Under the frog (25 page)

The
police story was better. ‘I left the party five minutes before the police
arrived’ made better narration than ‘I left the party five minutes before two
actresses stripped naked.’

As
Gyuri approached the student hostel, he could see a light in what he surmised
was Jadwiga’s room. That was all you needed: a lit window in the distance, the
knowledge that there was something there, something to work for. The company of
a dwarfy hope.

He
knocked civilisedly on Jadwiga’s door. ‘I have an important consignment of
vernacular Hungarian for you,’ he said as she opened up. She studied him
thoughtfully with much-read eyes, then backed away in a silent invitation to
enter. She closed the door. Gyuri sat down on the bed of her still absent
room-mate, while Jadwiga sat opposite him. Tired from her studying, she
appraised him as if she hadn’t seen him before, slightly narrowing her eyes as
if trying to focus better. Then she said with a half-smile: ‘We must talk.’ A
pause. ‘We can be friends … but no more.’

‘You
have a boyfriend?’ asked Gyuri, feeling exceptionally confident that any
competition could be trampled underfoot, obliterated effortlessly. He was
intoxicated with the certainty that he was on to a winner. He liked everything
about her, the way she spoke, the way she sat, the way she handled him.
Perfection. She paused again.

‘No.’
With the full smile. ‘I have a husband.’

September 1956

Striding
down Petõfi Sándor utca, Gyuri saw the sign in the window of the photolab: ‘Lab
Technician Required’. This, more than the phone call, brought home the fact
that Pataki was gone.

The
phone had rung and Gyuri had counted out the crackly silence. He had made it
only forty-two seconds before the distant receiver was replaced but it could
only have been the forty-five second signal agreed with Pataki. Pataki was out.
He had gone to heaven and called from a pearly phone. As if it had been
stitched there, Gyuri carried a smile so wide it hurt for the next day, a smile
that completely cancelled the mild melancholy he felt at Pataki’s escape: a
mild melancholy because he hadn’t wanted to dwell on the probability that he
would never see him again.

Pataki
was out. It was not only a stinking horseprick in the posterior of the
authorities, it was a colossal stinking horseprick. It gave him so much
pleasure that he tried not to think about it too much, to ration himself to a
few hours’ gloating a day. But this notice cut the floor out from under his
satisfaction. Only a fortnight gone and he was missing Pataki acutely. There
was no one else in the country who could call him an arsehead with quite the
same authority, the authority of a lifetime’s acquaintance.

When he
got home, he was glad Elek wasn’t manning the armchair and that his nosiness
wouldn’t be snooping around. He was also glad Jadwiga had consented to come to
Budapest and that he didn’t have to trudge down to Szeged. Did other people
really have to work this hard for happiness? You find world-class love but your
beloved lives at the other end of the country. He peered out of the window and
inspected the street although it was too early for her to appear. She had
insisted that he shouldn’t wait at the station – with her Polish disregard for
the passage of clocks, she couldn’t guarantee which train she would catch. But
at least there was no more nonsense about her husband. When she returned from
Poland after her summer visit, she had been full of news about the riots in her
hometown of Poznan. Gyuri had got all the details about that but Jadwiga had
been pleasingly reticent on the subject of her husband who seemed to have been
airbrushed out of the picture, like Trotsky standing behind Lenin.

The
news that Jadwiga was married had caused all his carefully handmade aspirations
to shatter like the china in a porcelain shop crashed into by a well-fuelled
bomber with a full payload. Gyuri had hoped that his facade indicated the manly
resolve he was searching for but couldn’t feel and not the widespread collapse
that was dominoeing its way through the regions of his body. He should have
expected something like this; it had gone far too smoothly. Jadwiga had talked
proudly of her husband. ‘My husband is a writer,’ she said in a way that left
no doubt this was the only thing for a quality husband to be. He was writing a
book on Polish painting.

