Bombshell

Chapter Three Poetic Justice

The notion to kill Khrushchev hadn’t come slowly; it arrived to him in one swift instant — not a thought, but an impulse, a need, a duty…

In America he was called Jonas Veres — Veres Jonas in his native land (Hungarians used their last names first) — though he was not yet accustomed to it, slow at assimilating, a reluctant exile. It was difficult to realize he had been in the United States for almost three years already, coming here following the revolution in Hungary in 1956.

Before the bloodbath, Jonas had been a student at the university in Budapest, where he would often pass time at the Writer’s Union, and dabble in poetry… But his major passion was history.

Through history he learned the tortured but fascinating facts about his country’s convoluted past — a past riddled with foreign invasion and suppression, first by the Asian warlord Attila the Hun, then the Romans, Turks, Austrians, Germans, and now… the latest in a seemingly endless chain of invaders… the Russians. A joke that circulated the campus among the students was: What time is it… and who’s ruling us now?

Perhaps it was inherent in the temperament of the Hungarian people — peaceful and happy — that they seemed so susceptible to conquest. Or maybe it was their willingness to make the best of a bad situation, a positive attitude that had a negative result by keeping them from attaining the freedom they so longed for.

Those days were over. The “gentle” people had had enough of rape and pillage. And of course invaders always seemed to forget that when they rape the women of a victim nation, they sow their warrior’s seed into the blood of the conquered people.

Jonas had been only eight years of age when Hitler was defeated by the Russian Army in the spring of 1945; with this victory, there was great hope among the people of Hungary — hope that they would regain their land, so brutally taken in the war, and at long last be able to govern themselves.

But Stalin crushed that hope — along with any resistance to the new communist regime he had installed — and the Russians ruled with a force that made the Hungarians practically long for the vanquished Germans. The irony was not lost on a college-age student of history like Jonas: the liberators of the Hungarian people had suddenly become their captors.

Almost overnight, street signs came down and old accepted names changed to new strange Russian ones; and, too, Soviet emblems quickly replaced Hungarian ones, shattering any sense of place, shredding national pride, even as schools began teaching the Russian language, twisting the Hungarian tongue in yet another unmerciful torture. Farmers lost their land, merchants their shops, and the workers any rights, as Russia moved like a hungry beast over the picturesque land, devouring everything in sight, a greedy monster spouting (between bites) nonsense about the “good of the people,” destroying a nation’s heritage in the name of collectivization and Soviet domination.

Bad led to worse: next came the witch-hunts and executions by the Russian Secret Police — the dreaded NKVD — of any “criminal” (real or imagined) who dared to criticize the new Russian government. Was it any wonder the people all but prayed for World War III to break out? If only the Americans would defeat the Russians, perhaps Hungary could again rise from the ashes…

Then two things happened to bring back a glimmer of hope: Stalin died, and neighboring Poland revolted.

Jonas, like all Hungarians, watched in awe as the crisis between the Polish citizens and Moscow — with Nikita Khrushchev now at the helm — boiled to a head. The result was astonishing: Khrushchev agreed that Russia’s satellite country could “choose its own path toward socialism,” and did not send in his troops!

A bolstered Hungary took this cue, and on October 23, 1956, staged its own revolt, in the belief — the hope — that they too might win such concessions.

The riot had ignited like spontaneous combustion, thanks to impassioned students like Jonas, and what had started on campus quickly spread throughout the country — writers, artists, teachers, laborers, merchants, peasants, even children, all picked up arms supplied to them by the Hungarian Army, who sided with the populace in the effort to drive the Russian government out. NKVD agents were shot on sight, and the few Russian tanks that did dare enter the cities received Molotov-cocktail welcome parties.

And now it was the Russian street signs that came down, the Soviet emblems defaced, while statues of Stalin were toppled and spat upon and sledgehammered and even riddled with bullets. But the fervent patriotism — incited by Jonas and his fellow student rebels — had a righteousness that did not lose its high ground: there was no looting of broken store windows — even the professional thieves abstained.

And after three intense, frenzied days of fighting, Hungary was rid of the communists. Elated, the people of the often-invaded land — for the first time in hundreds of years — went to sleep that night a free country.

