The Longest Pleasure (11 page)

Irena stared at her, eyes flickering. 'How should I know?'

'You have told no one that I was coming to Budapest?'

'I only knew myself last night. I haven't left the flat since.'

The boards creaked again, and knuckles drew across the door, gently.

'Avo,' Kirsten breathed, the automatic pistol thrust forward.

'I thought you had killed them all'

'I can shoot through the door,' Kirsten whispered. 'Stand away.'

'No!' Irena shouted.
'You
stand away. It is not Avo. I swear it.' She pulled herself free, turned the key in the lock, wrenched it open. 'Sandor! You're hurt!'

Galitsin fell to his knees. His uniform jacket was torn, and there was blood on his face and hair. 'I would like a drink,' he muttered.

'Of course, dearest.' Irena held his shoulders. 'But come and lie down. Kirstie. Help me.'

'He's a Russian !' Kirsten accused.

'He's a
man,'
Irena shouted.
'My
man.' She dragged Galitsin to the bed, laid him across it, stroked his face with long, soft fingers. 'What happened to you?'

Galitsin shook his head, slowly, from side to side. Blood dribbled from an open cut behind his ear.

'Ssh, darling,' Irena said. 'Kirsten, pour some vodka.'

The German woman hesitated, then made a face and filled a glass. 'You take the customers at home now, is that it? He will have to die, anyway.'

'He is not going to die,' Irena said. 'And he is not a customer. He is Sandor. Do you not remember?' She took the glass, raised Galitsin's head, wetted his lips. 'The boy in Pest? The one who destroyed the tank?'

Kirsten Moeller stood above the bed. 'I don't believe it. He raped you.'

'He made love to me.' Irena mopped at the blood with her rolled nightdress. 'Hundreds of men have done that.'

'He was one of the men who beat me up,' Kirsten said.

'He never touched you.'

'He was there. He did nothing to stop them. He's an Ivan. Can't you understand? It is war now. Us against them. At last we are killing Russians, in the street, in the open.' She brought up the gun.

'No!' Irena screamed, propelling herself away from the bed, all arms and legs, striking the blonde woman on the chest, sending her tumbling over the one chair. They fell together, Irena uppermost. Kirsten's head banged, and-went swinging. For a moment she lost her grip on the pistol, and Irena pounced on it. Galitsin lay motionless on the bed.

Kirsten sat up, rubbed the back of her head, looked down her left leg at the laddered stocking. She reached out and replaced the shoe which had come off in her fall.

Irena Szen backed away from her, the pistol thrust forward with the nervous uncertainty of a novice. 'Listen,' she said.
'You
must try to understand. He came to Madam Csank's one night, oh, three weeks ago. He came with another man, and he saw me, and took me, and he is only a captain. I was amused, until we got into the bedroom, and he called my name. He remembered me, you see, because he has never stopped thinking about me.'

'He told you that?' Kirsten's tone was contemptuous.

'Listen ! He is not a moujik. He has a fine, sensitive mind.'

'Christ give me patience,' Kirsten begged.

'Listen! You do not th
ink about people. You size them u
p
by what they look like, what they do. But there are motives. Your Nazi friends murdered his mother, before his eyes, when he was only
a
small boy. Twelve, or something. Can you imagine the effect that had on him?'

Kirsten smiled. 'It gave him
a
fine and sensitive mind.'

Irena's fingers were tight on the trigger. 'He could never forget it,' she said. 'He kept seeing her body. Because do you know how they killed her? They crucified her, with bayonets, when they had finished with her. And he kept seeing his mother, hanging there, bleeding. Until that day in Pest, in
1945,
when he and those two men raped us. He stopped seeing her after that. He saw me instead.'

'So he's
a
nutcase. Shooting him would be to put him out of his misery.'

'Don't you understand? All the guilt and horror he had felt at being forced to stand there and watch his mother die was combined with his personal guilt and horror at helping his comrades ill-treat me. Ill-treat you, as well, Kirstie. He assumed the guilt of the whole thing.'

"You need a brass plate on the door, Irena. And a nice big couch. You could screw them and suck them dry all at the same time.'

'And he lived with this guilt for ten years, Kirstie. Until he encountered me again. He told me he had never doubted he was going to find me again. Perhaps he even knew to look in a brothel, after what happened. But don't you see, Kirstie? He loves me.'

'Oh God! He loves your bloody pussy, you mean.'

'He loves
me,'
Irena said. 'As a woman, maybe even
a
little bit as a mother. He loves
me.
Sometimes we lie here on this bed together, and he never even touches me. We just talk.'

'And now you love him.'

Irena Szen glanced at her, and flushed. 'No. I don't know, anyway. I always thought I could love only you, Kirstie.'

‘I
thought so, too.'

‘
But you don't love
me,
do you? To you I'm a sweet little dolly who can jerk you off, and, more important, can provide you with that bolt-hole in Buda. Like you said, who's going to come knocking on the door of Buda's biggest whore? I've known that for years. I've never resented it, Kirstie. I wanted to give, not take, from you. But now I know that I need love as much as the next person. Sandor loves me. I like being loved.' 'And when he's gone?'

Irena shrugged. 'Then I go back to Madam Csank's. I'll come back to you, Kirstie. I don't even want to leave you now. I just want you to understand.'

