‘To be honest, I can’t,’ Gyuri owned up. ‘I’m sorry; but I don’t know any.’
‘Ha, ha. Always modest. Always modest. Any section, just fire away.’
‘No honestly. I don’t want to waste your time,’ Gyuri had insisted.
‘Exam nerves, eh? All right, just recite any one of your favourite poems.’
It was a reasonable request, but it caught Gyuri by surprise. He rifled his literary knowledge but the drawer was empty. ‘No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t recite anything.’
‘Ha, ha, Fischer, your sense of humour will get you into trouble one day. I’ll put you down for a pass. Send in the next candidate, please.’ Botond was extremely avuncular to everyone (except those who evinced a sincere enmity to poetry). He was one of the few masters who was liked, a fondness fuelled by the biographical information, passed on year after year, that Botond had got drunk with all the major figures working the Hungarian language since the turn of the century. He had starved with Ady in Paris (‘Bandi and I were arguing who should peel the potato for supper’) and with eight other unwashed and less posteritied Hungarians shared one bed on a shift basis in an unheated garret, got drunk with all the major literary figures again, punched Picasso in an argument over prosody and was, despite his senior teaching post, available at short notice for drinks with any major (or minor for that matter) literary figures left after two world wars and a plethora of emigration. Literary criticism was more compelling when you knew that your teacher had dragged the author out of a bar by his legs.
No, Botond was not the type to hand out a fail lightly, especially since he still owed Elek a five figure sum.
Once out of the exam, in the corridor, with post-incident clarity, it did occur to Gyuri that there was one poem he could have rounded up, by Botond’s old pal, Ady, on the pleasure of seeing the Gare de l’Est in Paris; one of Ady’s most appealing themes being that the noblest prospect a Hungarian could see was the way out of Hungary. Good but sozzled poet. István had been in Érmindszent, Ady’s birthplace, during the war and had been surprised to find not so much as a plaque to Ady’s memory, whereas, by comparison, Hungary was littered with commemorative notices such as ‘Petófi walked past here’ and ‘Petófi almost walked past here’. When István pointed out this omission to a local the rejoinder was ‘Why should we put up a monument to a second-generation alcoholic?’
The maths exam was first thing the next morning but it was too craven to stay in, despite the frittering away of time caused by the afternoon’s ant-circus. Elek was in the armchair, in some difficulty without a cigarette. As Gyuri was heading out, Elek caught him in the back with ‘You’re going to love the Army’.
* * *
The first time he sat the mathematics exam, he had prudently taken the precaution of smuggling in the textbook. The main reason he failed at the first attempt was because he hadn’t known enough to know he hadn’t known enough. Gyuri dipped into the textbook in the hope of succour, but had found its pages totally unintelligible. He angrily registered that if he had worked a bit harder he would have been able to cheat properly.
The second time around, his preparations at least gave him enough expertise to understand the questions, even if the answers weren’t jumping into view. It was possible for him to do something about these questions, even if it was like fighting a forest-fire with a thimbleful of water. An all-pervasive desperation not to do military service saturated his being. He had seen a group of conscripts the previous week, ideally cast for the role of a chainless chain-gang, miserable, bones veiled in skin, carrying a loaf of bread that had long ago lost its credibility in the civilian world, that required a pickaxe rather than a knife.
Gyuri liked to think he was tough but knew he didn’t have the resilience for hardship so well-planned, so non-stop; although things were rough, there was always the prospect of something good happening to you if you were outside the Army, no matter how remote that prospect might be. In the Army you weren’t going to be bothered by any comfort, cheer, or anything that could be classified under the heading pleasant; there would be no appointments with pleasure.
The others in the exam hall, from a distance anyway, seemed to be beavering away confidently. Did he look in control to those two rows back? Gyuri wondered. The first question offered a few footholds, so he hastened to put something down on paper, before the wisdom he had fished out slipped away, and in the hope that if some apocalypse should curtail the exam after ten minutes, he might have enough answer to pass.
