Szabad Read online

  ‘She screams one word: Szabad! Free. Again: Szabad!’ It is the 1950s. The Soviets and the Secret Police have a choking grip on Hungary and the lives of its citizens. Attila Szabo is one of them, just a teenager, but he’s been forced to grow up quickly, with his father in prison. In the top-floor flat, a new couple has just moved in, clearly different in class, so why have they been sent here and can they be trusted? But it’s the beautiful wife who is of interest to Attila. His coming fight for his country’s freedom is also to become one of passion.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Chapter twenty-six

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Chapter thirty

  Chapter thirty-one

  Chapter thirty-two

  Chapter thirty-three

  Chapter thirty-four

  Chapter thirty-five

  Chapter thirty-six

  Chapter thirty-seven

  Chapter thirty-eight

  Chapter thirty-nine

  Chapter forty

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Paul Szentirmay, Honorary Consul-General to the Republic of Hungary for New Zealand, whose help and editing advice did so much to bring this book to life. To the Institute for the History of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 (Budapest) and Dr Tamás Takátsky, Honorary Consul of the New Zealand Consulate in Hungary. To my brilliant editor, Harriet Allan, who makes sense of my outpourings. To my father, Gowan, whose teachings gave me interest in worlds outside my own. And most of all to those Hungarian heroes and heroines who fought against oppression, who dared to take up arms against impossible odds and fight for democratic freedom.

  I COULDN’T STAND the wait. Small as our flat is, it felt like some vast, empty hall, echoing with the steps of people on the march — to hell. Going to their deaths, sobbing, but without sound since there is no one hearing who cares.

  Our rude severing from the innocence of childhood arrives on that day when the whispered words of parents, of those in their tiny trusted circle, hit home and you get this choking understanding, one you don’t want to accept, that your country, your city, your street, the building you live in, is divided between those for the State … and those the State is against.

  Not you against the State — that comes later. In response to what they do to you first. It is when your turn of awakening comes that you know the greatest power is against you, the power that makes the laws and rules, the power that controls the courts that will sentence you.

  In this country you grow up the day you realise the State can do whatever they like to you. And do to vast numbers of us. I’m twelve and have had this realisation ever since I can remember.

  I’m a distance from the tram stop, knowing my time’s limited before my presence is construed as a crime by every possible eye in every window of this street of four-storey tenements. Curtains are like funeral shrouds. Veils disguising evil beings. Shapes, shadows, dark patches in windows are framed pictures of anyone who is an informer.

  Some are in the employ of Internal Security, or Secret Police, or Ministry of the Interior, whatever they call each dreaded government department that inflicts suffering on its citizens by grand design. But most become informers out of spite, to gain revenge over a petty quarrel, a small jealousy, even though the consequence can devastate the victim, their family. Like our family. (We’ll never know who gave my father’s name to the Secret Police, and yet I keep dreaming one day I’ll find out. Then I’ll obliterate that person’s name from the roll of the living.) And some just inform before someone does it to them.

  So, a portion of the population turns on the other; some say it is half and half. I wouldn’t know the percentages, only that we’re a creature turned on itself. We’re a nation deeply divided yet pretending to be proudly Magyar. We’re fucking liars and hypocrites and government oppressors of our own. As if in undeclared civil war, except totally one-sided. And no one really knows the reasons.

  None is exempt from being informer, not your relation, close friend, long-standing neighbour, not sweet little old ladies or friendly old pensioners sucking on pipes, who you’d think were contemplating their sunset years with at least a gladness to be seeing the last of this Rákosi Prime Minister’s hell on earth. No one is exempt and no one is what they seem. We keep getting it sadly right and unjustly wrong about each other all the time — and that’s what they’ve done to us: rotted our souls.

  The endearing face stopped to chat might be trapping you into saying something you’ll regret when your name is passed to the authorities. To work in bureaucracy means you work against the Hungarian people, not for. Your heating pipes freeze over in winter, or burst, and the State landlord doesn’t send repairmen for weeks, months. You make an innocent comment about a government decision, or some new rule at school if you’re a kid, and the State has Secret Police swarming over you within hours, at most days.

  Even within families, each relationship has a qualification expecting it to turn at any given moment. Tamási’s own wife and children informed on him, when my father, his friend, swore Zoltán Tamási was a man he’d trust with his life. Trust, though, is our family creed.

  I think.

  I hope.

  The first people I see get off the yellow tram are elderly, and within a few steps I have them as my enemies; I watch them coming my way, huddled on this warm spring day into their overcoats, and my mind interprets this as reason to be suspicious. Until I see it’s Mr and Mrs Zelk. Good people. That’s what the State has done to us.

