement below.

  ‘Do you know how they catch these tigers, Milos?’

  ‘No.’ And I didn’t care.

  ‘They take a live goat into the field and tether it to a stake. They use the tethered goat as bait to lure the tiger into their trap.’

  I still didn’t see what the tigers had to do with me.

  ‘It is a primitive tactic but effective,’ said Istvan. His eyes glinted cruelly. ‘Major Bogati has no further use for you, but I have. You will be my goat, Milos Heyman. You will lure your brother into my trap.’

  The iron fist around my stomach tightened its grip.

  ‘You are worthless, Milos, worthless to everyone in the world except to your brother and me. You will bring him to me. I don’t care how long it takes. Patience and persistence are the stock in trade of all good investigators. You will bring Tibor to me and then I will take him downstairs. And you, Milos Heyman, you will watch what I do to him.’

  I was sent to the prison at Vac on the eastern bank of the Danube, about thirty kilometres due north of Budapest. Before Tibor could rescue me he had to know where I was. Istvan made sure my sentence was published in every one of the city’s newspapers. From then on, my gaolers sent reports every month back to Istvan. There were informers everywhere within the prison, desperate to provide any information that might lead to a reduction of their sentence, more food or better accommodation. They kept a record of who I spoke to and who so much as uttered a word in my general direction. Those prisoners were tortured to see if there was any link back to Tibor. Word quickly spread throughout the prison that I was to be avoided at all costs. Years passed but no information was forthcoming. Yet a report was prepared for Istvan every month without fail, and every month they interrogated me as a matter of course. Istvan had patience and persistence in abundance.

  I was kept in that prison for eight years, the first four of them without seeing daylight. Vac was the most notorious prison in all of Hungary. If there is a greater hell on earth I cannot imagine it. It was built alongside the Danube and water seeped into the cells on the lowest levels. I spent three months lying on a bed in a cell in pitch darkness where to stand meant standing in thirty centimetres of icy water. In winter the water froze. Many prisoners did not survive in those cells. Men froze to death in there, went mad or died from pneumonia. I knew men who rejoiced when they were taken upstairs to the interrogation cells to be tortured. The interrogation cells were heated. Never in my life could I have imagined that people could be so cold, so obsessed with the need for warmth, that they would welcome torture just to feel a little heat on their bodies. But they did. It was my good fortune that I didn’t have to spend winter in that cell because I could not have survived it.

  Torture and beatings were routine. The political prisoners fared worst; I probably owe my life to the fact that they chose to regard me as a common criminal. Most of the political prisoners had done nothing wrong. They were victims of a system whereby informers had to identify enemies of the state or be accused of being an enemy of the state themselves. Innocent people were sent to Vac, tortured and driven mad there. When I close my eyes at night I can still hear the screams of the tormented begging for mercy. Sometimes it is my voice I hear, my screams. They tortured me regularly every month as part of my interrogation to see if Tibor had made any attempt to contact me. They also tortured me on the rare occasion when anybody spoke to me in case they had given a message. Tibor never did try to contact me but Istvan Kiraly needed to be sure. Patience and persistence, Istvan had said, patience and persistence. How I cursed his persistence.

  Food became an obsession. In the mornings we were given a mug of coffee and a pound of stale bread. Twice a week, around eleven-thirty, we were given soup with meat and vegetables. There was never much meat but it was the first thing we looked for. Grown men cried if their spoon came up empty or they were given less than their fair share. I’ve said before that Hungarians are a race of meat eaters; that we believe the consumption of meat is essential for strength. Hungarians also eat a lot of fat in the belief that it insulates the body against the cold. It was fat the prisoners in the lower levels looked for. In the afternoons we were given a meal of vegetables. The portions were always small. We probably ate better than the Jews in Auschwitz, and better than Gabi did in Theresienstadt, but it was still far from enough. The beatings became more painful the thinner we got.

  There were no friends in gaol. There were too many informers to trust anyone. Besides, there was always the risk of speaking to the wrong person and being accused of being an accomplice. But we learned in
the midst of that horror who could be relied on when we were sick or needed help. One man sought me out and managed to talk to me without appearing to. He said his name was Nyers and that he knew Tibor. I thought he was an informer and ignored him for fear of the beatings it could bring. Yet this man Nyers fed me my meals when I was too sick or weak to feed myself. When I was fevered he gave me his blanket and one time he lay with his arms around me all night to share his warmth. Such humanity and generosity was rare. But for him I believe I would have died that night. Still I ignored him but now as much for his sake as mine.

