Fuchs had been doubly depressed by the double detention: he had never had a detention and Hidassy, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, had never given a detention.
As they left their punishment, Fuchs bent double with woe, his briefcase pressed to his chest, Pataki, since there was no one else around to witness it, felt compassion and tried to cheer Fuchs up. ‘It’s no use,’ moaned Fuchs, ‘I’ll never do the great stuff like you, selling grenades. No one sits on you.’ Pataki strived to play down the kudos of arms-dealing but as they waited for the tram, his sense of humour pushed in front of his compassion when Fuchs suggested: ‘Look, couldn’t I help you sell some?’ Pataki looked contemplative for a theatrical moment, then agreed. ‘Okay,’ he said.
Pataki outlined the hidden underground German arsenal he had discovered which was brimming over with top SS gear, ammunition, weapons, grenades etc., which would make the two of them a fortune.
‘What you need to bring is rope… a lot of rope, fifty feet. A miner’s helmet or if you can’t get one, a very powerful torch. And lots of sorrel.’
‘Sorrel?’
‘Yes. You know, the green stuff. Sorrel is the best thing to pack explosives in; it relaxes them,’ elucidated Pataki with an infallibly serious face. The rest of the way home, after he had farewelled Fuchs, Pataki kept lapsing into laughter at the thought of Fuchs working his way through the shopping list. And on the appointed Thursday, when Fuchs showed up at school hidden under enormous coils of rope, a miner’s helmet at a rakish angle on his head, carrying two huge baskets full of fresh green sorrel, Pataki was truly afraid that he was going to injure himself or pass out. He had also primed the rest of the class about the proposed weapons-quest, so there was universal merriment, but it was the touch of the miner’s helmet, which must have potently taxed Fuchs’s ingenuity, that finished Pataki off. He couldn’t control himself and earned three detentions for inexplicable spasms of mirth. By the next afternoon he had managed to compose himself as he read his Tompa.
* * *
The schoolish atmosphere at number 60 Andrássy út was further heightened by an instruction, after he had been standing in the corner for hours, to cover two sides of paper with his curriculum vitae. Pataki was calm now, if not utterly confident of talking his way home that night. The grenades he had actually sold would be long gone, deniable. A blanket refusal to acknowledge them was the tactic there, and as for the subterranean German arms cache, since there wasn’t one, he could reveal it as a schoolboy prank, apologise profusely and go home. It was a pity he hadn’t had a chance to liaise with Fuchs to harmonise their narratives, but he polished various emotional stages, fear, incredulity, repentance, with a few stand-by lies in reserve. Mentally, he adjusted the tones of denial and set the level of horrified innocence he wanted to draw on at key junctures.
They were interrogated separately. Pataki was allowed to sit, and this he did as respectfully and helpfully as humanely possible. His interrogator was wearing the new blue-insignia uniform of the AVO and he started off the session with: ‘Of course, we know all about you, Pataki.’ Pataki paid no heed to the contemptuous tone and smiled steadily, working on the theory that smiling might reduce the chances of getting hit. The interrogator looked at his life story with conspicuous disgust. He put it down with what Pataki as a consummate dissimulator instantly spotted as an artificial hiatus; he had the feeling that his interrogator wanted to go home. It was nine o’ clock after all. ‘Fuchs has confessed everything about the weapons. He told us you wanted to be his assistant in organising an armed struggle… ‘No,’ said Pataki as uncontradictorily as possible, ‘there aren’t any weapons, it’s…’ ‘What’s this then?’ asked the interrogator, slapping a German sub-machine gun on the table. He counted the beats and said: ‘An oversized and extremely impractical toothpick? Part of a lawnmower perhaps?’
Pataki found himself, for the first time in his life, out of stock of any suitable fabrications. Were they going to frame him? Whatever was going on he realised he wasn’t going to get any of the good lines. ‘But as I said,’ continued the interrogator, ‘Fuchs has turned on his mouth. He explained that you didn’t know anything, that he was just bringing you in to help distribute. We’ve nipped this one in the bud, which is as well for you.’ Here it is, thought Pataki seeing it coming, he wants to go home. ‘We know all about you. That’s our job. But you’re young. We’re going to overlook this mistake though it’s a weighty offence. We’re going to give you another chance.’ Whatever you say, thought Pataki. ‘You’re in the scouts, aren’t you?’ It wasn’t a question.
