Budapest, July 1992
Ferenc Németh always said Mass in the afternoon. In the morning, his congregation had other places to be: at jobs, in the markets, with family, and for some, in the other churches where politics and safety dictated that they be seen. It also took time for all of them to get there: they couldn’t all come at once, lest the neighbors and police suspect something.
In safer times, Ferenc held the service in his apartment. These weren’t safer times, so his house church moved from place to place – basements, other people’s dwellings, back rooms of offices and stores. This week, he was in the cellar of a back-street café that one of his congregants owned. In the dim light provided by a single bulb and a television screen, with sacks and jars and crates piled all around, it might have been a catacomb, and no doubt Ferenc’s motley congregation – these from the university; those, still in their work clothes, from working-class Zugló and Angyalföld; others in the suits they might wear during the week in their high office towers; over there, a professor of mathematics whose grandfather had been a Magyarab.
One ritual was always the same, no matter where the Mass was celebrated and no matter how precarious the times were: that after the service, Ferenc would share tea with the congregation. “Our sermon,” he called it – in a house church where there might be twenty people one Sunday and eleven the next, and where all of them were there because they had strong opinions, it could hardly be otherwise. Hierarchy couldn’t be as strict in such a place as it might be elsewhere, even if Ferenc wanted it to be, and he didn’t.
“The sin of pride,” said Katalin, the Zugló housewife. She was looking over her tea at the television, which was showing another fission-bomb test in space: earlier, it had shown a parade of riders massing near the Croatian border.
“Pride, yes,” said Zoltán from the crate he shared with his fellow students. “And nationalism and oppression. The sins of El Salvador, the sins of Belgium…”
“Sins washed away by blood, in El Salvador’s case,” Lajos the mathematician finished. His speech was clinical, but his voice betrayed fear. “And in ours…”
“There hasn’t been much blood so far,” said Ferenc. “Fights in the streets, yes, but no soldiers. Not even many police. The regency council is worried about what side they’ll take.”
“But tomorrow will be much bigger than before. The council can let a hundred or a thousand people demonstrate, but they know what happened in Russia when a million came out.”
“If they don’t have the army, who do they have?” Katalin asked.
“I don’t know,” admitted Lajos. “But I think it’s too much, too soon.”
“Too soon?” said Zoltán? “Almost too
late, if you ask me. We need to hit them fast, before they get their feet under them…”
“You’re talking like we’re at war.”
“Aren’t we? And if we wait a month longer, the Croats will back down, and then where will we be?”
Imre the machinist gave a sharp laugh. “A month? A week at the outside. Haven’t you heard the exporters in Zagreb screaming ever since Croatia revoked the customs union? And the president of the Fiume council’s even worse. ‘Brotherhood despite disagreement’ – certainly, if ‘brotherhood’ means ‘profit…’”
“And if they do back down?” said Erzsébet. “The people on the streets
started coming out because prices rose, but it’s more than that now…”
“Not as much more as you think. You’re a lawyer, so prices don’t matter much to you, but for most of us, if we can put food on the table, we’ll go home and cook it.”
“And if we don’t win this war quickly,” Zoltán said, “there might be a real one if the Croats
don’t back down.”
“You don’t think…” Katalin began.
“Those riders on the television – do you think they’re for show? The regents aren’t sure of themselves, so they’re letting the diplomats and the courts handle things for now, but if things get bad enough…”
“We have to do our part to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Ferenc. “We at least have to try.”
“So you’ll be there tomorrow?” asked Anna, who sat to Zoltán’s left.
Lajos began to say something, but fell silent when Ferenc answered. “We all will be. Because otherwise, we do nothing in the face of sin.”
Ferenc had lived his entire life in Budapest, but he still couldn’t walk through its streets without thinking how beautiful it was. The boulevards and stately buildings of former centuries were all around, and only a few still bore the scars of the long-ago civil war. Some still called Hungary’s capital the Paris of the East, but to Ferenc it surpassed Paris, and never more so than today.
The people in the streets stretched in all directions, too many to count. Maybe there were a hundred thousand, maybe three, maybe a million: only an eagle could begin to say which. They were as motley as his congregation, and they carried Hungarian flags and pictures of Kossuth and chanted
szabadság – freedom. It was all patriotic and proud: it might have been a demonstration organized by the regency council itself, except that the freedom the people were calling for was real, and the regents were its targets.
