BIRDS OF PASSAGE. CHAPTER 4. Its song faint
“Tivadar!” The shout comes from the far side of the round-about. “Tivadar Varga. The very man I want to see.”
The voice is a harsh echo of a voice Tivadar remembers from the distant past. The man emerging unhurriedly into the light is not only confident, with the inimitable confidence of westerners, but exotic too. He wears a white panama hat and is expensively dressed in soft colours. There is something familiar about the square face, its heaviness around the chin not entirely hidden by a downy beard. The complexion is ruddy now, and the eyes are bloodshot, but this was once a handsome face.
“Rudi Gyöngyösi,” Tivadar says quietly. From somewhere nearby, the lyrical menace of Mahler’s First Symphony is straining against the limitations of a car radio.
“Who?” The taxi driver can’t hear Tivadar clearly.
“Rudi!” Tivadar says, ignoring the driver. “It must be twenty years since I’ve seen you!”
“Come with me,” Rudi says, looking Tivadar over. “We’ll walk to the Gellért. You need a bath. I want a massage. And I have some dollars I want you to spend. You look like you could use them.” His Hungarian is broken and curiously accented. Not like a foreigner’s: like that of a man who has forgotten his mother tongue. Does he not know any Hungarians, then, wherever he’s been living?
“The Gellért? They’ll never let you in, not in those clothes.” The taxi driver laughs loudly. “D’you think they’ll let him into the Gellért smelling like a butcher’s shop at the end of a heat wave?”
“For a few dollars everything is possible,” Rudi pats a pocket under his lavender-coloured jacket. “I’ve been looking for you for days,” he says to Tivadar, turning his back on the taxi driver.
“Are you back for good?”
“For now, anyway. This is the place to be at the moment.” His voice trails away. He is not quite as confident as he looks. He eyes Tivadar. “It’s high time we struck it rich, Tivadar. If we don’t make our bundle now, we never will.”
“Cigarette?” The driver makes a last bid ot hold on.
“I don’t smoke tobacco, thank you,” Rudi answers coolly.
The driver thinks to make a smart-ass reply — like, well, what else would you smoke? — and then suddenly he knows the answer.
Can he have understood this guy right? He has money too.
By this time, though, Tivadar and the newcomer have already set off along the embankment.
“Csa!” is all that Tivadar says over his shoulder in parting as he walks away with the newcomer, a spring in his step. This is what kids have started saying to one another in Budapest- a trendy new version of ciao which — like szervusz and szia and halló — like all such informal greetings in Hungarian-serves as both hello and goodbye.
“Halló.” The taxi driver’s farewell is flat. His dark eyes follow the two men longingly as they pause on the far edge of the roundabout while the stranger lights a cigarette, draws on it, and then passes it to Tivadar. Then he watches them for a minute as they saunter down-river towards the Gellért.
Resigned, he lights himself an unfiltered Kossuth cigarette, straightens his back, pulls the hot nicotine down to the very depths of his being, and glances into the tunnel, wondering if there really was a bird in there. He doubts it. Guys like Tivadar are full of fancy ideas that won’t buy a glass of water. The driver toys with the idea of walking the length of the tunnel just to have a good look for this bird, but walking holds little appeal for him, birds none at all, and so he just stands, listening to Mahler’s Habsburg follies crash over him, smoking his rough cigarette, and letting his eyes drift over the Danube.
On the far side of the bridge, the last swallows of the season are sweeping over the water, diving and soaring around the roof of the Ministry of the Interior. That’s the inscrutable building with the copper roof on the corner of Roosevelt Square. It was from the pretty windows of this Ministry that Big Brother used to watch the dissident activists with their printing press and their flimsy little publications. If he is still there — is he? could he be? biding his time! — he is now watching the growing demonstration in front of the boxy Forum Hotel. The doorman has whistled for a renegade taxi driver to take a Swiss businessman to the airport. A bulky woman with spiked, pistachio-coloured hair is protesting. She is a Greek-Hungarian named Kalliopé, and she’s been doing this all day, with more or less success. She’s winning this one, though, and the doorman is at a loss as a crowd is gathering, backing her up, refusing to let the scab get through.