They didn’t give him a lift back home. Andrássy út, bleak and black as it was, looked tremendously beautiful to Pataki. He inhaled a generous amount of night air. A poem about freedom was coming on, given his new qualifications in valuing it. The prop with the gun had been a little crude, he judged, but he had been really afraid they were going to stitch him up. But if they deemed waving a gun necessary to get his co-operation, that was their business.
Ladányi was then in charge of the scout troop. The other Jesuits took part, but it was Ladányi’s principal duty, fitting enough, as he had worked his way up through the ranks. He looked the part of the Jesuit, tall with sober eyes that could gatecrash your thoughts. Pataki had to remind himself that although Ladányi was dressed in black, he was still on probation; there was some ridiculously long apprenticeship for the Society of Jesus, advanced altar-kissing and so on.
‘I know you may find this hard to believe…’ Pataki began.
‘Let me guess: the AVO want you to spy on the troop,’ Ladányi volunteered.
‘Er… yes, frankly. How did you know?’
‘Someone would have to do it. Your fondness for getting into trouble makes you the obvious choice. May I suggest copying out the troop’s newsletter? It’ll save you a lot of time. Just give a little more space to any particularly noteworthy knots, any really intriguing bonfires. Those people are very keen on paperwork. Anything else?’
Pataki met Fuchs on the way to school a week later, the first time he had seen him since their joint incarceration. Fuchs seemed terribly frightened and upset to see him. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were joking about those guns: that’s why I took them to the caverns; but I think I managed to convince them it was me who found them. I’m sorry.’
Pataki and Fuchs never talked about it again. They never really talked again. And Pataki certainly never talked about it with anyone else. But he noticed that people didn’t sit on Fuchs any more.
September 1948
The ant-training had been typical. Gyuri knew he should be studying much harder. Unlike all previous exams, whose certificates of importance he had never found convincing, this was frighteningly, windpipe-constrictingly important, and he really should have been studying much harder. He had wanted to study much harder. The intention had been beautifully formed, it had been everything an intention should be, but it remained an understudy, never getting on stage.
He had rowed out on his own to a quiet stretch of Margit Island with a whole boatful of textbooks, leaving no clue as to his whereabouts. It was just him and the mathematics. One on one. Lying in the heat of the elderly summer, Gyuri opened the books to lay himself bare to calculus, to bask in the equations, but while his tan deepened, somehow his erudition didn’t. He felt cheated. Like jumping off a cliff, he had hurled himself at the distant algebra, but instead of plummeting down to impact with those formulae, he just hovered above, aloft, some covert anti-gravity repelling him from the maths.
Relishing the unrationed sunshine, he succumbed to a bout of ant-shepherding. Prior to this, his only dealings with ants had been stepping on them, either by accident or squashing them when they invaded his possessions or edibles. He had partitioned himself at the intersection of a number of formic caravan routes and spent the better part of three hours devising olympianly a series of obstacles and tests for the ants with the aid of twigs, leaves and extracts from his lunch sandwiches. He toyed with the i
dea of becoming a great entomologist, a world-leading zoologist. As far as he knew, biology was an area unpolluted by Marx though some of his disciples, like Lysenko, had tried to make up for Marx’s silence on the phyla.
The fascination of the ants had run unabated as long as there was no other distraction from the maths. Mathematics had this to recommend it, if nothing else: it made everything else, ants, English, push-ups, ironing, washing-up, beguiling and wonderful. Whole new galaxies of interests had popped open now that the maths exam was drawing close; anything unconnected with maths was irresistible.
He rowed back to the boat-house to discover that Pataki had been sculling up and down the Danube looking for him in a fruitless attempt to gloat over his revision.
