In Europe

is sitting on a bright red tractor, the other one is guiding the plough.
    At the campsite where I am staying, close to the brand-spanking-new customs house on the border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, almost everyone has left. The last few employees sit in the canteen at night, watching television. There's a film on: a girl is seduced by a fat old man, she goes with him to bars where the patrons speak only English, a former boyfriend tries to talk sense into her, she laughs in his face, the old man cheats on her and she becomes increasingly addicted to the foreigners’ lifestyle, until the ex-boyfriend …
    Outside you hear only the crickets, the brook, an owl …
    Budapest, after all this, is wild, footloose, careless, full of holes and dents and honking cars, not a museum or a display case but a living city. In Buda the cranes swing back and forth, in Pest one hears the chipping and chiselling of the stonemasons: like everywhere else in Central Europe, the building and the painting is going on here as though half a century must be made up for in five years.
    The Monument to the Martyrs, the falling figure with which the Hungarian communists would later commemorate the 1956 uprising, has vanished from the city centre. The marble stairs lead nowhere. The former party headquarters has been taken over by the socialists, the building still hums with spirited discussions, with the sound of typingand the murmur of meetings. The monument itself has been moved to the edge of town, to the place where statues from the olden days are sent to die, a walled place of exile specially built to house the former communist memorials. And there they are, indeed: the comrades joining hands, the leaders with spectacles and briefcases, the soldiers with flags and pistols, all those popularly edifying mothers, children, tractors, flowers and flames. At least half the statues have their hands raised to the sky: in this sad compound, a muffled ‘hurrah’ is always present in the background. It is not all ugly, by no means, some of the monuments are absolutely lovely, it's just that they bear the wrong names, the wrong slogans and the wrong symbols.
    No one in Hungary saw 1956 coming. The little square where the young upstarts first gathered lies in the space between two highways along the Danube and is dominated by a statue of the revolutionary hero of 1848, the poet Sándor Petófi. The lawn at his feet is the perfect place for spontaneous, hit-and-run demonstrations, and that was their only intention on 23 October, 1956. Hungary, just like Poland, needed more freedom, and in the previous months a few hundred students had been meeting regularly in the university auditorium to talk. Now they had decided to organise a demonstration. But to everyone's surprise, huge crowds of young people from all over the city joined the usual group of students. They waved Polish and Hungarian flags, shouted ‘Long live the young people of Poland!’ and ‘We believe in Imre Nagy!’ The streets of Budapest were filled with a spirit of revival and adventure. Even students from the staunchly communist Lenin Institute came to the gathering, carrying red banners and a portrait of Lenin.
    Rarely has a mass meeting got out of hand the way this one did. Soldiers from the barracks across the way unexpectedly joined the students. Because it was closing time at the factories, masses of workers came along as well. None of it had been planned. ‘To Stalin!’ someone shouted, and those who followed spent hours working with blowtorches, cables and a truck to topple the giant statue. ‘To the radio station!’ someone else cried, and the broadcasting centre was surrounded by thousands of people and finally occupied. The first shots rang out. Inten hours the clock advanced from 1848 to 1956, that's how fast things went in Budapest.
    In European history, 1956 was a pivotal year. It was the year of Khrushchev's Stalin speech, the year of open discussion in the Eastern Bloc, of unrest in Poland.
    It was the year of the Suez Crisis, the fiasco for the British and the French who had worked with the Israelis on a joint colonial expedition against Egypt to secure passage through the Suez Canal, and who withdrew with their tails between their legs when the Americans threatened to cut their funding and undermine the British currency.
    1956 was the also the year in which three pretty Muslim girls carried out the first attacks on the Milk-Bar, the Caféteria and the