Ferenc walked down Váci street, carried by the tide of people. He was moving far too slowly to be marching, but he felt as if he were, and a ribald song from his days as a conscript came unbidden to mind. He was part of a victorious army that held the city unchallenged: there was no sign thus far of soldiers, or even of the thugs the council had brought in to quash the smaller demonstrations. The regents’ palace was closer, almost in sight…
The aircraft came without warning, six of them streaking low above the crowd and releasing their bombs as they flew. There were explosions and the beginning of screams, and almost before they could finish, the helicopter gunships came in the bombers’ wake, firing machine guns into the crowds. Banners fell with those who carried them, and the shouts of
szabadság were mingled with cries of panic.
“This way!” shouted Ferenc, calling to his congregation and any others who could hear. Miraculously, none of them had been hurt, but the gunships were coming for another pass. “Run! Run!” There was an alley to the left that would take them out of the kill zone and away from the crowds that might trample them, and he pointed them to it, watching them go before he ran himself.
The alley led to a side street and that street to another, and they ran. There was the sharper report of rifle fire now, sporadic and scattered: not the army or the police, Ferenc realized, but thugs who had waited just outside the ambush zone.
The regents have enough loyal soldiers to control the air, but still not the ground.
But even uncontrolled mobs could be dangerous. A group of club-wielding men blocked their way, and Ferenc doubted that they’d be satisfied with administering a beating. They were out to kill. He seized a length of pipe from an alley rubbish-pile and saw that others had done the same. “Stay together,” he said. “We have to get past them. They’ll push us back to the kill zone if they don’t kill us themselves. Get ready and rush them.”
He raised the pipe and broke into a desperate charge, swinging wildly to clear a path in front of him and ward off blows. Somewhat to his surprise, the tactic worked. The thugs had expected to rush groups of panicked demonstrators, not to be rushed themselves. They fell back in confusion, and by the time they regrouped, Ferenc and the others were past them with only a few blows struck.
“Now we know who they still have, Katalin,” said Lajos, bleeding from a shrapnel wound.
“Now we know who we have to fight,” said Zoltán.
“Quiet,” whispered Ferenc. “We’re not out of danger.” His conscript training, far older than his ordination as a priest, had taken hold now. “We have to get out of here, find a place to hide until the shooting’s over. And then we do what we can.”
They found shelter in a basement, and for three days, they cared for the wounded who drifted in. Those who they could treat, they treated, and for the others, there was prayer. In thirty years as the priest of a house church, Ferenc had given last rites maybe a hundred times. In the three days after the protest, he gave nearly as many.
On the fourth day, with the smell of gunpowder gone from the streets, they began to drift home. They argued about what they might do, talked about setting up another field hospital in Ferenc’s apartment or raising money for the families of the dead, but for many, defiance had turned to despair. Ferenc wondered what he would say to them at the next Mass, turned it over in his mind a hundred times, but each idea he had was as unsatisfying as the last.
And then the next collective sermon was no longer a worry, because on the sixth day, the secret police came for him.
Maybe a spy among the demonstrators – because surely there had been spies – had identified him. Maybe someone had picked him out as a leader from aerial photographs. Maybe they had some other source of information, some other way of knowing. It didn’t matter once the cell door closed behind him.
They did all the things Ferenc expected. They denied him sleep and filled the air with harsh and piercing noises. They tied him up in positions that made his muscles burn after an hour and had every nerve in his body screaming agony after three. They put a hood on him and struck blows at unpredictable intervals as they shouted questions. They used electric shocks and rubber truncheons. And sometimes they let him see them and used fists.
“Who paid you, traitor?” asked an interrogator on what he believed was the tenth day. The man’s voice was deceptively calm, but it was punctuated by a blow to the head. “Was it the socialists? The Germans? The Consistory?”
Ferenc found that he was still able to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Another blow, this time to the gut; Ferenc doubled over as much as he could and vomited. “Was it the
cigányok, you disgusting pig – the gypsies in Eastern Transylvania? Was it the
zsidók in Buganda and Salonika? The fucking Habsburgs? The Sultan?”
