Under the frog (29 page)

He
talked to three people before he realised that simply finding out what he was
supposed to be doing would exhaust him and would be going well beyond the call
of duty. Gyuri counted, for his own amusement, that he explained twenty-two
times that he was phoning from the Feather Processing Enterprise and he wished
to obtain correct and up-to-date figures for the Plan, finally, he was
connected to a voice whose hostility and reticence convinced him that he had at
last reached the right person in the right department.

‘You
expect me to tell you all this on the phone?’ reiterated the irate voice. ‘How
do I know you’re not an American spy?’

‘Look
at it this way,’ said Gyuri, chewing over this epistemological doubt, ‘would an
American spy tell you to fuck your mother?’

Ashamed
of having tried to do his job, Gyuri had sauntered out of the plant. Passing
through the guard’s lodge at the entrance, his eye had been drawn to the
vigilant defender of proletarian power vivisecting some dog-ends on his table
to frankenstein together a new cigarette. Gyuri noticed that the guard was
tearing off a leaf of paper from a document entitled,
The Hungarian Feather
Processing Enterprise: Revised Five-Year Plan Figures, 1955.

When in
doubt, go home, go to bed, Gyuri thought. He had had a restless night fretting
over the prospect of the disciplinary session and elaborating his defence,
reckoning the tribunal would be the occasion for a backlog of overdue bad luck
to unload on him. He opted to go home and file himself between the sheets.

He
found Elek trying to persuade some used ground coffee to do an encore and
produce more black soup. ‘You’ve just missed Jadwiga,’ he said. ‘She’s come up
to Budapest for the demonstration.’ Gyuri swivelled on his heel and went out.

From
the other side of the river, he saw the crowd around the Bern statue as he
started to cross the Margit Bridge. Bern had been the Polish General who was
confused about which revolution he was in, and zealously led the Hungarian Army
of Independence in 1848 against the Habsburgs and led it very successfully,
until the Russians were called in and the Army of Independence proved how
Hungarian it was by getting wiped out. But at least it went down to vastly
superior forces, though, apocryphally, when he heard that the ten-times-greater
Russian force was attacking, Bern had remarked: ‘Good, I was worried they’d get
away.’

The
students had chosen to gather around Bern, since one of the goals of the
demonstration was to express their approval of the political changes in Poland
(Jadwiga had gone on about them with great enthusiasm) which were the sort of
changes they wanted in Hungary: a friendly, ideology-next-door, happy-go-lucky
sort of Communism. They didn’t seem alone in this wish.

Not
only was the Bern square a lawn of heads but the entire embankment around it
was one huge dollop of humanity. Thirty, forty thousand people and more
drifting in at the edges. It was a vomiting up of an indigestible system. It
had all the makings of uncontrollability.

‘Gyuri!’
He turned around to see Laci with two friends who were carrying a huge
Hungarian flag. It was the first occasion Gyuri could recall that he had
experienced the sensation of feeling old, gazing enviously on those younger
than himself, those who hadn’t expended their optimism and could believe that
carrying a flag around could change things.

‘Jadwiga’s
here somewhere,’ said Laci, looking back at the crowd. ‘She’s here with some
friends from Szeged.’ Gyuri surveyed the throng. It could take him the rest of
the day to find her if their destinies weren’t synchronised.

‘I must
congratulate you. I never thought I’d ever see anything like this’ commented
Gyuri, taken aback by the scale of the protest. ‘Have you seen the sixteen
points?’ asked Laci, unfolding a sheet of paper and passing it to Gyuri. ‘We
started drawing them up yesterday at the University and we just kept going.’

The
first demand that Gyuri read was for a change in the leadership of the
Hungarian Working People’s Party. That was the sort of thing that, say in 1950,
just thinking about it would have got you a ten-year stretch in an unlit cellar
with swollen kidneys and icy water up to your knees. Now, what with Stalin
smelling the violets by their roots, and Uncle Nikita rubbishing all his
predecessors, that sort of thing was negotiable if you were accompanied by a
very, very large crowd. The Communist movement, in the best tradition of
bankrupt capitalists, was highly adept at changing name and premises and
continuing to trade under a new veneer.