Gyuri lugged the maths books home. He was used to carrying the heavy weight about as a sort of tandem intellectual and physical toning, helping his stamina and also, he hoped, the proximity of the knowledge would help it to spill out on him. There were many dogs in Budapest that weren’t as well-walked as his maths textbooks. Entering the flat, Gyuri noted that Pataki wasn’t around, because Elek was on his own. Pataki had taken to frequenting the Fischer flat, because he found Elek most congenial, as unlike Pataki’s father, Elek had no objection to Pataki smoking; indeed, he would hoard up cigarettes, ear-marking sole survivors of a delivery to be reserved for an appearance by Pataki.
More and more often Gyuri would return from training or a run to find Elek and Pataki in a nicotine partnership, making the most of scanty tobacco; Elek usually testifying to the callipygian glories of a set of buttocks he had encountered as long as four decades ago. Gyuri didn’t smoke. The odds against him playing first-division basketball were already so great that he couldn’t afford any handicap however small, so he didn’t begrudge the extrafamilial sharing of the cigarettes.
What was irritating was Elek’s equanimity.
Elek would now be regularly on duty in the large armchair which was almost the last remnant of their prewar furniture, indeed virtually the last of their prewar property. Stationing himself in this armchair, abetted by a cigarette if available, Elek looked unbelievably good for a man completely ruined. His hair and moustache were so disciplined it was as if they had been sculpted into place; however the grey pullover which was now the core of his wardrobe did have two impossible-to-miss holes. Other men having seen all their assets evaporate overnight, especially having an entire fortune fly by night, would have protested bitterly at the unseen forces reducing their wealth to the small change in their trouser pockets. Destitute at the age of sixty, even allowing for the common denominator of a world war and vast industries of suffering and misery, you would have expected some cursing and shrieking. A gnawing of fists. A denouncing of higher powers.
But Elek didn’t issue any unseemly lamentations. He simply sat in the armchair, at ease, as if enjoying a day off. He tried to resurrect his fortunes after the war, and more crucially, after the hyper-inflation, which Hungarians proudly pointed out had been the fastest and greatest in economic history. Once the inflation was over, Elek went to the bank where he had deposited millions, emptied his unfrozen account and bought a loaf of bread, hardly getting any change back. The gutters of Budapest had been clogged with discarded banknotes, the fallen leaves of an old order.
What tortured Gyuri even more than Elek’s tranquillity, what racked him night and day, was the sheer inanity of the loss. It could have been so different, a tiny stash in Switzerland, a loose gold ingot buried in a field, some well-cached jewellery and things would have been different enough for them to eat and even eat well. But everything had gone in what would amount to no more than, at best, an eyebrow raising footnote in abstruse economic journals.
Funnily enough for a bookie who had made a very good living out of people losing their money on horses, Elek’s first ventures to recoup some money saw him going to the track for a string of flutters. Gyuri could distinctly remember Elek before the war coming home with the takings from the races (in a small brown suitcase, the money all jumbled up for Elek’s staff to sort out) and exclaiming: ‘Human folly- it’s the business to be in. You can’t go wrong.’ His turf accountancy riches had been less the result of his astuteness than the fact of bookmaking being a virtual monopoly and one of his old army chums being responsible for handing out the licences. Nevertheless, incited perhaps by his inside knowledge, Elek remained adamant that the gee-gees would provide, if not a regular income, a start-up capital for some future, nameless, hardship-solving enterprise.
Elek’s excursions to the track were, in the main, shirt-losing exercises but now and then he must have won since there were evenings when there was something to eat. More direct action took place too. One day Gyuri came home to find that his books, all his books, were gone; all that was remained was a patch of lighter wallpaper ‘I had to sell them,’ Elek replied to Gyuri’s inquiry: ‘we have to eat you know.’ Which was fine, but Elek could have asked first, and the galling thing was not that the books were gone but that whatever the going market value of his library was Elek would have been bamboozled and only got a tenth of it. Elek’s business sense, if he ever had any, seemed to have been mislaid somewhere during the war. The grocery shop that he had run for a month was the best example; it nearly destroyed the family because they had to rise before dawn to buy stock and not only did they not make any money, they lost it. They lost a staggering amount, more than if they had just jettisoned the greens in the street. Grocers weren’t keen on other people becoming grocers.
