Under the frog (23 page)

‘Don’t
worry,’ Elek had said, struck by a wave of paternity. ‘There is a season to
these things. 1911 in my case. In 1911, I couldn’t so much as say hello to a
woman without her running away or calling the police. The whole year there was
this great wall of China between them and me. Nations, individuals, they all
have their ups and downs. Pussy shortage doesn’t last.’ This paternal wisdom
might have been more consoling if Elek hadn’t been coiffuring himself prior to
some nocturnal escorting of one of his female acquaintances. Pataki had
doubtless passed on gleefully to Elek the news of Gyuri’s latest failure, an
unprecedented hat trick of romantic flops.

On
Andrássy út, Gyuri, having bumped into István’s wife’s youngest sister, had
been introduced to two shapely netball players she had in tow. He had taken
advantage of their fortuitous discussion of a new film to propose a joint
outing. The film, like all Hungarian films, would be rubbish, but it might help
to flush out the girls’ evaluation of him. And the beauty of suggesting the
film was that he hadn’t, technically, asked the netball players out, so that a
refusal would be a rejection of the film rather than his charms. This appeal to
culture was necessary because: his self-confidence was pavement-high, and also,
because from such a cursory reading of the netball players’ interest meters he
hadn’t been able to ascertain how keen they were to admit him to the two-legged
amusement park. Then there was the question of balancing their inclination
towards him with his inclination to them; the blonde was more attractive, but
on the other hand it would be foolish to pass up the brunette if she were
unattached and itchy.

The
invitation would act as a form of natural selection; the less eager being less
likely to attend, it would be survival of the amorous. Determined to put his
fist through his bad luck, Gyuri had also issued a third summons to another
aspiring accountant, Ildikó, whom he had got to know in the library by fetching
a book for her from a top shelf that she had been struggling to reach.

Standing
outside the cinema, Gyuri congratulated himself on his blunderbussing his
misfortune, overcoming his jinx by a concerted human wave attack. However, as
the film started with no trace of the girls, so did his perplexity and the
choking sensation that he had been stood up in triplicate. By trebling the
odds, he had trebled his penalty. And he had had no chance to sell the other
three tickets. He had been skint and although Gyurkovics owed him a hundred
forints, it was exactly because he had been so hard up that he hadn’t been able
to ask for it because it would have looked as if he had been extremely hard up
which he didn’t want.

Gazing
out the train window, through the snoring, Gyuri could see peasants engaged in
doing something autumnally agricultural. Too stupid to find the road to the
city, Gyuri chuckled, confidently conurbational. Still, someone had to grow
potatoes. And someone had to film them. As part of his acolyteship at the
College of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts, Pataki had been out in the
countryside, acting as tripod carrier for a newsreel crew he had been assigned
to study in action.

They
had gone to the village of Zsámbék, the closest representative of hamletness
and unabashed bucolicality to Budapest, only an hour’s drive away. The story
the newsreel crew was covering was the fourth and a half anniversary of the
collective farm which might have been connected with the need of the director,
Gáti, to acquire some comradely crates of white wine for his garden parties.

Even in
the artistic circles of Budapest, where the entry fee was egomania, Gáti had
tantrummed his way to prominence. However, for some reason he had interpreted
Pataki’s presence as homage, as a tribute from one eager to learn the secrets
of documentary filming from a master, and Gáti warmly took him under his wing
although Pataki would far sooner have been rowing. ‘It’s a shithole, this
place,’ Gáti said, surveying Zsámbék. ‘I think I voted here in ’47. Mind you I
voted everywhere in ’47. How many people can say they voted sixty times in a
general election? These three-duck hovels all look the same though. Me and the
Second District Communist Youth Committee, we spent the whole day driving
around, voting. Bloody tiring, democracy.’ They were standing in the office of
the collective farm. Feeling it was time to do some directing, Gáti shouted out
of the window at the cameraman who was contemplating various angles: ‘Janos, I
want you to capture that feeling of historic achievement, okay?’ Then he
returned to glugging rows of local wines. ‘Rule number one: know what you want.
Rule number two: good casting. Good casting does all the work for you. I’ve
already got the centre character, Uncle Feri. He’s the village elder, as it
were, who’s been through decades of suffering, hunger, exploitation etc., etc.,
but who in his contented old age can comfortably beam on the gains of the
people, happy in the knowledge that future generations will never know want or
hardship, thanks to the application of scientific socialism etc., etc.’ Gáti
emptied the glasses of wine as if pouring them down a sink.

