Ram Kanval recognized Istvan. His face, with a smile on his rigidly set lips, resembled the face of one dying of lockjaw. The counselor leaned over the plank bed and took the man’s cold, limp, sweaty hand.
“Nothing is lost, Ram. You will go yet. I promise.”
“No.” The word came through his labored breathing. “They are lying to you. They said today that they do not want me or my pictures.” He spoke in a broken whisper, coherently, but suddenly he looked walleyed at the ceiling.
“Did he poison himself with alkaloids?” Margit said worriedly. “It is too late for gastric lavage. What was in the stomach would have come up with the milk. The dose was not lethal, but even now I can see the effects of paralysis. Not much can be done to help. I believe he will survive.”
“He will live?” his brother demanded, picking wisps of his mustache from between his lips with a bent finger.
“If he has the desire — if he will fight,” she replied, coiling up the rubber pipe of her stethoscope. “Whether he will have a reason to live depends on all of you.”
“Listen, Ram”—Terey jogged his hand—“I swear that if you don’t go to Hungary, you will go to Czechoslovakia, to Romania. All the attachés are friends of mine.”
“They said my pictures are decadent, opposed to socialism,” Kanval said in a gurgling whisper. “They said that the uprising was not quelled so people’s minds could be poisoned with such an exhibit.”
“Ferenc,” the counselor snarled.
“No. The ambassador himself. It is the end of everything.”
“It is the end of nothing!” Istvan cried, nearly beside himself. “You will go to Paris! I will move heaven and earth.”
Ram Kanval twisted his lips into a misshapen smile. His eyeballs rolled and the pupils darted into the corners of his eyes; he could not control their movements. He must have been growing tired. A sweat heavy as foam broke out on his forehead.
“You must live, do you hear? Live! You will go!”
“Do not shout. I hear you…in red,” he whispered.
All at once he began to choke. Spasms bent his body until whitish clots showed on his lips. His wife knelt by the bed and rubbed his face with a wet towel. “He is dead,” she whimpered. “He has left me.”
Margit pushed her hands off him roughly. “No. He has gone to sleep. Leave him alone. Don’t tire him with questions. Cover the window; the light bothers him. Noise makes him see colors. I would prefer that he be sent to a hospital—” she turned to an older man in a camelskin vest whose bare knee could be seen from below his wrinkled dhoti, shaking nervously.
“What for? Here everyone keeps watch over him. He is well cared for. It is better not to fatigue him. A hospital is costly. And the whole building would raise a cry and say that we killed him.” He tugged at the arm of his daughter-in-law, who was hunched over beside the bed, and commanded, “Put hot water bottles on his legs. Have you been tending him or not? He is your husband!”
“You all wore him out. You know nothing!” She leaped at her father-in-law, waving her open hands like talons in his face. “A while ago a merchant was at the barsati and wanted me to sell his pictures. He put down ten rupees for each of them.”
“And did you sell them?” the brother asked worriedly. “That is quite an opportunity.”
“I am not stupid. He gave ten rupees; he will give twenty.”
Istvan saw that the painter’s eyelids had parted a little. His eyeballs moved uneasily. His lips were forming, not a grimace, but a hint of a smile. “The paints themselves cost more. Do not sell them,” he whispered.
A gaggle of children peeked into the hall, where a gray-haired woman was talking about the case. When they had jostled their way onto the stairs, a little boy jerked at the bag that belonged to the girl with bows in her hair and the marbles fell in a cascade, striking each step hard. The children jumped around, shrieking, to catch them.
“Thank you, sir.” The translator bowed. The ends of his mustache were sticky with saliva. “You have given him hope.”
“Not I. That merchant. He doesn’t believe me.”
They went out to the road and he turned to Margit.
“Yet another casualty of the trouble in Budapest. I’m not joking. If it hadn’t been for the uprising, we would have given him a stipend.” He glanced at his watch and was silent. He hunched over the steering wheel. It was past six.
“I’ll park the car. You run to the box office for the tickets. Cut in front of the line; no one will object. These colonial customs — sometimes I think they like to feel abased.”
They made their way in without difficulty and reached the balcony at the moment when the lights were dimmed. They sat in the first vacant seats they found. After an advertisement in color showing a sleek young man suffering from a headache and a kind soul offering him the wonder drug Aspirin, the newsreel began. They sat nestled against each other; Margit’s hand found Istvan’s, stroked it, then rested on it with a gentle pressure as if to say: Don’t torture yourself, I’m with you. What you will see has already happened. It is the past.
The building of the dam in Bhakra Nangal; the modern city of Chandigarh; in windows, glare breakers that looked like empty honeycombs or thinly sliced Swiss cheese; a palace of justice with gigantic columns like an Assyrian temple; oxen wading in thin mud at a snail’s pace, dragging a wooden harrow with several children standing on it so that the wheels ground more deeply into the churned mire.
Suddenly Istvan trembled. Three hunters flashed on the screen and moved precipitously toward the ground. A city that seemed to be made of white blocks appeared, smothered in a fleece of smoke. A crowd that from that elevation looked like a liquid overflowing fled into gardens and palm groves. He sighed heavily: this was not Budapest or any Hungarian city.
“An attack by the Israeli Air Force on Port Said”; the speaker’s voice penetrated his consciousness. They were shooting from airplanes and the crowd dispersed, dissolved into individual particles, darting figures running in zigzags before they fell, as if they were simulating the deaths of insects. But Istvan knew it was real. On the screen it even had its own aesthetic; people toppled over like ninepins, and a low murmur of something like approval ran through a hall inured to such scenes by American battle films.
A view of Budapest from a monument by the Danube burst onto the screen. He saw General Bem in a hat with a curling cock feather and the crowd with uplifted heads listening to a speaker who had climbed onto the stone plinth. There was nothing unusual in this frame, but Margit, with her hand on Istvan’s, felt Istvan’s fingers lock onto the arms of his seat. His breathing quickened. He raised his head. All his emotion seemed to be drawn to what he was seeing. The commonplace faces, the bared heads of the singing crowd were profoundly moving to him, for they were his countrymen — Hungarians.
He felt a bond with them that was incomprehensible to her, a connection she would never share. She looked furtively at him; his reactions gave her clues as to the significance of the images that changed like clouds driven by a windstorm.
A closeup of a half-torn away plaque with the inscription Stalin Road and under it the old name, Andrássy Avenue: the camera gave a view of the streets over which the crowd was surging. Long tricolor flags with holes ripped out of their centers where the stars had been torn away hung from buildings. Batteries of cannon in the park fired among houses. Soldiers in uniforms like those of the Russians, with cockades on their caps, held long missiles in their hands; at a command the missiles’ mouths emitted clouds of steam. The film had no sound, only a music track. The picture trembled. Evidently it had been made by hand by an accidental witness.