Jonas woke the following morning in bed next to his girlfriend, Eva. She too was a budding poet, her father a cobbler, much as his had been a baker; a year younger than him, a slender fair-haired blue-eyed beauty, Eva seemed nearly waif-like in comparison to the norm of Slavic zaftig farm girls. And for all his artistic and scholarly leanings, Jonas had something of the warrior in his blood — the Hun in his ancestry could be seen in an angular face Eva insisted had a pleasing “exotic” quality.

“The Magyar in you,” she had reminded him that wonderful night, “it shows.”

“Don’t speak foolishness,” he laughed.

“They were fierce tribesman, you know. A thousand years ago they made a kingdom, here. Maybe you will be a poet king. Maybe you will help forge freedom. So few poets can make history…”

Such talk came only after many cups of their nation’s sweet, delicious wine. Of course students shouldn’t have been drinking in the dormitory, a violation of university policy…

As was spending the night together, which was an infraction that could have had both students expelled; but this was the new Hungary, and many such rules fell by the wayside that glorious night, including their previous precautionary use of birth control. With the promise of freedom, it suddenly seemed all right now to risk bringing another life into this better world.

As morning sunlight streamed in through the slatted windows of the tiny dorm room, Jonas was enjoying the warmth of Eva’s nude body, running his hands along her slender curves, mentally composing a poem to her charms as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Her long blonde hair smelled of smoke from last night’s bonfire; but the acrid scent was perfume to him, a pleasing reminder of how the students had made a pile of communist books and propaganda pamphlets they’d ransacked from the Party’s bookshop, and hauled into the street, and set aflame.

Suddenly, the door to the dorm room burst open.

“Jonas!”

Pluck, a younger classman — his pale, smiling face dominated by wild eyes so brown they were almost black — was standing in the doorway. The boy was wearing a Soviet Secret Police hat with the emblem torn off, his brown hair sticking out from underneath it like straw.

“Our resolutions are written!” Pluck blurted. “We’re taking them to Parliament…” Then he noticed Eva, who was hastily pulling a sheet up over her head, due to his unexpected entrance, and the boy shyly added, “Oh… hi, Eva.”

Eva giggled, muffled from beneath the sheet. She drew the bedding back, just enough to reveal her face. “Good morning, Pluck,” she said with a smile.

The happiness in the room — unaided by wine, merely a heady mixture of elation and youth — was as clear and obvious as the sunshine lancing through the shutters.

Jonas leaned on an elbow. “When are we marching?”

“Right now, you silly goose! Hurry up!”

And Pluck shut the door.

“Such language,” Jonas said, and burrowed under the blankets, cupping one of Eva’s firm, round breasts. “Maybe they could do without us today…”

Her blue eyes held his, her full lips made a kiss that was also a smirk. “Do without the poet king? Stuff and nonsense.”

“I’m no king, my sweet. Just another student.”

“And think of what we students have done… Don’t you even want to know what the student delegation has come up with?” And rather formally, she removed his hand from her small, perfect breast, then gave him a playful smile. “There will be plenty of time for… poetry… later.”

On Rákóczi Avenue in front of the dormitory building, Jonas bent over and picked up a leaflet dropped by one of the students. Eva, buttoning her dark wool coat against the cold morning wind, leaned against him, peering at the paper.

“Multi-party democracy…” Jonas was reading. “Freedom of worship, press, and opinions… public ownership of industry… return of the land to the peasants…”

“This too is poetry,” Eva said. “What about neutrality?”

Jonas scanned the paper. “…Hungary non-aligned with any other country.”

Eva’s eyes widened.

They both knew this was a bold step. By demanding neutrality, the Hungarians would be asking even more from Moscow than the Polish had, daring to demand that the door to the West be pushed open wide.

Jonas slipped an arm around her and Eva smiled at him, and he at her. He gave her what began as a peck of a kiss and turned into a long, passionate embrace.

Their lips parted, but their eyes did not. “Let’s catch up with the others,” Eva whispered, touching his mouth with a fingertip as he tried to kiss her again.

Jubilantly, holding hands, they hurried along the wide street where shopkeepers were already busy cleaning up debris and repairing broken windows. His father in Szeged would be doing the same, as would hers in Miskolc. Here and there lay remnants from the recent battle: a burnt-out Russian tank, sprawled like a dead beetle, an overturned Army truck, its broken headlight eyes looking stunned; in the middle of an intersection stood a life-size statue of Stalin, its arms outstretched as if directing traffic, but its head knocked off, at its feet.

