Under the frog (14 page)

What
Csokonai was doing was extremely dangerous and Gyuri had no intention of
frequenting him any longer than was necessary to obtain an apple or two. The
other week, a worker who had either too much pálinka or hardship had suddenly
burst out with: ‘They say that under Horthy, Hungary was the land of two
million beggars. Well at least under Horthy it was just the beggars who were
beggars and not the whole sodding country. I can’t feed my family on this.’ A
black car had been waiting for him outside the gates. ‘We have a few questions.
It’ll only take five minutes.’ No one had seen him since, but then no one had
ever seen again those people whom the Russians had invited for
‘malenky robot,’
a little work five years ago.

Being
an old-world courtesy fiend, Csokonai handed over three apples which Gyuri
could only bring himself to refuse once. Mulling over how egg-shell thin
dignity was when your belly was yelling, Gyuri returned to work to find Sulyok
talking to Tamás: ‘Listen, Tamás, we need a little favour, we’re having some
comradely difficulties.’ It took Sulyok some time to spit it out, but the
problem was this: there was only one place manufacturing the machine tools Ganz
needed and for some reason – enmity, superior bribery, incompetence, kinship,
the machine tools were being shipped to other factories, not to where they were
needed at Ganz, where despite Stakhanovite book-cooking, the Three Year Plan
was not being fulfilled. ‘Tamás, could you go over there and explain in a
constructive, fraternal and socialist manner the absolute dire necessity for
some urgent supplies to aid the intensification of the Three Year Plan
fulfilment situation?’

‘You
want me to hijack one of their deliveries, right?’ asked Tamás.

Taken
aback by this uncomradely language, Sulyok winced, but didn’t blab anymore. ‘Yes,’
he said, handing over a set of lorry keys. ‘Take Gyuri and some of the other
lads if you need.’ It’s all about having the right skills for the right task,
Gyuri thought. You can read Lenin on International Law, but no amount of
reading Lenin on ambushing and highway robbery could help you if you didn’t
know the business.

Tamás
picked up Palinkas, another well-known pugilist, and an apprentice jaw-breaker,
Bod. As they were pulling out by the front gates, Gyuri noticed Pataki,
apprehended by two security men who were unwinding a long length of copper wire
from underneath his shirt. Smiling, Gyuri waved, looking forward with keen
anticipation to hearing how Pataki could talk his way out of that one.

Tamás
dropped everyone off, one by one, wherever they wanted to go, before putting
his foot down on the accelerator to head off to the Zuglo where the machine
tool factory was located. ‘Don’t worry, I can take care of it on my own,’ he
said to Gyuri with an expectant grin on his face, slipping his knife in between
his teeth.

At
home, Gyuri found Elek still parked in his armchair, but entertaining Szocs,
his former doorman who came monthly to pay his respects. Szocs was the only one
of Elek’s old staff who made the effort to seek him out and he was made welcome
because of that and also, more saliently, because he always brought a package
of food from his farming cousins. His mother had always complained that Elek
showered his staff with holidays and bonuses, though as Gyuri recalled, Szocs,
who had been on duty outside Elek’s office, had never copped any of the
goodies.

Szocs
was inescapably stuck in cheerfulness but went up a jubilation or two when he
saw a younger Fischer. ‘How are you, Gyuri? Settling down yet? Thinking about
getting married?’ Gyuri knew he was at the age when everyone was immensely
inquisitive as to what he was doing with his willy, so he was prepared for this
sort of inquiry from his seniors; he was as keen to be castrated as to get
married but he laughingly denied major romance with good grace. Someone who had
come halfway across Budapest to deliver food was entitled to question away.
Gyuri discerned an opened package of goose crackling, and started to make
arrangements digestively.