‘Uncle
Feri’s the perfect candidate. I found him when I came down last week. Research …
research is everything. This yokel is perfect. He’s got a moustache that must
be half a metre long. He oozes earthy wit, rustic swagger. Everyone’s Uncle
Feri. He thinks he doesn’t want to do it but I’ll make a star of him.’ There
were only a couple of glasses left. ‘And remember, rule four: you can never
talk too much to your cameraman.’ Gáti leaned out the window: ‘Janos, you
finished?’ To Pataki: ‘You’ll go far. You know how to listen.’ To the chairman
of the collective farm: ‘Great. We’ll take the lot.’

His arm
avuncularly around Pataki, Gáti went out to the fields for key shots. ‘Where’s
our Uncle Feri?’ he shouted.

‘Uncle
Feri is gravely ill,’ explained the chairman. He had rounded up a selection of
aged, gnarled peasants for Gáti to choose from. ‘You see,’ said Gáti to Pataki
in what was probably a failed whisper, ‘people always interfere. They all think
they know best. They all think they’re film directors. Come on, where’s the coy
old bugger?’

The
chairman, the mayor and the Party secretary all explained in succession, very
apologetically, that old Feri really was very ill and wouldn’t he be satisfied
with another, carefully approved, suitably decrepit codger? Gáti just laughed
and ordered to be taken to Feri’s abode where the priest was timidly
administering the last rites.

‘Cut
that out, or we’ll have you nicked,’ said Gáti, who was joking, but it looked
to Pataki as if the priest had shat himself. ‘How are you, Uncle Feri?’ said
Gáti, giving him a hearty slap which produced no noticeable reaction since Feri
was too busy dying. ‘He looks fine to me,’ Gáti pronounced, but the cameraman
and Pataki had to laboriously carry Uncle Feri out because none of his body was
in working order. Even if Uncle Feri had wanted to issue instructions to his
legs, they wouldn’t have paid any attention.

Gáti
strode on to find a good spot while Pataki, the cameraman and the chairman
transported Uncle Feri who was light as peasants went but still an
uncomfortable burden. ‘This is it,’ said Gáti, surrounded by burgeoning husks
of corn. ‘This filmically says it all,’ he announced as the peasant-porters
struggled up.

‘Yes,’
interposed the chairman, ‘but this doesn’t belong to the collective. This
belongs to Levai. He jumped out of the window at the meeting when everyone had
to sign over their land.’

Gáti
wasn’t bothered. Fortunately, there was a wooden gate they could leave Uncle
Feri leaning against, since his legs wouldn’t have supported him.

‘Okay,
roll,’ called Gáti. ‘Now, Uncle Feri, how old are you?’

Uncle
Feri didn’t say anything– he seemed to be concentrating on breathing.

‘How
old is he?’ Gáti asked the chairman.

‘I don’t
know. Seventy something.’

‘Okay,
so, Uncle Feri,’ continued Gáti, ‘how does it feel to see the achievements of
the new Hungary?’ Uncle Feri still failed to respond. Gáti tried another
question: ‘Uncle Feri, how do you feel gazing on the wonderful changes that
have taken place here in Zsámbék?’ Uncle Feri remained mute. Pataki had no
doubt that if Uncle Feri had had the power of locomotion he would have walked
off by now. But all he could manage to do was to cling onto the gate. Gáti
patiently let the camera turn, waiting for Uncle Feri’s views. After a minute
or so, Uncle Feri started to cry.

‘This
is great,’ exclaimed Gáti, ‘he’s moved to tears by the successes of people’s
democracy. Get a close-up. We can write into it.’ Pataki found Gáti’s
explanation unconvincing and reasoned that Uncle Feri’s weeping was caused by
his dying in a field, on camera.

According
to Pataki, Uncle Feri survived his moment of posterity but not for long.
Well-mannered, he waited till he was returned home before pegging out while
Gáti loaded up the van with crates of wine, reiterating ‘Did you see that
moustache?’

Knowing
what you wanted helped a lot, reflected Gyuri.

What
are your ambitions?’ Makkai had asked him the first time he had gone to him for
English lessons when he had revealed to Gyuri that, at the age of four, he had
been placed on a bareback horse in (as Makkai claimed) the traditional Magyar
fashion to test his fortune and fortitude. The question had made Gyuri realise
that he didn’t have any ambitions as such, just a wish– to get out. It seemed
embarrassing somehow not to have ambitions, a sort of lack of social grace, an
ignominious shortcoming. Something like billionaire or ruler of the planet
would be nice though. He wouldn’t refuse that. Perhaps his failure to have gone
shopping amongst the stalls of ambition was due to Elek’s forgetting to place
him on a saddleless horse when he was four.