  One way or another, I lived with death, torture and the numbing, grave-like cold for eight years. Eight years without hope or reason to hope. In our hermetic world we heard nothing of the outside. There were no newspapers or radios. Then one day a group of prisoners in the cells alongside the river heard someone shouting to them. It was October 17, 1956, and somebody had taken the enormous risk of rowing a boat beneath a prison window.

  ‘Political prisoners!’ called the rower. ‘Do not despair. All will be free within two weeks!’

  Can you imagine the effect this had on us? Fevered speculation raced around the prison, reaching into even the most remote and terrible underground cells. Suddenly there was hope where there had been none. Suddenly there was the prospect of a future beyond those walls. Every day we waited for something to happen. Nothing did but our sense of expectation did not diminish. Then, on October 24, machine-gun nests appeared on the prison roof and we were all confined to our cells. Something was happening but we couldn’t imagine what. Someone said that there was a war and the Americans were coming. We did our best to believe the rumour; it justified the machine guns. But why hadn’t we heard shooting? We all knew what war sounded like.

  Our guards became increasingly nervous and we began to notice changes. Within a couple of days of the machine guns appearing, the red stars vanished from the front of the AVO officers’ caps. Such a small thing but it signified so much. Then the guards exchanged their green uniforms for police uniforms. A prisoner who had the privilege of a cell with a window overlooking the street saw a man standing on the opposite side of the road calling to the prisoners and waving the Hungarian flag. The hammer and wheat sheaf emblem had been cut out of the middle. This was news almost beyond comprehension. The prisoner told those in the cells on either side of him what he’d seen and they passed the word on till every prisoner had heard the unbelievable news. Someone started singing the Himnusz and soon every prisoner joined in. Even more unbelievably, our singing struck terror into the heart of the guards. They dragged prisoners from their cells and beat them in the corridors to silence them, but the prisoners kept singing even as the boots thudded into their faces and bodies. The guards gave up on the beatings and ran.

  The guards ran from us! If we needed proof that something momentous was taking place, that provided it. As dawn broke, the thousand prisoners in Vac began their own uprising. We broke up the furniture in our cells and used it to force open the doors. The freed liberated others. We brushed aside the terrified guards and dashed in a wild screaming mob for the street. Not all of us made it. There was a doctor in Vac, a Doctor Adam, who was a cruel and merciless AVO officer. As we dashed for the gates he began machine-gunning us. Prisoners who had spent years in Vac and were on the very threshold of freedom went down in that withering hail of bullets. Other prisoners, defying death themselves, climbed the walls to his position and killed him with an iron bar. The bastard kept firing up to the instant his brains splattered onto the concrete.

  Suddenly the gates were open. I confess, I stepped over the fallen bodies of my fellow prisoners as I seized this chance for freedom. Nothing could stop me, but I wasn’t alone. It was a stampede. I had no objective in mind other than to put myself on the other side of the prison walls. As we ran away down the streets of Vac, people applauded and cheered us. At that moment the world was utterly incomprehensible. Ordinary citizens were applauding gaol-breakers? I saw a woman standing in the doorway of a shop weeping with joy.

  ‘What is happening?’ I asked her. ‘Why am I free?’

  That was the first I heard about the uprising. I was standing there, slack-jawed in amazement, when Nyers grabbed hold of my arm. I’d last seen him scaling the wall to get to Doctor Adam. He might even have been one of those who killed him.

  ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘We have to get to Budapest.’

  Budapest. It’s a strange thing. As soon as he mentioned a destination I knew where I wanted to go: back to Sarospatak. But no sooner had the idea entered my head than I realised that was the very last place I could go. That was where Istvan would look for me. So I went with Nyers to Budapest.

  Nyers was very resourceful, much like Tibor. All of my life I had been accustomed to following close behind and not asking too many questions and that is what I did again. Nyers talked our way onto a coal barge which was carrying vegetables and fruit to feed the revolutionaries in Budapest. For the first time in eight years my world was defined not by walls but by sky. A cool breeze brought fresh air to my lungs and it tasted unbelievably sweet. So this is what freedom tastes like, I thought. Why had I never tasted it before? I sat down on the deck and leaned against the wheelhouse. Nyers sat beside me. I spoke my first words to this man who had saved my life. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He shrugged dismissively.

  ‘Why did you take so many risks to help me?’