He had unrolled as much of the answer to question one as he could, when a glance to his left established that his gaze had a direct flight path to the left breast of the young lady there; either she had forgotten to do up her blouse or the buttons didn’t feel like working but light was taking off from untextiled skin and crashlanding into Gyuri’s retinas. His loins underwent a stepping-on, all the mathematical erudition he had convoked was summarily banished. To deliberately have arranged such an alignment, to visually sidestep the clothing barrier in other circumstances could have taken hours, but now, at such a delicate moment, his composure and her mammary impacted. Simultaneously, he looked away, but it was too late – the chemical heralds hit the road, stirring up a global ache.
Crippled by this unwarranted intrusion into his concentration, he returned to the maths and found he was locked out. The second question scarcely acknowledged his greeting.
Surveying the 180 degree view on his right, Gyuri ruminated on a group from one of the People’s Colleges. These were the special institutes where individuals predominantly from the bottom of the bucolic barrel were crammed with learning to provide the Party with man and womanpower. Peasant lads, in the main, who had ties fastened around their necks, copies of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) stuck in their hands, along with a ticket to the centre of the universe, Budapest, where accommodation in some appropriated bourgeois building would be waiting. They were loud in their endorsements of Marxism, as anyone in their new shoes would be.
Gyuri needed, as a minimum, three attempted answers to pass and while he had one attempt and a feint, the remaining questions looked hermetically sealed, inscrutable. A girl on his right, one of the People’s College contingent, kept staring over at his paper which Gyuri found droll. How could she think there was anything worth examining on his laughably blank paper?
He was coming to the conclusion that glaring at the questions in the hope they might crack was a waste of time and he might as well enjoy a display of swagger by walking out and perhaps fooling a few despairing souls into believing he had done brilliantly, instead of squirming around like a maggot on a hook.
The People’s girl was still looking at his paper and what was worse, looking as if she was looking. Being disqualified for cheating wasn’t going to make much difference to Gyuri but it might to her.
‘I can’t help,’ Gyuri mouthed to her. ‘Don’t look or we’ll both…’ he drew a finger across his throat. The girl reddened and threw her regard down onto her own sheets of paper. Now that he had conceded the mathematical match, Gyuri adjourned to treat himself to a spot of ocular plundering from the chest of the girl on his left, but was disgruntled to find that a fold of blouse was now refusing his glance admission, barring any further visual trespass.
Having decided that he wasn’t going to sit like a cabbage any longer, he was putting the top back on his pen as a prelude to departure, when the supervising rays from the invigilator were momentarily diverted and a square of paper made its way from the row on the right to his desk. Opening up the paper, Gyuri found it contained a neatly written solution which although he couldn’t entirely follow it, had such aplomb that he couldn’t doubt its correctness. He copied out the answer and sauntered out of the exam-hall knowing he had vaulted the pass, although, with hindsight, he conceded the ant-training and other diversions had drained the blood from his luck.
In the aftermath, several congregations of maths discussions formed. Numerous
people were slumped around, with crumbled faces, as if auditioning to illustrate the caption ‘despair’. For the first time in his life, Gyuri felt like going to church to say thank you.
He certainly thanked his immediate saviour. He was in good form with her since she was so unattractive that there could be no question of making an overture and he could relax. Pataki appeared, closing in and frowning to see Gyuri wasting verbal effort on a young lady lagging so far behind the pack of beauty. Pataki, of course, hadn’t failed any of his exams. He had strolled down to the exams, dipping into a textbook or two as he walked, packing bites of knowledge into his cheeks like a hoarding hamster and then spitting them out at the examiners. By the time he walked out of the exam, he already knew less than when he walked in. In basketballing terms it was like a one-armed blindman throwing the ball, the ball hitting the ring, circling around, wobbling, teetering but then finally slumping into the net. Lucky, very lucky, travelling to the border between luck and miracle, but two points nevertheless.
