toward me, leaving Leonek to his anger.
“You got out,” he said. He looked back. There was a smear of blood from his ear to his collar; it wasn’t his blood. “Kaminski is after you. Says you attacked him. Says you refused to fight.” He brushed his shoulder with a hand. “Sounds like you just fought the wrong person.”
“Did I?” My hands were between my knees. I didn’t know what had happened to my club. “Did you see Brano?”
He turned to me.
“Sev was dressed up like a worker. This was all a setup.”
Moska grimaced, but didn’t say anything for a while. As the last van left, we saw what remained: a bloodstained sidewalk with spare pieces of clothing-a torn shirt, a shoe, some hats. A crying woman knelt over a hat, and a few dazed militiamen stood perfectly still.
“To dirty us,” said Moska.
My hands were dirty. My clothes were dirty.
Moska sat down next to me. “A trial run, to implicate ourselves. So that if they want to use us later, we won’t hesitate. You, though,” he said, but didn’t finish his sentence. He stood up and said something that, at that moment, struck me as utterly strange: “I wonder where my wife is right now.”
10
It took an hour and a half to walk back to the station. I wasn’t thinking of Malik Woznica anymore. He and his morphine-addicted wife were nothing to me. A few busses passed, but I didn’t flag them down. Brano Sev had helped organize a demonstration in order to close it down. The absurd logic of state security was difficult to grasp.
If I were sent to prison-this is what I remembered telling Leonek-Agnes and Magda would be alone, maybe even harassed. I would not be able to protect them. But I couldn’t take a club to those people. And Kaminski-I’d attacked him. That, perhaps, was my one regret. But it wasn’t a deep regret.
I didn’t go inside the station. I found my car, waited for the ignition to catch, then drove fast.
Magda was putting away groceries in the kitchen. “Agnes is with a friend,” she said absently. Her hands shook as she closed the cabinets.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Of course I’m all right.” I was glad she didn’t look at me, because I was not all right.
Pavel followed me as I turned on the radio and went back to the kitchen. But instead of the usual Russian composers, or even staticky American crooners, I heard a Hungarian voice speaking slowly and clearly, giving news of the continued fighting in Budapest. Then another voice asked Soviet soldiers why they were killing their Hungarian brothers and sisters; why, after suffering Stalin for two decades, they were now serving worse Stalins. Magda looked up, surprised and, it seemed to me, terrified.
“You’ve been listening to the Americans?”
“No,” she said abruptly. Pavel let out a sharp cry; she’d stepped on him.
“Christ, Mag, I’m not going to arrest you for it.” I forced a smile to show that this was true.
Pavel scurried, whimpering, into the other room.
Magda turned back to the counter so I wouldn’t see her face. “Maybe it was Agnes,” she said, then: “No, it was me.”
“Doesn’t matter. Just turn it back to something mundane when you’re finished.”
She nodded at the wall. “Of course. Yes.”
I wanted to talk it all out with her, to tell her what had happened. I wanted her to touch me and say that I’d done right. But she wasn’t listening today. She was somewhere else. She was distracted by her own decisions.
When the telephone rang, I turned down the Americans, who were calmly asking Russian soldiers to lay down their arms and disobey their officers in the interests of justice.
“Ferenc.”
“Emil?”
“Look, Ferenc, we’ve been talking.”
“Who?”
“Us. The guys. We’re not going in tomorrow. We’re calling in sick.”
He sounded like he’d been drinking, which was what I should have been doing. “All of you?”
“Stefan, Leonek, and I. And you, Ferenc.”
I paused before answering. “I guess it should be all of us.”
“Good.”
Magda was throwing something away; I could hear paper crunching. “Just tomorrow? There’s the rest of the week, Thursday and Friday.”
“No decisions yet. But we can discuss it tomorrow.”
I still wasn’t completely sure, but the thought of that office was more abhorrent than the fears for my own family. After I hung up, I raised the volume again and said to Magda, “I’m staying home tomorrow.”
“You’re-” she began, and looked closely at me for the first time since I’d gotten home.
“I’m calling in sick.”
Then a high squeal filled the apartment as the radio-jamming went into effect.
11
I called the Militia switchboard in the morning and coughed through my lie. The operator took it as easily as she’d taken all the other calls that morning, finishing with a knowing Take care of yourself that meant more than a warning about illness.
Agnes and Magda left together, and I sat with Pavel and the newspaper. My coffee became cold. Although the fighting in Budapest would go on for a few more days, it was evident to The Spark that the battle was over. The Hungarian agitators of reaction are shrinking back into their bullet-riddled holes. They were defending from broken windows. And the Americans, despite their proud radio talk, were staying out of it.
There were only a few lines about the demonstration: Yesterday, an unwelcome scene appeared on our streets. Hungarian and other foreign elements staged a counterrevolutionary riot that quickly exposed their violent intentions. Four brave members of the People’s Militia were injured restoring order.
I was preparing to take Pavel for a walk when the telephone rang. It was Moska. “How are you feeling?”
I hesitated. “Sick. I feel sick.”
“So do I, Ferenc, but I can’t do anything about it. Other than Brano and Kaminski, this place is deserted.”
“Oh.”
“Listen. Your disappeared woman has been found.”
“Svetla Woznica?”
“Third District. Central train station. Ferenc, they picked her up for prostitution.”
“For what?”
“When they brought her in, someone noticed the missing person’s report, so they called over here. Are you too sick to pick her up? I can’t leave the station.”
“Can’t they drive her over?”
“Too short-staffed. Seems half their men are out with the flu.”
The Third District Militia station had been moved when its previous home-the old royal police station on Bishop Albert Street, later Engels Street-caught fire in 1952. The cause of the fire was never fully proven, but five Party officials who had, before the Liberation, been high in the Peasant Party were blamed. The charge was subversion, and they were executed. The new station was a concrete slab built on the ruins of a bomb-damaged
