The Draining Lake

What he did not know was that this would be the last time they would speak together in Leipzig.

“How’s Ilona?” Ha

“How do you know Ilona?” he replied.

“I don’t know her,” Ha

He sipped his turgid coffee without replying. There was a strange tone to Ha

“Does she ever talk to you about what’s going on in Hungary?” Ha

“Sometimes. We try not to talk much about…”

“You know what’s going on there?” Ha

“We talk about Hungary,” he said. “We just don’t agree on it.”

“No, of course, you know more about what’s going on there than she, the Hungarian, does.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“So what are you saying?” Ha

“What happened to you, Ha

“The Great Hope,” Ha

They fell silent.

“I just saw through all this crap,” Ha

Ha

“People don’t dare say what they think because everything here is under surveillance. The whole fucking society. Everything you say and do can rebound on you and you’re called in, arrested, expelled. Talk to people. The phones are bugged. They spy on the citizens!”

They sat in silence.

He knew that Ha

“They’re dangerous men, Tomas,” Ha

“Why are you always talking about freedom of opinion?” he said angrily. “You and Ilona. Look at the witch hunt against communists in America. You can see how they drive people out of the country, out of their jobs. And what about the surveillance society there? Did you read about the cowards who informed on their comrades to the House Un-American Activities Committee? The communist party’s outlawed there. Only one opinion’s permitted there, too — the opinion of the capitalist cartels, the imperialists, the warmongers. They reject everything else. Everything.”

He stood up.

“You’re here at the invitation of the proletariat of this country,” he said angrily. “It pays for your education and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for talking like that. Ashamed of yourself! And you ought to fuck off back home!”

He stormed out of the cafeteria.

“Tomas,” Ha

He strode down the corridor away from the cafeteria and bumped into Lothar, who asked what the hurry was. Glancing back, he said it was nothing. They left the building together. Lothar offered to buy him a beer and he accepted. When they sat down in Baum next to Thomaskirche he told Lothar about the argument and how Ha

“I don’t understand it,” he said to Lothar. “I don’t understand how he can abuse his position like that. I could never do that,” he said. “Never.”

That evening he met Ilona and told her about the argument. He mentioned that Ha

“Do you agree with him?” he asked hesitantly.

“Yes,” she said after a long pause. “I agree with him. And not just me. There are many, many others. People of my age in Budapest. Young people here in Leipzig.”

“Why don’t they speak out?”

“We’re doing that in Budapest,” she said. “But we face huge opposition. It’s awesome. And there’s fear. Fear everywhere about what could happen.”

“The army?”

“Hungary is one of the Soviet Union’s trophies from the war. They won’t give it up without a fight. If we manage to break free from them, you couldn’t say what would happen in the rest of Eastern Europe. That’s the big question. The chain reaction.”

Two days later, without warning, Ha

He heard that a police guard had been stationed outside Ha

He could not believe his ears when Emil burst in and related the news. Emil did not know much. He had met Karl and Hrafnhildur, who told him about the police guard and how everyone was saying that Ha

The following day, three days after their argument in the cafeteria, he received a message from Ha

You asked me what had happened in Leipzig. What had happened to me. It’s simple. They kept asking me to spy on my friends, to tell them what they said about socialism, about East Germany, about Ulbricht, what radio stations you listened to. Not just you, but everyone I knew. I refused to be their informer. I said I would not spy on my friends. They thought I could be persuaded. Otherwise, they said, I would be expelled from the university. I refused and they let me be. Until now.

Why couldn’t you just leave me alone?