Ahead of him was a space about the size of a soccer pitch. A large formal garden rather than a park, though without a single tree or flower. White sanded paths connected a pattern of grass rings, and around the edges of the rings the statues – those saved from the gleeful acetylene torches – were deployed in the sunshine like pieces of defunct weaponry. Soldiers, political leaders, abstracts of ideal citizens cast in monumental bonze or sharp-edged steel or stone, their hands raised, their bodies straining forward to greet the future. Some he recognized. Others dated from after ’56 and were new to him. But glowing in the mid-afternoon sunshine they were still impressive, still exercised some remnant of their old imperium, the light flashing from their massive shoulders, their bayonets, their metal chins. The strangeness was in seeing them all together, corralled in the park, walled in, as though they might break out and impose themselves again on the squares of the city. It had been wise of someone to insist on keeping them. There was even an element of humiliation to it, a sense that the monuments could be shamed, their failure kept in public view. And how utterly of the past they were! How soundly beaten! But moving among them, László began to feel a flutter of unease, like the survivor of a sea battle washed up among the bodies of his enemies, afraid that one might groan and stagger to his feet and be vengeful.

Their spell was broken (it was always thus) by laughter. A tour bus had arrived, and the park was cheerfully invaded by teenage students from some international summer school, who fanned into the park with worksheets and baseball caps, calling to each other in French and Italian and English, and taking each other’s pictures in front of the statues. What did they care for all this scrap metal? Communism was something their fathers and grandfathers had known about, perhaps feared. Now it was the pelt of an old wolf, a shaggy old bear, moth-eaten and ready for the tip. Did they find it odd that people had been so easily duped in the past? That anyone could have been so foolish as to believe in the common ownership of the means of production, the abolition of class, the equal distribution of wealth? Their generation was more sophisticated, more knowing, and yet, thought László, also more childish than the one he had grown up in. He liked their irreverence – no looming fathers with black moustaches to keep them in line – but what would they do with this freedom? He worried for them. Les Enfants du paradis. A pair of them, necking behind the Heroes of the People’s Power memorial (‘Those loyal to the people and the Party will be forever remembered...’) stared at him sharply, as though he were the litter man, or perhaps a pervert, and he moved quickly past them.