1.
George was fast asleep when Josef returned early to the apartment. I had so wanted to tell George of the husband who’d been forced to divorce me, to tell him of my past, but the moment never came, never seemed the right time. I wondered whether there’d ever be a right time. The last thing I wanted was for the two men to meet before I had had chance to explain but when Josef knocked on the door at ten in the morning, it was too late, the chance had gone; the meeting was now inevitable.
Josef lingered on the threshold and for a moment I felt I could have sent him away. Part of me wanted to, part of me wanted to confine him to the past where I felt he belonged. Instead, I gave in and invited him in. He apologised (unnecessarily) for his absence and told me that people were going back to work, the strike was as good as over but the mood still swung between hope and fear – the Russians were leaving / the Russians were coming back. No one, he said, seemed to know.
I offered to make coffee and as I waited for the pan of water to boil I found myself smiling, almost laughing, at the ridiculous situation I’d put myself in. Here, in the apartment, were the two men of my life, one current, the other past, each unaware of the other’s presence. But the saddest part of all was that I loved one as a brother and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the other.
‘Something amuses you, Eva?’
‘No, it’s nothing.’
‘I picked up one of these new newspapers. There’s so many to choose from now.’
‘It was easier when there was only the Free People.’
‘Eva, you can’t mean that. That mouthpiece of the Party served no one but itself.’
‘You used to digest it every day.’
‘It helped me survive. But these new ones, they speak the truth; they have opinions of their own. OK, the writing leaves something to be desired but you can’t fault the sentiment. Some of them are only a page or two.’
‘Your coffee.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What do we do, Josef?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You and me. The future. Our future.’
‘I don’t know.’ He stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee. ‘I guess we’ll have to see how the dust settles and decide from there.’
‘Aren’t you frightened of the future?’
‘I’m more frightened of my past.’
‘The past.’ I felt my stomach tighten. ‘We don’t really go there, do we? We never talk of the past.’
‘You know I’d rather not.’
‘But I do.’
‘There’s no point, woman. You tell me, what would be the point?’
‘I suffered, Josef. And yet, seven years on, we’ve never discussed it.’
‘I’ve never wanted to.’
‘But have you never thought of what I might want? No, more than want – need. We lost a baby, Josef, yet I’ve never been able to talk to you about it.’
‘For goodness sake, Eva, it was a long time ago. Surely you’ve got over it by now.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve never said how if affected you, you never told me –’
‘OK, if you must know, it didn’t affect me very much at all. There – I’ve said it. Eva, it’s not as if I got to know her. She didn’t make it and I’m sorry about that but we’ve lived through war, oppression and now, by the looks of it, a revolution as we speak. I’ve been tortured, had my dignity thrown out the window and was locked up for six years in conditions I wouldn’t keep a pig in. And yet we always have to come back to a person who never was.’
‘Our daughter.’
‘Yes, our daughter.’
‘You never think of her?’
He shook his head.
‘I thought...’
‘You thought what, Eva?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know any more.’
I don’t know how long George had been there, standing in his dressing gown, his hair eschew, examining the stranger sitting at the table. I felt my stomach tighten. ‘George, I didn’t see you.’
‘Who’s this?’ he asked.
Josef rose to his feet, glancing at both George and me.
‘George, I’m sorry, let me introduce you, this is... this is Josef, my husband.’
‘Your husband?’ George walked over in slow deliberate strides, his shoelaces undone, his eyes fixed on Josef.
‘Josef’s been away for a few years,’ I said, using the familiar euphemism.
‘How long?’
‘Six years.’
‘Long enough.’
‘Yes.’
‘Gyűjtőfogház Prison?’
Josef nodded.
George spun on his heels and said to me, ‘Is that what you were trying to tell me yesterday, when you talked about knowing only the edges of each other’s past?’
‘Yes. It was.’ I felt drained. I didn’t want another confrontation.
Josef looked awkward. ‘I’m sorry but do you... you both live here?’