At this, they looked at each other and laughed.

Just past Republic Square, they caught sight of the student delegation — nearly one hundred in all — approaching the steps of the Parliament Building, where a de facto government had hurriedly been put into place.

He and Eva were walking arm-in-arm, with a bounce in their step, when they first heard the brittle mechanical sound, shattering the peaceful morning, and it took several seconds before Jonas recognized it as machine gun fire.

The crowd of students — at first confused, then yelling and even screaming — tried to scatter, but were cut down by Russian soldiers materializing from all around them like uniformed ghosts. The hand-held machine guns made a terrible drumming, and the students marched to it, the air misted red with blood, the cobblestones streaming with it, crimson battle ribbons of dying surrender.

Within seconds, they were all dead — all of them — many still clutching the white resolution papers, now speckled and spattered with red.

Half a block away, Jonas and Eva froze in their tracks — they did not seek cover… they were not in the path of the invaders; like Stalin’s headless statue, they stood there, stunned and horrified, witnessing the massacre like some abstract theater piece, a grotesque ballet of blood.

But this was nothing abstract — not when their friends were dying. Eva gripped his arm and turned away when a boy fleeing toward them turned out to be Pluck, his eyes wide not with enthusiasm but terror; then his body was riddled with bullets, flung to street like so much refuse.

The machine guns stopped.

The street was scattered with puppets whose strings had been snipped; the acrid stench of gun smoke floated on the wind, a ghastly echo of last night’s bonfire.

Some of the soldiers prowled the perimeter, while others — snouts of their machine guns curling smoke — began climbing, two-at-a-time, the steps of the Parliament building — to assassinate the renegade government inside. Jonas and Eva were taking this in when, over the top of the building, a Soviet MiG fighter came streaking down.

Jonas grabbed Eva’s hand, spun her around, and pulled her roughly back down the street.

“Truck!” he said, meaning the overturned truck could provide a barrier from bullets.

He wasn’t sure she had heard him, though she kept pace at his side; he could hear the plane bearing down on them. Behind them, bullets chewed up the street and spat up powdered cement, spraying their feet. The bullets were stitching the street at their back as they dove behind the truck, Jonas throwing his body over hers.

“Oh, God… Oh, Jesus…” he moaned, on top of her, like last night. “Where the hell did they come from…”

But the body beneath him was so motionless, not even trembling with fear, that he knew. He knew.

He raised himself up enough to look down at Eva, who was on her back, blue eyes staring and empty and, yes, she was dead. Then before he could even sob, much less cry out in anguish, he felt his head explode, or seem to — the butt of a Russian rife had come down on the back of his skull, to put him temporarily out of his misery, and he lay on her one last time.

When Jonas regained consciousness, he was on his side on a flatbed truck, arms and legs bound, face encrusted with dried blood, like the crisp sugary surface of a pudding. He wasn’t alone: the back of the truck was filled with other boys, some of them very young, all of them bruised and bloodied.

Jonas’s tongue was so dry he couldn’t speak, but a youth next to him, who was similarly bound, answered the question he could not pose.

“They’re taking us to Russia,” the boy whispered, his eyes large and frightened. “For rehabilitation.”

A burly Soviet guard near the cab stirred and moved toward them.

“Shut up down there,” the guard snarled in Russian, pointing his rife threateningly at them. His eyes were as black as Pluck’s and as dead as Eva’s.

Jonas lay his throbbing head back down and closed his eyes. When he awoke again, it was dark. He was still in the truck, bouncing along a rutted dirt road. He soon realized, due to his position, that he could probably throw himself off the truck — his first thought was to try this, not to escape, but to die. Something else deep inside, burning like some foul food that refused digestion, pushed him instead toward escape and survival; he did not know it yet, but his life had a new engine now — not history, not poetry, not freedom, not Eva… revenge.

Slowly, inch by inch, he moved his bound body toward the edge of the flatbed, and when the guard wasn’t looking, took a deep breath and rolled off.

