Under the frog (27 page)

The
architect was cruelly woken one morning by a phone call from Party headquarters
saying they had been looking for him for a week and that he was expected that
afternoon to display the model of the new building and that Rákosi wasn’t in a
very good mood. Luckily the architect didn’t have a hangover, as he was still
drunk, having only just got to bed after three days’ revelling at a gypsy
wedding in Mateszalka. He had enough clarity of mind to realise that he would
be shot or if he were lucky he could spend the rest of a short life making
uranium pies down a mineshaft under an unfashionable part of Hungary.

Desperately
rummaging through his closet, he unearthed a model he had constructed years ago
in his student days before the war, for a competition to build a luxury hotel
in Lillafiired. The model was quite detailed, though the gothic towers weren’t
in keeping with the latest thinking from Moscow but while this model would
finish his career as an architect, it might save his life and allow a
possibility of further boozing and gibbering. Who knows, Rákosi might even have
a thing about gothic towers?

As he
was dreaming up some brazen lies to accompany the model, he didn’t pay the
necessary attention to pulling on his trousers and he keeled over, crushing the
model beyond redemption and the most epic of his falsehoods.

Spotting
a shoebox skulking in the closet, he remembered the words of his professor: ‘All
the best ideas are accidents.’ (The professor had got the commission to build
the Ethnography Museum because he had copied down the wrong address for a
prospective client who wanted a layout for a cakeshop and had ended up on the
doorstep of the head of the museum committee who had been won over by his
gibbering.) Seizing the shoebox and drawing some windows on it, he started to
improvise a speech making copious reference to the dictatorship of the
proletariat. ‘I could have brought an elaborate model but surely in an era when
the working people dictate…’

Then
there was the Szell story. Every time Gyuri looked at the White House he
recalled it. Szell and his father specialised in food-processing equipment and
he had insisted that they had received a decree to install two king-sized
meat-grinders in the basement of the White House, obviously to mince up those
particularly difficult corpses for the fishes. Of course, both Szell and his
father were inveterate liars. If they were facing a firing squad and you were
to ask them, ‘Do you want your lives to be spared?’ they’d be forced to answer ‘No’.
On the other hand, you could see how an ample meat grinder could come in handy
and it was a good way of turning the blue Danube red.

Gyuri,
Bánhegyi, Róka and even, in the end, Bokros, all tried to dissuade Pataki from
executing the wager, but Pataki was, even in the bright sunshine, almost
incandescent with anger. Bokros attempted to jolly down the situation, perhaps
realising that the consequences of such an action might well injure even
himself. ‘No,’ said Pataki walking off, ‘tomorrow, at twelve.’

Worried,
Gyuri pondered how to divert Pataki from taunting the White House with his
buttocks. Talking him out of it directly wouldn’t work and Gyuri was unsure
which style of machination would have the desired effect. It was like lacking
the right-sized spanner to undo a bolt; simple if you had the right tool,
otherwise impossible.There was a formula of words that would make Pataki laugh
and go rowing but Gyuri couldn’t think of the combination.

So
alarmed was Gyuri that he even took the step of talking to Elek about Pataki’s
planned run. Elek wasn’t taken aback; he showed no consternation at the
prospect of losing his partner in nicotine, indeed he maintained his armchair
aloofness. ‘I suppose you’ll be getting arrested with him, will you? They say
prison is character-forming. Mind you, my character was already formed when
they put me inside in Bucharest.’

‘You
were in jail?’

‘Only
for a few days. Bribery’

‘Bribery?
Who did you bribe?’

‘No,
the problem was I hadn’t bribed anyone. They were very upset.’

‘Look,
Pataki’ll be in for more than few days.’

‘It’s
very hard to work out why people do things. Back in Vienna, when I was in the
Army, one of my friends ended up in a furious row over something trifling. The
positioning of napkins in the officers’ mess – something like that. But he
challenged this other fellow to a duel. We all took turns trying to get them to
call it off. Apart from the chance of someone getting killed, duelling was
furiously prohibited and droves of careers could have dropped dead like flies.
The thing everyone was terrified of was losing face, so I put my arm round him
and said “Józsi, this is a stupid misunderstanding. Grown men don’t behave like
this. Honour’s honour, but you can’t shoot a fellow officer over a napkin.” I
thought I was doing a good job when he looked at me and I can still remember
this vividly, he was so passionate. “No,” he said to me. “You don’t understand.
I
want
to blow his brains out.”
Nothing to do with the napkin, of course, just the usual traffic jam on the
thigh of a Viennese fraulein.