‘Yes,’ said George.
‘We’re flatmates,’ I said. ‘There’re three of us. There used to be many more but they’ve all gone one by one.’
‘I see.’ He paused, looking from George to me. ‘The last thing I want is to...’ he grappled for the word, ‘to upset your arrangements. Perhaps, it’d be best if I left.’
‘Perhaps it would be,’ said George. ‘How long have you been married?’
‘Well, technically we’re divorced but we got married in forty-six,’ said Josef.
George stared through him, absorbing the situation, pondering his next move. ‘Ten years.’ He turned to me, shaking his head. ‘You never said it was that long.’
‘I tried to – yesterday.’
‘I don’t know what... If you excuse me, I think I need some air.’
‘George, you don’t have to go.’ I didn’t want him to leave, not now.
‘I won’t be long but I...’ He looked at me and then at Josef. He tried to smile.
‘Are you OK, George?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry for everything.’
2.
They’d been out in the forests for five days now, fighting off the cold and living on meagre rations; waiting for orders that never came while the Soviet Politburo made up their mind. Rumour followed counter-rumour: they were withdrawing; they were going back in; more tank divisions were pouring into Hungary; a final push was only a matter of days away. No one knew for sure, least of all the colonel. The Hungarians, surely, had gone beyond the point of compromise. If Khrushchev had truly accepted the Hungarians’ position, they would have been ordered out by now. But still no order came, one way or the other.
Their presence was no secret and the locals routinely came up to see them and ask what they were still doing in their country. Even these peasants seemed convinced that more Russian tanks were coming in than going out. Valentin heard the colonel tell them that the soldiers were still here in order to ensure the safe evacuation of Soviet citizens living in Hungary. So, they asked, why are you hiding away in the forest? The colonel had no answer. Waiting for orders was his only retort.
But at least they were away from the insurgents. How many people had he killed out there in Budapest? He couldn’t say, not because he’d lost count but because it was impossible to estimate while stuck in the dark coffin of a T-54. He hadn’t given it any thought until now; too wrapped up in the thrill and the fright of battle, too concerned for his own skin to worry about the enemy’s. Valentin had narrowly missed out on going to Korea so this was his first experience of armed combat. In his mind he referred to it as armed combat because he couldn’t, in all consciousness, call it war. Not when the enemy consisted of ordinary citizens, women and children – so many children, many as young as nine or ten. He couldn’t have credited children with such valour, such a keen disregard for their own lives. What were they fighting for? Did they truly believe in their cause or was it, for them, simply a grand adventure? They all admired the way the kids attacked the tanks with their ingenious methods – pouring petrol in the paths of the tanks and then setting alight to it; jam on the tank windscreens; the hanging saucepans impersonating anti-tank guns, their highly effective petrol bombs. (He often wondered whether Vyacheslav Molotov, high ranking dignitary of the Soviet Politburo, saw it as a compliment that his name was so associated with homemade petrol bombs.) The tank crews soon scratched away the word ‘petrol’ from the petrol caps. But the admiration for the children’s courage came only with the safety of time and distance. At the time they were considered as rats – small, lethal and unpredictable; and, like vermin, they sought any way to exterminate them. The thought made him shudder with shame now – he saw too many dead children, too many bearing unimaginable wounds.
And the women too. But when Valentin thought of the female fighters, his only thought was of the red head at the bonfire, valiantly standing her ground while her comrades fell. (Although he tended now to think his colleagues right – it was not so much valour but the act of a woman demented by battle).
The whole city, the whole country, had been activated by the Soviet presence and the justice of their cause. He saw it more with each passing day. At first, only the young men and the fearless street kids carried their fight, but then, as the days progressed, more and more seemed prepared to join the affray – men and women of all walks of life flocked to the cause, the young and the old joining together. From the neutral man’s point of view, it was an inspiring sight – only he wasn’t neutral.
