BIRDS OF PASSAGE. Chapter 1: The Last Sunday of October, 1990
Gábor Marton is staring at the ceiling of his apartment on the Hill of Roses. He has his wire-rimmed glasses in one outstretched hand, and a lit cigarette in the other. The windows and doors are closed. Cecília, his favourite sparrow, is swooping back and forth, lower and lower, between the bookshelf and the tapestry on the wall.
Gábor is forty-eight. His cropped hair is grey, the same colour as the worn carpeting he’s lying on. In the fading light of late afternoon, his head seems infinite. His entire body, the ashtray, the packet of Marlboros, the cardboard and scissors and glue, all the debris, all the furniture, every single thing on the floor seems to nestle in the hairs of his head.
In a moment Cecília will alight on his hand. She will stay there for a while, only slightly nervous, and then fly away again to the edge of the desk and watch him from a safe distance. The other birds follow this flirtation with pretended nonchalance from the carved moulding on top of the bookcase. The books are all pushed back to keep them out of the way of the droppings that have spattered the room. The glossy foreign editions of Gábor’s own plays, translated into a dozen languages, crowd the top shelf. Closer to hand are the original Hungarian editions. Slim volumes, raggedly produced on the old samizdat printing press, they belong to the past.
Music has been drifting into the living room for some time from the other side of the bedroom door. Veronika has woken up and turned on Bartók Radio. Harsh and discordant, the music is punctuated at unpredictable intervals by the rattle of a percussion instrument that Gábor knows from somewhere. The effect is haphazard, like an accident of sound. In fact, it dawns on him, he knows the composer, Gyöngyösi, who died just last year. Gábor had met Gyöngyösi’s son, Rudi, once or twice when they were both students, but it was later — about the time of Charter 77 — that he got to know Gyöngyösi himself, and to hail him as an ally in the fight for human rights.
Gábor listens to the music for a moment. An unsettling late work, dating from the early eighties, when Gyöngyösi was at the height of his fame. If not, perhaps, of his powers. Gábor wouldn’t know. That percussion sound is distinctive, of course, in its thin, unsatisfactory way, but Gábor has no ear for this kind of music. His taste in theatre, in painting, and in poetry is eclectic; not in music. He appreciates music with depth and harmony; he has a passion for the opera. Experimental music doesn’t appeal to him at all.
Veronika, who is twenty-seven, has been sleeping a great deal recently. She goes to bed early, rises late, and often sleeps in the afternoon. She is an actor and, like most theatre artists in Budapest nowadays, she is out of work. This troubles Gábor more than it troubles her. Veronika and Gábor have been married a little more than a year.
Suddenly irritated, Gábor puts on his glasses and gets up off the floor. Tall and still strong enough that his thinness is attractive, he has the lack of self-consciousness of a man who has always looked good. All around him on the carpet are little papier-maché figures and the sets he has been building out of cardboard. He’s just at the early stages of work on a new project. He says “project” to himself because he has begun a novel, for the first time in his life, and he is still tentative about it. He does not yet know where this new work will lead him, or if he can really do it; he knows only that he has to write some new kind of thing, different from anything elsemhe has written.
Pausing, out of long habit, at the window of his apartment, Gábor surveys the scene down the steep little hillside street. He must have missed the frail man. Every day from this window Gábor sees a man limping up the hill, leaning heavily on a walking stick and holding his other arm across his chest. Scarcely older than Gábor himself, he has the slow, painful movements of a man recovering from radical surgery, doggedly determined to regain his strength and survive. He must live nearby — he certainly can’t walk far, not at that pace, with that gait — but Gábor knows him only by sight. Every day, watching him draw near to the pothole in the road, Gábor fears for an instant that the man will stumble into it. On several occasions, Gábor has been on the point of opening the window to call down a warning when the man sidesteps the danger just in time. Gábor is relieved. He wouldn’t want to see the man fall, but he has no desire, either, to enter into any kind of social contact with him.
Golya Steps is deserted, and Gábor turns his attention to the white stucco villa on the other side of the street. The shapeless figure his now widowed sister Eszter is bending over her ironing board. Her son no doubt is practising his oboe in the back room as usual. Alice, the energetic Canadian woman who lives upstairs from Eszter, on the main floor inthe villa, must have gone out. There is no sign of her yet, but she’s sure to reappear at any moment.