It’s in the office building behind the Ministry that Gábor’s old friends are playing at being parliamentarians. It is not a role they play entirely convincingly. They can hardly belleve it themselves. The change has been too swift, too sudden, and there’s more up in the air than any of them know. A few months ago they were all charged with hope that their Hungarian Civic Party might win the elections. Within another year they will be quarrelling among themselves. But what on earth persuaded them to set up their offices behind the Ministry of the Interior on Oktober 6 Street?
There they are now, a good dozen of them, tired professorial men mostly, in their forties and fifties, several of them uncommonly tall, with dark beards, corduroys, and bags under their disappointed eyes, sitting around the big table in their smoky boardroom. They have spent their adult lives wondering whether or not to emigrate. None of them, even in their wildest dreams, imagined they would ever see the end of the Communist regime, the withdrawal of the Soviet army. Why not start a new life elsewhere, abandon this half-life in Budapest? Two of them, indeed, were in the United States just last year and were tempted to stay there. Csaba, all in black over at the far end of the table, was already calling himself Charles, Zsombor, sitting beside Csaba, has toyed with the idea of changing his name to Humphrey, a name that has had magical connotations for him ever since he saw his first Bogart film. In the end, though, he settled for changing his wife’s name from Bözsi to Betty. They all flew back to Budapest like homing pigeons when the Communist regime began to fall apart.
And now, plodding along in impotent opposition to the increasingly nationalist and populist ruling coalition, some of them think they’ve been cheated by history.
They should have formed the new government. They deserved power. Weren’t they the Christians who threw themselves to the lions in the long dark years when everyone else was afraid?
But others despise mass politics and are secretly dismayed at the party’s rather surprising popularity. None of them is entirely sure who stands where on this question.
They were united, in the old days, by their contempt for the old regime. These days the only thing they have in common is an ineradicable sense that they are the cure for the ills of Hungary. They don’t fully understand why deeply conservative Hungarians are wary of their radical proposals for reform. The walls around them are emblazoned with torn election posters and the party’s emblem of birds in flight. They’re talking strategy now, what to do, what to say,how to react to the government’s next move in the ongoing negotiations with the taxi drivers.
“Do we know what the Free Democrats are planning?” asks Csaba. He is pretty sure his voice sounds calm. He has been looking towards the window, unable to shake the feeling that they’re all being watched, but he’s reluctant to let the others think him jumpy.
He strains to see into the Ministry across the road. There’s no one in there, but you can’t blame him for wondering. In his place, you too might have your doubts about what goes on in the decorative, sinister fortress across the street.
The Ministry has been having its face lifted. The round copper dome on the corner has already been buffed to a sheen, but work hasn’t yet begun on the long, angular dome reaching across towards Mérleg Street and back towards Oktober 6 Street.
There’s no sign of Big Brother now anywhere. He’s either dead or playing dead, but no one’s entirely sure which, for what are those strange clicks on private telephone lines? And didn’t the East Germans just discover their own Secret Service hard at work? This is a city of watchers. Everyone watches everyone else, minds everyone else’s business. Is anyone watching the watchers? Lower your voices, prick up your ears, listen to the paranoia.
“This is a test of the liberal coalition as well as a challenge to the government,” Csaba continues. “We must be careful not to be left out of the negotiations. It is unlikely the government will resign over this, but we must be ready just in case they do.”
“We aren’t ready,” Zsombor comments drily, crossing his legs and, as his socks stop short of the ankle bone, giving his colleagues a good view of his hairy shin.
István, sitting opposite, frowns. Looking at him, Zsombor asks, “Why isn’t Gábor here?”
István, who has been wondering the same thing, was hoping that no one would remark on Gábor’s absence. With a confidence he does not feel, he says, “He’s on his way” — as though the answer were obvious.