Looking
down the finger he was pointing at Gyuri as if down the barrel of a gun, Szocs
remarked: ‘You’ll know when you find the right one, you’ll know.’ Gyuri nodded
concurringly as one does towards someone who has mustered goose crackling. ‘I
knew the moment I saw my wife,’ he said chuckling. This surprised Gyuri because
he had only seen Mrs Szocs once, and his first, last and lasting impression was
of consummate ugliness; he had always imagined that Szocs married her out of
charity, or that their wedlock was a further symptom of Szocs’s chronic
misfortune rather than elective affinities. Szocs’s life was one of
round-the-clock calamity: an orphan, he had been shipwrecked as a cabin-boy,
lost the use of one eye from an infection, lost his toes from frostbite in a
Russian prisoner of war camp, lost both his children in the great dysentery
epidemic of 1919. You just had to laugh. There was surely more disaster in his
past, but unusually for a Hungarian with such promising material to draw on,
Szocs was very niggardly in passing out the details of his years.

‘The
Party secretary catches Kovacs,’ said Szocs changing tack. ‘“Comrade Kovacs,
why weren’t you at the last Party meeting?” “The last Party meeting?” replies
Kovacs. “If I’d known it was the last Party meeting, I’d have brought the whole
family.’” Szocs was now, in an odd way, a successful figure, now that poverty
and misery had been generally distributed; he was a tycoon of jollity. In the
land of the blind, Gyuri thought, the man who knows how to use the white stick
is king.

The
only irritating aspect to Szocs was that his whistling in totalitarianism
rather invalidated one’s licence for self-pity.

Gyuri
could never enjoy his resentment for quite a while after Szocs had left. Szocs’s
presence made him lose that acute sense of accumulated injustice and
aggrievedness that he had been so carefully working on. Elek, for example,
might be sitting comfortably in the back of adversity’s big black car, but
Szocs seemed to thrive on hardship like a slap up meal.

To his
shame, Gyuri was glad when Szocs left and he didn’t have to pretend any more
that he didn’t want to throw himself on the goose crackling. Elek had ventured
out earlier to get some fresh bread and this in combination with the goose
crackling yielded a profound sense of well-being, an undispersable glow of
plenitude that would linger on for the minimum of an evening or until Gyuri
went to do some training.

The two
packets of cigarettes (French) had been part of a great plan Gyuri had been
hatching to do some profitable bartering– but Elek looked so deformed, so
unnatural without a cigarette that Gyuri handed them over and watched Elek’s
face become an amalgam of joy and reflection on how to apportion the cigarettes
chronologically

One
strove to be hard, to be tough, dangerous and independent (Gyuri weighed up the
effects of the pile of goose crackling) but self-discipline is such a delicate
thing, a plant that wilts on either side of a narrow temperature band. In
mitigation, it had been exceptionally adipose, unquestionably hastened to the
capital that morning, wrapped before darkness had been dispelled, possessed of
an evanescent crispness and a tang that had to be captured by taste buds within
twelve hours or it would abscond to the limbo of fabulous flavour.

The
glut of cigarettes and goose crackling engendered a pliancy and a conversation
between the two of them. Of late, Pataki had been the top recipient of Elek’s
locutions, a hunched, cigaretted dialogue running through Elek’s lewd
₄
material.
Gyuri made a point of ostentatiously going for a run or loudly doing some housework
while they were thus engaged, but it didn’t have any dampening effect.

He
decided to press Elek on abroad.

‘What
was it like in Vienna?’

Elek
had spent a couple of years stationed outside Vienna as an Austro-Hungarian
officer and gentleman before the Big One that had vaporised the Strudel Empire.

‘I don’t
remember much now,’ said Elek. ‘It was a long time ago. I remember the sex but
that’s about it. That’s the odd thing about Vienna: all that culture, all those
libraries, piano recitals, all that learning, all that Mozart was here, all the
elaborate chocolate and patisserie and the women were interested in only one
thing. If I hadn’t been twenty it would have killed me.

‘There
was one lady, the wife of a distinguished geologist, who was still vigorous
enough to carry out his conjugal duties. I timed myself one day. From ten in
the morning to three in the afternoon: five hours. I thought she might say stop
or ask for an intermission, but no. We only abandoned the mission because her
husband was coming back with some very gripping granite. When I got out into
the street I had to call for a taxi because my body had gone on strike. Then I
found out that someone else from the regiment was leaving his calling cards
there as well – the husband challenged him to a duel and I had to act as his
second. You would have thought she could have read a book or gone to a museum
every now and then.’

‘I don’t
think I’ll be getting to Vienna for a while,’ Gyuri remarked.

