Lace

  “But who’s to know, Sandor, if you sell a pig or a goose?”

  “If you’re caught selling one goose on the black market, you can get a seven-year sentence. What I’m telling you is that, slowly, we are becoming Russian slaves.”

  They walked in silence along the moonlit road, then Sandor added, “Janos the schoolmaster says that the newspapers and radio are censored and most of the new books and plays are just crude Soviet propaganda.”

  “Nothing new about that, Sandor.”

  “No, but Janos says that even the Communist intellectuals in Budapest have now started to criticise the harshness of the Russian system. See what I mean?” He stumbled again. “Hungarian Communists are criticizing the Soviet Union.”

  “Very healthy.”

  “The Russians won’t allow it. The secret police get more powerful every day.” He hung one arm around his brother’s shoulder. “Back in June, Miklos the blacksmith got drunk in the csarda one night and said more or less what I’ve just told you. Next afternoon the secret police turned up in a car, shoved Miklos into it and headed back toward Budapest.”

  He suddenly stood still in the moonlight, remembering. “Nobody knows what’s happened to him, but someone said he was being taken to the Avo headquarters at Andrassy Street and everybody knows that number sixty Andrassy is where the Avos have their torture chambers, so we don’t expect to see Miklos again. I tell you, if it wasn’t for the farm and the old couple, I’d leave with you after the wine festival.”

  Felix kept his plans to himself as they clumped along in the peaceful moonlight. He simply observed, “Farmers never starve if they keep their mouths shut.”

  Vendors wandered among the tents pitched around the csarda tempting the peasants to buy their strings of pork sausages, cakes and sweetmeats. Inside the tents, a brisk trade flourished in hats, dresses, ornaments, pots and pans, scythes and other agricultural implements. The evening before, the land around the csarda had been covered only with grass, but now it was jammed with brightly dressed peasants in their Sunday best, celebrating the szuret, today’s wine festival. Some of the women wore as many as twenty-five petticoats under green or scarlet skirts that reached to the top of their soft, scarlet leather boots; their white organdy blouses were richly embroidered, and so were their little waistcoats.

  Early that morning the women had made a huge wreath of grapes mixed with wild flowers and bound it with coloured ribbons. This wreath had been carried in state from the vineyards to the village, followed by a gypsy orchestra that fiddled merrily in front of the parade of vineyard workers. Jostling along in the happy, noisy procession, Elizabeth and Roger passed slowly through the town until they reached the csarda, where, like everybody else, they drank a glass of pale, golden wine before the feasting started. Then the gypsy leader flung his dark head back and very slowly drew his bow across the strings of his fiddle. One by one the other instruments joined in until the music grew louder and louder, faster and faster, more and more insistent. Soon boots were kicking, skirts whirling, arms twirling as dancers spun with uninhibited shouts of joy.

  “No other nation can dance like Hungarians,” shouted Uncle Sandor, pulling Angelina up to dance. “Dancing is in our blood and nothing can stop us.”

  Very different from the quiet, staid Swiss, thought Elizabeth, her eyes as big as eggcups, as she watched the whirling skirts, the flying dark hair, the flashing eyes of the dancers.

  “Come on, Lili, I’ll show you how to dance,” cried Felix, grabbing her hand and running forward. In an open-necked, white shirt with huge billowing sleeves, a scarlet cummerbund, black open waistcoat and tight black trousers thrust into high scarlet leather boots, he looked wonderfully dashing. Felix tugged her toward the dancers, then suddenly stopped, hobbled a couple of steps, stopped again and winced.

  “Damned if I can. My foot’s throbbing. You’ll have to wait for Sandor.”

  So Elizabeth stamped and whirled and twirled with Uncle Sandor, while Felix limped to a bench, took off his right boot and winced as Angelina examined his foot. “It was a mosquito bite that I scratched; now it’s septic. Nothing to make a fuss about.”

  He didn’t want a mosquito bite to spoil the fun of the szuret so he painfully squeezed on his boot again, ignored his throbbing foot and contented himself with watching the dancers instead of joining in. But that evening Felix rode back to the farm with the women on the horse-drawn cart.

