When they reached Budapest, Ladányi thanked Gyuri and Neumann for their support. It was the last time Gyuri would see Ladányi. Gyuri had no inkling of that, but years afterwards, re-examining the scene, he suspected that Ladányi knew. ‘Don’t forget what I said about good books. And read the Bible occasionally. It’s had some good reviews, you know.’ Ladányi’s tone in this farewell admonition was not that of a salesman, or a friend recommending a good read, but rather that of a visitor handing a prisoner a loaf of bread with a file in it.
September 1949
It was as the tram was on the last stretch of the Margit Bridge that, from the corner of his eye, Gyuri logged the girl sitting on the edge of the railings, and then, the girl that wasn’t sitting there. There was nothing he and the others on the tram who had spotted the suicide bid could do. By the time the tram had stopped and they could have got back to the bridge, the young lady’s fate would be, one way or another, cleared up. It seemed a bit heartless to say ‘Well, there goes another one’ and to shrug one’s shoulders but apart from forming an audience, nothing could have been contributed by returning. People down by the river bank would be doing whatever samaritaning could be done. Besides, Gyuri was late.
Having a suicide dropped in his lap, would of course, be typical of his luck, especially when he was late for work. On the other hand, it would at least be an honourable excuse for tardiness. A sharp picture of the girl stayed with him – eerie how quickly a detailed portrait could imprint. She looked like a country girl, seeking a populous conurbation for taking the exitless exit and not really attractive enough to encourage diving in after her but then if she had been attractive enough to have hordes of men diving in after her, she wouldn’t have had to jump in the first place.
Also, one had to respect suicide as the national pastime, as the vice Hungarian. Gyuri wasn’t up to date on how suicide was progressing under socialism, it could well have been abolished but the popularity of doing-it-yourself couldn’t entirely be laid at the door of Rákosi & Co. For centuries, Hungarians of quality and quantity, who hadn’t managed to be part of Hungarian armies that got wiped out, had been blowing their brains out or uncaging their souls in other ways. Yes, a few idle minutes, some melancholy music and a Hungarian would be trying to unplug himself. And not just the nobility- Hungarian maids in Vienna had been notorious for their fondness for bleaching their entrails.
The tram deposited Gyuri in front of the monstrous Ganz Electrical Works but he was the only one the tram off-loaded who made his way through the entrance of Ganz; all the other workers had arrived much earlier, before the shift had started.
Of course, Gyuri thought, the Hungarian propensity for suicide might stem from their other great proclivity: their love of complaining. Who better to complain to than the chief architect? Go to the top, go meet your maker and give him an earful about the shortcomings of the universe. There was probably a dirty great queue of Hungarians outside God’s office ready to remonstrate.
As Gyuri entered the main yard, he passed a board which was bedecked with amateurish red decorations and which had a heading ‘Socialist Brigades’. Underneath were lesser signs such as ‘ Guernica ’, ‘Dimitrov’ and ‘Béla Kun’, presiding over wonderful production figures and grainy black and white photographs of sheepishly pleased and self-conscious lathe-operators lathe-operating. These photographs didn’t change. Alongside these displays was an elegantly penned scroll, ‘Hungarian-Soviet Friendship Society’, heading a series of ailing black and white photographs of Soviet lathe-operators watching Hungarian lathe-operators lathe-operate with avuncular, elder-brotherly encouragement, and photographs of Hungarian lathe-operators watching Soviet lathe-operators lathe-operate, with younger-brother wide-eyed admiration. There was no seasonal variation in these pictures either.
Not far from these displays, but diametrically opposed to them, on the other side of the yard, was an enormous caricature of US President Harry Truman made out of card. At the foot of this caricature was a board with the inscription ‘FRIENDS OF TRUMAN’ in wobbly calligraphy, and in less bold lettering ‘I’m out to destroy the gains of the people of democratic Hungary, please help me by taking it easy. My thanks.’ On the board, which looked like an old situations vacant notice that used to be hung outside the factory, various names had been inserted. There wasn’t much seasonal variation in this either. Top of the list was Pataki, Tibor, followed by Fischer, Gyorgy (Gyuri could never fathom how Pataki had managed to get top billing once again) with one or two other more mutable names, Nemeth, Sándor or Kovrig, Laszlo. Unknown but agreeable figures to Gyuri.