Ambitious projects like grocering were behind Elek now, the armchair was enough. Since Mother died, Elek had demonstrated less of a need to be seen doing something. There were mysterious absences from time to time, which spawned packages of food, but Elek treated life largely as a spectator sport.
This lack of remorse and of pleading to rewrite the script could be accounted in some quarters as admirable, but Gyuri found himself unable to applaud: ‘How does it feel to have one of the most sat-on arses in the universe?’ he inquired after a very forlorn day. Elek shrugged: ‘My father lost everything,’ he said, as if this were a lucid explanation, appending by way of conclusion, ‘You’ll dig me up when I’m gone.’
Gyuri hadn’t seen much of his grandfather. Memories of his grandfather’s visits in his furthest childhood had two components: nice cakes he wasn’t allowed to touch and a bullet-headed, dangerous-looking old man who kept asking who Gyuri was. His grandfather had, according to Elek, stood surety for a friend’s gambling debts. The friend had been unable to pay and instead of doing the done and honourable thing, passing a bullet through his brains, went off to Berlin to open a Hungarian restaurant, leaving grandfather to fork out. But if nothing else Elek and grandfather had handled fortunes. Somehow Gyuri feared that he wouldn’t be given a fortune to lose.
Nevertheless, Elek’s snap pauperdom had certain benefits for Gyuri. Having a father who had stepped down from life meant there was no friction over the exam business. Elek had never been excessively concerned about Gyuri’s schoolwork; sometimes Gyuri wondered if Elek knew which school he was attending. In a rare and ephemeral flare of studiousness, Gyuri once asked Elek to test him on some Latin verbs. ‘Do you know them or not?’ Elek had queried, and when Gyuri had responded that he thought that he did, Elek had retorted: ‘Then why do I need to test you?’
Still, Gyuri reflected, as he shaved in the first of his preparations for his evening out, at least he only had to sit one subject again to get his matriculation certificate. Next door, while he decapitated his bristles, he could hear Mr Galantai repeatedly complaining about the nationalisation of the factories which really must have been exercising him since it had happened some months ago. ‘This is too much – it can’t go on much longer.’
Gyuri had no doubt that things would go on for some time yet. Enough to get him in the Army. This was the sole encouragement to study – and it was a truly major carrot. No pass, no university. No university, yes Army. Yes to years of not eating, standing ou
t in the rain, digging ditches, not seeing anyone you knew, anyone you liked, prison with salutes and worse beds. People preferred to commit suicide before being conscripted as it was more agreeable to die at home in comfort, rather than truncating your arteries in some dingy barracks.
It was a good thing that mathematics was the only remaining weight threatening to drag him down into all that; after all there had been many fails nuzzling up against him in the exams. Hungarian literature had been a real case of digging himself out of the grave. Luckily, Botond had been conducting the oral examination, albeit with a couple of other teachers who didn’t like him as much, or probably at all. The set text was Arany’s Toldi. Either he had never had a copy or he couldn’t find it but the evening before, when Gyuri had resolved to read a bit, his sudden desire to read Arany was foiled so he turned up dutifully at the exam to collect a fail.
Botond was sitting with his feet up on the table. The other teachers’ faces were strongly broadcasting that this detracted from the decorum of the occasion but Botond was the head of the Hungarian Department and what was more was unchallengeable in Hungarian literature. He had read everything twice, and when it came to poetry could recite nearly every published verse. If you were lucky, if something sparked him off, he would enter a Hidassy-like trance and declaim flawlessly for twenty minutes, giving the class a much-needed break. As befitted someone deeply implicated with art, Botond had long unruly hair, so remorselessly unruly that pupils and staff suspected he engineered his coiffure to look like a starfish every morning.
‘Well, fischer,’ Botond had said jovially staring up at the ceiling, tapping a cuspid with the earpiece of his spectacles, probably running through some juicy texts at the back of the cerebral shop while he was going through the tedious business of testing the pupils. ‘It’s always a pleasure to see you, but I regret that you’ll have to give us some of Toldi before we can let you go.’
Under the Frog Page 5