His lips parted as if in a prayer of gratitude. They were alive. It had passed them by. He looked at the date: it had been sent the day before yesterday. He raised his head and was pained by Margit’s despairing look. He had been distant from her again. He had left her on the far side of a threshold she could not cross.
“All is well.” His smile was shadowed with anxiety. “They are alive.”
It seemed to him that she had expected something else. Her eyes were full of anguish. “Well,” she said. “You are calm.”
He embraced her, but he felt that she had gone stiff in his arms. The oneness between them, the overflowing adoration and surrender without reserve, were missing.
“You will stay?” It was a question, not an order.
She felt the difference keenly; she caught it, not with the ear, but through the pulse of the blood.
“As you like,” she answered sleepily. She went over to a chair, unfastened her tweed jacket, and began to undress. “Turn out the light.” She motioned with her head. “I thought I saw someone standing near the window.”
“The watchman. He wanted to be sure he could lie down and not go on making a show of guarding the house.”
“Take me home later,” she whispered, touching him to feel whether he had undressed. He took her in his arms. He trembled as he touched her firm, cool breasts, her slightly swelling belly. The distance between them dissolved.
“No…No…I want you by me when I wake. Before I open my eyes, I must know that you are here. Margit…”
All at once he wanted to confide his anxieties to her, to tell her about his conversation with Chandra and his premonition that a threat hung over them, but her nearness drove other thoughts away. He ran his fingers through her luxuriant hair as if it were spring grass. His hand traveled over her back as if it were a stone on the bank of a stream, warmed by the sun. He heard the soft murmur of her breath. It seemed to him that he was in a forest with treetops swaying in the wind. Again she was his whole world. What happiness, he thought, choking with gratitude — that I can love so intensely.
At the embassy the telegram from his wife made quite a stir. It was taken as confirmation that a general calm had ensued and that the destruction must not be farreaching, since the postal service was operating efficiently.
“If nothing happened at your house, as I was certain was the case, the Western press has outdone itself in magnifying the disturbances.” Ferenc gazed at the telegram. “All is well with my family, too. My mother and father live around the corner near Lenin Road and a few houses down.”
A trio had gathered: Istvan, Ferenc, and Judit. Istvan tried to penetrate Ferenc’s drawn, dogged look. His eyelids were dark with sleeplessness. He is worried, Istvan thought. For the first time he is showing anxiety about his parents. He has never spoken of them. It was as if he had given birth to himself and had himself to thank for everything.
“The boss is breathing more easily. In the night Kádár’s declaration came; he read as much of it as he wanted and walks around proud that he did not go off in a rush of adulation for Nagy. He repeated the same sentence to me three times, ‘Whoever demands the withdrawal of the Soviet armies knowingly or unknowingly proclaims himself a counterrevolutionary and impels the nation toward the loss of independence.’ I foresaw this. From the beginning this uprising stank of counterrevolution to me.”
“That means that he understood nothing.” Istvan looked Ferenc in the eye. “Either he didn’t hear or he didn’t want to know why the unrest began. He would have had to beat himself as penance.”
“You think that blood was not shed in vain?” Ferenc hesitated. “Certainly there were mistakes, but not such as to necessitate smashing all the machinery of government, disbanding the party. On whom is Kádár leaning now? On those who hid away at the crucial time and were not slaughtered by the crowd? Or on the rebels who shot at the Russians? I know one thing: there are too few of them to make a government.”
“You speak harshly.” Judit turned her head. “Something in that text must have nettled you.”
“Me?” Ferenc frowned. “I have a premonition that there will be an evening of the score, and how that will look you may see in any American newspaper with coverage of Budapest. It only takes a moment to hang someone, and then everyone can commiserate for as long as they like because it was a mistake.” He thrust a finger behind his collar and pushed as if the starched linen were pinching him.
“Don’t work yourself up. We are in India. In the meantime, things will sort themselves out at home,” Judit said.
“Radio Free Europe has thrown out a slogan, ‘Destroy the factories, sabotage the machines, so Russia will have no profit from your workshops.’ Nice, eh?” the secretary said pointedly. “I heard it myself.”
“Well, who is going to pay any attention to them? After all, the workers would be hurting themselves,” Istvan shrugged.
“As they did when they began to shoot,” Judit said dejectedly, “and they had reasons. There is nothing more tragic than for honest outbursts to be exploited by enemies and turned to our undoing. You can’t expect a mob to think; a mob is elemental. It praises, elevates, and destroys with equal ease.”
“Give me that declaration to read,” Istvan requested. “I am arguing when I haven’t seen it in black and white.”
“The boss is certainly learning it by heart, but go to the cryptographer. He will give you a copy,” said Ferenc. “It shows clearly that we were on the brink of a precipice. The plan of the West was that we would throw our force against the Russians, and that it would incite us, promise help, in the meantime accomplishing its goals with respect to the Suez. This is the logic of these events. I begin to understand Khrushchev’s haste. He had to have peace in Budapest. He seized the trump cards from the opponents who were trying to play the game at their own pace. He did not give them Hungary and he did not allow the Suez to be taken away from Nasser.”
They were sitting in the corridor on the second floor. The light fell on Judit’s luxuriant hair and worried face. Outside the window in the hot Indian autumn, spider webs sailed about. The gardener was raking away crisp leaves. Yellow butterflies flew over the scarlet salvia.
“What did you mean, ‘He did not give them Hungary’?” Terey challenged Ferenc. “Hungary is not a spoon to be tucked into the top of a boot! He didn’t give us away because we didn’t let ourselves be led away by the West, for our people don’t want magnates in the Csepel mills or hereditary owners on land that is parceled out. Socialism, whatever we make of it, is our own affair; it is indivisible from independence.”
Ferenc tilted his head slightly and looked at him with a barely perceptible smile. “You are quite the chess player,” he said, pushing out his lower lip. “So you like a new configuration of things…”
“Player? I’m sorry for you if you look at what is happening to us and see only a game, and our politicians as pawns on a chessboard. Damn it! Aren’t you Hungarians?”
“Perhaps you are going to start in again talking about how many books were published before the war and how many are published now, about the amateur ensembles and museums open to the public. I tell you: write a revolutionary’s notebook, not verse. Write, write and you’ll be running a newspaper — you’ll be the head of Szabad Nep,” Ferenc snapped.
“Listen, Istvan”—Judit tried to divert his attention—“that painter, your protégé, called me. He wanted assurances that he has a chance to receive a stipend.”
“Hardly the most pressing issue,” Ferenc said sarcastically, “when all Hungary is in convulsions.”
“It is important to Ram Kanval. Surely the paperwork has gone out? The main thing is that he has hope. They are taught to wait patiently.”