Gyuri could see Pataki taking his time, lining up a whole afternoon’s witticisms about his poor choice of female interlocutors, but it wasn’t going to bother him. ‘Thanks again for the help,’ said Gyuri as his valediction, ‘you must be phenomenally good at maths.’
‘Oh no,’ said the girl modestly and endearingly, ‘they gave us all the answers last week. We had plenty of time to learn them.’
* * *
They took the watch to the brothel. His mother’s watch which had incredibly not ended up on a Soviet Army arm, which was probably the only pre-liberation timepiece left in Hungary and which had once been worth an awful lot, was on that particular evening enough for two beachings, one for himself and one for Pataki.
Gyuri had been fervently determined to celebrate and to have the much-respected good time but once the negotiations over the gold watch’s weight in harlots were over, Gyuri felt oddly detached, as if he’d left his dick at home. He would never have believed he could appraise so academically femaleness being exposed.
Whores were so often associated with ugliness, sadness and debasement but the girl who had introduced herself as Timea was young, vivacious and if not intelligent had an alertness that could pass for it. ‘You’re very beautiful,’ Gyuri remarked, repeating the observations of his eyes. ‘Oh, my breasts are much too small,’ she replied as she continued to undress for work. It wasn’t true. She had the sort of beauty that removed the possibility of difficulties; she could have had anything she wanted from hordes of men genuflecting in submission. Her employment in the brothel was strange, since you would have thought she could have easily bagged a couple of millionaires to have a less demanding lifestyle.
Considering the inordinate amounts of time he spent in contemplation of four-legging, Gyuri found it hard to account for the sudden amputation of his desire. Watching Timea was delightful, worth the money in itself but a curiously abstract experience like admiring some art in a museum. Gyuri suggested that Pataki go first.
It was terrible. His callousness had simply packed up on him: out of order. He was annoyed with himself for wanting to do it, and at the same time, he knew that once he was out of range of the brothel, he would be annoyed with himself for not doing it. When Pataki re-emerged, all he could suggest was that they should leave. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Pataki expostulated. ‘You can’t throw away a perfectly good fuck!’ He returned to claim the unused coitus.
Gyuri learned there are people who can take their deceased mother’s watch to a brothel and there are people who can’t. And if you’re one of those who can’t, you can’t. It was an expensive lesson and one that was not likely to have any future applications because he wasn’t going to have any more deceased mothers or deceased mothers’ watches.
He wished Pataki would hurry up. He wanted to go home since he had the feeling he was going to cry.
January 1949
They spent the last hour telling camel jokes.
‘The new Foreign Legion officer arrives at the fort in the middle of the Sahara desert,’ explained Ladányi. ‘And he’s being given the introductory tour by the sergeant and he listens attentively but eventually he says: “This is all very interesting, Sergeant but there’s a rather delicate matter I’d like to inquire about. We’re going to be out here for years. I mean what does one do when the juices start to build up?” “Well, sir,” says the sergeant pointing to a camel tethered in the yard, “when an officer is missing the ladies’ company, that’s what we have Daisy, the regimental camel for.” The new officer is rather shocked to hear this but says nothing. Months elapse and finally after a year in the Sahara, he snaps, runs screaming across the yard and flings himself on the camel. As he’s pumping away, the sergeant comes up and coughs discreetly. “It’s none of my business, sir, but the other officers prefer to ride Daisy to the brothel in the next village.’”
For a Jesuit, Ladányi had an astonishingly good fund of camel jokes. Gyuri and Neumann could hardly get any in. Ladányi was rather hogging the camel section but it was a very long journey, and Gyuri certainly didn’t have enough camel jokes at his disposal to cover a fraction of the trip to Hálás.