They
had gone out for a walk anyway. It had been pitch black, cold and windy and
there wasn’t much to be seen in Szeged even in the best of daylight but Gyuri
enjoyed the walk because despite having the someone-just-trod-on-my-throat
sensation, the black environment had given them a duopoly. They were the movers
of the universe, the animation in a depeopled darkness. Gyuri had generally
considered walking to be one of the most inferior of amusements but that walk
with Jadwiga had been infinitely preferable to doing anything else with say,
Agnes. Kissing her respectfully on the cheek, he bade her farewell.

On the
train back to Budapest, he had juggled two main thoughts. Firstly, that he didn’t
care whether she was married or not and secondly (as a consolation prize for
his floored morality) the conclusion that it was rather an odd sort of
marriage, where you lived hundreds of kilometres, days of travel apart. It didn’t
look like a thriving marriage at all, it was a marriage stretched so thin that
you couldn’t really notice it.

He had
determined to avoid Szeged for a fallow fortnight but the next weekend found
himself dashing to the Nyugati station. He invented some nearby athletic
activity to justify his presence and sought out Jadwiga. He found her dutiful
in the library, asleep. He went out, bought a flower, and returned to leave it
on her notebook and to wait for the study-fatigued student to rouse herself,
which she did after ten minutes. She was surprised to see the flower and then,
looking round, was surprised to see Gyuri. Despite the arguable propriety of
the flower, she was pleased. ‘You are a very keen friend,’ she remarked.

This
time supper was accepted and Gyuri didn’t regret having to sleep on Solyom Nagy’s
floor although its embrace lingered on his back for the next twenty-four hours.
The conversation had been agreeable and unremarkable but as with the walk it
had been intensely pleasurable. If Pataki had known that his friend had spent
the better part of two days travelling in order to have a so-so meal with a
side-serving of jejune dialogue, he would have been shocked and incredulous,
but Gyuri felt it was time well used. Jadwiga’s husband worked very hard, it
turned out, though the admiration with which she wheeled out this information
had been a trifle faltering, a little adulterated.

The
next weekend saw Gyuri becoming a real expert on the Budapest-Szeged rail link.
Individual haystacks and trees were recognised on the way down. Gyuri hadn’t
let Elek in on the reason for his travelling down to Szeged but it was obvious
that it wasn’t Gyuri’s passion for the local architecture. ‘Have fun,’ Elek had
said in the way that parents do, convinced that their offspring were engrossed
in incessant debauchery the moment they set foot outside the front door.

Jadwiga
was again surprised to see him. ‘You take friendship very seriously indeed,’
she observed. They went to supper and the cinema which vacuumed Gyuri’s pockets
clean. Posting a birthday card to her grandfather, Jadwiga asked Gyuri if his
grandparents were still alive; this annoyed him slightly because she asked the
same question during their first walk and thus it was obvious she didn’t store
away everything he said in the way that he noted down her words for future
examination, building up a dossier on her. ‘My grandfather was in what the
Germans called Auschwitz. The Jews don’t like to mention how many Poles died
there. My grandfather survived, I think, because he’s a persistent man: a very
persistent man. He taught me the value of persistence too.’

Reviewing
the proceedings, Gyuri was astonished how much pleasure could be had without
taking off any clothes and with a moat of oxygen dividing him from the castle
he wanted to storm. He had listened politely when she had made reference
several times to her husband not writing dutifully enough to her, though this
had been presented more as a general critique of men. The travel was a nuisance
though. Gyuri wished they could provide a gymnasium in the train so he could do
some athletic training. He opened an accountancy textbook and he and the print
stared sullenly at each other for a while. The travel was eating up a lot of
his time.

The
next weekend he was spared the purgatory of hours of travel because Jadwiga
came up to Budapest to visit some fellow Polish students, to whom in the end
she barely said hello. It was an unusual situation for Gyuri. He had never
shown anyone around Budapest before, indeed he had never had the inclination to
do so. Jadwiga had only spent half-days in Budapest in transit to Szeged, so he
had to shake his brains for an itinerary.

He took
Jadwiga up to the Gellert Hill where there was the Statue of Liberty, a woman
reaching out above herself with her arms at full stretch as if reaching for
something on a top shelf. Into her grip had been lowered some amorphous burden,
perhaps palm fronds, perhaps oversized laurels, certainly something of heavy
significance weighing down on the sprightly dame, who nevertheless effected a
transcendental expression.

