Under the Frog
Tibor Fischer
Winner Betty Trask award 1992
Shortlisted for Booker Prize 1993
Set in post-war Hungary between 1944 and 1956, this ferociously funny and bitterly sad story follows the fortunes of two young men in the pursuit of sex and the avoidance of work and army service. They survive the chaos of communism by becoming part of a travelling basketball team.
Tibor Fischer
Under the Frog
© 1992
November 1955
It was true that at the age of twenty-five he had never left the country, that he had never got more than three days’ march from his birthplace, no more than a day and a half of horse and carting or one long afternoon’s locomoting. On the other hand, Gyuri mused, how many people could say they had travelled the length and breadth of Hungary naked?
They always travelled naked. He couldn’t remember how or why this started, but it had become the irrefrangible rule for the Locomotive team as they traversed the nation for their matches. They always travelled in their luxury wagon (custom-built by Hungarian railways for the Waffen SS to facilitate them in their Europe-wide art-looting, and well known to the authorities on rolling-stock as a peerless carriage for riding the rails) and they always travelled naked.
Róka, Gyurkovics, Demeter, Bánhegyi and Pataki were playing cards on the mahogany dining-table, an ex-antique (according to Bánhegyi, who had served in his father’s removal business) it had been mutilated out of value by years of liquid rings, inadvertent and advertent lacerations, the burrowing of burning tobacco. Left as an object unsuited for pocketing in time of rout, the table had been proudly kept by the Locomotive team despite its great (if progressively diminishing) value as a symbol of corporate excellence.
Who was grassing? Who was the informer?
Róka was shifting about, as if uncomfortable: because he was being tapped of his money like a rubber tree and because of the commotion in his blood stream.
Basketball, for Róka, was essentially an aid in disseminating his chromosomes across the country. Basketball, and in fact any activity that got Róka out the front door, served as a bridge between him and members of the opposite sex. Abstention from sexual relations for anything longer than twenty-four hours would result in Róka getting extremely agitated, and doing things like running around in small figures of eight, ululating. Even in a habitat like the Locomotive carriage where women were over-represented in the conversation, Róka’s devotion to gamic convolutions was remarkable.
But Róka was too decent to be a brick in their wall.
That is, Róka was good-hearted, and Gyuri, like everyone else, liked him. So it was hard to imagine him as a delator, grassing up the team. Indeed, it was hard to imagine anyone in the team snitching. Except Peter. But as the only card-carrier Peter was surely too obvious. Pataki, he had known from the age when you start knowing. Gyuri couldn’t see any of the team informing. Demeter – too much of a gentleman. Bánhegyi – too jolly. Gyurkovics – too unorganised. And all the others were… singularly uninformer-like. However, Gyuri contemplated, turning the proposition on its head, perhaps it was Róka’s decency that had snared him. If you don’t do this, we do that to your motherfathersisterbrother.
As always, when Róka wasn’t humping, he consoled himself by talking about it: ‘So I explained to her it was okay by me.’ That was Róka. He wasn’t elitist. He was generous, egalitarian. He scorned petty bourgeois concepts such as beauty, desirability, and youth. He was relating his tryst with a recent conquest, a lady whose attractiveness, he emphasised, was in no way impaired by her artificial arm. The denouement of Róka’s anecdote was that the lady had become dismembered and Róka had found himself with an extensive annex to his tool. This, apparently, had occasioned great distress to the lady, despite Rolca’s chivalrous assurances that it could happen to anyone with an artificial arm.
Nevertheless, the chief punchline, Gyuri sensed, hadn’t been reached when the narration was guillotined by Róka’s fury at losing a heavily-wagered hand to Pataki. Gyuri wasn’t playing cards, because he found it boring, and additionally, Pataki always won. They only played for small amounts of money but as he only possessed very small amounts of money, he didn’t see why he should hand it over to Pataki. It was a mysterious process, but an inevitable and obvious one, like droplets of rain guided down a window-pane, how all the currency gravitated towards Pataki. Pataki would lose a hand every now and then but it was at best courtesy and looked more like blatant entrapment.
Tired of trying to crack the problem of the informer, Gyuri settled down to think about being a streetsweeper while he gazed out of the window at the countryside that went past quite lazily despite the train’s billing as an express. The streetsweeper was a sort of cerebral chewing gum that Gyuri popped in on long journeys. A streetsweeper. Where? A streetsweeper in London. Or New York. Or Cleveland; he wasn’t that fussy. Some modest streetsweeping anywhere. Anywhere in the West. Anywhere outside. Any job. No matter how menial, a windowcleaner, a dustman, a labourer: you could just do it, just carry out your job and you wouldn’t need an examination in Marxism- Leninism, you wouldn’t have to look at pictures of Rákosi or whoever had superbriganded their way to the top lately. You wouldn’t have to hear about gambolling production figures, going up by leaps and bounds, higher even than the Plan had predicted because the power of Socialist production had been underestimated. Being a streetsweeper would be quite agreeable, Gyuri reflected. You’d be out in the open, doing healthy work, seeing things. It was the very humility of this fantasy, its frugality that gave the greatest pleasure, since Gyuri hoped this could facilitate its coming to pass. It wasn’t as if he were pestering Providence for a millionaireship or to be handed the presidency of the United States. How could anyone refuse a request to be a streetsweeper? Just pull me out. Just pull me out. Apart from the prevailing political inclemency and the ubiquitous shittiness of life, the simple absurdity of never having voyaged more than two hundred kilometres from the spot where he had bailed out of the womb rankled.
