The Secret Speech (37 page)

The crowd closed ranks around the streetlight as though it were territory to be defended. One of the officers grabbed the flag, which was wrapped around Zoya, pulling it free, holding it up contemptuously. It was only now that Zoya noticed the Communist hammer and sickle in the center had been cut out, a gaping hole in the middle of the material. The AVH officer sounded like a barking dog, Zoya unable to understand a word he was saying. He searched Zoya’s pockets, infuriated by her silence. Finding nothing apart from the beret he threw it back at her. A single bullet trapped inside the material fell to the street.

The officer picked up the bullet, staring directly at Zoya. Before he could speak the drunk woman reached down and grabbed the beret from the street, placing it proudly on her head. It looked ridiculous, too small for her. The officer turned to the woman and Zoya didn’t need to speak Hungarian to understand that he was asking if the beret belonged to her. The officer raised the bullet to the woman’s face. Did this also belong to her? he must have asked. In reply, she spat in his face. While the officer wiped the glob of phlegm from his cheek, the woman flicked Zoya a glance: run!

Cutting a diagonal across the street, Zoya ran. Mid-sprint, she turned around, peering over her shoulder. She saw the AVH officer swing a punch, connecting with the side of the woman’s face. As if the punch had connected with her own face, Zoya’s legs crumbled and she collapsed, her hands scraping across the ground. Rolling onto her back, looking over the tips of her shoes, she saw the woman fall. A man jumped forward, grabbing the officer. A second man joined the fray. Scrambling to her feet, Zoya lurched into another run, this time reaching the side street. Out of sight, she didn’t stop. She had to get help. Fraera would know what to do.

Fraera and her vory occupied several apartments within a small courtyard set back from Rakoczi ut. Accessed by a narrow passageway, the apartments couldn’t be seen or spied upon from the main street. Reaching them, Zoya stopped running. No one was following her. In the unlit passageway, relieved to be off the street, she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Malysh. They hugged. He said:

– Are you okay?

She shook her head.

They entered the courtyard. There were six floors of apartments. Fraera had occupied several apartments, spread across various floors, each put to a different use. There was a small printing press, producing leaflets and posters. In another apartment there were stocks of guns and munitions. A third apartment served as a meeting place, to eat and sleep and discuss. Entering the communal apartment, Zoya was surprised by the number of people-far more than usual. On one side were Hungarian men and women, most aged in their twenties, arguing passionately. On the other side were the vory. Most had not made the journey from Moscow to Budapest, remaining behind, preferring the certainty of the criminal underworld. They didn’t understand the deal Fraera had made with Panin. They couldn’t conceive of a life outside of Russia. Only a small number of her most ardent supports had followed her, partly out of loyalty, mostly because they knew no other vory gang in Moscow would want them. From fifteen, only four remained.

Fraera was in the middle of the room, in between the two groups, listening even when Hungarian was being spoken, sensitive to body language and gestures. She saw Zoya immediately, spotting her distress:

– What happened?

Zoya explained. Fraera’s eyes came alive, turning around, addressing her translator, a Hungarian student named Zsolt Polgar:

– Find as many Hungarian flags as you can. Cut the hammer and sickle out of them, so that there is a hole in the middle. This is the symbol we’ve been waiting for!

Fraera had no interest in the woman who’d risked her life to save Zoya. Upset, Zoya left the apartment. She leaned against the balcony rail. Malysh joined her. He lit a cigarette, a habit he’d copied from the other vory. She took the cigarette from his lips, stubbing it out under her foot:

– It makes you smell.

She regretted her words. The smoke did make him smell: it made him smell like all the other vory. But she hadn’t meant to embarrass him. Hurt, he slid off the rail, sulking back inside the apartment. She needed to remember that he was not her little sister to boss around.

At the memory of Elena guilt clutched her throat like a hand. She’d contemplated her decision countless times-had she not joined Fraera, she would’ve been killed. Yet the truth was that she had wanted to leave, to run away, and had there been a free choice, had Fraera offered her a chance to go home or come with her-she would’ve left her little sister behind.