By now, the torturer wasn’t even waiting for answers: he rained questions and blows on Ferenc as if only they mattered. The list of enemies went on and on, and all at once Ferenc found it oddly liberating: if everyone was the regency council’s foe, then he and his church had the support of all humanity.
Between that thought and the backhand slap that followed, Ferenc didn’t hear the next question. “I said, are you a member of the underground, you pig?”
“Yes, of course I am.”
“You listen to the foreign radio? You run a house church?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then who pays you, you bastard? The socialists? Germany? Russia?”
Those questions occupied the remainder of the day, and the one following.
Some time later, they gave him clean clothes and a shower and brought him into an office. The man across the desk was in an ordinary suit, not a uniform, and though Ferenc was tied to a chair, there were no guards with truncheons standing behind him.
“I’ve reviewed your case,” the officer said mildly, “and I must say I deeply regret the things that have been done to you. It seems to me that you’re not culpable. You have grandiose religious ideas, you reject the authority of the Primate of Hungary, you believe you have a messianic mission… you aren’t a criminal, you have a religious and political psychosis. You should be treated with compassion, not beaten.”
Fear stabbed through Ferenc deeper even than it had done in the face of bombs and torture. He knew better than most what happened in the regency council’s psychiatric hospitals: he’d ministered to two people who’d spent years there. One of them had been a member of the
old regency council, before the Croatian secession and the coup of ’67. Most of the time, he no longer remembered.
“I’m perfectly sane,” Ferenc made himself say.
“Then why haven’t you done what sane people do, and shown your adaptation to society? Why haven’t you confessed?”
“I did confess. I can confess again now. I’m a member of the underground. I was a priest in an unauthorized church. I gave names” – he had done, of people he knew they’d already killed or caught – “and I can tell them to you again.”
“Now, now, I’m a doctor. Your confession wasn’t complete, and it wasn’t in the right spirit. You may want to think about that before we meet again.”
In the cell that night, Ferenc wondered whether this would be the point where he truly broke.
Two days later, they let him go.
His release came as much without warning as the bombers and the torturer’s blows. They took him down the route he normally walked to the interrogation chamber, but brought him to another room instead and told him to change into his street clothes. They walked him out the door without a word, closed it behind him, and left him there.
He wandered to the corner, not sure at first where he was, thinking only of putting distance between himself and the prison. It took him a few minutes to get his bearings, but when he turned onto the main street of Zugló, he could place himself again on the map.
Katalin’s apartment wasn’t far, and it didn’t take long to get there: there was still a pall over the streets, and people came out only when they had to. She was inside with her children – thank God she hadn’t been taken – and when she saw Ferenc’s face, she made him sit down while she went to get cold compresses.
“What happened to you?” she cried. “Everyone was sure they’d killed you, like they did to Zoltán – they just took him out and shot him.”
“They were going to break me for the show trial. They were just about to do it, too – and then they just let me go.”
She nodded, as if it all made sense. “They’re afraid,” she said.
All at once it made sense to him too. The regents controlled the air but not the ground, and while the people might have been cowed, their fury had only increased. The council was scared that a show trial of a priest, or even an execution in a prison basement, might be a spark.
“There have been clashes on the Croatian border too,” Katalin continued, “and they’re worried about desertion, or even mutiny.”
“Clashes?” said Ferenc sharply. “When did they start?”
“About three o’clock this morning.”
Ferenc did a quick calculation in his head: about five hours had separated the first shots fired on the border from his release. “If there are deserters, we need to shelter them.”
“We need to do more than that,” Katalin said.
“Of course…”
“I’ve been talking to Anna since they took you and Zoltán away. She told me about Russia and Adamawa and Sarajevo – how the people made their own state when the state failed them. You’ve already done that with your church, but we need courts and welfare workers and schools – things they can’t bomb from the air. They don’t own the ground, so we must replace them on it, and when the soldiers desert, they’ll desert to us.”
“That will take a long time,” he said. “It’ll be hard, if those clashes become a war.” He sat in silence for a long moment. “But we have to, I think, or else we’ll be silent in the face of sin.”