This pillorying was attributable chiefly to the reluctance of Pataki and himself to come to work any earlier than was truly necessary to avoid dismissal. Gyuri didn’t care too much about President Truman’s friendship (though he did wonder if he ever got to the United States whether the amity would stand him in good stead there), largely because there were few additional penalties to having your name publicly associated with the President of the United States (and Gombás could deal with them). The juxtaposition of names was clearly deemed by the agit-prop department to be sufficiently shameful to obviate the need for further reprimand.
Being class-x, being a class alien, Gyuri really couldn’t be much worse off; he was starting from the back of the queue for the goodies (had there been any in the first place). Apart from the obvious problems of having class-x stamped on the moral credentials you had to produce every time you wanted a job, a place at university or more or less anything, what was so grossly unfair and infuriating about being labelled as the son of a bourgeois family, was that Elek was so profoundly, all-round unbourgeois. Aside from the profession of bookmaking not being the most highly regarded of careers in canapé circles, there was the whole weight of the old morphinist’s behaviour: molesting widows and chambermaids, carrying a cosh, shooting up. He had always instructed his employees to call him Elek (which in itself had been tantamount to membership of the Communist Party in the eyes of his fellow capitalists) and gave them afternoons off if the weather had been outstandingly good or if he felt like treating his torticollis with some morphine (although it had been evident for years that the dope didn’t do his neck any good – just as the hypnotist had failed but Elek had only given him one go. The hypnotist had brandished his pendulum and chanted ‘You are in a deep, deep sleep’ for ten minutes after which Elek had said ‘No, I’m not. Are you planning to charge for this?’). And then, when he lost all his money, instead of trying to recoup his losses, going out to toil dutifully in the respectable bourgeois way, Elek just sat around contentedly in his armchair, wearing his lacunar pullover, his neck cricked, grappling with the theoretical questions of how to get a cigarette. Bourgeois and Elek didn’t mix. Agreed: he had some money at one point, but that had been a long time ago, before Gyuri was old enough to use it.
‘What I’m giving you is priceless,’ Elek had said, holding court in his armchair that morning. ‘I’m giving you your independence. You’re making your own way. You owe me nothing. Whatever you achieve you can say “I made it on my own”. You’re not weighed down by an over-solicitous father. You have no towering figure of paternal success to intimidate you. How many people can say that? You’re a talented acorn that can grow without fear of the shade of a great oak.’
The curious thing about Elek was that the less active he became, the less he slept, thus ensuring his availability to give Gyuri the benefit of his thoughts as Gyuri got ready to go to work. ‘You see, István, for example, will always have the disadvantages of everything that money could buy.’ István, in practice, was bearing up beneath that burden rather well. He had returned at the end of ’45, with a dozen chums who disembarked from the prisoner of war camp in Denmark where they had been guarding themselves, carrying two thousand cigarettes and fluent in fifteen languages. Before things grimmed up, István had managed to get a job in the Ministry of Agriculture where he had got to know everything there was to know about sugar. Because he was u
nobtrusively junior and because they had to retain some people at the Ministry who knew something about agriculture, he had been magnanimously tolerated.
István had laughed about it all, as he did about everything. Always of a jovial disposition, he had returned from his years on the Russian front, with one important souvenir: the inability to get worked up about things that weren’t three years on the Russian front. You could tell István things like, you had gone to a restaurant and contracted hepatitis, you were going to be conscripted into the army, you had just been jilted by the girl who was more important to you at that moment than life and that you wanted to fold up and die, and István would just chuckle or if you looked really miserable, guffaw loudly.