  ‘I owed your brother.’

  Tears ran down my cheeks but I also started laughing so hard I nearly choked. Tibor was still looking after me, it didn’t matter that his help came indirectly. Despite the torture and the monthly reports, we’d beaten Istvan Kiraly.

  The captain and his two men celebrated our freedom with us. They gave us most of their lunch — thick beef stew and stuffed peppers cooked in pork fat. We weren’t cold any more but we couldn’t help ourselves. Meat was strength, fat was warmth. We gorged ourselves. The crew also had more barack than was good for them and we drank until we were drunk. Drunk on freedom, drunk on warmth and drunk on barack.

  We were welcomed like heroes into Budapest because we came with food. The crew wanted no payment; the fruit and vegetables had been given to them by peasants in the north to feed the freedom fighters. Everybody wanted to help the revolution. Nobody wanted payment. Students took the food away to hospitals and barracks and food distribution points. Nyers and I wanted to help with the unloading but we were too weak. When the students heard we were political prisoners freed from Vac they refused to let us work and lifted us high on their shoulders. At first light that day we had been prisoners; now, at dusk, we were heroes. This world we had come back to was very strange. That night, after we’d said our goodbyes and given our thanks to the crew of the barge, we discovered just how strange.

  There were open boxes on the pavements outside buildings to collect money to fund the revolution. They were unguarded. Even while we were watching, people emptied their pockets but nobody stole a single coin. Shopfronts were shattered but there was no looting. Buildings had been reduced to rubble but nobody was picking through the remains. We passed places where food was being given away. All people had to do was queue up and they were fed. People took the minimum they needed, aware that there were many others who were hungry and that the available food was limited. We saw children, boys and girls between twelve and fifteen, running around with rifles and siphoning petrol out of cars into bottles. Neither of us realised it at the time, but we were looking at the frontline troops of our revolution. The Russians had insisted that Hungarian schoolchildren be taught the art of guerrilla warfare in the event of a NATO invasion. Ironically, what they’d succeeded in doing was teaching the young people of Hungary how to overthrow them when the time came. It was these young children who destroyed and disabled tanks. It was their broken little bodies that lay in the streets and in the shallow graves in the parks.

  Nyers couldn’t find a phone that worked so we trudged from place to place looking for
a bar that was open and a face he knew and could trust. Occasionally we saw dead AVO officers hanging from lampposts and from trees. Many had notes worth hundreds of forints pinned to their uniforms. Blood money. Budapest was a very strange place. Eventually Nyers found somebody who knew how to contact Benke. Next thing we knew we were in a Mercedes racing through Pest. From time to time we were stopped at roadblocks manned by armed students, police and sometimes even Hungarian soldiers. But on this night two escaped ‘political’ prisoners in a car owned by a notorious criminal were not arrested but applauded. We didn’t realise that Benke and his cohorts were fighting alongside the revolutionaries.

  Benke greeted his ex-deputy with genuine affection. Apparently Nyers had been given a script to follow in the event that he was captured by the AVO, referring to properties that could be sacrificed to give the illusion of cooperation, and had stuck to the script despite the best endeavours of his torturers. Benke took us to a house in the hills of Buda and put us in the hands of an elderly couple who were instructed to give us anything we wanted. We were told to rest, eat and put some meat on our bones. Under normal circumstances those arrangements would have been fine. But we were in the middle of a revolution, what was almost certainly the most momentous event in the history of our sad, suffering country. Nyers and I were agreed on what we would do. Yes, we would rest and eat and get strong. We gave ourselves two days to build up some reserves. Then we wanted to fight. I also wanted to find Istvan Kiraly and wring his scrawny neck. In the meantime we listened to Radio Free Budapest.

  It was October 27 when we escaped from gaol and November 2 before we made our way back into the heart of Budapest to fight the Russians. Despite our bravado we were still weak. It had taken eight years to turn me into a living skeleton; this could not be fixed in a few days. We heard that Andrassy Street had been raided and that all the AVO officers who had not escaped had been killed. The Party Headquarters in Republic Square had also been raided. The prisoners in the cellars had been released and the AVO officers upstairs hanged. Nobody could give me any information on the whereabouts of Major Istvan Kiraly or Major Bogati. What I did learn was that the freedom fighters had discovered that many high-ranking AVO officers had secret escape passages in their homes and offices. Imagine that. In their hearts they knew there would come a day of reckoning yet they still didn’t change their ways. They built escape tunnels instead.