A veteran activist with no patience for paranoia, István is a stocky man of less than medium height, and his shortness is accentuated in the company of his lanky companions. Yet his authority dwarfs them all. His eyes, dark and unforgiving, are deep-set in a ruthlessly clean-shaven face. A brilliant strategist, he has an unerring sense of timing.
It was István who complained to the international press about anti-Semitic slurs against liberal candidates at a crucial moment during the election campaign — and who then found himself having to educate reporters who had no idea that there are some 100,000 Jews in Hungary. It was István who waged war against turncoats within the party. And it was István who spoke out most angrily and persuasively when Tivadar became a liability. Yet no man can be a more loyal friend than István. Gábor Marton could tell you that. Together they took on the immovable object of the old regime. And they won in the end, against all odds. They won.
And so?
That’s what the journalist asked István last year when he was being interviewed for The New York Times. “How does it feel, now that you’ve won?”
“It is a start,” István had said in his harsh, heavily-accented English. “A start has been made. For years now, struggling sometimes without hope, we thought about this day, about how wonderful it would be. Now this day has come, and we are a bit disappointed, because it isn’t so wonderful after all. In some ways it is much easier than it was, for we do not have to fear beatings and mprisonment any more. But then again, the goal is not as clear as it once was. Mainly we feel overworked and exhausted, and we know we have so much still to accomplish.”
They are selling hollow little wooden nesting dolls — modelled on the babushka dolls — everywhere in the streets these days. The outer doll is Gorbachev, who stands about five inches high. When you open him up you find a four-inch Brezhnev. Inside Brezhnev is a three-inch Khrushchev, then a two-inch Stalin, and inside them all is a tiny Lenin doll scarcely higher than an inch.
In Moscow Square one afternoon early in the fall, István heard a man telling a little boy of about two — his son, judging by the look of them both — to see if he could open one of the dolls. The boy’s hands, like starfish, were too small to go around Gorbachev’s chubby middle, and they kept slipping off the cheap, painted surface of the wood. But he persevered, and eventually the pieces started to shift and the gap between them to widen. Knowing he was succeeding, the child looked up in triumph. By this time, though, his father was reading a newspaper and was paying no attention to the child.
Feeling Istvan’s eyes on him, the boy smiled at István instead. Suddenly the two halves of Gorbachev came apart completely, one in each starfish, and the inside dolls dropped on to the ground. The child frowned and hunkered down to look. Putting the two pieces of Gorbachev down on the pavement, he picked up Brezhnev. His hands fit more easily around him, and he twisted him this way and then that, once or twice, and rattled him a bit, before leaving the pieces on the ground, standing up, and sticking his index finger in his mouth.
The image of that little boy plays itself over and over in István’s head. It is a scene he would like to film, but he doubts if he ever will. István has not had an idea for a new film in years. Only two people know this. One of them is Gábor, but Gábor has been unable to help him. For a long time it seemed as though no one could help him. István had lost his way. Alone at night, he felt suicidal. He was convinced his life, his real life, was over.
That was before he started this middle-aged romance with Magda, more pleasing to them both than any love affair in their younger days. When they are together he is content, mostly, and when he is alone and unhappy he needs to see her again. It is time they started living together, he tells her, but she disagrees, and he will not anger her.
So, these days, he reminds himself that there’s no money around for film anyway in Hungary, and he devotes every waking minute of his time to politics. It is as well that he cherishes no ambitions to lead the party, for he is too unbending and too unanswerable for that. He has spent the past three days in the streets trying with surprising success to convince the drivers to allow deliveries of bread and milk through the barricades.
“Whether or not we are ready is irrelevant,” he tells his companions around the table. The voice they hear is crisp, and only Gábor, if he were here, would catch its frayed edge and eye his friend appraisingly over the top of thick glasses. “There’s a press conference in two hours. The people are looking to us to speak for them. We must call for the resignation of the government and offer to govern in its place .We can do no less. That is what an opposition party is for. And the people expect it. It doesn’t matter what the other parties decide to do. It is vital that we do our duty that we do what we were elected to do. Whatever happens next, they will remember that. It we let them down now, they will never look to us again.”
