Budapest
Wednesday, October 12, 1988
The day he arrived was one only he would remember: cloud-covered, sticky, unending. Attila stood beneath the small black Departures board suspended between tracks seven and eight from the sloping, steel-beamed, grimy glass ceiling of the Keleti train station. People streamed around him like a river over a rock. Bocsánat, they said. Excuse me. According to the train schedule, a traveler could even go to Vienna, at least if he had the right papers. Attila was content just to ponder it. Four hours ago, he should have died. Bocsánat, he responded, smiling.
Some of the women smiled back. Not bad, this guy with the soft whisker-sprouting face, standing unharried in the vortex of Budapest’s primary transportation hub. He carried nothing but his determination. Attila’s straight dark bangs, carelessly pushed underwear-model-style to one side, could even have passed for cutting-edge; new fashions were arriving quickly now that some of the Western boutiques had been allowed to stake their claim of Budapest real estate. But… was that a pair of overalls? It was hard to tell exactly what he was wearing. His clothes were striped with black grease, as if he’d just stepped out of an oil well. Sorry, but they had a train to catch.
He didn’t care. He didn’t want to go anywhere. Attila Ambrus had long known that if he ever got to Hungary, he would never leave. Sure, it was still communist terrain, but he was finally among his own—a very Hungarian Hungarian who had never, until today, been to Hungary. To his eager ears, even the most banal statement that afternoon was a shrstk-hat-chop sonata, the syncopated conflagration of consonants, accents, and unabashed umlauts an auditory orgy.
Daylight faded. He walked down a stairwell to the city mall, a dingy concourse beneath the street lined with kiosks offering the best vendibles on the market: at the music booth, Madonna, Jefferson Star-ship, and Komár László Sings Elvis Presley cassettes; at the feet of wrinkled women with bulbous noses and black shawls, waist-high sacks of sunflower seeds; and at the newsstand, crossword-puzzle books with naked women on the cover and a selection of Hungarian-language newspapers, trumpeting the impending arrival in Budapest of U.S. deputy secretary of state John Whitehead. Earlier that day in Berlin, Whitehead had implored East German authorities to tear down “that gray, monstrous snake,” the Berlin Wall.
Attila swiped a postcard: Budapest at night, when you saw only what they illuminated—the windows of the stately former Hapsburg palace twinkling like a thousand cubic zirconias over the electric golden garland that outlined the Széchenyi Bridge. With a pen borrowed from the nearby subway ticket counter, he wrote on the back of the card, Itt vagyok—I’m here— and stuck it in his back pocket to mail later.
When night fell, the proprietors padlocked their wooden booths and went home. The Gypsy women tied up their sunflower sacks and curled into the station’s dank corners. The cool cement hall was almost quiet when a lone busker on a violin appeared at the subway entrance playing the theme to Attila’s favorite TV show, those Communist Party–approved darlings of contemporary Eastern Europe, The Flint-stones. There were no police around and those he had seen earlier appeared neither armed nor dangerous. Relieved, Attila sat down against the wall, singing himself a lullaby: Let’s have a doo time, a dabba doo time. Let’s have a gay old time!
In the morning he awoke in a slump at the edge of a people stampede with a stiff neck and a six-part question. He went outside to where the cabbies were lined up in black-and-white-checkered Russian Zhigulis and let it fly: Where might he find some food, clothes, money, a job, an ID, and a place to live?
The answer to all six was 55 Népköztársaság, just a few doors down from the infamous Communist Party headquarters building, from which a summons might still be interpreted as a memo to cancel your plans and pack a toothbrush. As the Thursday workday began, Attila set out into the linty fall air. The city was like a bustling ghost town, an inhabited shell of the place it had been at the turn of the twentieth century, when it was the fastest-growing city in Europe. Bullet-pocked five- and six-story fin de siècle limestone buildings loomed over the sidewalk like uncalled witnesses to the carnage of the 1945 Soviet “liberation” and the unsuccessful 1956 uprising. It was never quite clear if the scars remained as a warning or as evidence that there were no quick fixes in the lands of the Red Star.