* * *

Gyuri
had been hoping that the slob would remain asleep and overshoot Szeged, but
with the same precision the driver of the train used to bring the carriages
alongside the platform, the slob timed the moment to eject from sleep. By this
stage, Gyuri was the only one left in the compartment, the others having fled
under the relentless bombardment of zeds.

He didn’t
know much about Szeged but he knew enough, when the slob asked the way to the
centre of town, to send him helpfully in the opposite direction.

Treasuring
the miniature revenge, Gyuri set off to look for Sólyom-Nagy
to fill up the time until the party in the evening.

The
search for Sólyom-Nagy meant a lot of crisscrossing the university, making
repeated treks to his room and asking randomly for his whereabouts, of which
everyone denied all knowledge. By a process of elimination, eventually, Gyuri made
his way to the library.

The
university library had a duly grave, library-like dumbness, still with the
sediment of millennia. Most libraries with their accumulated letters gave Gyuri
an oddly reassuring sentiment. It’s okay, the books encouraged wordlessly, we’re
here. Out there it might be lunacy piled up to the heavens, rubbish on the
rampage, the havoc of mediocrity but we have no truck with stultiloquence; in
here, it’s fathoms of culture, the best of the centuries. The Zelks sifted out,
the poetasters and bores, the platitude-salesmen booted out. The invertebrates
of the past, desiccated, powdered, crumbled, blown away, leaving only the bones
of those with spines, those who were fortunate enough to have been backboned
before Marx so they had no opportunity to cast aspersions on him and cast
themselves into lectoral exile as a result.

The
shelves served up the freedom to travel, thousands of escape hatches into
countries, eras that Lenin had never heard of and that had never heard of Lenin
(‘What happened in 1874?’ Róka had asked him the day before, coaching Gyuri for
his Marxism-Leninism exam. ‘1874?’ ‘1874!’ ‘No idea.’ ‘Lenin was four’).
Entering a library was always cleansing (as long as you didn’t tamper with
anything published after 1945), though Gyuri could never settle down there
because after a quarter of an hour or so he would break out into fidgeting,
yearning to scratch his backside or stretch his legs, have a coffee, do
anything but read. However vehemently he strove to immerse himself in his
books, to hold his academic breath, he invariably had to come up for interludal
air. When it came to studying he was a sprinter.

Then
there was the trouser barking. The discipline and decorum of libraries were
somehow great catalysts for the cultivation of amorous propensities. It was
exactly because libraries weren’t supposed to be about sex that they were.
Gyuri would sit down, soak up a few lines, and then, there she would be. No
matter how empty it was, every library seemed to be provided with a young lady.
No matter how fascinating the accountancy textbook he was reading, the entire
crowd in Gyuri’s control-room would throng around the newcomer. The staid
background of a library boosted the pulchritude of even the plainest girl to
unbearable levels.

The
speculation would begin. Would putting this in that affect the rest of her
life? Would you need a machete to work your way through the sub-navel jungle?
Density of the venereal grass was a tiresomely recurring theme, the irrigation
of the delta, the borders of the areolae. The panel would raise the same
questions again and again, until the curiosity made him ache and he was out of
breath. If only he could have diverted some of this torrent, he would have been
the president of a medium-sized country somewhere. It was perpetual motion. It
might slow down but it never stopped. He would sit in the library and the quim
styles would rotate: the doormat? the black sheep? the winter tree? the
pom-pom? the paintbrush? the chainmail? His vision would tunnel down to mons
size.

Ascending
the various levels of Szeged University’s library, Gyuri kept on not seeing
Sólyom-Nagy. He remembered that Attila József had been a student there, this
making the staircases fractionally more interesting. For some reason Pataki had
been very angry about József. Gyuri had caught Pataki kicking a volume of his
poetry about. József had been so insanely poor and insane that he had no choice
but to become a poet. So poor he couldn’t even afford to starve in a garret and
so insane he had thrown himself under a train at a good age, thirty-two, though
some might quibble that thirty-two was the outside limit for a young and tragic
death, especially since his life had been so unremittingly awful it was hard to
understand why he had waited that long.