Under the frog (5 page)

* *

A lot of Gyuri’s fellow pupils had been killed, so the first
roll call of school recommencing was rather grim. Annoyingly, none of the
teachers had snuffed it. In particular, Gyuri had been hoping that Vagvolgyi
would have copped a direct hit from some Russian artillery or an American
bomber, but there he was, bald as a snooker ball, unsmiling, blocking Gyuri’s
path down the corridor, patently expecting the project on Kossuth which was
already a week late when the Russians had arrived to give Gyuri a breathing
space. If anyone else had said: ‘I trust you used the extra time to broaden
your background reading?’ he would have been joking. Vagvolgyi wasn’t. As Gyuri
floundered in his explanation of how reading one more book on Kossuth’s
American exile had prevented him from entirely completing his opus, Vagvolgyi
shook his head with a wounded look. ‘Fischer, Fischer, this is deplorable. You
can’t let a little war interfere with serious scholarship. You know our
history. As a Hungarian you should be prepared for the odd cataclysm.’

October 1946

Pataki was having a lucubratory crap when they came to
arrest him.

He was comfortably perched, working his way through a first
edition of Tompa’s poetry, a splendid gold-embossed publication printed in 1849
that had come from a bombed-out Jewish flat. Tompa was the sort of poet Pataki
liked, plodding and second-rate, and this was precisely why Pataki was
investigating his rhyme schemes. Tompa’s mediocrity was rather reassuring.
Tompa had been
there,
Petófi’s sidekick, in the middle of the 1848 revolution,
the highlight of the century, bobbing up and down in the cauldron of
era-making, handed all the great moments of existence, and he had fluffed it.
All Tompa had managed to do was to knock out greeting-card verse, a chain of
tum-tee-tum.

Tompa was what you wanted in the way of a literary
predecessor, solid, reliable, uninspired, doing some useful groundwork, warming
up a few promising stanzas, passing on the baton to his successors so they
could make the dash to glory. A spear-carrier. A stagehand. Not like that
bastard Petófi who had fenced off most of the language, who had confiscated
most of the things worth poetising about, creating Hungarian literature in the
lunchbreaks between his revolutionary activities; the man who (according to
some authorities) had declared the 1848 revolution open, monogrammed all the
best poetic forms, tossed out entire school and university syllabuses as a
sideline, and fought with the Hungarian revolutionary army which thrashed the
Habsburgs, the army which looked as if it had ironed out the jinx, when whoops,
it got wiped out.

Then Petófi had the nerve to die, looking sharp in a white
shirt, alone, on foot against Cossack cavalry at twenty-six. A man whose verse
was embossed on every Hungarian at the factory.

That was what you didn’t need – some rotten genius queering
the pitch, eating up all the literary glory on the table. Pataki had two
recurring dreams. One was rather nightmarish: he would be drummed by a
heart-rending fear that he couldn’t remember either the names or the addresses
or the telephone numbers of two or three staggeringly attractive women he had
met: their details were always just out of recall, the fingertips of his memory
couldn’t reach the shelf they were kept on, so he had no way of tracking down
the beauties. They were out there, waiting for him, but he couldn’t get his
memory to cough up. He would wake in a sweat.

The other dream featured a bookcase. It was the type of
dream where you knew from the kick-off it was a dream. The pre-eminent book was
a thick volume of poetry. The whole form of this book spoke of great
literature, it was stuffed with world-class stuff, the sort of thing that would
be in everyone’s collection, even those people who don’t read. So Pataki would
read the book, thinking, this is brilliant poetry, it could muscle its way into
any anthology of verse, it leaves Petófi at the starting-line and it doesn’t
exist.
All
I have to do, thinks Pataki, is memorise it, write it down when I wake up, and
hey presto, instant immortality.

Nevertheless, although he trotted through the dream again
and again, he could never capture a chunk. Once, exceptionally, he returned
with a line ‘The dog is in the dogcase’, which despite long consideration, wasn’t
any good on its own, and Pataki was unable to do the sequels. There was a
variant on this dream where he came across a heap of gold coins, and despite
furiously concentrating on bringing them back, he would wake up with a fist
full of nothing.