  It’s getting to eight o’clock, the tram rush-hour to work is well over; now it’s housewives (why do they bring babies into a world so hostile to them, unless it means they’re on the State side?). A stricken girl, aged about nine, dashes the other way around the corner, late for school, afraid of punishment. My older brother Béla and I have got the day off school. Permission took three weeks and five forms to fill out. But we have the last laugh because being a Wednesday it’ll be compulsory Russian we miss, on this day of my father’s release from prison for criticising the Communist State of Hungary. Which we on the wrong side call a province of Russia.

  We hate Soviets and their tongue forced on ours; we hate their military presence in our city, our country. We hate that our parents slave under the latest Five Year Plan dreamed up in Moscow, a heavy-industry scheme making useless products that are sent to the Soviet Union and returned at inflated prices to the Hungarian government only for stockpiling. It’s regarded as reparation, for our being on the side of the Germans in the Second World War. And so the people fall deeper into poverty. But we hate our own kind far more for what they do to their own.

  Though there are good people, like the Zelk couple, who endured all these years of change, one political tumult to another, two world wars started by our German cousins. Yet the Zelks never surrendered to the other side, even though living under a series of oppressive regi
mes has hunched their shoulders earlier than years might. You can say any anti-government thing you like in front of them and know no Ávós will knock on your door.

  Look at both of them, warning me: don’t be standing around on a school day like this, Attila, it could get you arrested, gaoled on some trumped-up charge. I read all this in just their expressions.

  Mrs Zelk comes near and says my surname first in the formal way: Szabó Attila, Szabó Attila. Then, Tilla, Tilla, why do you hang around in citizen clothes on a school day? You will bring trouble on yourself, the whole street.

  And Mr Zelk adds, When we have had no trouble for — what? — it must be a week now.

  Four days, I correct him. They took the Juhász father and mother away.

  Oh, that’s right. Mrs Zelk responds, And the five children, Lord, they just disappeared.

  And her husband says, Not that they were the most likeable kids on the street. The older boys were like gypsies, thieve everything they set eyes on. Attila, my wife is right, you will bring the Ávós asking questions soon. Why aren’t you at school?

  Their concern is so genuine, the more for possibly endangering themselves: they might be swept up in the same Ávós swoop if we get a bunch even more drunk on their power than usual — the little strutting cunts, nobodies otherwise; how we loath them.

  Mrs Zelk, my papa is coming home.

  No need to say from where. There must be fifty fathers on this street at any given time serving gaol sentences for — what else? — crimes against the State. Our little bald-headed leader is called Hitler without the hair. He’s gone mad on his power, as if he wants to wipe out the half of the population not working for him.

  The Zelks are fearful then, throwing practised flicking eyes in every direction and disguising movements made to look like age.

  You tell your papa from us, we have prayed for him.

  Though my father is no believer, nor I. But these good Christians are of another generation, from long before the Communists made example by gaoling the Catholic Cardinal, Mindszenty.

  I will tell him. He will be glad to hear your words.

  But they have risked enough and are crossing the street to their tenement building, she unlocking the front door; and as they step in I glimpse the courtyard, like an embrace, and I hear their relief as the door shuts quickly after them.

  Papa, where are you? What tram will you be on?

  Every movement in any window, every unmoving human shape veiled by lace or gauze curtain, I see like my time being counted down. He must come soon or I will have to go back home, to Mama, Béla, Grandma Lili, and those massed footsteps again.

  Now the overhead tram wires tighten to say another tram comes, and a yellow snout appears on the curve and straightens. Stops. Only one passenger gets off; he’s carrying but a small cotton sack, and I know the walk, if not the man doing it, for he’s too thin. But that’s his walk, I know it, I know it.

  This is like the start of a movie: the lone man alighting a tram, coming up a city street, where too much misery has been transported over the unyielding hardness of its grey-black cobblestones.

  Now I’m in the movie, feet carrying me towards him, I’m the camera and I’m on that face … trying to place it, to put it in the right slot. Now I’m not the camera, I’m its subject, and I must be frowning and have slowed, almost dragging my feet, as I fight to make that face fit.

  But it doesn’t fit, not with any memory the boy has, yet so familiar he’d know it if it were half-crushed under the wheels of the departing, squeaking tram.

  Now both of us are in real life, and the real life is here, on Havas Street, near the Duna River in the city of Budapest, Hungary, April 1952. And it appears that Sándor Szabó, father of the son struggling to come to grips with what he sees, the father not in any state of recognition, has come home with a terminal illness, thin and gaunt.

  (Oh, Papa, what have they done to you? What have you, bastards, done to my sweet apa?)

  I’VE MADE A decision. I don’t know why my mind chose this time, of all occasions. Just that inside I hear this voice say, enough. I’ve had enough. I will never cry again.

  Enough of crying. Of seeing this, my mama, my grandma, my big brother, all crying. Though maybe it’s what I see behind those eyes drained of colour that once were sparkling sea-blue, the story he can never tell us. I know he can’t.

  Look at the character lines in his face now deep gouges, canyons darkened by their own shadow, I used to call them his tough lines, because they reflected his toughness.

