How long did it last? As long, he thought, as it took to tell it. Long enough. Then the crack! crack! of a rifle from one of the ground-floor windows to the right, the plainclothes man slumping against the car, the uniforms bundling him on to the back seat, and the big car reversing at speed, swaying its plated flanks like some ungainly animal startled at a water hole. Feri sprinted from the double doors behind László, wrenched the gun from his grip, and set off in pursuit, shouting wildly and firing from the hip, gangster-style. At the wreck of the Skoda, Karcsi and Joska knocked in the windscreen with rifle butts and dragged out the unconscious Zoli. Anna, crying his name, ran to where Péter lay between the car and the pillars, his jacket torn open beneath his ribs, and so much blood, and such a smell of blood, one of the bullets must have burst his liver. She knelt beside him, pressed her cheek to his lips, then turned to László, gazing up at him with such mysterious intensity that he realized – sudden shock of embarrassment and gratitude – that she knew everything, knew exactly what Péter had been to him, and had guessed it long ago. Their secret! Had she also, then (this girl majestic in the presence of death), understood why he had not pulled the trigger? Why he had abandoned his friend to the killers?

When Feri came back they wrapped Péter in a tarpaulin and carried him, all five of them, into one of the classrooms, and laid him on the table. Nobody reproached László – if nothing else, the utter dumb misery on his face would have made accusations impossible – but he spent the night apart from them, curled in a ball under his coat, shivering, while in the distance scattered gunfire played out the last hours of the revolution. Nagy was gone; General Maléter a prisoner of the Russians; and though the radio continued to broadcast appeals, the world had its eyes elsewhere, and there would be no help for Hungary, no miraculous intervention. In the fighting by the Killian barracks the next evening, Feri was killed by a grenade blast. At the end of November, Joska and Anna were arrested, beaten for days, and sent to Tokol internment camp on charges of armed conspiracy. Zoli went into hiding. Karsci fled the country. Two hundred thousand that year, László among them, crossing the winter marshes with their suitcases, their parcels, their spoiled lives.

A girl with black hair and a little silver stud in her nose put her hand on his arm and asked if he was unwell.

‘It’s just the heat,’ said László.

‘Sit in the shade,’ she said, leading him to a bench under the trees. ‘I thought you were going to faint.’

‘I just need to breathe,’ he said. ‘Really, I’m feeling much better already.’