– You’re angry?

Startled, she faced Fraera. Although they’d lived together for five months, Fraera remained intimidating and inaccessible, more like a source of energy than a person. Zoya composed herself:

– The woman with the flag saved me. There’s a chance she’ll die for it.

– Zoya, you should prepare yourself… many innocent people are about to lose their lives.

Descending the stairway and leaving the courtyard, Fraera checked that no one had seen her. It was late at night. The streets were empty. There was no sign of the AVH officers that Zoya had described. Fraera set off, frequently stopping with calculated abruptness, turning around and making sure that she wasn’t being followed. She trusted no one: including her supporters. The workers, students, and representatives of various underground anti-Soviet resistance movements were indulgent and impractical, preoccupied with irrelevant theoretical debates. It would be easy for the AVH to infiltrate their ranks. They’d be too self-absorbed to notice the signals, putting all of them in danger. Despite Fraera being here under Frol Panin’s instructions, the AVH knew nothing of her operations. If she were caught she would be shot. No one outside of the conspirators in Moscow had been trusted with information regarding the plans to trigger an uprising. If her dissident supporters found out that she was simultaneously working with Soviet ministers, they’d kill her.

Bending down, Fraera scooped up a leaflet fluttering in the gutter-a copy of the revised sixteen points, sixteen demands for change. The points had been formulated yesterday afternoon in a crowded meeting at the Technological University. Unable to pass for a student, Fraera had loitered outside. When she’d heard that the intention of the meeting was to debate whether the students should leave DISZ, the campus Communist Party organization, as a protest against their Soviet rulers, she’d decried their lack of ambition, encouraging her student acquaintances to divert the discussion onto bolder issues. Fraera had been working in this fashion for the past four months, applying pressure, offering material support, and stoking resentment against the occupation as best she could. While the anger was real and deep, she’d struggled to convert sentiment into direct action. There was only so much she could do herself. Her role was to professionalize amateur dissident. Yesterday, finally, there’d been success. With a determination and clarity that surprised Fraera, the students had distilled their debate into sixteen points: We demand the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet troops, in accordance with the declaration of the peace treaty.

On the scruffy handwritten notes carried out from the hall, that demand had been ranked fourth. Fraera had hurried back to her apartment, transcribing the notes and making one amendment: placing the demand for Soviet troop withdrawal at the top. Within hours her vory were handing out revised copies interlaced with the most provocative extracts from the Secret Speech.

Outside of the few vory, the remnants of her gang, Fraera’s closest associate was Zsolt Polgar, her translator, an engineering student she’d met in a revolutionary underground bar, located in a factory basement. With low ceilings that were never visible because of the thick haze of cigarette smoke, Fraera had found the venue’s population rich in ambition. Zsolt-the son of a wealthy Hungarian diplomat, destined for power and money were he only to conform to the Soviet occupation and find his place within it-spoke fluent Russian and Hungarian and had quickly become Fraera’s most valued intermediary. She humored him, slept with him, beguiling him with stories of her ruthlessness. Appreciating his skills, she flattered him as a libertarian and revolutionary. In reality, she saw him as little more than a rebellious young man, kicking out against his father whom he despised as a sycophantic Soviet appeaser. Regardless of his motivation, he was brave and idealistic, easy to manipulate. He had suggested a demonstration in support of the sixteen points-an inspired notion. As it happened, the idea had been duplicated around the city and Fraera wondered if that might be the work of one of Panin’s other cells. Either way, the result was that tomorrow two marches would set out at the same time, one from either side of the city, joining at Palffy Square. There had been previous shows of disquiet in the capital, none of which had amounted to anything. Fraera was certain that only when people were standing side by side, feeding off each other, was there any chance that the underbelly of anger would transform, like a pupa to a butterfly, from bitter obedience into glorious violence.