The train went into a slower kind of slow, signalling that they were arriving in Szeged. This was, he knew from his research, 171 kilometres from Budapest.
Just next to the railway station in Szeged was a high, redbrick building which now advertised itself as a hotel. It had been, as everyone knew, one of the most renowned brothels in Hungary before such dens of capitalist iniquity were closed down. Town, gown, yokels in their Sunday best (only worn at church, in a coffin, or at the knocking shop), commercial salesmen and royalty (admittedly only the Balkan variety) had all made their way through its portals.
There was no doubt that it was pure hotel now. The girls would have been dispersed to some more dignified toil. Gyuri recalled the Party Secretary at the Ganz works making quite a ceremony out of it when the factory had taken on four night butterflies. Welcoming the new arrivals, Lakatos had launched into a heated denunciation of how the loathsome capitalist system had dragged these unfortunates into the lustful sweatshops of hypocritical bourgeois depravity. How capitalism had perpetuated the droit de seigneur, how capitalism had taken young male proletarians to be slaughtered in wars for markets and how their sisters were thrust into strumpetry. It had been, especially for Lakatos, a sterling performance. He had obviously read it somewhere; he was probably parroting a section in the Party secretary’s manual, ‘upon receiving former whores on the shopfloor’. The girls had listened to Lakatos’s fulminations demurely, wearing factory overalls. The diatribe had ended with Lakatos wiping the rhetorically-induced sweat from his brow and disappearing into his office while the girls had been led off to learn the ropes.
Within a fortnight the girls had been once again plying their trade insid
e the huge coils of copper wire the factory spun. That really was the heart of Communism, Gyuri decided: it made it harder for everyone to do what they do.
Róka threw his cards down in disgust as Pataki made off with another hand: ‘In the words of the Grand Provost of Kalocsa after he had had both his legs sheared off by a train, “Aren’t you going to take my dick too?”.’
‘We can talk about that jazz record of yours,’ replied Pataki, patiently shuffling the cards.
Róka, as the son of a prominent Lutheran bishop, was the carriage authority on all matters ecclesiastical, plus Horace’s odes. Every time Róka’s father had seen one of his three children, he had greeted them with a line from Horace; the offspring had been enjoined to respond with the subsequent line, on pain of an imminent clip around the ear. The bishop was not completely severe. A slice of chocolate cake was on offer for anyone who could catch him out on Horace’s texts; Róka claimed he had never eaten chocolate cake until he was sixteen.
Like Gyuri, Róka was class-x. But Róka seemed unperturbed by this, and certainly didn’t allow his political handicap to interfere with his mission in life. Methodically, he scanned the platforms at Szeged station for any woman who had the sort of look on her face which suggested that she might be thinking about a vertical liaison against a secluded wall with a basketball player en route to Makó. Aside from his interminable hormones, Róka had also acquired a haul of excellent (i.e. Western) jazz records that was now almost entirely in Pataki’s clutches, and he was looking out in the hope of a deliverance that might prevent another disc from taking up residence in Pataki’s collection. Róka’s countenance grimly, faultlessly, registered the absence of a woman under sixty at Szeged ’s railway station.
‘We haven’t blessed Szeged, have we?’ remarked Bánhegyi. It was childish, but cheap, and sometimes amusing. Katona leaned out of a window further along, so he could capture the scene while, as the train pulled out of the station, Róka, Gyurkovics, Demeter and Pataki promoted their posteriors up against the carriage window next to the platform. A gallery of photographs starring bewildered or outraged rail passengers from all over Hungary adorned the carriage walls.
Szeged was a little disappointing. One elderly ticket-inspector got the full blast of the four-bum salute but she remained unmoved. Myopia perhaps, or an overdose of war; it looked very much as if some misfortune had spooned the zest out of her. Or possibly they were inured to basketball teams in Szeged.
Gyuri looked out on the river as they crossed over, still ruminating on the attractions of being a streetsweeper. ‘The border’s too far to walk from here,’ said Pataki, continuing to preside over the impoverishment of his team-mates. ‘Make your break from Makó.’
Gyuri’s aspirations, though he had never opened them up, dripped out over time and had been fully divined by the others. Keeping secrets from those you travelled around with naked wasn’t easy. ‘It’s really not that wonderful out there, Gyuri.’ Gyurkovics kept on repeating this. Gyurkovics was a liar – not in the same league as Pataki but competent. But while Pataki turned on the falsehood principally for entertainment and only used it as a shield at the last resort, with Gyurkovics you knew as soon as his enamels parted, his lying was to exile the truth.
Gyurkovics had got out. In ’47, before the borders had been sealed up tighter than a louse’s arse, Gyurkovics went off to Vienna. It had been about the same time that Gyuri had gone to see Pataki about skipping the country. Wearing newspaper for underwear, Gyuri was spending most of his time worrying about when his next foodstuff would be making its appearance. He had been going upstairs in the hope of catching lunchtime in the Pataki household when he bumped into Pataki coming down the stairway. Pataki was wearing his US Army sunglasses (clandestinely obtained and one of only a dozen pairs in the whole of Hungary). Pataki was better off in that his loins weren’t girded with newsprint and he had a mother and an employed father to assist him in the obtaining of meals. But Gyuri doubted that was the crucial factor. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get out of this country,’ Gyuri had urged. Pataki paused, mentally fingering the proposal. ‘No,’ he said, ‘let’s go rowing.’ That had been that. Gyuri had no doubt that if it had been yes, they would have strolled down to the station without any ado, but it had been no and a saunter to the boathouse.
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 lif
e (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.
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