Many of the street names were Russian, which Attila assumed explained why he had to zigzag back and forth in order to maintain the direction in which he’d been pointed. On the looping, traffic-choked avenues, ottoman-size automobiles and the occasional brightly colored BMW or Mercedes coursed like clots through damaged arteries. On the diagonal side streets, boys on bikes went bumping along the uneven black stone and men smoking Multifilters stood in patches of sunlight.
When he reached Népköztársaság (which was only a year away from reclaiming its original name, Andrássy) he turned left onto the wide, leafy boulevard that was modeled after Paris’s Champs-Elysées. Above him, the crenellated windows of the baroque attic roofs looked out from their curved perches like sunken eyes. Walking in the opposite direction of the statue-filled Heroes’ Square, where Chief Árpád and the seven other founding fathers of Hungary rode bronze horses, Attila passed the renowned M
vész café and confectionery, whose patrons debated the merits of democracy while employing aluminum spoons to shovel sugar into their espressos; the nineteenth-century Opera Pharmacy, where pitchers of water sat on the counters for those who couldn’t wait to take their medication; and the neoclassical State Opera House, roosted atop a swath of marble steps, behind a statue of Liszt. Every few minutes a banana-yellow tram, linked to a network of elevated cables, clanked to a stop and deposited its passengers onto a cement island in the middle of an intersecting avenue, there in the convenient, high-occupancy, and fashionably invadable neighborhood of dead central Europe.
At number 55, Attila stopped. Under a small red, white, and green Hungarian coat of arms, a sign read, BEVÁNDORLÁSI HIVATAL—Immigration Office. He’d made it.
“Excuse me,” he said to the woman sitting behind the counter on the second floor.
“Take a number.”
He looked around. The small room was empty. Nevertheless, he took a numbered square from the stack of paper and sat down on a bench.
A few minutes later, with the atonal fervor of the condemned, she called his number. “Fill this out,” she said, handing over a two-page form and a pencil.
Name: Attila Ambrus
Place of birth: Csíkszereda, Romania
Date of birth: October 6, 1967
Member of associations: UTC KISZ
(Communist Youth Association)
And so on.
At the bottom of the second page was a paragraph stating that if he renounced his foreign citizenship, he could not be involved in any political activities in Hungary and that he would respect the laws of the land. Below it Attila volunteered, “Hereby I state that I do not want to return to Romania. Never again. I would like to live in Hungary as an upstanding man. I accept that I cannot get involved in any political stuff.”
He left only one question blank: Have you ever been prosecuted before?
He signed his name in tall half-cursive lettering that leaned exaggeratedly backward as if laboring in a headwind, then brought the form back to the woman. Told to wait, he returned to the unforgiving bench.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Three hours later a man in an olive green Party uniform with silver buttons down the front appeared from behind a door and asked him to follow. All too familiar with state-sponsored hospitality, Attila had already begun making mental notes of potential escapes from the building, and as they walked, he added a couple more windows and a likely back hallway to his list.
He was ushered into a windowless room with a desk upon which two small flags sprouted from a coffee mug—one bearing the communist Hammer and Sickle, the other the horizontal red, white, and green stripes of Hungary. The dark wood furniture whispered, Shoot me.
“Mr. Ambrus,” the officer said, sitting down behind the desk and pointing for his subject to take a seat. He had Attila’s forms in a brown folder, marked by his case number, 0224-877-6.
“Yes, Comrade,” Attila answered.
Comrade? Was this peasant serious? “You are from Erdély [Transylvania]?” the man asked.
“Yes, Comrade,” Attila said.
“Why do you make this request for temporary residence in Hungary?”
“Because I would like to stay in Hungary and live here,” Attila said. “And with time I would like to get Hungarian citizenship.”
“How do you plan to make a living?” the officer asked, unmoved.
“I would like to work,” Attila stated. “In Romania there’s no point trying to make ends meet.” Bureaucrats, Attila thought. Did he need to spell out hell for him, too? Attila assumed he knew only bits and pieces of current events, but from what he understood, even the United States had condemned Romanian president Nicolae Ceau
escu for his human rights abuses against the Hungarians living in Romania. He’d heard it himself on an illegal shortwave radio, tucked comfortably in a patch of beech trees, on the far-reaching signal from Radio Budapest. Now he wondered if he’d taken the news too much for granted.
“Have you ever been prosecuted before?” the officer asked, eyeing Attila.
