Under the frog (2 page)

Gyurkovics however had snapped the homeland umbilical cord,
but incredibly had returned six months later, when there were even fewer
reasons to return. He had an uncle in Vienna, who from Budapest looked
immeasurably rich, having coined it in the shoe business. Many an evening had
been spent in the throes of unrestrained envy, but Gyurkovics had reappeared
looking gloomy and sporting an unimpressive suit. The rumour had been that only
insanity or murder could have brought him back; his brother had passed out the
truth. Gyurkovics had demolished the shoe empire. In his suicide note,
Gyurkovics’s uncle had written: ‘You have incredible gifts – anyone who can
destroy an enterprise built up over forty years with love, diligence, early
rising and an unequalled regard for the customer, in the space of a few weeks,
has extraordinary talents. I trust that one day these powers will be harnessed
for the benefit of mankind.’

Still biding his time with a bit of basketball before
redeeming humanity, Gyurkovics played down the West. Probably there were
further embarrassments littered around Vienna that he didn’t want any
acquaintances to chance on. Besides, this stretch of border around Makó wasn’t
worth the effort of crossing it. Who wanted to go to Yugoslavia or Rumania?
Both red star affairs. Yugoslavia – a bunch of knife wielding Serbs and
Rumania…

Gyuri had been miffed at not going on the Rumanian tour.
Okay, Rumania wasn’t really a country, but it wasn’t Hungary and it was
infuriating that bourgeois lineage should have deprived him of the trip when
crypto-fascists and rotten decadents like Róka and Pataki had gone. They had
wanted the team to win, so they couldn’t leave Pataki behind, but they didn’t
want anyone too class-x passing the ball to him. By some incomprehensible
ministerial process the level of class-x in Róka had been deemed more
acceptable than his.

Rumania hadn’t had a good press though. Years before, Józsi
from the ground floor had returned from a summer holiday visiting relatives in
Transylvania and recounted in horrified tones: ‘They actually fuck ducks. I’m
not joking, I saw it’. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pataki had riposted, ‘it must
have been a goose.’ Józsi had seemed genuinely aghast and when you thought
about how all the great Hungarian generals, all the true hard men of Hungarian
history had come from Transylvania, it seemed plausible that rising in the
morning to discover your neighbour with his breeches around his ankles making
some fowl howl could toughen you up.

Gyuri had also quizzed István, who had been the last soldier
out of Kolozsvar, ‘the last but the fastest’, about Rumania. István just
laughed and carried on laughing. Elek, who had taken the Orient Express to do
business in Bucharest before the war, when he heard that Gyuri was angling to
get on the Rumanian tour, commented: ‘My son is an imbecile. This is the
cruellest blow.’

Still, Gyuri was subjected to an air of distinct smugness as
the others made their preparations to depart for Rumania. Róka managed to
acquire a Rumanian phrase, which he went round chanting all day, which, he
believed, translated roughly as ‘put your hole on my pole’. Pataki packed extra
toilet paper and took a small, aged guide book on Rumanian gastronomic
delights.

They went, they saw, they lost, but at least they came back.
Gyuri had met the returning train at the Keleti railway station.

Róka was the first off. Always reedy, he had noticeably lost
weight, a skeleton painted a white skin colour, totally out of place for
August. ‘Let me put it this way,’ Róka summed up, ‘if you gave me the choice of
spending two weeks in the waiting room here at the Keleti, with nothing to eat,
or a night in Bucharest’s best hotel, I wouldn’t have to think very hard about
it.’

They had lost the two matches they played. Largely because
Pataki had been out of action. Pataki, who had never had a day’s illness in his
life (the closest he had got to being ill was when he had invented ailments to
dodge various duties), who had only ever come into contact with doctors for the
obligatory check-ups on all players, had spent the duration of his stay in
Bucharest, on his knees, spewing incessantly, vilely betrayed by his sphincter
muscles, bowing to the lords of disgorgement, hugging different immobiles in
his bathroom suite, pleading for divine intercession. The others had had
ruthless alimentary disruptions but had just succeeded in getting out on court;
the Locomotive players had all felt as if their legs were encased in lead casks – they bitterly regretted getting possession of the ball since that forced them
to run or try to do something. They would have happily forfeited the match at
half-time, if it hadn’t been for a fervent appeal to national honour and
auroral threats of unprecedented strength by Hepp. Despite losing irremediably
from the first second (or perhaps because of it) Locomotive were soundly booed
by the crowd and one of the darts thrown by the spectators had skewered
Szabolcs’s ear.