Ladányi had been a little vague at first about what he had to attend to in Hálás, the hamlet where he had been born and raised. ‘I might need a bodyguard,’ he had said to Gyuri. Gyuri would have been glad to do a favour for Ladányi anyway but it was flattering to be thought of as large and dangerous (though Gyuri had brought Neumann along in the event of any bona fide bodyguarding being required. As a water-polo player and a very large person, Neumann was going to have the last punch on any subject. Gyuri had seen Neumann, when two drunk and quite large firemen had merrily announced that they were going to thrash the living daylights out of him, pick them up and throw them across Rákoczi út where they had hit a wall with unpleasant bone-breaking sounds. It had to be some sort of record, but sadly throwing firemen wasn’t a recognised sport.)
‘The new Foreign Legion recruit arrives at the fort in the middle of the Sahara desert,’ Ladányi resumed. ‘And he’s being shown the ropes by an old sweat, and he finally summons up the courage to ask the question that’s on his mind. “Look,” he asks, “we have to spend years out here, what do you do about the urges?” “‘What we do,” the old sweat elucidates, “is we go out, find a bunch of bedouin, ambush them and find relief with their camels.” So time passes, the troops go out into the desert, they hide behind a sand dune and bushwhack some bedouins. The old sweat immediately runs down towards the camels and the new recruit asks: “What’s the rush? There are plenty of camels for everyone.” “Yes, but you want to get a good-looking one.”‘
At the railway station at Békéscsaba, a wiry, behatted peasant who kissed Ladányi’s hand, was waiting for them. A cart, luxurious by local standards, but bottom-grating for an hour’s journey – the time the deferential peasant assured them it would take to reach Hálás, conveyed them.
Going back to his origins didn’t seem to excite Ladányi greatly, but as Gyuri surveyed the territory, where the shoe was still seen as a daring new fashion idea, where only the sound of crops growing disturbed the peace, he could comprehend the lack of enthusiasm. There was nothing to be said about the landscape apart from that it started where the sky finished.
Ladányi was coming home because of Comrade Faragó. Faragó had been, apparently, an egregious feature of life in Hálás for a long time. Ladányi had vivid memories of him although he left Hálás at fourteen to study in Budapest. ‘Faragó was both the village idiot and the village thief. In a small place like Hálás you have to double up,’ Ladányi recounted. But the small village had great tolerance for homegrown trouble.
The war and the Arrow Cross changed that. October 1944 was the last time the villagers of Hálás had expected to see Faragó. He had evolved from subsistence misdemeanours such as sunflower-stealing, apricot-rustling and abducting pigs, to running the district Nazi franchise. Ladányi didn’t expand on what Faragó had been up to. �
��You don’t want to know.’
Hálás’s citizens had not expected to see Faragó again after October 1944 as that was when he had been shot in the chest six times and taken by cart to the mortuary in Békéscsaba where the police deposited inexplicable and unclaimed cadavers. It was still a time when stray bodies attracted bureaucracy; a little later no one would have bothered.
It was when they put Faragó on the slab at Békéscsaba that he began to complain, quite loudly for a corpse, that he wanted a drink.
The villagers were very surprised to see him again. ‘You gave me a revolver with only six shots, is it my fault?’ a reproachful voice was heard in the csárda. This hadn’t been the first attempt on Faragó’s life. A month earlier, as Faragó was enjoying the hospitality of a ditch which was a lot closer to where he had got leg-bucklingly drunk than home, sleeping soundly in the cold, someone had chucked in a grenade to keep him company. The grenade had failed to get rid of Faragó, though it did get rid of his left leg but even this didn’t slow him down in his duties for his German mentors, hence the subsequent target practice.
It was the village priest who then suggested an auto-da-fé.
Again, when it was known that Faragó had his nose pressed to his pillow by an enormous volume of alcohol, anonymous hands set fire to his house in the middle of the night. Faragó must have been in the grip of a true carus because he didn’t lose a snore as the fire charred his front door and then burned to the ground the two neighbouring houses. ‘The priest suggested that?’ observed Gyuri. ‘Who knows?’ Ladányi said. ‘If we had the original text of the commandments, there might well be a footnote concerning exemption in regard to Faragó.’
Under the Frog Page 6