'Oh, I understand,' Kirsten said. 'You're the original empty belly. You want life to dole you out everything. So you'd better enjoy it while you can. Give me back my gun and I'll leave. There's a revolution going on while you mumble about the necessity of love.'

Irena looked down at the pistol in her hand.

'Don't you trust me?' Kirsten jeered. 'Look, I'll swear it to you. I won't shoot the bastard.'

'I want more than that,' Irena said. 'Promise you won't tell anyone that he's here. Promise that you won't be responsible for his death. Never.'

Kirsten shrugged. 'Why should I bother? There are nine million Hungarians would like to have a go at him. And at you, too, if you're not careful, sweetie. I'll take a back seat on this one.' She walked across the room, took the gun from Irena's fingers, picked up her travelling bag, and went to the door. 'See you up a lamp-post'

VI

Alan Shirley wrote in his diary: 'Page
6,670, 5th
November.
195
6.
And that is that. The landing at Port Said is so much wasted prestige. The damage was done in the Security Council last night. Presumably it will be possible to place this day in large letters in the history books and say that on this date Great Britain officially ceased to rank as a world power.

'Impressions: As a soldier, great pride in a brilliantly executed operation. As a Br
iton, utter disgust that a mous
tached dago is going to get away with it. As a moralist, concern that my nation should have found it necessary to embark on a war of aggression, over a trade route. And as an intelligence officer? Great concern over the real casualty of this war, the British spirit We have come to regard ourselves as crusaders, as the good gun in the western, slow to draw, sometimes even accused of timidity, but when forced to action, always triumphant. When will they make a western where the hero is killed because he lacks the money to buy bullets? Nothing like this has happened to Britain since
1781,
and I have an uneasy feeling that now, as then, it will need a generation and a successful war to regain our pride. Pray God that I ma
y be
wrong.

'And what of Hungary? If Soviet troops were assaulting Budapest yesterday, they will have taken the city by now. Or will Buda again hold out for three months? And will the sack be as bloody, as bitter, as brutal as in
1945.
I
wonder how many Russians will have taken part in both? Galitsin! Should have noted his name a fortnight ago, when Nan mentioned it. Why? Because it is rare to hear a name, at that level, twice, so far apart? Or because I liked the boy? Or the idea of his mother, leaving Motherwell, and setting off for the Red Horiz
on. I will wish Alexander Petro
vich Galitsin luck, and his comrades all the damnation in the world.'

2

The Prisoner

The
explosion awoke Galitsin. He rolled out of the narrow bed, landed on the floor, shivering; the gas had been cut off and it was Monday,
5th
November. There was something about the
5th
of November, something his mother had said, every year. 'Please to remember the
5th
of November, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.' The English had had their troubles, too, once upon a time. 'Please to remember the
5th
of November, when the Ivans hurt Buda a lot'

'Sandor?' Irena fumbled for him in the gloom. For twelve days they had remained within arm's reach, except on the four occasions she had been out in an attempt to find food, and then he had been afraid. Together they were not afraid. Twelve days, out of so many. Out of so few, really.

'I'm here, sweetheart.' He squeezed her arm, got up, tried the tap. He did this every morning, to remind himself of what was happening; the water had been cut off a week ago.

'What was that bang?'

'Shells. They must have reached the river.'

She sat up, her arms clasped round her knees. 'Are you afraid?'

He poured vodka, measuring carefully; each drop was precious. 'Yes.'

There is no reason to be afraid, Sandor. You did not desert. You were wounded. You could not move for two days.' She smiled. You were taken prisoner.'

He sat beside her, the g
lass held in front of him. They p
ressed their cheeks together, put their tongues into the quid together. They shivered against each other as the warmth entered their bodies. 'I could have got back that Thursday,' he said. 'Before the patriots took over the city.'

'It would have been too risky, Sandor. They were still lynching Avo men.'

'I was wearing a Russian uniform.'

'By then they were lynching everyone.' She smiled, and kissed him on the nose.
'They even tried to lynch me.' ‘
You never told me.'

'You were wounded, remember? And, anyway, they didn't. So I sleep with the Russians. I am a whore. Nobody lynches whores. A few kicks up the backside, that is good enough for a whore. For Buda's greatest whore, one kick was sufficient.'

'Don't talk like that.'

She lay down, her hands beneath her head; the cold made her nipples pout, and she wanted him to touch them. 'I am a whore. But I'm a good whore. I'm proud of that. And now I'm your whore. What will they do to you?'

'The penal battalion, at the very least And I will lose my rank.'

'That frightens you?'

He shook his head.

'I thought I understood you, Sandor. But I do not understand you at all. You are afraid, and yet you are not afraid. You are a soldier. I believe you were a good soldier. Yet you stayed here with me, while your comrades were fighting. You rose from the ranks to be an officer, yet you say you will not mind when they take it away from you. Kirstie said you were a nutcase. I think she may be right A nice nutcase.'

'Have you seen her?' He kissed each nipple in turn, moved down her body with lips and fingers, parted her legs, explored. He had done this so often he thought he knew every square inch of her flesh, and yet he could not do it often enough. She was not even beautiful. But she was unique. She was to Galitsin the man what the book of Chekhov stories had been to Galitsin the boy, a treasure to be opened whenever possible, always to be enjoyed. But the book had been paper, the enjoyment one-sided. This flesh was living, and already covered with the fine sweat-spray of a hastening orgasm.