“No, Comrade,” Attila said, lying.
The man paused, then continued. “Do you have a profession?”
That was a tough one. “After school I went to work as an electrician,” Attila said, stretching the traditional definitions of school, work, and electrician. “But not long afterward they took me to be a soldier. For a year and four months I was a member of the Romanian army. After that I started to work again, but even then it was my intention to live in Hungary. And I succeeded because I escaped. And now I’m here…. In Hungary!
“Bocsánat,” Attila added, apologizing that the last two words—in Hungary!—had jumped out of him like a victory toast.
“So you did not come on a visa, then,” the man noted coolly. “Did you come across the border on foot?”
“No, Comrade.”
“How did you come, then?”
Attila shifted in his seat. According to the Radio Budapest report he’d believed, Hungary was admitting all of its Hungarian brethren who made it out of Romania, with or without the paperwork. But it was a tenuous time. A few months earlier, in May of 1988, János Kádár, the apparatchik who had led Hungary for the past thirty-two years, had been ousted by the forward-thinking Hungarian nomenklatura in favor of a bickering collection of reformers and opportunists, each hoping to make history as the man to lead Hungary from communism. But not all of Hungary’s Communist Party tentacles were ready to play dead. In June, Budapest police had beaten about a hundred people who were trying to publicly commemorate the thirty-year anniversary of the death of Imre Nagy, the former Hungarian prime minister who was hanged for his role as an instigator of the 1956 uprising. And while Attila pondered his fate that morning in the airless immigration office, Hungary’s neighbor to the north, Czechoslovakia, watched as Moscow sacked its newly appointed reform-minded leader in favor of another iron-fisted lackey.
Romania, as Attila could report, was even less predictable. The country of 23 million had become the closest thing there was to a police state in communist Europe. Ceauescu’s secret police force, the Securitate, patrolled the cities in machine-gun-toting militias and had one in every seven citizens working for it as an informant. Food was closely rationed: each household received a cup of oil and sugar and one pound of an item referred to as meat every month. Even in the notoriously frigid winters, homes were allowed only two hours of heat per night. Some had taken to calling their country Ceauswitz.
Of course, it wasn’t only the ethnic Hungarians who were living in fear and misery, but they had the right to be especially terrified. Transylvania (population, 7 million), where almost all of Romania’s 2 million Hungarians lived, was a highly prized and historic piece of land that both Hungary and Romania claimed was the birthplace of their culture. And Romania, an independent state only since 1878, believed its ancestors, the Dacians of Rome, had lived there seven hundred years before Hungary’s Chief Árpád. If you were one of Romania’s Hungarians circa 1988, there were an increasing number of reasons you might suddenly disappear from society, among them the crime of speaking Hungarian.
Ceauescu’s recent treatment of Hungary’s displaced nationals had so enraged Hungarians in Hungary that some favored going to war with Romania over Transylvania. Ceauescu seemed ready. He had shuttered his embassy in Budapest and evicted Hungary’s Transylvania-based consulate from Romania. So although there was in fact a program in Hungary, with Red Cross funding, to resettle Hungarian refugees, or menekült, from Romania, the Hungarian authorities were necessarily suspicious of anyone associated with Ceauescu territory. Sure, Attila spoke good—if somewhat anachronistic—Hungarian. But so might anyone with no identification and an ulterior motive.
The door swung open and an older man entered the room. Same drab uniform except for the addition of blue ribbons on the shoulders and a stiff officer’s cap. Attila stood as the man moved behind the desk and sat down beside his poker-faced confederate.
“Sit,” he told Attila brusquely. “Mr. Ambrus, I’ve been reviewing your application form for a temporary residence permit.”
He handed Attila a clipboard and asked him to write down his account of how he had arrived in Hungary. Kérem, he added. Please.
The room’s only exit was the door on the other side of the desk, where the officer across from Attila sat. Attila didn’t know what he’d done that had raised the suspicion of his interrogators, but he had little choice now but to tell the saga of the past few weeks again and hope for the best. He picked up a pencil and wrote down his account while the officials watched. Then he passed the clipboard across the desk. The senior officer read through the pages with a wan smile, then put the clipboard back down and leaned forward on his elbows. “Listen, Comrade,” he said to Attila. “Do you expect us to believe this story?”