István had reappeared in Budapest the day after they had been burgled.There hadn’t been much left to steal after the Red Army had manoeuvred back and forth across the flat a couple of times and furniture had been traded for food. István had walked in as if he had just returned from the corner-shop to find Gyuri dazed by the inexhaustibility of their misfortune. István immediately went out again, and the next morning all the missing items were piled up outside the front door with a note apologising that the dust pan left wasn’t the original but hoping the replacement would live up to expectations and wishing the family good health. The only other survivor from István’s artillery unit it turned out, was one of the master burglars of Budapest who had been greatly peeved to hear that his commanding officer’s family should have suffered such an indignity. There was only one question that István asked when you started to reconstruct some tribulation: ‘What did you do about it?’
It was what you did about it, not the blubbering, that interested István. István came back for the peace, got married, got a job, got a flat. His most annoying habit was his way of making life look easy. His application and down-to-earthness were such that it was hard to believe he was related in any way to Elek. Where had he got it from? Why didn’t he have any? Gyuri pondered. István was capable of sorting out anything, of making the best of the worst, which was why Gyuri couldn’t understand what had made him come back to Hungary and what had made him stay there. István seemed capable of anything, except perhaps getting Elek a proper job.
‘Have you just given up then?’ Gyuri had demanded of Elek.
‘Given up? Given up what? Tennis? Smoking? Horse-racing? My studies in Sanskrit? I’m an old fart, you know,’ Elek remarked checking the length of each bristle of his moustache in a pocket mirror. ‘You can’t expect too much. You, the healthy, vigorous son with his whole life ahead of him should be thinking of supporting his valetudinarian father.’
‘Doesn’t it bother you?’
‘Does it bother me? Yes. No. You may be surprised to hear that when I was growing up it wasn’t the summit of my ambitions to end up in an armchair wearing a grey pullover with holes in it. I confess I was thinking more in terms of excessive luxury. But I do enjoy disappointing people by not being suicidally miserable.’
Elek should have considered a post as a Party secretary, Gyuri reflected, with his gift of the gab and his inclination for doing nothing. After the war they would have taken anyone. Not now. Now, they were hanging the Communists they already had.
Sulyok, the foreman, was doing one of his readings to Gyuri’s workmates when Gyuri finally arrived to do his day’s work. This discovery made Gyuri very pleased that he had arrived late. The main reason that Gyuri had such a surfeit of nonchalance about tardiness was that he and Pataki had been given jobs at the factory by Gombás himself, the deputy director of the works, and people knew this. An Olympic medallist, a weight-lifter whose efforts had been rewarded with a tasty sinecure at the Ganz works, Gombás was keen to build up the works’ basketball team, to propel them into the first division. Thus Pataki and Gyuri, as Pataki’s personal ball-passer, were invited to join the team and to spend a little time at the works. Gyuri got on well with Gombás and liked him, not just because he had provided Gyuri with the job and evasion of the army but also because Gombás was an affable type and Gyuri rather admired his open-handed perversion. What Gyuri rather admired was that, while other men would have been vein-openingly ashamed of their peccadillo, Gombás was charmingly frank and unrepentant about his penchant for girls teetering on pubescence. His office was spacious, sequestered and complete with shower. There, girls hand-picked by Gombás on his travels in the provinces and brought to Budapest for ‘intensive training’ received his ‘personal tuition’. Gyuri was always expecting to see some enraged parent or the police march into Gombás’s office, but so far it seemed the arrangement had upset no one and there was always the possibility, as Pataki had pointed out, that if fellatio ever became an Olympic event, Hungary would clean up.
Every now and then, Sulyok would feel obliged to give a reading from the Party newspaper which of course had the same content as the other papers but there were some fascinating variations in the punctuation. Considering how boring ‘Free People’ was on the page, and how people would only think about reading it in the most desperate circumstances of tedium, it was hard to see why it was thought that having Sulyok crawl through a passage, adding new layers of dullness, would render it more memorable.
The extract that morning was from ‘Party Worker’, a fortnightly journal that was even more tightly controlled by boredom than ‘Free People’. It was as if they specially selected the dreariest bits from ‘Free People’, excised any microscopically colourful vestiges, and then published the whole thing as ‘Party Worker’.