Pataki did try writing without the shortcuts but although he
would get enthused during the writing, as the ink dried, so did his
satisfaction. The ideas, the visions that turned his ignition were exciting but
it was like taking a pebble out of a river where it gleamed and watching it
become matt and boring. Pataki tried to splash with ink the invisible men that
only he could see, so that others could detect their outlines, but he always
missed and was merely left with a mess.

He hadn’t succeeded in penning anything he wanted to show
other people. It was so frustrating to see something like a beautiful girl and
then to end up with something like a matchstick figure scrawled on a wall.

Thus, drawing comfort from Tompa’s mechanical poetry, Pataki
was surprised to hear a jarring knock on the toilet door (not really designed
to take the force of a heavy fist) and an unfamiliar male voice calling his
name. He was surprised, but not as surprised as he would be when he discovered
it was the AVO outside waiting for him.

As secret police went, the AVO weren’t terribly secret about
what they did – half the business of being secret policemen is people knowing
about you, word-of-mouth-publicity. Pataki’s mother was, fortunately, even more
astonished than he was; she was flabbergasted into silence and so there was no
scene as they left the flat. Even more fortunately Pataki’s father was still at
work. If he was going to talk his way out of this problem he didn’t want any
interference. The problem was, what was the problem? The two AVO made a point
of not telling him why he was wanted for questioning; they were milking the
superiority of their knowledge, that Pataki could tell. Until he discovered the
cause of the trouble, it was going to be difficult to decide which fraud to
unpack; he readied two or three all-purpose disclaimers so as to have a good
story at hand.

They passed Mrs Vajda on the staircase lamenting with Mrs
Csörgó the demolition of the church that had stood at the end of Damjanich utca
for over a hundred years. ‘This can’t go on much longer,’ she was saying.

The AVO car was long and black, and Pataki tried to enjoy
the short ride. There was something flattering about being arrested, the
entourage did testify to one’s importance, but being in custody was becoming a
habit; he really had to cut down. There had been the corpse-collecting incident – the window had got them out of that. Then he and Józsi had accompanied Gyuri
to his mother’s cottage in Erdóváros. The first day in the countryside they had
walked out of a forest slap into a Russian camp. Pataki immediately feigned
intense pain, on the lines of acute appendicitis, and got the others to plead
for a doctor and medicine. This appeal had the desired effect, the soldiers had
told them to go to hell and shooed them away.

They had been reliving that escape the following day,
chuckling over Russian gullibility as they fired a revolver at some bottles
they had carried out to a local beauty spot for target practice. This was when
there had been notices everywhere, in newspapers, on walls, in railway
carriages warning that anyone caught with a firearm would be considered a
bandit, a fascist, someone to be shot forthwith. It was probably the shooting
and their chuckling that obscured the sound of Russian patrol until it was
right behind them.

One of the four soldiers, a true short-arse, who looked
about twelve, was extremely jolly. The Red Army manual for troops stationed in
Hungary obviously contained the phrase ‘We are going to shoot you’ (just to
prevent any misunderstanding) since the midget kept on repeating it with an
appalling accent, adding various onomatopoeic execution effects, like
‘bbubbbbuabbaa’.
This he did, interspersing delighted laughter, all the way to their
headquarters in the village of Jew. The people who lived in Jew didn’t look at
all Jewish, nor were they, otherwise they’d have been long dead.

Not for the first time Pataki reflected on the imbecility of
Hungarian village names and how idiotic it would look to be shot in Jew.

They were left in a small room, with a window so minute none
of them could have managed to get more than an arm out, and besides which their
titchy escort was on guard outside, still rehearsing for the firing-squad. It
was going to be a tough one to mendacity out, Pataki had reflected, bearing in
mind that none of them had a greater command of Russian than ‘fuck your mother’.
Józsi was beginning to smell badly and Gyuri’s eyes were on stalks of terror. ‘Don’t
worry,’ Pataki said in an endeavour to bolster morale, ‘they’re not going to
shoot us.’ ‘It’s not that,’ replied Gyuri, ‘everyone saw us being brought here.
My mother’s going to kill me.’ Pataki then recalled that Gyuri’s last word to
his mother before going out the door had been ‘no’ in response to the irate
question ‘You haven’t still got that revolver, have you?’