The
demands grew more demanding. Imre Nagy in, Soviet troops out. Free elections,
free press. Gyuri wondered, Why not throw in a requirement for eternal life and
compulsory millionaireships for all Hungarians? There was also a demand for the
secret files on everyone to be opened up.

‘Good
list,’ he said. ‘Good crowd.’

‘The
authorities were against it till we started,’ said Laci, ‘but now we’ve got
plenty of gatecrashers from the Party. I suppose they want it to look as if
they were behind it.’

The
idea of Jadwiga demonstrating against the Party had dismayed Gyuri greatly when
he heard about it. Apart from the more physical risks such as beating or death,
the threat of deportation had gnawed at his innards. Poland for him, as a
member of the passportless masses, was as inaccessible as the South Pole. But
he could see the crowd was too big to have problems. It was a crowd so huge you
couldn’t shoot at it or try to disperse it. The leaders and speech-makers would
doubtless be soon invited in to some subterranean cell for a little chat and
damage to their structures. But on the streets, the crowd was too much: like an
unwelcome relative coming to call, all you could do was humour it until it
decided to go home. Everything would be all right as long as Jadwiga could
restrain herself from haranguing the populace or reciting some inflammatory
poetry. ‘We’re going off to the parliament now,’ said Laci, ‘we’re going to
stay there until they make Imre Nagy Prime Minister again.’ Gyuri watched them
walk off along the bridge. Laci was only four, five years younger than him, but
his idealism made Gyuri feel like a grandfather. Strange how two brothers could
contain so many differences and similarities. Pataki had always harnessed his
intelligence to the service of his willy and winding people up as much as
possible. Laci was self-effacing, studious; every time Gyuri had been in the
Pataki flat Laci had been attached to a book, often extremely dull text-books.
Though you didn’t notice him, he was always around. It had been no surprise
when he won a scholarship to the University, a considerable achievement for
someone whose father wasn’t in the Central Committee. However, his mischief had
merely been more undercover, more insidious, biding its time. Laci hadn’t said
anything about it but Gyuri was sure he was leading rather than following at
the Technical University.

Scanning
the crowd, Gyuri tried to catch a fragment of Jadwiga. He was heartened not to
see her addressing the demonstrators with a loud-hailer. The people milling
around were no longer predominantly students, the demonstration was
snowballing: soldiers, old folk, nonentities, water-polo players, housewives,
office staff, all those who saw the demonstration and the placards and who
realised this wasn’t a stage-managed, Communist-led affair, that it wasn’t an
out of season May Day, abandoned their business and joined in with an air of
why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-before?

* * *

There
were dozens of people trying to pull down the statue of Stalin, imps gathered
around his boots. There were many more people giving advice on how it should be
done. The assays and the advice had been going on for some time. Sledgehammers,
hacksaws, chains attached to lorries, as well as copious abuse had all been
directed at the eight-metre-high statue. It remained highly indifferent to the
flurry around its legs.

Gyuri
was very glad that he was there. If he hadn’t been out searching for Jadwiga he
probably would have missed this – it was a definite bet that Budapest Radio
wouldn’t be broadcasting the news that a once-only performance of idol-toppling would be taking place that night.

It was
going to be, indisputably, a historic moment, one of those things that
grandchildren would be hearing about whether they felt like it or not. Gyuri
had never derived such intense satisfaction from anything before like this;
pleasure yes, but nothing that had made his soul throw back its head and just
laugh. However, it would be nice, Gyuri reflected, if the historic moment could
hurry up and get on with it, because it was really too cold to be standing
about even for a once in a lifetime sensation and having patrolled the streets
all day he was tired. Gyuri also couldn’t quite suppress the feeling that this
was going a bit too far. He had carefully positioned himself to have a good
view, but equally should penalties arrive, to have a good exit. It was like
that moment of schoolboy exuberance when the teacher was going to walk in and
curtail the pranks.

There
was nothing to give substance to his unease though. A few policemen were
circulating but they looked as if they were rather enjoying it and Gyuri had
heard the one with the moustache suggest that an acetylene torch would do the
job nicely. Two more senior, fatter policemen had been present an hour ago. The
fattest, presumably most senior one had endeavoured to disperse the crowd but
after issuing a few warnings, he got tired of being laughed at and vanished
with his megaphone to more pressing matters elsewhere.