There is a murmur of assent, but Csaba is not the only one eyeing the Ministry of the Interior worriedly.
Tivadar could tell them they’re worrying about the wrong thing.He is resting on his elbows now against the side of the Gellért pool, contemplating an aspidistra. When a pale old man’s unsteady breast-stroke edges through the lukewarm water in front of him, Tivadar contemplates him instead. A wobbly chin like a rooster, and a flattish nose. Fifty-five? Sixty? Not so old, really. Tivadar is letting his legs float apart so that the water can caress his chafed skin.
Beside him, Rudi has both hands in his tiny bathing suit, and is rearranging his genitals. His straight, fair hair is parted at the side and hangs into his face. Tivadar cannot remember having felt more pampered — or cleaner, for that matter. His stomach still satisfyingly full of gulyás, his senses heightened in the afterglow of Rudi’s hashish, he can feel his pores opening up in the steamy warmth, his muscles relaxing. As he curls and uncurls his toes luxuriously in the sulphurous air above the waters of the pool, he wonders idly when was the last time he cut his toenails. He inspects his hands too, the grime under his broken fingernails, and the wrinkled skin of his fingertips. Then he pinches his shoulder, and stretches his volatile mouth into a lopsided grin. Rudi raises an eyebrow at him.
“So I am awake!” Tivadar pulls of the regulation bathing cap and lowers his head into the water to rinse his curly hair. When he comes up, his foreahead is plastered with question marks.
“Did you have any doubt?”
“Perhaps. But if I am awake now, does that mean that the cold, hard floor of the railway station is a nightmare?”
“Assuredly.”
“A recurring nightmare,” Tivadar corrects himself.
“It is up to you,” Rudi says loudly, and his deep voice echoes off the high marble walls, “how often it will recur.”
They have been speaking English most of the time, to avoid being understood by the other bathers. Even so, Tivadar glances around to see who is within earshot. The old rooster has stopped swimming. He is staring at the younger men with an expression of suppressed excitement in his watery eyes. Possibly he has recognized Tivadar; that does occasionally happen. Or maybe the man is an officious old bureaucrat irritated that Tivadar has taken his bathing cap off. But perhaps he understands English. More and more do.
Rudi has not been back long enough to realize how much things are changing here. But, Tivadar tells himself, it’s mostly younger people who know English, not people of that age,
What of it, anyway? Tivadar stops to ask himself. It’s not a crime to listen, not even to such a proposal as Rudi’s. And pleasant as the prospect of leading a pampered life is, Tivadar has been making other plans. It’s true that his plans have only just started to crystalize, but they’re good plans. It’s that little bird in the tunnel that has given him the idea, this very afternoon. It’s a great idea, he knows it. A perfect idea. Perfect strategy. And perfect revenge on all his false friends, those opportunists. With their election promises receding into the distance, there isn’t a single politician staking his future on the issues that really matter — poverty, pollution, racism. Six months of poverty has taught Tivadar more about economic history than he ever knew. Air pollution will have killed off half of Budapest before anyone in Parliament will lift a finger to do anything about it. And the skinheads will make sure of a quicker death for many — and the authorities will protect them against every last one of the “aliens” that the skinheads choose as their victims. Highlighting issues like this, Tivadar knows he can make a nuisance of himself with all the political parties, showing them all up for the self-serving small-minded ego-trippers they really are.
With so much having changed, people in Hungary hardly know what to worry about anymore. The Soviets pose no danger now. Communism is a non-issue. The Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party has changed its name to the Hungarian Socialist Party, and most of its former members are falling over one another in their haste to deny they were ever sincere Communists.
It is now dawning on Tivadar — he has now forgotten the old rooster — that the changes are only beginning. Imagine what’s in store if Rudi, all the Rudis, have their way. Here we are, still eyeing the Ministry of the Interior warily. That’s not what we should be worried about. On the contrary. Before long we’ll be hoping for the secret police to protect us from criminals and drug dealers. The danger now is posed by Rudi.