  Maybe I don’t cry because I greeted him first, out there on the street, when he wasn’t expecting me, and when he hugged me I felt not the strength of his love but the weakness of a man who’d been unable to bear things done to him. He felt soft. Bony yet soft.

  Maybe it’s because I am my father’s son, it’s all I heard growing up. I’m my father’s son so much that his draining of soul is my suffering too, his loss of something vital is my loss, and yet I cannot be expected to endure that unless I make some change, make ready within me. I must be strong. I must never cry again.

  Or perhaps it’s that giving up tears is all I have to give, since the authorities have yet to start breaking me. All I know is, I’ve had enough of letting crying get to me, weaken me like these family members. Never again, I swear.

  Even so, seeing him like this is painful beyond endurance. Out on the street I thought I’d spill over. But when we hugged I felt through his emaciated frame a telling, which I must get in this instant or I’ll never again have same understanding.

  It said to me: son, I am in another place now and can’t ever get back.

  In that brief moment Papa took my face in his hands and tried his best to smile the smile of old, I then knew part of him had not come back and was never going to. I knew, no matter how well life might turn for the better, the bastards had achieved at least some of their aim: to take his manhood, his fighting spirit, his fundamental right to be a man with pride and dignity.

  My face cupped in his hands, the smile fast faded, a father, a man to his child he’d always treated like a man from a young age, was telling me without words: I am so sorry, but they got part of me. Part of me is finished.

  Me, with eyes over his bone-protruding shoulders, looking for Ávós, at windows for furtive observers minding our private family business (fuck you all).

  We walked close how we always did, accidentally-on-purpose bumping each other and exchanging little smiles. Just like old times. And I was believing again. No, I think he was believing; except suddenly doubt flooded his face like a drowning.

  By the time we got to the front door, he was in a kind of trance. Not excited, emotional, not even unknowingly cold. He was just like he is now, at the table with our best effort at a feast in front of a man with a fixed stare. He isn’t here.

  I watch him, a man who doesn’t know how to respond to his family’s emotion. He doesn’t even try to pretend, or once say we must understand his awkwardness since normal life has been denied him.

  I watch and watch him, desperate to rid myself of the sense of looking at a stranger in our house. But how can I do otherwise, when we’ve known a different face, every nuance, daily habit, household ritual; heard him make love to our mother, their satisfied laughter afterward, seen him drunk, the good occasions and the few bad ones when we dared not get in his way. This was the man who farted and crapped and burped and cried out in orgasm; whose morning shave was a performance of well-lathered brush, smooth upward strokes of razor-bladed shaver, an eyebrow arching on the opposite side shaved. When Béla and I were younger, we’d pretend he didn’t know we were watching him, and he’d suddenly slap a dab of lather on our noses, or give us a Santa Claus beard, or a soap-tasting kiss on the lips.

  He won’t know what I’ve decided, though if he’d only look at me he’d see that I’m removed from the others’ emotional state. No, I’m not my father’s son now, for I haven’t experienced what he has, they haven’t done enough
to break me. I know why I’ve decided this: it’s because if I do not deny pain then something will snap inside. I’ll either go mad or Rage will get me.

  Rage is an entity who has long resided in me and threatens to take over. It threatens and tempts what I — (or is it Rage?) — think about a lot: murder.

  Not against innocents, of course not. But to end the lives of the Secret Police. I have seen the ÁVH in exposed positions on enough occasions to know I could get away with it. Except my campaign would not last long, they would throw their overwhelming resources at me, hunt me down. Then everyone in this room would suffer, first unimaginable torture, and finally execution.

  Sometimes I think such an end for all of us is preferable to this miserable existence, of worsening poverty and a State propaganda machine that tells us life under Communism gets better all the time, when clearly it doesn’t. Why live like this? Why not go out in a blaze of retaliatory violence?

  But I cannot cause the death of my own family, though I will never again be brought to tears for them either.

  (Oh, Papa, look at what they’ve done to you.)

  BETWEEN US WE have procured something of a feast. Not one that a government official or Secret Policeman would call a feast, but the best we can manage and, surely, better than what Papa has lived on these last two years.

  Mama has made chicken paprika stew, of boiled necks, giblets, feet and bones flavoured with paprika and garlic, thickened with flour. She works at a chicken-processing factory, plucking feathers when the carcasses come out of a scalding bath. Factory employees earn tokens, which must accumulate to acquire a whole bird. No mention is made about the bulk of chickens being railed to the Soviet Union and officials having their own shops full of whole chickens, the best meats, the best of any food. But Mama is always saying we mustn’t let them make our culture one of endless complaint, not even if we are starving.

  Grandma Lili has made a half-day round trip by train to obtain a dozen eggs and some smoked pork sausage from old farm friends. She and Grandpa had been potato growers out in the country, but had to walk away from their land and let those the government considered peasants take it over. Now she and Grandpa are just another couple of faceless city dwellers, living on memories and a subsistence pension.