‘I’ll
talk to Pataki if you want but I don’t think it’ll make any difference. These
lunacies-in-waiting are usually readied well in advance, like all the best
off-the-cuff remarks. It was the same with me resigning my commission; it had
all the appearance of an extempore fed-upness but it had been in training for a
considerable while. That was my problem with the Army, I just couldn’t take it
seriously and that’s what they couldn’t forgive me for. I suppose people in any
profession who don’t carry the due reverence are in trouble. But the whole
military was a joke. Every time they get something good going they throw it
open to the amateurs anyway and then a natural soldier sticks out like an oak
in a meadow.

‘I’ll
talk to Pataki if you want. But I’ll be surprised if he’ll listen. You never
did.’

But
that evening Pataki was nowhere to be found for dissuasion, so, at the
appointed time they gathered on the Margit Bridge. Bokros had a pale,
posthumous look since he wasn’t going to gain however the day went. He implored
Pataki to refrain from his task. If he’d offered the bike, that might have
tilted it, but he didn’t. ‘Better stay here’ Pataki suggested, entrusting Gyuri
to look after the shortly-to-be-forfeited motorcycle.

‘This
could take some time,’ Pataki said, trotting off towards the White House with
the ease of a ruthless athlete. He was wearing his black tracksuit, until he
reached the embankment adjacent to the Ministry.

From
their vantage point on the bridge, Gyuri and Bokros watched as Pataki reduced
his attire to Locomotive-style basketball boots. He looked tanned, relaxed and
even from hundreds of metres away his muscles had precise definition. A superb
musculature, Gyuri thought, recalling how Pataki had been in line to be the
model for the naked proletarian Adonis-figure on the back of the new
twenty-forint note. They had been looking for a striking example of the new
Hungarian might and the artist had gone for Neumann who made a much more
towering symbol of resurgence, justice and truth, of socialist invincibility and
grit, and perhaps because Pataki had asked for money. ‘They’re not getting my
pecs for free.’

All
around the building there were guards. People weren’t exactly encouraged to
walk past the Ministry. While on the one hand, the AVO felt it only right to
have ostentatiously lavish headquarters by the Danube, the drawback to having a
headquarters was that people knew where to find you, which obviously made the
AVO slightly uneasy.

The
guards were drowsy and clearly not accustomed to doing their job. Pataki had drawn
up to the main entrance before they became noticeably stirred and perplexed by
this challenge to workers’ power. Then one of the guards had the idea of
chasing Pataki and the others thought this might be worth trying and followed
his example. The guards were well armed, but not well legged. By judiciously
using his acceleration, Pataki zipped ahead of them, dodging any newcomers,
maintaining a few tantalising metres between himself and his collection of
pursuers. He spurted round the corner of the Ministry taking a wake of guards
with him, leaving the frontage of the White House deguarded, motionless and
summery.

After a
longer time than seemed possible, Pataki reemerged from the rear of the
building and made his finishing line his starting point where he had left his
tracksuit, looking satisfied that he had encircled the White House with his
buttocks as his uniformed retinue caught up with him. The guards having
apprehended Pataki’s unhidden hide were uncertain what to do. Finally a blanket
and then a police van swallowed Pataki.

‘Oh,
well,’ Bokros summed up. ‘The engine needs a rebore anyway.’

Most of
the Locomotive team had decided to visit relatives in the countryside, to take
lengthy hikes in the hills, or to reside at someone else’s address for a few
days. Gyuri waited for the retributional spill-over at home, braced for
interrogation and ready with a four-dimensional denial.

Five
days after Pataki had blasted the White House with both his buttocks, Gyuri
returned home to find Pataki about to take a shower. He was a bit stinky and
his hair needed combing but otherwise he looked remarkably intact. ‘I hope you’ve
brought your own soap, you free-loading bastard,’ Gyuri remonstrated and then
unable to combat his curiosity any longer: ‘What happened?’