You
could see the statue from most parts of the city and from the statue’s foot you
had a panoramic view of Budapest. The Statue of Liberty had been originally
intended as a memorial to Admiral Horthy’s son, a fighter pilot who like most
Hungarians of his age had died around the Don but before it had been erected
there had been a change of government and of uniforms in the street. Purged of
its dynastic and political past, charged up with the ideology of a new age, it
had been stuck on top of the Gellert Hill to act as a spiritual beacon.

As a
supplement to the Statue of Liberty, perhaps as an additional ideological boost
to compensate for the statue’s ignominious beginnings, was a smaller, clumsier
statue of a Soviet soldier, known locally, Gyuri explained, as the Unknown
Watch-Thief.

Situated
underneath the Statue of Liberty, less visible and not tampering with the
skyline, the rather morose Soviet soldier, scowling from being left on duty for
so many years, had an inscription: ‘From the grateful Hungarian people’.

‘I
assure you the Poles are far more grateful,’ said Jadwiga.

Bánhegyi
had, as always when he ran out of cash, dislocated his shoulder (he could dis-and relocate his joints at will), gone to the doctor, collected a cheque from
the insurance company (despite the fact that he would be out on court bullying
the ball the day after) and invited everyone to the restaurant at the Keleti
railway station. Jadwiga impressed everyone with her Hungarian (Róka refused to
believe she was Polish) and also with the way she dealt with an enormous plate
of wienerschnitzel and a liberal portion of calf’s brains. Gyuri caught glances
of admiration from the team and Róka in a state of extreme perturbation had to
leave twice for ‘fresh air’.

Pataki
had been quiet. His mutism amply expressed his high regard for Jadwiga. Gyuri
would have been worried about the possibility of competition from Pataki were
it not for his conviction that he was backed by destiny this time. ‘I don’t
suppose you’ve drilled for the white oil yet?’ Pataki inquired. Gyuri snorted
as an all-purpose reaction which contained amusement, denial, confirmation and
contempt, hoping that Pataki would select whichever element would shut him up.
Everyone else was evidently assuming that he had full access and this had been
quite satisfying, since reputation is only one step away from the real thing. ‘I
think you’re going to make it this time,’ Pataki appended.

As he
railwayed down to Szeged the subsequent weekend, he tried to think of some good
pretext to cover his trip, at the same time thanking providence that he worked
for the railways which made such a long-distance liaison financially possible.
Jadwiga didn’t seem surprised to see him nor did she bother to ask for any
explanation of his presence in Szeged.

Gyuri
had still not met Jadwiga’s room-mate Magda, but had developed a great
affection for her solely on the strength of her absences. As they sat in the
room, Gyuri wondered how to elegantly polevault from friendship into a more
clasping form of love. He checked his watch. By six o’ clock, he resolved, he
would be entangled in her garments or out. He had put in the miles. This
deadline kept shifting steadily like the horizon as time progressed and he
remained frozen in a posture of warm cordiality opposite her.

A clock’s
far-off chiming entered quietly during a caesura in their conversation. ‘It’s
eight o’clock and you haven’t pounced,’ she commented. ‘You men are such frail
creatures.’

They
closed in to fit their urges together. The main thing, he pondered, hugging her
thankfully was that she felt it too; if he had made no inroads on her heart,
that would have been unbearable.They clung to each other as if they were
tumbling through outer space. Two supplementary conclusions made themselves
comfortable in his thoughts: that by holding her he had captured everything he
wanted in life and that he had got to the end of pleasure. ‘Switch off the
light,’ she breathed. Just before he alighted on her in the darkness, she
halted him, and from the bed she reached up to draw back the curtain; her naked
body was instantly coated with moonlight. How did she learn that?

They
sweated out the loneliness and after the gasps of surprise and exertion,
prostrated themselves on each other. That’s something that can’t be wrenched
from your possession, Gyuri reflected. Money in the unrobbable bank. Whatever
happens now, I’ve won.

Jadwiga’s
husband, it turned out, was a bastard.