When Demeter, as acting captain (on account of Pataki’s
indisposition), had offered to trade tops with the opposing captain as was the
custom with international fixtures, the Rumanian had insisted on haggling, with
the result that Demeter ended up with three unwanted Rumanian tops and the
Rumanians left congratulating themselves on having gulled the Hungarians.

‘I never thought we were going to get back alive,’ Róka had
said, kissing the platform. On the home leg of the fixture, they had had their
revenge, beating the Rumanian Railway Workers’ Union but only by two points, a
puny margin, acutely disappointing when one took into account that Róka’s
brother, who was in charge of the kitchens at the hotel where the Rumanian team
was staying, had applied injudicious amounts of rat poison to their goulash.

* * *

The train rolled into Makó, the last stop for both the train
and the Locomotive team. They were due to play the Makó Meat-Processors that
afternoon. There was a minor abattoir in Makó which helped to supply flesh to
the salami factory in Szeged. Their opposition was entirely drawn from the
small-bone cleaning unit of this abattoir.

No one was there to greet them at the station, but Makó wasn’t
really big enough to make finding anything too much of a problem. They arrived
at a school sports hall for the match to find the meat-processors out on court,
clumping about in what had the appearance of a desperate attempt to learn how
to play basketball half an hour before play was due to commence.

As they were changing, Hepp gave the team a pocket edition
of his pre-match exhortation. It definitely wasn’t needed, since they knew
without setting eyes on the meat-processors that they couldn’t be any good.
Unknown, provincial teams couldn’t be any good, since any hot player would be
immediately siphoned up, lured into the grasp of one of the big teams that
could offer huge betterments. This was a friendly match to appraise the
meat-processors, a newly formed team, who had probably lined up the
first-division Locomotive via political channels. A Makó Party secretary had
phoned another Party secretary to whom he had slipped a crate of salamis, who
would in turn phone another Party secretary, a soon-to-be proud owner of a
crate of salamis, and so on, till at the end of the chain Locomotive chugged
into town.

Thus there was no need for Hepp to flex his admonitions, but
the thing about Hepp, which could be quite irritating at times, was that he was
a professional: he took his job seriously despite the fact that ten million
other people in Hungary didn’t. He was good in every way as a coach, manager
and mentor of the team, but he did have one grave fault. He always got up at
4.30 in the morning, and after fifty years on the earth, still couldn’t grasp
that other people didn’t. His direst threat was circuit training at 5 a.m.

One morning, not long after he had joined Locomotive, and
not long after he had burned his bed, Gyuri woke up on the floor with the awful
knowledge that Hepp was expecting him at 5.30 for some track work in what was a
bottomless black October freeze. Wondering why so much of existence consisted
of getting up in the cold dark to do something you didn’t like, he resolved he
wasn’t having it. Normally Gyuri was exemplary about training, indeed, that was
why he had burned his bed, in an attempt to incinerate his laziness. It hadn’t
been a great bed, but it had been serviceable, it had worked, and lying there
in the mornings Gyuri had found its temptations preferable to running about in
the winter. He lay there in its fortifying warmth and comfort, thinking about
the training he should have been doing, repeatedly previewing it instead of
doing it. Gyuri knew he had to train, and train much harder than anyone else
because he was a self-made athlete, unlike someone like Pataki who was a
natural. To get the rewards that accrued from basketball, Gyuri had to work.

That was why he had lugged the bed down to the courtyard and
burned it with a sprinkling of petrol, to make sure that his will wouldn’t
buckle in the future. The neighbours hadn’t batted an eye, because, by that
point, if they hadn’t had their throats slit as they slept by Gyuri or Pataki,
categorised as the crazies of the block, that was good enough for them.

Gyuri placed his hopes on a groundsheet and the floor
encouraging him to get up briskly and to log a few hours’ exercise before the
other preoccupations of the day. But even the floor could grow on you. And that
morning, he had thought ‘you can’t rush reality’ and dived back into sleep,
having written off Hepp’s proposed cross-arctic running. The doorbell rang at
around six (as it would turn out). Elek, who was up, even though he had no
convincing reason to be, opened the door to Hepp. Hepp handed Elek his card,
which he always carried – ‘Dr Ferenc Hepp, Doctor of Sport’– and asked to be
shown to Gyuri’s room. Lying, Gyuri lied reflexively that he was ill, whereupon
Elek expressed surprise as Gyuri hadn’t mentioned feeling poorly the previous
evening. This somehow removed the sparse vestiges of veracity from Gyuri’s
statement.