  Angelina bathed his foot in the tin basin, while Grandma Kovago prepared the bread poultice. Grandfather ridiculed Angelina’s suggestion of a doctor. The gnarled old man took the black pipe out of his mouth and laughed. “For a mosquito bite?” The gold watchchain that looped across his little belly wobbled with mirth.

  The next day Felix sat outside the kitchen door. Swathed in white linen, his foot was propped on a chair seat. But by evening his leg had started to throb and the following morning Felix could hardly walk.

  Angelina insisted on consulting a doctor, so Sandor set off for Sopron on horseback. By evening when the doctor arrived, Felix was sweating, with a high temperature, unable to move without pain.

  “Blood poisoning. He needs penicillin, not bread poultices,” growled the doctor, frowning over spectacles pulled halfway down his nose at the swollen, purple-red foot. “You’re going to be in bed for a couple of weeks at least. If you’re lucky.”

  So Angelina wrote a letter to Herr Pangloss, the manager of the Hotel Rosat, to say that Felix could not return until the end of October. But there was no cause for alarm. After all, it was merely a mosquito bite.

  Early on the evening of Wednesday, October 24, 1956 (three weeks after Elizabeth and Roger should have been back at school in Switzerland), Uncle Sandor took his usual, two-mile evening walk to the csarda outside the village to meet Janos the schoolmaster for their usual drink, smoke and chat. The evenings were now cold so he wore his bunda, the traditional long embroidered sheepskin coat with fleece facing inward.

  When he hadn’t returned by ten o’clock, Grandma started to grumble. “Politics, politics, always talking senseless politics over too much wine.” At eleven o’clock they gave up waiting and were about to go to bed when the heavy kitchen door flew open and Sandor burst in, out of breath.

  “The revolution has started! In Budapest! Quick, turn on the radio! The students have captured the radio station.” A flurry of scraping chairs and questions followed him as he strode over to the big, old-fashioned radio and tuned into Radio Budapest, which was playing recorded gypsy music of a markedly unrevolutionary nature.

  Wakened by the noise, Elizabeth crept out of bed and peeped around the door. For once Felix ignored her as the grown-ups gathered around the wireless. Uncle Sandor burst out, “The Russians have appointed Nagy as President of Hungary again, and martial law was proclaimed at nine o’clock this evening. We heard it on the radio at the csarda. Later they said that Nagy had asked the Russian troops to help restore order.”

  There was a chorus of cries. “Nagy is a patriot, he’d never do that.”

  “Well, he did, I heard them say so.”

  “Then the Russians must have forced him to do it.”

  “Now sit down, Sandor, and tell it from the beginning. We’re obviously going to hear nothing except music on this damned radio.”

  “Perhaps we should return to Switzerland,” suggested Angelina, worried.

  “You can’t. The frontiers are closed and no one can leave without a Russian exit permit.”

  Horrified, Angelina looked at Felix. He limped over, hugged her and said, “There’s no reason to be frightened, we’re safe here. Put Lili to bed again and sit with her until she’s asleep—and you go to bed as well, Mama. War is man’s business.”

  Apprehensive but obedient, the women disappeared, then Sandor said, “Until your leg is better, Felix, you stay here and see they’re safe. I’ll leave you one rifle and take the other two with me to Budapest. They’re broadcasting for food, so we’ll start loading up the cart at dawn tomorrow.
No, Papa, they’re fighting for you and it’s up to you to feed them. Janos and I are off to Budapest tomorrow.”

  In spite of Grandma’s anguished tears, Sandor creaked off early the following morning, the horse-drawn cart laden with food and looking like a harvest festival float as it jerked down the steep, frozen, muddy ruts of the farm track.

  In the afternoon Grandfather walked into the village for news and didn’t return until nightfall. “The Avos in Budapest fired on an unarmed crowd of twenty thousand people that included children, women and old men,” he growled, “and then they threw the bodies into the Danube.”