The general consensus of the Russian soldiers was that they, the tank regiments, were engaged in the wrong type of war. It wasn’t the place for tanks patrolling the streets, providing easy targets for snipers and ambushes; what they needed was infantry, soldiers on foot and in mass, able to face the enemy on equal terms. But the Soviet military authorities were not ones who listened to the voices of their soldiers.
Did he want to go back in? No, of course not. Who’d want to relive that experience; to kill the children, the ordinary citizens, or face death at their hands? He wanted to get back to Moscow, collect a medal, and return to the routine he’d wanted to escape from.
But a part of him did want to go back; a part that however hard he tried to repress, was always there, the romantic in him, the part lacking any sense of reality, lurking, keeping him awake at night, telling him things might turn out all right when he knew damn well that it was an impossibility. But the thought was still there, entrenched in his mind that there was always the chance, a small chance, he might see her again – just one last time.
3.
George had known, of course, he’d always known. But that didn’t make anything easier. Why, like a locked diary, had she kept her past hidden from him; why, when he’d known it to be there, had he not insisted she told him? She knew all there was to know of him – his father, his football, the years of incarceration – but he knew so little of her. Their knowledge of each other swung unfairly to her advantage.
George found himself in City Park and wondered how he’d managed to walk so far in such a daze. It felt like a state holiday – despite the cold the park was again full of families with picnics, children playing, people walking their dogs. He found a bench and sat down. A toy boomerang landed next to him. Picking it up, he saw two girls of about ten waving to him, asking for it back. He threw it but of course it went in totally the wrong direction and the girl had to run further to retrieve it. He sat back down feeling self-conscious and slightly embarrassed.
So, this Josef was Eva’s husband. With that certain fact came a hundred questions – what did this man’s reappearance mean? What did it mean to Eva? Had theirs been a happy marriage, was it to continue? Did she love him? Somehow, he thought not. But equally, George knew she that didn’t love him either. Although somehow it worked. They’d floated together, the flotsam of wrecked lives, clinging onto each other. Love was not a necessity. But companionship was.
And now her husband was back, and Eva had accepted him back. He regretted now his hasty departure – he knew it’d been motivated in part by a sense of melodrama. And what good had it done him, save leave him with a cauldron of questions, and a heart perturbed more by this downturn in events than by Soviet tanks? And now, here he was, feeling somewhat foolish, sitting in a park waiting and wishing things were as they were, whilst around him, people passed by, celebrating their victory and talking excitedly of a liberated future. He felt a fraud – embarrassed that such a minor distraction in his domestic life had so vehemently diminished his revolutionary fervour. He stood up and the world returned into focus – the park, the picnics, Stalin’s boots, the revolution. As he left, George glanced back. The girls had resumed their game of boomerang.
He walked the streets, gawking at the post-revolution chaos that scarred the city, occasionally stopping to read one of the many new newspapers plastered up on walls or shop fronts. A weak sun filtered through the haze of clouds; people were out on the streets, a whole city trying to make sense of the past few days, trying to fathom what the future held for them. The optimists clapped each other on the back, and talked excitedly of elections and democracy; the pessimists shook their heads at their light-headed friends, predicting an imminent return of the Russian tanks (600 or more, some said). He saw a queue of people outside a Post Office – people waiting to withdraw their life savings. A few isolated tank crews remained but no one paid them much attention save asking the soldiers why they were still there, the evasiveness of their answers taken as ignorance. Some of Russians still thought they were in Berlin or Prague. Nagy, some reckoned, was already negotiating Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. It seemed too good to be true; he couldn’t equate the scenes of misery that lay at every corner with the bright new, Soviet-free society that so many enthused about.
No street was free of corpses; bodies lay statuesque, covered in coats or Hungarian flags, or sprinkled with lime. People strolled from one to another, their hands clasped over their mouths, lifting the coats, looking for a loved one. The dead AVOs or pro-Soviets that had the fortune to die from a bullet rather than suffer at the hands of the lynch mob had their chests skewered with pictures of Stalin or Rakosi.