‘Oh, I’m
sure you will. This can’t go on much longer. You realise you and István are my
last hopes.’

‘What
do you mean?’

‘The
only sort of success I can anticipate now is sitting in a café regaling my
cronies with tales of my sons’ successes. I’m counting on you for some
reflected glory and a modest income. You don’t want your old father to be stuck
in a café with nothing to boast about?’

‘So you’re
going into sitting around full-time?’

‘I’m
working up to it. But don’t forget you have no excuses: you’re at the perfect
age for disaster. Physical peak. Flexible. Durable. A good reservoir of
optimism. Nineteen is the ideal age for misfortune. You can fight back. And
things change. Nothing lasts forever. Hungary has had some bizarre moments in
its history. Mongols, Turks wandering in and out. Our friend Horthy, a regent
without a king, an admiral without a sea. But
Rákosi.
The one thing I can confidently
predict as a non-starter in Hungary is a Jewish King. I’m willing to bet that
you won’t last long at Ganz, and that you will have a good laugh about all
this.’

‘How
much are you willing to bet?’ Gyuri asked, sensing easy money.

‘We can
negotiate a figure.’ At this point Elek was racked by a caravan of coughs of
lung-ripping ferocity. ‘The trouble is,’ he continued weakly, ‘I’m not going to
be around to collect at this rate. But you still have no excuse for not
achieving stupendous prosperity. Think of all that bringing-up your mother
lavished on you.’

Gyuri
decided to tackle some of the housework. Nothing substantial, but tossing a
coin to domesticity, Gyuri entered the waiting-room for washing-up and exposed
some plates to running water. Considering how little they had to eat, there was
an alarming quantity of dirty crockery.

‘I told
her for months to go to the doctor. For months. You know what she said, “I can’t
go. I haven’t got a slip.” I don’t suppose it would have made a lot of
difference,’ Elek volunteered.

Suddenly,
Gyuri wished they hadn’t started to converse.

August 1950

They
estivated outside Tatabánya.

The
peasants out in the fields, on account of what they had endured or because of
some innate earthiness, evinced no great surprise to see half a dozen naked and
tanned figures strolling through their sunflowers. ‘Basketball players,’ they
muttered.

Pataki
was in the lead, wearing his sunglasses, striding out in his basketball boots,
a map neatly folded under his arm. Although they got plenty of exercise at the
training camp where Locomotive had been invited to act as resident sparring
partner for the National team, they were full of kicks, and at Pataki’s
instigation had gone out for an afternoon constitutional in order to ascertain
that the surrounding countryside was as boring as it looked. So far it was.

Most of
the vicinity was flat and obvious, but Pataki steered them to a distant clump
of greenery, a copse on a series of mounds, with a huge patch of baldness on
top. The view from this hillock corroborated their worst fears: the total
absence of anything that could be loosely accounted exciting or notable in the
neighbourhood. ‘So, gentlemen, there it is: the countryside. The place for
those fond of vegetable antics. The abode of bucolic delights as celebrated by
millennia of illustrious poets, who, in my opinion, were either heavily bribed
by wealthy farmers eager to boost their standing, or gibberingly demented,’
concluded Pataki.

There
was a rectangular stone some four feet high on the summit, which Pataki, having
consulted the map, announced was an object of significant trigonometrical
value. If it hadn’t been on the map, they probably wouldn’t have bothered; but
how often do you get a chance to destroy a landmark? The stone was recalcitrant
and astonishingly heavy, but with the help of a few sturdy branches as levers,
they eventually upended it and had the pleasure of watching it robustly tumble
down a good way. Feeling satisfied with their afternoon’s work sabotaging the
Hungarian state, they headed back to the camp.

‘Has
the new Hungary overcome the old three-layered class system of workers,
bourgeoisie and nobility?’ Róka asked, swiftly providing the answer (before
anyone thought he was posing a serious question). ‘Not quite. There are still
three classes in the new Hungary: those who have been to prison, those who are
in prison and those who are going to prison.’

On
their way back, Pataki saluted with the map a young peasant girl whose face
would have been ugly on a young peasant boy. Joke civility, Gyuri noted, but
another week of the camp and the gauche, sack-wrapped girls would start looking
like beauty queens.