[...]

The Chaika limousine was coal-black, indeed black as a crow, with glistening bluish-iridescent flashes on its body, a huge, chrome-plated radiator grille like a row of whale’s teeth. And wherever one looked, front and back, strips, scrolls and spirals proliferated upon it as if it had been parked in Brezhnev’s mythical vine bower, where diamond wine was grown and shoots of silver grape, silver gherkin and silver pumpkins, small and large, had been trained to grow over it. A Chaika was never seen in the street; it was reserved for the Moscow high-ups, notabilities and celebrities.
Brezhnev is said to have been so fearful of attempts being made on his life that he kept five versions of himself on hand at all times. Each so closely resembled him that he himself would have been unable to tell himself apart from himself, so it’s a good job they told him. That was why he also had five Chaikas, so if a Chaika pulled out of a Kremlin gate, in reality five Chaikas would pull out of five Kremlin gates, each identical to a hair, with an identical him seated behind the shaded windows in each, so that any would-be assassin would have been more than a bit confused, if he saw all five at once, which one he should aim at. And if he did not see them all at one and the same time, the assassin would simply open fire, giving Brezhnev a one in five chance of dying (or four to one of living).
Of course, the fact is that if the story had reached us in Hungary, in the dusty further reaches of the radiant Empire, then one must suppose any would-be gunman would also have got wind of it and he would have dashed his weapon to the ground, saying it was utterly hopeless, or he would canoodle with one of the serving girls from Big Daddy’s palace and one fine day she gets noticed by Brezhnev and groped by him behind the red velvet curtains. Got you! is just about to slip out from the disguise of Brezhnev’s all-eyebrow Boris the Bear mask and try to smile, but not on an expectorant pill as he was accustomed to at the Red Square parades, when he would wave only to that extent that it seemed he was shading his eyes with a trembling hand, or as if strings were being yanked on his hand just an itsy-bitsy bit every now and then, like one does on a spinning top. No, Brezhnev would force a conqueror’s smile to his lips, the stiffened tendons of the face muscles creaking like my younger sister’s bones, because she went to gymnastics classes where they were forced to stretch their legs even wider than the splits. And after a weak clinch that would not be shown on Hungarian TV even in adult-rated films—not that I saw any of them, because films like that were forbidden—anyway after that, the slip of a parlour-maid, while fiddling with the commander-in-chief’s grizzled chest-rug, would have wheedled out of him, like the secret of his hair out of Samson, which Chaika he would be sitting in the next day, and, having gone outside onto the balcony to Brezhnev’s bedroom in order to take the air, would have whistled this information down to her friend, the assassin, at the foot of a splendid fir-tree, who would jot the tune down as the boots of the revolutionary bodyguard crunched around him on the gravel paths.
Then it would have been no use that all of the Chaika’s motor parts were of the highest-grade steel, which was why it guzzled eight or nine m.p.g.—and no mixture either but premium, indeed super—not that it mattered because we had more oil than we knew what to do with, and moreover more and more from one year to the next, as it said on the chart in our geography textbook. And it would have been no use that the windscreen and all the darkened glass was bulletproof. No use that the guard at the gates would have been doubled. Because, where he was least expected, the Assassin would have stepped out and laughed satanically, while we would all laugh along with him, because naturally we too would get to see this. And he would lift up the armour-piercing shoulderwhatnot, much better than the ones they had in the ten-year-old films from the West that could be seen even here, because during those ten years the heroes of those films, particularly the Americans, and that’s what the assassin would have been, they would obviously have progressed heaps, obviously their guns too.

[...]

János Lackfi
has published nine collections of poetry (two of them for children) and two novels to date.
He teaches Creative Writing at Pázmány Péter Catholic University and translates from French, especially works by Belgian authors. The novel Mortuary, from which the above excerpt is taken, is reviewed by Tibor Bárány on pp.160–166 of this issue.