There was more quivering of stiff upper lips in amusement at the wary Hungarian who had no grasp of the international situation. ‘No,’ pronounced the military attaché, ‘they’re finished here.’

‘Indeed,’ said The Times, ‘I’m willing to bet you five pounds that they don’t come back. You can give me a few Hungarian lessons when I win.’

‘I hope you do win,’ said Gyuri.

Jadwiga had told Gyuri to meet her at the Corvin and going there he stopped on the Körút to buy a newspaper. A Soviet corpse was still lying there, an unusual sight now, since the dead had been mostly packed away out of sight. Something metallic glinted on his wrist. It looked familiar: an Omega watch, like the one the Red Army had relieved him of back in ’44, exactly the same model. He undid the strap, and looked on the back of the watch. There were the initials Gy. R ‘Thanks very much for looking after it,’ he said, pocketing the watch.

Walking across to the newsagent, a shout stopped him. It was Róka. ‘Hey class alien! This is what you want,’ he said, handing Gyuri one of the stack of papers he was nursing. ‘Kill anyone interesting?’ he enquired. ‘Not really,’ Gyuri replied, ‘but I was being choosy.’ Róka had spent most of the livefire time chasing a lorryload of AVO who were keen on surprise atrocities; they would flip open the flaps on the lorry’s rear and blast away at anyone in view, male or female, young or old, unarmed or unarmed. Róka’s crew had missed them several times by seconds. The story ended with the AVO being last seen motoring in the direction of the Angyalföld. ‘They couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes,’ Róka obituarised. The paper that Róka had handed over was entitled The Truth. ‘I’m working on the editorial committee,’ he explained proudly. ‘Oh, before I forget, Hepp wants everyone out at the club at Hepp-time, Monday morning. He says we’ve wasted enough time.’ With a parting injunction to look up Gyurkovics, who had managed to get himself put in charge of the distribution of a vast amount of processed cheese from Switzerland, Róka carried on down the street dishing out his journal to anyone willing to take it.

Gyuri had never thought he would ever in his life earnestly want to read a Hungarian newspaper. Newspapers were now teeming with the sort of increases that could normally only be found in the production figures of Communist enterprises.

The old papers had changed, they had received editorial transplants and new ones were springing up like mushrooms. They weren’t much good but you did have the novel sensation of wanting to read what they had to say. You couldn’t tell before you read the paper what would be in it; now you got all those things that hadn’t been there for nearly ten years, opinions that weren’t the Party’s. Casting his eye over The Truth, Gyuri read some soggy new poetry, some exhausted old poetry and some articles about the 23rd which hardly counted as news. It was still a pleasure to read.

After the fighting, the tidying up. Everywhere, shattered glass, masonry and martial litter was being victoriously swept up by the city-proud populace. Soviet wreckage was being pushed out of roads so that traffic could circulate properly. Everyone was on their best behaviour as if the Revolution was an honoured guest they wanted to impress with their hospitality and civility. A bubble of decency had risen out of the earth’s core and burst in Budapest. Peasants were driving in from the countryside with their carts to distribute food to whoever they came across, dishing out sacks of potatoes, apples, marrows, some late melons. In a broken jewellers’ window Gyuri saw a note explaining that the contents had been taken to the flat above for safe-keeping. There were cardboard boxes on pavements marked ‘for the fallen’, overflowing with banknotes contributed for the dependents of the dead.

The worst fighting or the best fighting depending on how you felt about it had all been around the Corvin Cinema. The Corvin Cinema was not a very salubrious or comfortable cinema, as a cinema it wasn’t much to brag about, but as if with astonishing forethought, it couldn’t have been better designed for street fighting. The circular cinema was surrounded by a ring of flats with lots of convenient alleyways in and out.

But the Corvin had not been the only streetfighting club. All over Budapest they had jack-in-the-boxed. Even around the Corvin, there had been stiff competition: the Prater utca school, just behind the Corvin, and, just across the road, on the other side of the Űllői út, the Kilián Barracks, the home of a ‘C’ battalion, a collection of soldiers considered by the authorities to have no commitment to the cause of Communism, who had been down for even more than the usual excessive ditch-digging and road-laying and who generally had a menial, unpaid, unfed time and who had been particularly interested to hear about the Revolution.

As if that wasn’t enough, running parallel to the Űllői út which had been the major route into Budapest for the Soviet troops, was the Túzoltó út, a ludicrously narrow street which had sired its own warriors, known locally reasonably enough, as the Túzoltó boys, who had pulled off one of the neatest coups of the fighting, known locally as the Túzoltó massacre. Seeing that his comrades were having nasty, mainly fatal, accidents on the Űllői út as they came to look for hooligans and reactionaries, a Soviet tank commander had made the decision to go down Túzoltó út. Five tanks had gone in, but none had come out.

‘We got the first tank and we got the last tank,’ one of the participants (a leading water-polo player) had related to Gyuri. ‘So the other three were stuck there. They weren’t going anywhere. We had a break for lunch and then we finished them off.’ So gorged was Túzoltó út with bits of Soviet tanks that the boys had to move their operations to another street.

When Gyuri arrived at the Corvin, as always there were lots of groups congregated outside the cinema; the necessity to be out on the street hadn’t diminished. People wanted to see history with their own eyes. The anti-tank gun was still out by the entrance with a sign ‘retained by popular demand’ propped up on the barrel; people were still carrying their weapons, despite the call for people to start handing them in. Jankó, the commander of the Corvin’s single anti-tank battery, was hobbling about on his wooden leg and didn’t look as if he would be paying heed. He had a rifle in his hand, a greatly-prized AK-47, the latest Soviet assault rifle, slung over his back, a holstered pistol and a bayonet peeking out of the top of the boot on his good foot. Indisputably a man who was afraid of missing an opportunity of killing some Russians, Jankó had certainly done a faultless job on the anti-tank gun, six tanks burst open like popcorn, one shot apiece. Not surprisingly in a man with such homicidal proficiency and a knack for the gadgets of death, he had a mean set to his face. Gyuri could imagine him working as a rat-catcher, getting a kick out of killing small mammals, until larger, more Soviet ones came along.

Jadwiga, true to form, was nowhere to be seen where she should have been seen. Gyuri glanced in at a few of the meetings that were taking place, but he couldn’t see her. Now the fighting was over, people were doing one of two things, either holding meetings or painting the old national insignia on everything. The meetings, initially bracing and euphoric, were lurching towards tedium. The absence of free association had been wearing, but it was like not reading a book for five years and then trying to read five at the same time to make up. Creedal orgies, nationwide.

All sorts of organisations were coming into existence; the old political parties carrying on from mid-sentence where they stopped in 1947 and all sorts of societies for political prisoners, for students, for office workers, for economists, for revolutionary water-polo players. The old joke about two Hungarians on a desert island resulting in three political parties had been enacted in earnest. There was probably already an association of one-legged freedom-fighters for Jankó to join.