Someone called his name. It was, Gyuri realised, Elemér, the dog-catching mailed-fist of the proletariat. ‘Gyuri, Gyuri, why don’t you explain to everyone who I am? Tell them I only worked in the stationery and office supplies department. They don’t understand I’m no one important.’

Gyuri was so taken aback that he was left fumbling for emotions and responses. Later on, he would wonder whether Elemér’s consummate invertebratery wasn’t in some senses admirable, such a remarkable absence of moral backbone being as worthy of attention as a circus contortionist. The ability to survive surely being a laudable thing. Elemér’s tone would have been apt for greeting a long unseen friend at a party. Gyuri settled for staring at him, aghast that he wasn’t standing between a Radio building and a loaded submachine gun. It was a case of either beating him to death or doing nothing. Since he knew the students would be upset at his tarnishing the propriety and decorum of their AVO reservation, giving Elemér a look that he knew would affect his digestion, Gyuri left.

Outside, he could still hear a muted battle raging, like the muffled argument of a domestic dispute a wall away. Trams had become a rare species, hardly glimpsed, but a tram appeared to take Gyuri across the Zsigmond Moricz Square, where he had a good, close-up view of two Soviet tanks shelling what he assumed were freedom-fighter strongholds. Once the tram was over the bridge track in Pest, things were quieter, a few streetsweepers were brushing the pavements clean with their customary sluggish swishes; their union evidently hadn’t called them out.

While keeping a look-out for any discharging tanks, Gyuri reflected on the corpse of the student killed that morning, now laid out in state in front of the University by some trees, surrounded by impromptu wreathes and flowers, and table-clothed by a national flag that had been draped over him. It was one of the old fashioned tricolours that must have been stored away somewhere, not one of the new-style flags that everyone was parading around, minus the centre where the Communist coat-of-arms had been cut out.

The makeshift catafalque had been moving but didn’t even start to make up for the death. A whole lifetime poured down the drain. The person gone, and a lifesize effigy, a livid, well-observed caricature left. All those beliefs, emotions, memories carefully stored up over twenty-three years junked. Twenty-three years. What? 200,000 hours, a Hungarian Second Army of tooth brushing, cleaning behind the ears, blackhead squeezing, small talk, waiting for public transport, wiped out. An identity, spring-cleaned out. A whole being just left as a resume in a few memories, until those repositories were disposed of as well. Abridged away. Nothing like death, thought Gyuri climbing out of the morbidity, for making life look good.

He got off the tram at the Körút. Although most of the shops were closed, he remembered that the day-and-night people’s buffet (a delicatessen short on the delicacies) had been open earlier, and he decided to investigate what was going in the way of edibles.

Near the buffet, lying in the middle of the road like a giant’s abandoned football, was the head from Stalin’s statue, dragged there by a jubilant public as a mark of their triumph, displaying the traitor’s head on a gargantuan scale. A gentleman was seeking to knock off a chunk with the aid of a pickaxe, and it occurred to Gyuri that he should take a souvenir as well. He queued up patiently behind the man, when the Soviet tank appeared.

It roared into the middle of the Körút and opened fire on Gyuri.

Sheltering behind Stalin’s head with the other souvenir-hunter, the first and only thing that occurred to Gyuri as the bullets smashed into the shops and cut down tree branches, was how much he wanted to live. He had never been aware of how enormous, how global this desire was deep down, a desire that was in no way smaller than the universe – how he would do anything, absolutely anything to live, to live for even a few more seconds. If life meant huddling up to Stalin’s head for the next forty years or so, that would be quite satisfactory as long as he could stay alive. Rolled up tighter than a foetus, he closed his eyes not questioning whether that could be of any use.

The shooting stopped, and there was no movement apart from some shards of glass keeling over; those who had taken up assorted positions on the ground were evidently quite happy with them and were in no rush to move. Gyuri could still hear the rumbling of the tank engine unpleasantly close. An old man embracing the pavement next to a tree, with his bag of shopping beside him, yards away from Gyuri, was protesting with amazing persistence and volume: ‘Two world Wars. Two world wars and now this.’ Gyuri considered whether it might be a wiser investment in self-preservation to run to a more secure and spacious sanctuary but while he had faith in his speed, the notion of having only air between himself and the barrel of the heavy machine gun on the tank was too disturbing. Unless the tank closed in, he was going to sweat it out behind Stalin. The rumbling of the tank continued at the same remove; Gyuri became curious as to what they were up to but he wasn’t going to have a look

‘I never thought I’d be grateful to Stalin,’ commented Gyuri’s companion whom Gyuri was half-crushing. They were there for what may or may not have been a long time but certainly felt like it. Gyuri didn’t mind waiting; it was one of those activities you could only do alive. His co-huddler had been in Recsk, the labour camp that had been set up as an extermination centre in the middle of the Hungarian countryside. Gyuri knew nothing about it except that it had existed and been shut down under Nagy; one of István’s friends had been an inmate but had given him only the most elliptical of accounts.

Normally, Gyuri avoided the offers of life stories offered in the traditional Hungarian style of expanded self-history, the vocal autobiographies that all Hungarians seemed to be working on continually but he didn’t have much choice and besides, Miklós’s extracts were quite gripping. Gyuri had always rated himself unlucky but now he realised he was only a weekend player in misfortune.

‘The Germans, what a cultured people when they’re not invading your country,’ Miklós explained. Miklós had done a stint in the anti-Nazi resistance. Caught, the Hungarians were too lazy to execute him and passed him to the Germans who put him in Dachau where he had been dying of cholera when the Americans arrived. He got better. ‘It seemed a bit pointless to die when you’d just been liberated.’

He came back to Hungary. ‘Talk about being stupid.’ Where he worked for the Smallholders’ Party. ‘Talk about asking for it.’ Then he got a free ride in a black car which led to him being imprisoned in Recsk. The concept of Recsk was that you went in but you didn’t come out. ‘Its scope was modest compared to the Soviet or German models, I suppose,’ Miklós conceded, ‘but we’re a small country, after all: there were only fifteen hundred of us.’ For three years Miklós and the others had no news from outside. ‘The only news we got was from shitty newspaper we filched from the guards’ latrine and let’s be honest, the papers aren’t much to talk about in the first place. We only found out about Stalin’s death when one of us noticed a black border around his picture in the main office.’

Miklós was very talkative despite the discomfort of his position, pinioned by a first division basketball player. ‘You know what the worst thing was? It’s all crap about how important freedom, friendship all that abstract stuff is. You know what matters? Sleep and food. The hunger was unimaginable. You thought it was bad during the War? I tell you, a few weeks, a couple of months of going hungry – it’s nothing, nothing. A doddle. A year… two years…three years without enough to eat,’ he was now shouting, ‘it’s beyond human belief. Ever since I got out, I always carry this.’ With some difficulty, he unwrapped a cloth containing a piece of cheese, a hunk of bread and some radishes. ‘I have to carry supplies with me all the time. I hardly ever use it. I just have to have it with me.’ He offered Gyuri a tired-looking radish.