Sulyok was just finishing an article by Revai on the executions of Rajk and his band. Rajk had been convicted of working on behalf of not only the British and American intelligence services (in addition to a distinguished career as a police informer when the Communist Party had been proscribed) but also doing a bit of moonlighting for Marshall Tito and his filthy Yugoslav deviationists. Why wasn’t he working for Walt Disney as well? Gyuri was tempted to ask. Probably because being Minister of the Interior had taken up too much of his time, Gyuri answered himself. It had been rather amusing to see Rajk hang, there was a shapely irony in the Minister of the Interior, the man who had so lovingly built up the Communist state, who had nourished the secret police, being the first to jig on air when they ran short of non-Communists.
Gyuri had no idea what the true facts of the hangings were but there could be no doubt that what was in the papers was a load of absolute bollocks, since it came from the people who specialised in absolute bollocks, the Hungarian Working People’s Party.
‘But with the disposal of the conspirators, our considerable victory will augment our strength and decisiveness, in order to finish the tasks waiting ahead for us,’ Revai’s article concluded. The only joke Gyuri could remember about Rajk was that he had been appointed to the government because they needed someone at hand in case documents needed to be signed on a Saturday. Rákosi, Gero, Farkas and Revai, the quartet imported from Moscow to run Hungary were all Jews, or at least were considered to be Jews, since as far as Gyuri was aware no one had caught them at the synagogue. The Moscow quartet was giving the chosen people the sort of publicity they hadn’t had since they voted to nail Christ to some bits of wood.
When he had started his readings, Sulyok had sometimes tried to initiate discussion about the exciting articles he read out, since discussion, as long as it concurred with the party line, looked more democratic. ‘There’s nothing as fucking democratic as a good discussion, comrades,’ Sulyok had insisted. The problem that he faced was that most of his audience was on piece-rates, and although the money was contemptible, especially for someone with a family, contemptible money was still better than no money. Others might have shared Gyuri’s editorial doubts but the upshot was that no one wanted to engage Sulyok in debate. Today, Sulyok didn’t try to elicit comment, but reached for a thin red paperback entitled ‘They Were Heroes’, evidently a collection of biographies of the people whose names were rapidly appearing throughout Budapest and elsewhere as streets: Communist mar
tyrs. There was an inaudible, invisible gasp of horror from Sulyok’s audience who had assumed their ordeal over. Obviously Sulyok was making a point for someone’s benefit. This was real ideological overtime. But for whose benefit? Everyone gathered around was well below Sulyok on the ladder of advancement, so he couldn’t be currying favour from anyone there, but perhaps he had deduced that someone present was informing to someone upstairs. The bonus martyr did seem a bit overindulgent. Nevertheless, it didn’t make that much difference to Gyuri if he was standing there listening to Sulyok, doing nothing, instead of standing at his job, doing nothing there.
‘Thus, Ferenc Rózsa, one of the outstanding leaders of the Communist Party, finally perished heroically in the torture-chamber,’ Sulyok terminated his reading with a note of finality of the sort reserved for the end of a children’s bedtime story.
‘Sorry,’ said Pataki interrupting the respectful silence, ‘this was last week, was it?’
‘No,’ said Sulyok, shocked. ‘It was 1942.’
‘Oh. I see. It was the fascists who killed him. Listen, could you read that passage about him being tortured to death again? It’s worth hearing one more time.’ Gyuri wished Pataki didn’t have to be so Pataki all the time. Pataki had said all this with the seemingly straight face of someone curious to learn more about the setbacks of the workers’ movement, but Gyuri couldn’t believe that Pataki’s luck would be everlasting. The first day at work, Pataki had helped himself to a long length of copper wiring. ‘The State owes me,’ he asserted. Anyone else would have waited a few days to familiarise himself with the layout before sticking something to their fingers. And it wasn’t as if Pataki was in abject need- he always had supper waiting for him at home.
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