He had hardly shut the gate when Trompette, bored with solitude, bounded out with a joyful bark. She tried to climb onto his chest and lick his face.
“Stop wiping your muddy paws on me.” He held her affectionately by the back of her neck, though she wriggled with delight in his presence and her pink tongue, like a slice of ham, quivered with readiness to kiss him in canine fashion.
“Mr. Nagar is not here.” The young Indian stepped out of the office with movements like a woman’s. With a gentle gesture he invited the counselor to come in for a rest if he liked.
“What is happening in Budapest?”
“The situation is under control.”
“That’s what I heard a week ago.”
“There is a new government. In the course of six hours the streets were cleared. Tanks demolished the barricades.”
“And what of the previous government?”
“They protested. They appealed to the conscience of Europe. But before it was aroused”—he spoke with a mocking, melancholy air—“the tanks rolled through to the parliament and the premier sought asylum in the Yugoslavian embassy.”
“And Mindszenty?” Terey saw that the secretary did not even know the name. “Well, the cardinal. The one who was let out of prison.”
“You have strange names, hard to pronounce or remember. He has taken refuge with the Americans. In Budapest there is a curfew. Meetings are prohibited. The military is disarmed.” He spread his hands in a sympathetic gesture. “After the Russian forces were called in, the West gave no help. Even diplomatic protests were very measured. The press has already turned its attention away from Hungary, Mr. Terey. It is not important to them,” he said emphatically.
“And what is important?”
“Suez. Incoming bulletins say the march of French and English units has been halted. Israel as well is prepared to withdraw its troops. They have gone lax; they have lost the momentum for battle. Khrushchev has won.” The Hindu seemed to pause and think, to remind himself of what he had heard. “They calculated that he would be drawn into an altercation in Hungary. In the meantime, he delivered one blow with a fist, then at once supported Egypt. He threatened to send weapons and volunteers, and that would have meant — war, a third world war. So what could the Americans do? Support the Arabs, for otherwise the Russians would have garnered all their sympathy. The French and English themselves were on the battlefield. The cat jumped at the mouse and found itself nose to nose with the watchdog, so it looked around to see which tree to run up in order to feel safe.”
His long eyelashes fluttered. He bustled around the hall preparing a drink for the counselor. Istvan thought of a woman who, in her husband’s absence, entertains a visitor and, finding herself at a loss, repeats opinions she has heard, stretching her mental horizons and wounding and intimidating without knowing what she has said.
Istvan sank between the cushions of the chair, gazing despondently at two slivers of wood in the fireplace that were bristling with little combs of flame. Suddenly everything became oppressive to him: the black head of the rhinoceros that Nagar had not shot, only bought. The room tricked out with hunting imagery for show. The purebred setter not trained for hunting. The French cuisine to efface the memory of years of hunger. The masks that hid the lonely, hounded man longing for peace and a comfortable life, a man who had been born on the cusp of three empires: the kaiser’s in Germany, the emperor’s in Austria, and the czar’s in Russia. A man who had been cut off from his native country, the religion of his childhood, and the memory of his murdered family, and for those losses had gained so little in exchange.
Perhaps even his homosexuality was a façade, an indulgence that eased him into a circle of refined snobs, of artists full of eccentricity and ennui. What do I hope to find here? he wondered, suddenly disconcerted. No; facts are facts; only commentary can change them to half-truths, quarter-truths, stuff them with sweet lies. I came here for bulletins, nothing more. Nagar gets them sooner than anyone else. And he likes me, so he does not withhold what for several hours is exclusively his property. Tomorrow I will hear the same facts on New Delhi radio; I will read them in the papers. They will grow old terribly quickly. Their significance will last for a little while, and in that hour — the hour when they astonish and dazzle us with the Hungarians’ extraordinary devotion to their cause — they will also leave us shocked by the forces that threatened them. The next day, after we have grown used to them, they simply are—they only add to the sum of our ineffective knowledge of life, of what is behind us. Of the past.
There is no way to overwhelm the opposing forces. A nation of twelve million, and it is only a chip in a game. Human life, the highest good, ten lives, a hundred thousand, have no significance…What can be done? How to help one’s own? Whose side to be on?
No. He shook his head as if answering a question put to him suddenly by someone else. I will not shoot at the Russians. They mobilized me then. I was in uniform. The gun barrel showed who the opponent was. I had no choice. It became clear that there was no compass unless you looked into your conscience, unless you acknowledged other people’s right to food and freedom. We wanted, after all, to save our country. And we returned from the war mutilated, written into the register of enemies, alongside those humanity judged to be criminals. They made us into…no. One must have the courage to say: we became, having paid with enormous sacrifices, with the ruin of our country, their partners.
Now, after this ill-fated uprising, what will become of us? The facts say that we rose up against those who had to subdue us in order to liberate us. And we had our chance in our hands. Do we still have it? Who has the nerve to speak of friendship again over freshly spilled blood? Friendship — Rakosi and Gerő were always declaiming about it, and they built prisons, they sowed hate. Who will stand before the nation after what has passed and say, “Trust me, I am a communist?”
Kádár will form a government? And what sort of person is he? On what grounds did he call in Soviet tanks against Hungarians, he, who is Hungarian himself? What was he trying to save? Today he has everyone against him except for a handful who think as he does — think that they will rescue Hungary, or what remains of it after the madness and slaughter. Can the nation believe him now that cannons have pled his case? The Russians cannot trust him, for he came out of prison. He was tortured. He had his brush with death. He had been falsely accused. He came out of that prison his comrades had built. He came out alive, but was his faith in socialism intact? Has he outlived the memory of the injustice he suffered? Perhaps he called in the Russians so as to have the opportunity to even accounts with his old tormentors at last. Now he will take revenge…Does he have within himself the greatness not to aggravate the situation, not to condemn but to unite, to support, to rebuild what has not been destroyed? How can the Russians trust him, since his country let him out of his cell? He is, above all, a Hungarian.
Istvan rested his head on his hands and gazed at the winking, dancing flames. The burnt wood burst and a handful of sparks shot into the dusky funnel of the chimney. The dog exhaled heavily, as if she shared his anguish.
If Kádár brought about the recent coup in order to seize power and square personal accounts, in a hundred years a crowd will drag his bones from the burial ground and throw them into the Danube. If he truly wishes to rescue Hungary, taking on himself the terrible burden of responsibility — of being an object of suspicion and hatred — the nation will not only pardon him but will number him among its heroes, whose names generations to come will utter with gratitude and adoration. The next few years will make it clear. Time wounds; time heals.