  By Sunday, only five days after the fighting had started, the tired but triumphant voice of Prime Minister Nagy announced over the wireless that Khrushchev had agreed to withdraw the Soviet troops. Unbelievably, it looked as though the country really had liberated itself as Russian tanks started to rumble out of the devastated streets of Budapest and—for the first time in ten years—broadcasts and newspapers were uncensored.

  But Grandpa was skeptical and suspicious. “It’s not like the Russians to give in so easily, they’re up to something,” he insisted. “When you’re my age you, too, will mistrust bears who behave like lambs. The uprising must have surprised them—after all it surprised everyone—and they probably didn’t think we Magyars had so much fight in us after so long.”

  He lit his pipe, sucked at the stem and shook his head. “You mark my words, the Russians are being meek just to stop the Western nations from joining in the fight. Once the fuss and interest has died down, the bastards will be back here with their boots on our necks again.”

  And Grandpa was right. On November first came the ominous news that hundreds of Soviet tanks were streaming over the border into Hungary. Thousands of Soviet troops had marched in and surrounded Budapest.

  Every morning and evening at eight o’clock Grandpa rode into the village to wait at the post office at the hour when Sandor said he would try to telephone. “No news yet, Mama,” he reported, “except that refugees from the cities are streaming to the Austrian border and the Russian tanks are turning them back and shooting anyone who tries to escape. Not much fun trying to escape in this weather; bitter wind, heavy snow and worse to come.”

  On the following Tuesday, on the evening of November sixth, Sandor got a message through to the post office. “Now don’t get upset, Mama, but they were storming a Soviet tank and Sandor has been shot in the right arm and shoulder,” said Grandpa, not adding that Janos had been killed at the same time. “The Russians are apparently pouring into Budapest. They’re shelling buildings and shooting passersby. There’s also been heavy fighting in the other cities, but it’s worst in Budapest and the Russians are in control of the city again. It’s just like 1945, God help us.”

  Grandpa continued sadly. “Sandor says that the city is starving, the Freedom Fighters have run out of ammunition and medical supplies. . . . Sandor’s trying to get home, and then he thinks that we should all escape to Austria. The reprisals are going to be terrible, and any able-bodied adults might be shipped to Soviet labour camps.”

  Felix said, “For God’s sake take the children somewhere else, Angelina.”

  The children had been almost ignored all weekend, and finding the strain of adult anxiety irksome, they had kept out of the way. It was too cold to go outside and there wasn’t yet enough snow for play, just a thin film over the hard earth. But now Uncle Sandor had been shot and all the grown-ups looked worried.

  “Hang a lantern in the window and keep it lit all night in case Sandor turns up,” Grandpa ordered, then he turned to Felix and took his hands. “My son, we’re too old to leave. We were born here and we want to die here when the good Lord wills it. But the rest of you must leave as soon as Sandor returns. We did not raise our two sons for the benefit of the Russians.”

  Unable to speak, Grandma could not take her sad, wrinkled eyes off Felix. She feared that she was seeing him for the last time.

  The moon shone through the clouds, flooding the countryside with silver. The small group could see a hamlet and vineyards edged with trees as they hurried along a path between bare fields of silver snow. They wore dark, heavy overcoats, and the two children had cardboard identification labels tied around their necks, as did all escaping children, in case they were separated from the adults who accompanied them. Sandor’s right arm was in a dark sling, which meant that he couldn’t button his coat up to the neck and the cold wind hurt his chest. Felix walked with the help of an old shepherd’s crook and carried the farm’s only remaining rifle in his other hand.

  It was two o’clock in the morning and they were nearing the frontier. The journey had not been difficult, mainly downhill through wooded land. Twice they had waded through icy, rushing streams over which Elizabeth had been carried on the shoulders of Felix, who was still limping badly and should not have been walking on his poisoned leg. They were heading for a path through the woods to the frontier that Sandor knew hadn’t been fenced off. It ended at a barbed-wire fence. Beyond that fence lay half a kilometer of no-man’s-land, then a second barbed-wire fence, which was the actual frontier. Both fences and no-man’s-land (between the fences) were patrolled with guard dogs by the frontier police.

