‘No. Thanks. So are you going to be looking up your old guards while you have a chance to express your gratitude?’

‘That’s an interesting question. We used to discuss that a lot at Recsk. What sort of people could beat someone to death just for the hell of it? There was disagreement about this in the camp, as there’s always disagreement when you get two Hungarians together. You know how the 23rd of October is going to be described in the history books? The day the Hungarians agreed.

‘Anyway, my view was that the guards at Recsk were basically very ordinary, if not too bright lads. They’d been told we were the scum of the earth, the most evil, degenerate, child-murdering, odious, verminous parasites to be found in creation: in short the sort of people who would run concentration camps. What use was it us trying to explain we were there because we h ad voted the wrong way?

‘The other thing is that, you know, someone who is jailed falsely for a long time, not a year or two, but three or more, tends to go to one extreme or the other. Judging from my experience you either become excessively forgiving or excessively vengeful. I feel we should remember Recsk. People should know what happened. But we should also forget about it and get on with other things. When the tanks go.’

A moving-off rumble came. Having made its point and intimidated the vicinity, the tank moved off. When Gyuri saw people emerging from the buffet he knew he could safely stand again. His clothes were soaked with sweat, the nostril-curling stench of fear. ‘Nice meeting you,’ he said, shaking Miklós’s hand, ‘hope you like the revolution.’

He bought some food. It was after seven, and because he had made eight the rendezvous time with Jadwiga and because his luck was sorely depleted, Gyuri was very keen to get home. Moving up to the Keleti Station he was annoyed to see the revolution strengthening. Dead Russian soldiers were lying in gutters and against buildings like inebriated vagrants. While Gyuri had no objection to dead Russian soldiers, it suggested that he was moving closer to the fighting rather than away from it as he desired. His hands were still shaking from his time out on the target range. His stomach would be mulling over the terror for weeks. Ridiculously, in the middle of the shooting he had had the impulse to shout at the tank crew: ‘Stop! You don’t understand. I’m a coward. This isn’t fair. Find some brave people to shoot at.’

A Soviet armoured personnel carrier that had erupted, probably by grenade, was proving a big hit with the locals because, apparently, it had a headless Russian on display inside. People vied to peer into the charred interior. Gyuri was totally unmoved by the sight of the Russian dead. He had heard all the arguments about how the Russians were people, how everyone is the same, what a great composer Tchaikovsky was; nevertheless he couldn’t help wishing that the Russians would fuck off and be people and the same, back in the Soviet Union. An incinerated corpse at his feet failed to elicit any compassion. Probably a conscript- he didn’t give a toss.

All around the Keleti Station, there were groups of tanks cutting off his intended route home. The Russian tanks weren’t doing anything but they didn’t seem to want to move. They were just occupying space. No one, Gyuri noticed, was strolling around close to them. The streets were full of people, no one wanted to stay at home, but a peopleless belt extended for hundreds of metres round the tanks. The streetcorner militia that had formed on the Rákoczi út were discussing what to do. There were two soldiers, several new teenagers (two on roller-skates) and a hotchpotch of individuals you’d find waiting for a bus, including two postwomen. ‘We need petrol bombs. That’s what they’re using at the Corvin. Who can get some empty bottles?’ asked one of the soldiers.

It was nearly eight. Gyuri cut down a sidestreet to see if he could sidestep the Red Army.

An hour later making his final approach, closing in from the direction of the Zoo, Gyuri was annoyed to discover that the Red Army had completely surrounded his flat. He was getting angry enough to attack one of the tanks.

As he was observing the tank blocking the end of Benczur utca and trying to think of a way of blowing it up, safely, without risk, with his bare hands, from an enormous distance he saw a man walk out of one of the blocks of flats at the end of the street and start to knock on the side of the tank, as if he were knocking on a door. He knocked very assiduously and after a few minutes, the turret opened and a leather-helmeted head popped out. What was the man doing? Asking them for a light? Hoping that the Russians would be less likely to open fire in mid-conversation, Gyuri galloped over. When he ran past, despite his grudging Russian, he realised that the man was haranguing the tank crew. ‘What are you doing here?’ the man demanded.

‘We’re here to protect you from hooligans and reactionaries,’ the officer protested.

‘Where are the hooligans? Where are the reactionaries?’ It was an intriguing exchange, but Gyuri had had enough current affairs for one day. Going up the stairs, he met Jadwiga coming down.

‘You’re late,’ she said sternly.

‘Time flies when you’re having a revolution.’

Inside, Elek greeted them with the news that Imre Nagy had formed a new government. ‘I’m pleased for him,’ said Gyuri, ‘but if you’ll excuse us, there are some urgent aspects of Hungarian-Polish relations to consider.’

Why shouldn’t things be conducted in comfortable conditions? thought Gyuri, glad that he had obtained a fully-qualified bed from Pataki as his farewell present. Worn out by history, worry, fear and his conjugal work, he was reclining into sleep when Jadwiga said apropos of nothing:

‘We are winning. It will be Poland next.’

He loved her craziness. Did it really matter what went outside the bedroom where they had established a bad-free zone? ‘Who knows, maybe even the Czechs will do something?’ Jadwiga continued, recounting her day out in the revolution and how she had come to Budapest. On Saturday, the students at Szeged University had held a meeting, as was suddenly the fashion, to discuss the pervasive iniquity of things. ‘It was the first time in my life I’ve seen anything that could even loosely be called democratic. Strange that I had to wait twenty-two years to see someone saying what they thought in public; there was something almost improper about it. So we voted to withdraw from that Communist-guided student union and to set up our own. I told them we had to do it. I remembered what you said about fighting all the way. That pushed me.’

Gyuri strained his memory but he couldn’t recall any such dictum.

The Szeged students had then voted to send a delegation to the university youth of Budapest to urge them to do the same. Jadwiga had arrived in Budapest on Monday night but hadn’t wanted to come and break the back of Gyuri’s sleep by saying hello at four in the morning. She had then been touring the collapse of the Party’s power. While Gyuri had been sheltering behind Stalin, she had been at the Corvin cinema, with one of the best seats in town to watch the fighting. Gyuri related his various encounters with Soviet tanks.

‘Were you afraid?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he lied, choosing a tone of cool indifference to the lethal nature of Soviet armour but not one of scorn, since he didn’t want to overdo it.

‘I wasn’t afraid either,’ she said. Not for the first time, Gyuri registered that Jadwiga was much braver than he was. A soul as firm as her breasts, beauty and fortitude, Venus and Mars in one. And her bravery was a self-fuelling, independent, detached bravery, the sort that would work alone, in the dark, in the gas chamber. What is she doing with me? Gyuri could envision rustling up some bravado if there was an audience or some support, but the sort of solo bravery that exists even though there is no one to witness or mark it was, he knew, beyond him.