Whatever
the outcome of the day, it had been the most enjoyable day, on all counts, that
Gyuri had spent for … well, he couldn’t remember the last time precisely but
the reign of boredom had lifted for a day.

A lorry
pulled up and two workers who handled the acetylene equipment with practised
lightness pulled themselves up onto the plinth to amputate Uncle Joe at the
boot tops. A ripple of applause rose as the flame bit into Stalin’s calf, a
miniature sun in the night’s darkness. The audience for such a monumental event
could have been larger; there couldn’t have been more than three thousand
gathered around the statue, a mere fraction of those out on the streets that
night who would have undergone a quiver of pleasure at the toppling of the
bronze abomination. Still, Gyuri knew, tomorrow everyone would be claiming they
had been there.

Gyuri
assumed that most people were still back in the centre of the city, around the
parliament where Imre Nagy had waved sheepishly to the hundred thousand people
assembled there and begun his address to them: ‘Comrades…’ This had exactly the
opposite effect to what Nagy had wanted. Despite the fact that the crowd wanted
him to take over, his opening malapropism brought boos and a rhythmic chant of ‘There
are no comrades.’ Nagy had handled the rest of his speech better, urging
coolness and good sense. It wasn’t a brilliant performance, but then, as a
Communist, Nagy wasn’t familiar with the concept of an audience that wanted to
hear him speak. People weren’t overjoyed, but it had been getting late and most
of them, content with a good day’s demonstrating, started to go home. Gyuri had
seen nearly everyone he had met in his life at the Parliament Square, but not
Jadwiga. He was on his way home to check for her there when he happened upon
Stalin about to come a cropper.

With
some guided combustion, Stalin was tripped up by the will of the people and
came crashing down with a clanging slap that dwarfed the ovation of the
souvenir-hunters who closed in to feast on the fallen carcass with
sledgehammers and pickaxes. Gyuri quite fancied a piece of Stalin as a sort of
talisman, a memento of evil not always having its way, but he settled for
making one more trip to the Radio to look for Jadwiga if she wasn’t at the
flat. She wasn’t. So he took the tram down to Kalvin Square.

The
whole network of streets around the Radio in Sándor Bródy utca was full, packed
with people. It was like a replay of the World Cup protest, except this time
the number of extras had quadrupled. Gyuri heard that a delegation of students
had made its way to the Radio in the late afternoon to politely ask for their
points to be read out to the rest of the country. More delegations, more
well-wishers of democracy, more politeness had arrived throughout the evening
and now by eleven o’ clock, the politeness was being discarded and the student
idealism was being replaced by proletarian bellicosity. Gyuri hoped Jadwiga
wasn’t around here (though he guessed his presence would produce her absence)
since he was adamant that the Radio was where the Party would draw the line.
The Stalin statue, that was allowing people to let off steam, since, after all
Stalin was rather dead and
passé,
and it saved them the embarrassment of removing it
themselves. But the Radio was real here-and-now power, it could pour the unrest
all over the sleepier parts of the capital and the nation…

Gyuri
spotted Laci and his gang by the main entrance. He squeezed his way through,
earning a great deal of rancour from the people he had to shove and step on to
reach them. ‘You haven’t seen Jadwiga?’ he inquired. ‘Yes,’ replied Laci, ‘she
was here a minute ago.’ Adding proudly: ‘They’re going to read out the points.’

There
was a stir around the entrance way and a suit full of shit started to shout: ‘The
points are being read out now. Please go home. The points are being read out as
I speak. Please go home.’ He sounded familiar and he had a booming voice; Gyuri
assumed that he must be one of the presenters. The radio man stressed that the
points were being read out and that people should go home. Then, from a window
in one of the flats opposite the Radio entrance, a woman with the look of a
harried housewife materialised. Balancing her wireless with some difficulty on
the windowsill so that everyone in the street could faintly sample the
broadcast, she shouted: ‘You evil liar! There’s nothing but music.’