Pataki was exploring two lines of thought: first, that they
had found the revolver and were on their way to hand it in, precisely because
they realised how illegal and dangerous such an object was and how it could
easily fall into the wrong hands. Or there was the hunting down of a Nazi
soldier reputed by the locals to be scavenging in the forest, harbouring wicked
anti-Soviet ideals, with the jackpot line ‘we wanted to bring him in ourselves
as thanks to the Red Army for having so selflessly liberated our country of
evil scum like this’; it was a better yarn but sadly less believable.

Then the commanding officer came in. Pataki divined from the
crestfallen look on the midget’s face that perhaps they weren’t going to be
fattened up with lead. None of the fabrications were given a chance to come
into play but an abrasive, sandpaper severity lecture skinned them alive
(through an interpreter) and to Gyuri’s disappointment they were released and
had to go home. That captivity had been just over an hour; how long would the
AVO hold him?

At a stately pace, the driver took the AVO car down the
boulevardous Andrássy út and turned right at number 60, their headquarters.
Pataki cut off his reminiscences with the thought that the entrance to number
60 looked familiar and recalled that he had seen it in a newsreel, showing
captive Arrow Cross leaders and other assorted Nazi assistants being led in,
handcuffed, having a good idea of how their trials were going to go: hangings
all round. The car pulled into the side entrance, the tradesmen’s entrance as
it were and Pataki suddenly ran out of nonchalance; fear made itself
comfortable in his mind.

He was ushered up a long, ornate staircase, with
incapacitatingly thick carpet. The opulence of the interior was all the more
striking since Pataki couldn’t remember seeing a freshly-decorated wall or
indeed one without bulletholes or some sort of martial damage for years.

He was shoved into a large room, with a ceiling almost out
of sight from which was suspended a chandelier the size of a crystal yacht. ‘Go
and stand in the corner,’ said one of his escorts. Pataki then noticed someone
else in another corner with his nose pressed into the right-angle of the walls.
Even though he only got the rear view, from his red hair, bolt upright like a
thistle, he recognised Fuchs. This revelation and the schoolmasterly injunction
to stand in the corner brought on a fit of laughter which had a high hysteria
content. This, in turn, produced a fist in Pataki’s ear, which was still
smarting when it got dark outside but Pataki was quite happy to stand like a
dunce because he now knew what it was all about and he could get the juices of
expiation, protestation and misrepresentation ready to flow; moreover, for
once, he hadn’t done anything.

It had all started with the rowing trip down the Danube with
Gyuri. They stopped for a bite of lunch on Csepel Island and as they relaxed on
the verdant riverbank Gyuri spotted a small container of the type that usually
housed grenades. To their joy, it was full of grenades. They did some fishing – grenades producing unbeatable results – no wasting time with maggots, bits of
line, hooks, weights, waiting. But after you’ve harvested a good haul of zapped
fish, the fun diminishes.

They were good grenades, German grenades, so Pataki, having
acquired Gyuri’s holding through a boat-counting wager, decided to sell or
trade them at school, as he had done a roaring trade at the close of the war,
arms-dealing for a little pocket-money.

During one of Hidassy’s physics lessons Pataki started his
retail exploits. Hidassy was, no matter how many times he had taught a topic,
passionate and excited in his exposition, so much so that as soon as he
launched into density or atomic eccentricities he didn’t even notice what the
front row was doing, and as far as the back row was concerned, with Pataki and
the grenades, it could have been on the other side of the planet. One week they
had even managed a small scale football match using a rolled-up paper ball without
Hidassy intervening.

Hidassy made a pleasant change from the other masters who
loved to supervise every aspect of a pupil’s existence, for example someone
like Horvath, whom it was rumoured had been stripped of his Army commission
because of the embarrassing number of conscripts who had died in his charge.
Horvath was always caning people or grooming them for expulsion on grounds of
insufficiently perpendicular spines. Snoozing on the workbench however didn’t
bother Hidassy, who just carried on waving sections of rubber tubing or
sticking things into a bunsen burner. On the occasion Pataki had ignited one of
the laboratory benches, purely experimenting to see if it would burn, Hidassy’s
only reaction had been to open a window to let the smoke out.