  Paradoxically, the safe places to cross were often near the high, wooden lookout towers that punctuated the frontier and from which a single guard had a good view of all the surrounding land. These towers were undermanned and even, occasionally, empty. That was too much to hope for now, but if they crossed near one of the towers, they would be able to see what was happening and where the searchlights were probing.

  Their plan was to wait in one spot until the dog patrol had passed and then make a dash for freedom. Ideally, Sandor hoped to reconnoiter the spot in moonlight, then wait to move until the moon had passed behind a cloud. He would have preferred also to have picked a cloudless night, but they had no choice: the longer they waited before escaping, the more dangerous it became.

  Suddenly, they nearly walked into the first barbed-wire fence. It was almost invisible, about six feet high and with much longer, more vicious barbs than agricultural barbed-wire. Beyond it lay no-man’s-land. The patchy snow was spattered over rough grass that sloped up a fairly steep bank. They couldn’t see what lay on the other side.

  Sandor touched his brother, and wordlessly pointed to the right. They skirted the trees until they came within sight of a wooden frontier tower. It seemed to be operated by one man who slowly rotated a single searchlight. The little group of five melted back into the trees. They had to get out of the scent range of the dogs and yet remain within earshot; luckily, the wind was blowing from the frontier into their faces. After the patrol had passed, they would move down to the fence and cut the bottom wires with their two pairs of clippers, blades carefully smeared with dirt so they didn’t glint in the moonlight. They would move back into the shelter of the trees when the searchlight swept toward them, and having cut the wire, they would dash forward to escape as soon as it had passed. Roger would hang on to Sandor’s coat and Elizabeth would hang on to Felix.

  Sandor could no longer feel his cold feet. His arm, neck and chest were painful, but they weren’t as dangerous as Felix’s poisoned, painful, throbbing leg. Silently Sandor moved forward, alone, and waited under a fir tree. It shuddered noiselessly and sprinkled his shoulders with snow. Then he heard a distant crunch of boots, low growls and animals panting. He faded back into the trees to where the others were waiting and looked at his luminous watch. Two-twenty.

  They stood there in the freezing cold until the patrol returned because they had to know how much time there was between each patrol. Angelina gently rubbed the faces of the children with her wool mittens to help their circulation.

  Then they again heard low voices and again the panting of the dogs as the patrol returned. The wind was blowing from behind them, so Sandor waited to get a good view, when he could see the two-man patrol wearing overcoats and round Russian hats with earflaps. They
carried automatic rifles.

  Fifty minutes between patrols; that should be time enough.

  He hurried back to the others and beckoned them forward. The moon was now hidden behind the clouds and it was difficult for them to see Sandor and follow his dim shape as he ran between the firs.

  Angelina and the children waited under cover as the two brothers crept forward to the six-foot-high fence and started to cut the bottom wires. Clumsily using his left hand, Sandor started cutting the bottom wire while Felix worked on the wire above it.

  The clippers seemed to make no impression on the wire. Then suddenly Felix held two slack strands instead of a taut one. Swiftly he started to cut the next wire. Panting, the men hacked fiercely, knowing that their lives depended on speed. When the searchlight swept toward them—as it did every twelve minutes—they dashed back into the cover of the trees.

  The moment the searchlight had passed, they ran back again to work on the wire, cursing and panting with effort, until there was a soft scraping sound and it parted at last.

  Bending low, the two men stumbled back through the snow to where the others stood and they all waited, hearts pounding, for the searchlight to pass.

  A gray beam swung through the darkness, getting brighter as it approached them. It moved on, then grew gray again. Like sprinters in a race, they dashed forward, Angelina so frightened that she tried to blot everything out of her mind except the will to follow Felix.

  The men held the bottom wires back as Angelina and the children scrambled underneath. Then, in sodden boots and coats, they all ran clumsily up the escarpment.

  Sandor could see that they were nearly at the top of the slope. Twenty meters . . . Ten meters . . . Felix was falling behind . . . Five meters. . . . Then they clambered over the rise and started to scramble downhill, sweating with relief, gasping painfully for breath.