Reaching the Astoria Hotel, several blocks from her apartments, Fraera took a moment to observe the crossroads before glancing up at the hotel’s top-floor window. In the last window along, on the corner, a red candle was burning, the quaint signal that she’d devised. In this context it meant she was to come upstairs. Moving around to the back of the hotel, entering through the deserted kitchens, she climbed to the top floor, walking to the room at the far end of the corridor. She knocked. A guard opened the door, gun drawn. There was a second guard behind him. She stepped into the suite, frisked before being ushered next door. Seated at a table, glancing out the window like a contemplative poet, was Frol Panin.

An alliance with Panin, or any man like him, had never been part of Fraera’s plans. Arriving in Moscow, she’d accepted that unless she was content with merely plunging a knife in Leo’s back, she needed assistance. Similarly, Budapest had never been part of her plans. It was another improvisation. With the illusion of Zoya’s death, her original ambition-to bring ruin down on Leo’s hopes of happiness-had been achieved. Leo was tortured as she’d been tortured: the loss of a son paid for with the loss of a daughter. He was broken, forced to live with grief, and not even allowed the fire of righteous indignation that had sustained her through those same emotions. Her revenge complete, she’d been faced with the decision of what to do next. It had become apparent that she couldn’t untangle herself from Panin and melt away. If she stopped being useful to him he would order her death. If she escaped it would be a life of wealth and growing old, a life she had no interest in. Hearing of his international operations, his attempts to agitate disturbances within the Soviet Bloc, she’d volunteered herself and her men. Panin had been skeptical but Fraera had pointed out that she was likely to make a far more convincing agitator against Soviet Russia than the loyal KGB agents he was using.

Panin offered his hand-a polite, formal gesture that she found absurd. Nevertheless she shook it. He smiled:

– I’ve flown over to monitor progress. Our troops are in position on the border. They have been for some time. Yet there is nothing for them to do.

– You’ll get your uprising.

– It needs to happen now. It is of no use to me a year from now.

– We’re on the brink.

– My other cells have had considerably more success than you. Poland, for example…

– The riots you instigated in Poznan were crushed with no serious loss of face for Khrushchev. They did not have the impact you required, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering with Budapest.

Panin nodded, admiring Fraera’s gift for weighing up situations exactly. She was right. Khrushchev’s plans to scale back the conventional military had not been derailed. They were a central platform of his reforms. He had argued that the Soviet Union no longer needed so many tanks and troops. Instead, they had a nuclear deterent and were building an experimental missile delivery system that required no more than a handful of engineers and scientists, not millions of soldiers.

Panin considered the policy foolhardiness of the most dangerous kind. Aside from the inadequacies of the missiles, Khrushchev had fundamentally misunderstood the importance of the military, just as he’d misunderstood the impact of his Secret Speech. The military existed not solely to protect against external aggressors; its purpose was to hold the Soviet Union together. The glue between the nations of the Soviet Bloc wasn’t ideology but tanks and troops and planes. His proposed cuts, combined with the reckless sabotage inflicted by his speech, were putting their nation in peril. Panin and his allies were arguing that not only must they maintain the size of the conventional army but they must also extend and rearm it. They must increase spending, not decrease it. A disturbance in Budapest, or indeed in any other East European city, would prove that the entire fabric of the revolution depended upon its conventional military might, not merely its nuclear arsenal. Several million men with rifles were useful in reminding the population, at home and abroad, who was in control.

Panin said:

– What news do you have for me?

Fraera handed him the leaflet printed with the sixteen points:

– There’s going to be a demonstration tomorrow.

Panin glanced at the sheet of paper:

– What does it say?

– The first demand is for Soviet troops to leave the country. It is a call for freedom.

– And we can trace the inspiration back to the speech?

– Certainly. But the demonstration won’t be enough.

– What else do you need?

– A guarantee that you will fire upon the crowd.

Panin placed the leaflet on the desk:

– I’ll see what I can do.