‘Well,’ Hepp had said good-naturedly, ‘if you can manage to
triumph over this unwellness, if you can bring your body to heel, because a
hard mind makes a hard body, and get to the track in twenty minutes and do ten
more laps than the others, to show this illness you’re not going to take it
lying down, I think I can do you a commensurate favour: I can sign your
military deferment papers.’ That had been quintessential Hepp. Other coaches
would have sent someone else round to threaten him but Hepp was unwavering in
doing things himself.

‘It goes without saying you’re going to win this match,’
said Hepp, ‘so I’m not going to say it. These meat-processors have undoubtedly
got webbed toes and if they’re in basketball gear, it’s because they brought
their mothers to help them change. I don’t want to be accused of being
unreasonable, I don’t want to be the target of petulant rumblings but
gentlemen, I have to insist on a twenty-point victory.

‘They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but as far
as I’m concerned that’s exactly what it’s there for – this bunch couldn’t find
themselves in the dark. So I have to insist, even allowing for your not
inconsiderable indolence, I have to insist on a twenty-point, no, a
thirty-point margin of victory. Otherwise it’s sit-ups in the City Park on the
rainiest five o’ clock in the morning that I can find.’

Hepp then erected his blackboard, which he always carried
around, and chalked up a few plays, selected from his notebook as thick as a
hammer-thrower’s thigh (Gyuri once glimpsed a play with a number as high as
602). This was often the hardest part of any match, paying attention to Hepp’s
schemes, since, certainly when dealing with a collection of small-bone pickers,
the required tactic was simply to get hold of the ball, pass it to Pataki and
watch him obligingly run down the court and propel it into the basket. This was
a tactic stunningly effective against all but the top three or four teams in
the first division who had the brains, talent, speed or foresight to impede this
model operation.

But there in Makó, it was hard to attend to Hepp’s
phenomenally involved machinations. You had to put one or two into action,
regardless of whether you needed to or whether there would be any benefit from
using it, such as collaring a couple of points. Hepp was the coach, and
basketball was better than a real job where you were expected to work for the
money they didn’t give you. A certain amount of explaining away was possible – ‘Doc,
the marking on Pataki was too fierce, we couldn’t use the Casino egg play…’ – but if there wasn’t some evidence of orders being obeyed, Hepp’s favourite
remedy for disregard of his specially-bound leather notebook was half an hour
of stadium steps and it didn’t make any difference how fit you were, your legs
would become solid outposts of pain.

And of course there were times when Hepp’s scheming won
matches, such as the Great Technical University Massacre, when the better team
hadn’t been allowed to win because of Hepp’s plays. When the end whistle had
blown, the Technical University team had stood on court, unmoving, unable to
believe they had been beaten, viciously beaten, by a team five places further
down in the division. But it wasn’t so much to do with the winning, as with
control. Gyuri had learned from his own coaching in the gimnáziums that the
greatest part of the pleasure was seeing the invisible strings pulled,
relishing the remote control, like being a theatre director or a general. You
wanted to recognise your handiwork.

Róka, as was the custom, went out alone onto the court with
the gramophone player. They all knew that this showmanship was wasted in Makó,
but this was the point of being professional amateurs – you went on with the
show even if there was no one to watch, or if the spectators were too thick to
appreciate it. The gramophone player was István’s. István and the gramophone
player were about all that was left of the Hungarian Second Army. István had
got the portable gramophone player as a present from Elek when he set off to
the front in ’41. Gyuri had no idea how much it had cost, but fortunes were
involved; there had been German generals who didn’t have the sort of musical
recreation enjoyed by the Hungarian artillery lieutenant. The Hungarian Second
Army, like all Hungarian armies, had the unfortunate habit of getting wiped
out. István returned, flayed and dented by shrapnel, even though 200,000 other
Hungarians didn’t. Even more miraculously, the gramophone player had been
returned home months later by one of István’s comrades-in-arms. István had no
objections to Gyuri permanently borrowing it.