He was now back in the street of the apartment, having walked a huge circle. So, this husband of Eva’s must have been among those released from the city jails a few days before – the much-feted release of the totalitarian victims. Josef was one of them. The two men had much in common. It irked him when he recalled the expression on the man’s face as he sat there in his apartment, at his table, being waited on by Eva, drinking what was left of his coffee. Who’s been sleeping in my bed? At the time he hadn’t really noticed it but when he relived the scene in his mind (as he’d done so many times already), he could almost feel the smug triumph in Josef’s eyes, the radiance of irritating satisfaction. And what was upsetting him was that Eva failed to see it. The man was manipulating her.
So immersed was George in his role of self-pitying victim, it took him a few seconds to register that the object of his resentment was walking briskly towards him wearing one of his coats.
Not wanting to appear as if he’d been waiting on the street, he made to move but hesitated, not sure of what direction to go in. It’d seemed more natural, he thought, to look as though he was walking away from the apartment – no, towards it. In his indecision, he spun round and virtually collided with Josef. Josef glanced up, muttered an apology, and took a few steps before halting in, what George considered later, a rather exaggerated fashion. He turned slowly, his wizard-like finger pointing accusingly at George, his eyes flashing with delighted recognition, ‘It’s you, the usurper.’
Usurper? The word sliced through him with its mocking sharpness. ‘I was...’
‘Yes?’
‘Going home,’ he said firmly, hoping the quiver in his voice didn’t sound as clearly as he feared.
‘Going home, indeed!’ For a man so thin and fragile after his years locked away, he possessed a brittle bitterness that George found unnerving. ‘Going home to my wife, perhaps?’
‘You’re divorced.’
‘Only in the eyes of the authorities. But listen...’ He stepped closer, an artificial smile spreading across his face. ‘I wanted to thank you.’
‘What d’you mean?’
He quickly looked left and right as if frightened of being overheard and said, ‘For looking after Eva – you know, while I was detained.’
‘I don’t –’
‘It must’ve been difficult for her but you took her on, gave her shelter, so to speak, and that took guts, I’m sure. I don’t mean you harm, calling you usurper, that was wicked of me, I’m sorry. But listen, George – it is George, isn’t it? – Go home now, back to your own life if it still exists amongst all of this. I can take over from here.’
‘You don’t understand –’
‘But I do, though, George. You’re fond of her, I appreciate that, she’s a lovely woman. But now that I’m back – she and I, well, we need time together, you know, get to know each other again as man and wife.’
‘She no longer wants you.’
‘How can you say that? How do you know – have you asked?’
‘Not in so many –’
‘Exactly. I mean, how well do you actually know this woman, George? We met in forty-five, Eva and I, and together we fought the Nazis, together we lived through communism. Together we survived the baby...’
‘The baby?’ The words fell like heavy stones.
‘Yes, the baby. She never told you? No, she wouldn’t have. No one knew really, just us.’ The words so pitifully said, could not disguise the sparkle of renewed triumph in Josef’s eyes.
A couple walked by, arm in arm, rifles slung casually over shoulders, her laugh reaching to the sky. ‘You’re lying,’ said George.
Josef, this delicate man, seemed possessed of an anger that dwarfed George’s own sense of injured disbelief. ‘You truly think I would lie about such a thing?’ he said. ‘You think I would make up such a story in order to score petty points over you? Go away, you silly boy, come back when you’re a proper man, when you know something of life.’
George stared at him, at Josef’s hard detached expression, desperately wanting to articulate something to diminish this man but with his mind suddenly numb, nothing came. He looked up briefly at the apartment window and wondered what Eva was doing at that moment, whether she was aware of him and Josef together so close to her. He looked back at Josef, whose expression had remained exactly the same. Involuntarily, he found himself taking a step back, then another, and a third. With the word, baby, echoing in his mind, George withdrew, his dignity in tatters.