‘What
do you mean?’ Pataki shouted from the shower ‘What do you mean, what happened?’

Pataki
was soaping himself and Gyuri could see Pataki wasn’t going to give him the
story just like that. ‘I thought the talent scouts from the AVO signed you up.’

‘Oh,
that.
Isn’t it obvious? I’m insane.
Would anyone sane run naked around the Ministry of the Interior? You’re looking
at an escaped lunatic. Could you fix me something to eat? We nutters eat the
same sort of thing as you sane people.’

Pataki
came into the kitchen, reading a letter which had been posted just before his
escapade. The letter was from the Ministry of Sport informing him that his
application for a scholarship abroad had been turned down. A slogan had been
rubber-stamped further down the page, below the terse refusal: ‘Fight for Peace’.

‘Look
at this,’ said Pataki waving the letter in disgust. ‘How can they expect me to
live in a country where they put idiotic rubbish like this on every letter? I’m
off.’

Pataki
for some time had been trying to raise the subject of getting out. This had
meant that Pataki talked about it while Gyuri was in earshot. The subject had
become fascinating for Pataki, chiefly because Bánhegyi had been moved to work
in the international freight department of the railways. Bánhegyi, like all the
Locomotive players, wasn’t actually required to work, but when he popped in to
collect his wages he had access to all the information. It was an extremely
hazardous way to get out, but then there were only extremely hazardous ways to
get out. If it hadn’t been for Jadwiga, if Gyuri had been on his own, he would
have given it a go, but he wasn’t willing to expose Jadwiga to the risk,
although knowing her, she wouldn’t refuse. He had something to lose. Pataki
should have taken up the offer in ’47.

Pataki
insisted that they should hunt down Bánhegyi. ‘I feel like leaving before the
doctors catch me.’ Providence was evidently in the mood to grant Pataki his
wish because they found Bánhegyi just returning from a dislocation-certifying
session with the doctor. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there are trains going out but I can’t
be sure where the trains are going to. They chop and change the forms a lot.’
Bánhegyi wanted to wait a few days to study the opportunities, but Pataki
wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Thinking about it isn’t going to make it any easier,’ he
said. So at midnight they went down to the sidings and breaking the seal on a
freight-wagon, prized it open. It was full of shoes. ‘Shoes are risky,’ said
Bánhegyi, ‘they can go East or West.’

‘Is
there anything else available tonight?’ asked Pataki.

‘No.’

‘Fine.
This will do.’ He climbed aboard with a bag containing two loaves, cheese, six
apples, a bottle of mineral water and three bottles of Czech beer whose last
place of residence had been the Fischer flat. ‘Getting drunk is one of the few
amusements possible in a dark freight-wagon full of shoes,’ said Pataki
defending his choice of company.

They
agreed on means of communication. ‘Even if it’s Siberia, do drop us a postcard,’
urged Gyuri.

‘Sure,’
said Pataki. ‘And let my parents know in a day or two. Tell them I would have
told them but it’s easier for everyone this way.’ He handed Gyuri an envelope. ‘That’s
a blanket apology for them. And tell them not to look for granddad’s wedding ring.
I’ve got that. Does anyone know how many years you can get for this?’ He looked
at Gyuri. ‘You’re really not coming, are you?’

‘Things
can’t go on like this much longer.’

They
closed the door and Bánhegyi resealed the wagon with the official implement.

23rd October 1956

On his
way to the Ministry of Sport (as everyone referred to the National Committee
for Physical Education and Sport which liked to pretend it wasn’t a ministry,
since a ministry would detract from the atmosphere of amateurism they tried to
cultivate) Gyuri spotted a ticket-inspector getting on the tram. Gyuri didn’t
have a ticket. He never had a ticket. He had never had a ticket. Gyuri hadn’t
paid a filler for public transport since the last years of the war.
Furthermore, in all that time he had never even so much as contemplated paying.
Not for a moment. This was, firstly, because he didn’t feel like handing over
any of his money to the state, however trivial the sum, and secondly, because
the trams were normally so crowded, only a risible percentage of his body got
in. Most of the time, he had to hang on by one hand, with one foot perched on
the running-board, in the company of several similarly positioned citizens and
he didn’t feel that such a posture justified payment.