Gábor has a kind of intuition that sometimes surprises him. Time and again in his life he has seen a man’s face materialize unexpectedly out of the past, only to find a letter from the man in his mailbox that very morning — or only to bump into him that very evening at the theatre. Time and again he has thought of a woman the very instant before the telephone rings and he hears her voice.
When a graceful movement catches Gábor’s eye, he shifts his gaze to where a hawk is gliding over the field at the bottom of Gólya Steps.
It’s always been the best spot around, that field, and it’s a wonder it was never developed. Not that it was completely forgotten. The trees that Gábor climbed as a boy were torn down decades ago, and the land cleared for building. Plans must have been made for the field. But somehow or other it survived and just developed in its own way.
The old wire fence still sags inward from the road where the buses bully Zsigulis and little Polski Fiats out of their way in their hurry to get back down to Moscow Square. The cracks in the walls of the old yellow mansion at one corner are a little longer, the abandoned house on another corner is surrounded by ever thicker brambles, and the field spreading down to the dirt road and the Hungarian National Agricultural Institute leads a more and more intricate secret life.
This field is home, in its own disorderly way, to a substantial urban population of insects, caterpillars, spiders, ticks, birds, field- mice, rats, and moles. A family of ferrets, too, happier in lonelier fields, has been driven to the capital to forage for the food they can no longer easily find in the wild. When the light of this October day fades, the most daring of the ferrets will scan the sky and venture forth.
This whole population has settled like silt at the bottom of the field, as far from the rumble of the buses and cars as the seedy, crowded conditions allow. A lane separates the lower end of the field from the monumental brick buildings and the chicken coops of the Institute. Unlike all the other thoroughfares of the district, and perhaps of all of Budapest, this lane is unpaved, and it carries no street sign. Only the city’s mapmakers and long-time inhabitants of the district know that it was named Prézsház Street after the impressively weathered but now unused old wine press just inside the Institute grounds.
It’s anyone’s guess what will become of the field now. For a while during the summer there were rumours that it had been sold, that the new American ambassador’s residence would be built here. Surveyors came out one afternoon, and two tall men in grey suits and precisely cut hair, obviously Americans, talked with them for a while. But then they all went away, leaving behind them only rumours. The site is certainly a good size, big enough for a sizable parking area near inside a high, electronically monitored fence big enough for heavily armed guards to remain invisible from the great windows during a glittering reception.
What those tall men will have learned that afternoon, though, is that the whole slope, this whole side of the Hill of Roses, is slowly, almost imperceptibly, sliding down into the valley. A few millimetres a year, no more than that. The old stuccoed villas, the elementary school, the abandoned house, the Institute, the great poplars and chestnuts and plum trees on all the hillside streets will still be standing a hundred years hence, just a little more fissured and twisted, under just a little more strain. But, even so, those men must have asked each other, is this the place to build? And, as month follows month with no further sign of them, it is possible to hope that the threat of the hillside’s small, irregular slide may have averted catastrophe.
Gábor never tires of this view across the valley to where lights are coming on here and there in apartment buildings and villas peppering the far hills, but he is searching now for any sign of movement. None. The valley has the stillness of a photograph. The sun is sinking over János Hill with its squat look-out tower, and over the hills named after Liberty and God, Fairies and Swabians. Gábor casts his eyes north towards the distant Börzsöny mountains and the Slovakian border. Everwhere it is quiet, with the eerie quietness of a day entirely without traffic.
So the standstill continues. It was too much to expect otherwise. Over on the other side of Castle Hill, the crowded inner city on the flat plain of Pests prawls eastward as far as the eye can see. So very still: not a car, not a truck, not a bus is on the move.
And the air. It’s not just the quiet, as this Sunday afternoon turns into a Sunday evening: the air is peculiarly clear. Of course the air is always better here, high over the hillside, than it is on the congested streets of the inner city. And then, too, a Sunday does move slowly. But even on a Sunday there would normally be cars, here and there, and a slow, reluctant bus wheezing up the hill from Moscow Square.