Tivadar has been listening to Rudi with fascination. And slowly, insidiously, Tivadar can feel himself being tempted, he cannot deny it. Clean new clothes. All the hot food he can stomach. Riches beyond imagining. And it must be real. A man like Rudi wouldn’t come back to Budapest if he weren’t sure that he would be better off there.
Didn’t someone once say that living well is the best revenge?
“People will be begging you to sell to them. It will be like waiting for ripened plums to fall of the tree into your lap,” Rudi says, climbing out of the water and flicking his hair out of his eyes in a way that Tivadar remembers from twenty years ago.
Tivadar’s mouth opens and shuts without his saying anything. The little bird in the tunnel is distant, now, and its song faint.
“Do you enjoy being poor?” Rudi is towering above him on the edge of the pool. “No matter how good you are, Tivadar, you’re bever going to make more than a pittance trying to make the world a better place. Believe me, I’ve tried, but the theatre is a charity case. You don’t know where your next meal is coming from. Or if you’ll have a next meal. And it’s the same in politics. Look at the way you’re living! There comes a time in a man’s life when the worthy causes are no longer enough. I rather imagine that you have reached that time in your life Tivadar, as I most certainly have in mine. Don’t say anything now.”
He lifts a wet hand to his lips, and a fat drop of water falls into Tivadar’s eye. “I don’t want ot hear what you have to say until tomorrow afternoon. Just think about it until then.”
“Think about it,” Tivadar repeats, wiping his eye.
“And, if you like, talk to this woman about it. If you can trust her. But don’t mention it to another soul.” Rudi turns away and moves off in the direction of the dressing room.
Tivadar thinks of Kalliopé. He knows he won’t tell her anything. No. This is a decision he has to make alone. Apart from anything else, he doesn’t dare tell her. She’s cool enough about a lot of things, but she’d turn into a fury over this.
The real danger is not Rudi either. Rudi is only the man who knows how to tap into this cornucopia. The danger is temptation.
Greed. The real danger, Tivadar decides, hoisting himself out of the pool, is ourselves. He doesn’t notice the old rooster draping a towel around his shoulders and following Tivadar into the dressing room.
Tivadar has to put on the same grimy clothes he’s been wearing day in and day out for weeks. When he suggests that perhaps Rudi might give, or at least lend him some others, Rudi shrugs.
“You can have all the clothes you want,” he says. “It’s up to you. I’m going up to my room for a rest. I’ll see you tomorrow, at noon.”
Then, relenting just a little, he hands Tivadar a joint. “No hard feelings if you decide against this idea,” he adds. “But not a word.”
“Csá.”
“Csá.” And Rudi is gone.
What bothers Tivadar the most about his clothes is the smell, which must have got worse in the damp warmth of the baths — either that or Tivadar has been so spoiled that he notices the stench more than he did before his swim.
Still, it’s just as well, really. There’s no way he could explain new clothes to Kalliopé. He’ll need a good story for that when, no, not when: if he decides to go with Rudi.
But he won’t. No. No way. He isn’t that kind of man. He has many faults, he admits, but he isn’t a crook, he’s never committed a crime. Or at least no real crime.
Tivadar doesn’t consider his dissident activities criminal and certainly wouldn’t compare them to dealing in drugs. And that’s what Rudi is so calmly proposing. In the west they take it for granted that there will be drugs, and therefore dealers.
Tivadar pauses at the doors of the baths,and then walks around the corner to the main entrance to the Gellért Hotel. It’s a long walk from here back to the station, a good walk.
Behind him, the man with the wobbly chin watches for a minute and then, deciding against following Tivadar, he goes into the hotel lobby, identifying himself as Nándor Vidéki of the narcotic squad, and asks for the house detective. But the house detective lives twenty miles outside the city, and has been unable to get in to work.
So, Nándor leaves for home, where his invalid mother watches for him nightly from behind net curtains.
Outdoors, in the chill of the evening, a young journalist is interviewing a huddle of drivers at the Szabadság Bridge in halting Hungarian. Nándor ignores them, straightens his shoulders, and sets off down the empty street.
