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 an
d 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.
One day, an hour after school had finished and the class had filed out, it was claimed Hidassy had been seen still conducting a lesson on electromagnetism: he loved physics. And he was liked by his pupils, not only because he left them in peace, but because, when it came to exam time and mouths were left gasping like landed fish, he would give a good mark for ‘understanding the principle’. In fact what usually happened during the oral exam was that he asked the question and then, even before you had time to supply an answer (should you have happened to have had one), however feeble or conquering, he would beamingly answer it, requiring at most a little nodding in agreement from the examinee.
‘Teller was telling me that if you split the atom, you’d blow up the whole world: the least he could have done was write to apologise,’ Hidassy was rambling as Pataki sold his grenades. Keresztes, as well as Fuchs, came round to examine the goods, which Pataki wished they wouldn’t do. Keresztes was an unwelcome customer as he was perilously unpredictable. During the siege, Soviet machine gunners had found Keresztes at their elbows, asking for a go. Once Pataki and Gyuri had been at a fairground when Keresztes had latched on to them. A gypsy, without carelessness or malice, entirely through the natural Brownian motion of public place, had brushed into Keresztes. Courteously asking for Gyuri’s celebrated penknife, Keresztes had run through the different attachments and, having selected the longest blade, sunk it into the gypsy. ‘Thanks,’ he had said politely.
That was the only occasion, though, that Pataki had seen Keresztes exhibit good manners. Fuchs wasn’t great as a prospective customer either as he had an unblemished reputation as penniless. In any gathering of thirty youths, there is always one who gets sat on. Someone, anyone, would call ‘time for a Fuchs’ and immediately a quorum of eight would sit on Fuchs; more might be interested, but Fuchs wasn’t very large, and even with ten there would be a couple only sitting on a brace of fingers, a hand, a nose – something peripheral like that. It was a rather simple, but an inexhaustible amusement. Fuchs was also good for locking in cupboards, and because it was public knowledge that his mother would phone the police if he was two minutes late home, on one side-splitting occasion he had been handcuffed to a rail in the number forty-seven tram, where he had stayed despite his impassioned pleas until the driver took the tram back to the terminal.
Even more amusing than doing things to Fuchs was doing things to his briefcase. He had acquired a very sober, expensive leather briefcase through a family belief that such an accoutrement would boost his scholastic achievement. Because the briefcase was pompous, very expensive and above all belonged to Fuchs it came in for a lot of attention. Fuchs had a curious spiritual oneness with this briefcase that transcended merely trying to protect it. Since it was kicked on sight Fuchs had to walk around with the briefcase clutched to his chest, but as he couldn’t maintain such tight security all day, the briefcase would disappear. Invariably, the moment it fell into hostile hands, no matter how distracted he was, Fuchs was telepathically alerted and he would have to be sat on while his briefcase was filled with liquids, trampolined on, nailed to a wall, or on one memorable occasion during one of Solyom-Nagy’s chocolate gluts in early ’44, topped up with chocolate melted over a bunsen burner to the accompaniment of Hidassy’s discourse on the spectrum.
They were sitting on the window ledge at the rear of the classroom where Keresztes pawed the grenades much to Pataki’s discomfiture. The lab was on the second floor and there was a drop of twenty feet to the pavement. A vogue was sweeping the school for jumping off the top of the music block, which was a twelve foot drop onto grass, started
by Gomboc, whose elder brother had been a paratrooper, resulting in an epidemic of sprained and broken ankles. Keresztes lobbed a grenade up and down thoughtfully: ‘I tell you what. I bet you this grenade that you can jump out this window and walk away.’ Keresztes never explained what he was going to put up but in any case Pataki wasn’t having it, since whether or not Keresztes broke his neck, such an escapade could only add to Pataki’s detention time, which was already heavily curtailing his rowing on the Danube.
Pataki had already said no three times when Keresztes, who needed to be told things six times as a minimum, threw Fuchs out of the window. Fuchs looked surprised at the physics lesson having run away from him but had got up swiftly and dusted himself off. ‘See,’ said Keresztes, ‘my grenade.’ Whereupon he pulled out the pin. Row upon row of boys ducked under their benches as awareness of the unpinned grenade spread.
After a good three or four minutes, Pataki crawled out from underneath the neighbouring bench to see Keresztes holding the grenade up to the light. ‘All right, how did you know it was a dud?’
‘I didn’t,’ replied Keresztes. Just then Fuchs walked back into the classroom. Hidassy, who hadn’t missed a word of his eulogy on the electron during the grenade scare, rounded on Fuchs. ‘How dare you leave the classroom without my permission? Double detention.’ That lesson was the last time they saw Keresztes. Two rumours made the rounds. One that the headmaster had Keresztes on a retainer to stay away from school; the other that Keresztes’s vanishing was due to having bet someone at Kobányá railway station that he could headbutt the 4.15 from the Keleti, which didn’t stop at Kobányá, into submission. Pataki definitely preferred the latter version and found the detail verisimilar.
Under the Frog Page 4