It is quieter and clearer on this particular afternoon than at any time in Gábor’s memory. This isn’t just because it is a Sunday: it’s because it is the last Sunday of October, 1990, the weekend of the taxi strike. The quiet is ominous, and nothing but the air is clear, for Hungary is in the grip of a political crisis graver than any it has seen since the Revolution in 1956.
Every main road in the whole country has been barricaded, and the only way to cross the city is to fly or move underground. It is enough to make Hungarians despair. When will life here ever be normal again? The summer past was a summer of drought, the summer to come will be a summer of floods.
Three days ago, on Thursday morning, the government made a public announcement that it would not increase the price of gasoline. On Thursday evening it increased the price of gasoline by 67%. The taxi drivers promptly organized their blockade in protest.
This is the government that the people themselves voted into power in the spring, in the first free elections since the Communist regime begged the pardon of Hungarians and faded ruefully into history. This new centre-right government has no experience of government — how could it have acquired such experience? — so Gábor’s party, one of the mainstays of the liberal opposition, blames it for the crisis. Gábor sits as an opposition Member of Parliament,
and he is supposed to be downtown at this very moment at an emergency caucus meeting of the Hungarian Civic Party on Október 6 Street.
Unlike the government itself, the opposition coalition parties have lots of experience: experience of opposition, at least, unofficial opposition. As dissident activists under the old regime, they were in and out of jail, in and out of Paris and New York and small liberal colleges in New England. But they have no real experience with democracy either. There have been nasty disputes, with some of the old friends falling away, others joining the governing party. And they are the bitterest of enemies, the government and the opposition, bitter and vindictive.
In private, the government spokesmen curse. In front of the cameras they blast the opposition. How irresponsible those liberals are! They are capitalizing on anarchy! But what can you expect from a disgruntled coterie of ragtag dissidents? And so many of them the sons of Communists, too! They may call themselves the Hungarian Civic Party, but there’s no sense of civic responsibility there.
If ever there was a time for the opposition to rise above partisan politics, this is it. The future of the country is at stake. But no. There are too many sour grapes in the liberal ranks for that. Brimming with resentment that they lost the elections, Gábor’s old friends are not unhappy to have this opportunity to bring the government to its knees.
Grocery stores are empty. Vegetables are rotting in parked trucks. The borders have been closed. Hungarian Television has cancelled all its regular programming in order to bring the nation news of every twist and turn in the negotiations. People watching are torn between alarm and cynicism. They sympathize with no politician. Their sympathies are all with the taxi drivers. Na! What did I tell vou? Let the foreigners ooh and aah over freedom. Hungarians know better.
Freedom? Pah! Poverty, more like, and endless bickering.
Enough! The drivers have sworn not to move from the middle of the streets until the prices come down.
Gábor hasn’t forgotten about the meeting on Október6 Street. He has no heart for it. It is only a few months since the elections, but already he has lost interest in politics.
Political dissidence had the virtue of being risky under the Communist regime, and there was great camaraderie among the men who dared to voice their opposition. The work that Gábor and István did together to undermine the old regime has become the stuff of legend. Illicit border crossings, smuggling reams of paper rolled up in Gábor’s red blanket, a canny use of innocent foreigners and their cars, secret stashes in safe buildings, a network of trusty sympathizers across Hungary, and a masterly way not only with the international press, but — far, far harder — with the Hungarian secret police.
Now the risk has disappeared, and political opposition — once so seductive a mistress — has been institutionalized. Even at this moment of crisis, a caucus meeting has all the allure of duty.
Besides, Gábor knows he is increasingly out of touch with what is really going on. Things are changing too fast in Budapest these days for an opposition politician to be able to keep track, let alone feel that he’s performing any kind of useful function. It’s a free-for-all. The city is starting to fill with car thieves, pickpockets, money-changers, drug dealers, and pornographers. Crime is one of the few things that is organized. The police — as powerfully ineffectual as bodybuilders flailing at hornets — don’t even pretend to be in control of this new throng. How they must long to turn the clock back to the days of the police state. How they must be plotting. Or is that just as great a delusion as so much else? Maybe they too are in despair. Who knows? Not Gábor.
Gábor is tired of it all. Let the others argue over strategy at party headquarters. Gábor’s work is here, in this room.