A peasant woman found him along the roadside the next day, took him in, and dressed his wounds. After a few days, he set out on foot for Austria. There, the American Embassy helped him — along with hundreds of others like him — get to the United States, where he remained in New York, working at various menial jobs, his childhood baking skills proving helpful…

But with each passing day he became more restless; America was a great country — they had freedom, though they did not seem to appreciate it — and, anyway, it wasn’t his country. And the language was hard to learn.

He hopped a train, sharing a boxcar with hoboes, fitting in fine, eventually landing in Los Angeles because that was as far as the rails could take him. Then the Holy Cross Mission helped him put down some roots — an apartment, a bakery job — which gave him some semblance of peace. But at twenty-three Jonas could never really see himself finding a wife better than Eva, or raising a family, or even becoming an American citizen. No matter how hard he tried, these universal visions, once precious to him, would never materialize. Something had died with Eva; the only thing still alive in him was that hot coal of revenge, which never went out… cold as the rest of him might be, it always glowed hatefully at his core.

No, his notion to kill Khrushchev had not come slowly; it came in one swift instant… like the instant it had taken for the MiG bullets to kill Eva. It was a reflex — a doctor’s hammer to a patient’s knee. When his co-workers in the bakery began to talk of “that fat commie fucker,” “that Red bastard,” Jonas perked up.

Khrushchev is coming, they said.

All right, then.

Khrushchev is coming… Khrushchev will die.

At first, Jonas thought he might have to return to New York to assassinate Khrushchev; he had enough money saved to take a bus — hopping trains would not be necessary, this time. But soon the American press was thoughtful enough to provide the premier’s travel schedule, which included a stop in Los Angeles.

How wonderful freedom of the press was!

His parents had been Roman Catholic, but when Jonas went off to the university, he had abandoned the church; like so many students he found notions of existentialism interesting, and considered himself an agnostic.

Now, in America, and for the first time in many years, Jonas went to a Catholic Church and prayed — thanked God for this gift. He did not, however, take confession.

Jonas watched the hearse-like black limousines pull away from in front of the hangar at the airport in Los Angeles. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his flour-soiled chinos, fingering the press-pass card he’d lifted off a Newsweek reporter. His fellow reporters had been nice enough to mention among themselves that Khrushchev was going to a luncheon at Fox Studios later, and that a civic dinner would follow at the Ambassador Hotel that evening.

Getting into Fox Studios would be hard — they had a gate, and guards, and everyone knew everybody. But the hotel? That was a public place; so much was unguarded in a free country. The hotel would be easy, with so many guests and restaurant patrons…

Jonas caught a bus at the airport that took him downtown, boarding another one going to West Los Angeles, where he lived on the fifth story of a rundown brick apartment building in which only a few less languages were spoken than at the United Nations.

In his tiny kitchenette, he placed the stolen press badge that read, “John Davis, Newsweek” on the table next to a black Kodak camera with silver flash attachment. He opened the camera and inserted a small revolver in its hollowed-out interior. The pistol didn’t look very threatening — like a starter’s gun at a track meet — but pressed against Khrushchev’s temple, it would be up to the noble task.

Then, taking a piece of butcher paper, Jonas printed a note for the authorities to find. He didn’t want his adoptive American country to bear the brunt of his actions.

Satisfied, Jonas went into his bedroom where a new brown serge suit, white shirt, diamond-patterned beige tie, and tan hat awaited, spread out like a sartorial feast on the threadbare bedspread. The outfit had taken much of his savings, except for the change in his pocket. But that was all right; after tonight he would have no further need for money.

He’d studied the photos in the recent Life magazine of the pressmen covering the dictator’s trip… of what they wore… and newsreels at second-run movie houses and news programs on televisions in store windows… of how they acted, these American reporters. He practiced their brash stance and obnoxious smirk in the bathroom mirror, until he thought he’d gotten it right. He was no actor, but he had been in the arts; he was creative.

Jonas pulled out the loose change in his pocket. There was more than enough for him to call a taxi, and arrive at the Ambassador in style.

But that would be later.

He checked his watch.

There was plenty of time for a long, refreshing nap.

And, sunlight creeping in the shuttered windows, Jonas slept better than he had since that night with Eva, who entered his dreams and kissed him and called him a poet and a warrior.

So few poets, after all, can make history.