‘The Party secretary catches Kovacs,’ said Szocs changing tack. ‘“Comrade Kovacs, why weren’t you at the last Party meeting?” “The last Party meeting?” replies Kovacs. “If I’d known it was the last Party meeting, I’d have brought the whole family.’” Szocs was now, in an odd way, a successful figure, now that poverty and misery had been generally distributed; he was a tycoon of jollity. In the land of the blind, Gyuri thought, the man who knows how to use the white stick is king.
The only irritating aspect to Szocs was that his whistling in totalitarianism rather invalidated one’s licence for self-pity.
Gyuri could never enjoy his resentment for quite a while after Szocs had left. Szocs’s presence made him lose that acute sense of accumulated injustice and aggrievedness that he had been so carefully working on. Elek, for example, might be sitting comfortably in the back of adversity’s big black car, but Szocs seemed to thrive on hardship like a slap up meal.
To his shame, Gyuri was glad when Szocs left and he didn’t have to pretend any more that he didn’t want to throw himself on the goose crackling. Elek had ventured out earlier to get some fresh bread and this in combination with the goose crackling yielded a profound sense of well-being, an undispersable glow of plenitude that would linger on for the minimum of an evening or until Gyuri went to do some training.
The two packets of cigarettes (French) had been part of a great plan Gyuri had been hatching to do some profitable bartering- but Elek looked so deformed, so unnatural without a cigarette that Gyuri handed them over and watched Elek’s face become an amalgam of joy and reflection on how to apportion the cigarettes chronologically
One strove to be hard, to be tough, dangerous and independent (Gyuri weighed up the effects of the pile of goose crackling) but self-discipline is such a delicate thing, a plant that wilts on either side of a narrow temperature band. In mitigation, it had been exceptionally adipose, unquestionably hastened to the capital that morning, wrapped before darkness had been dispelled, possessed of an evanescent crispness and a tang that had to be captured by taste buds within twelve hours or it would abscond to the limbo of fabulous flavour.
The glut of cigarettes and goose crackling engendered a pliancy and a conversation between the two of them. Of late, Pataki had been the top recipient of Elek’s locutions, a hunched, cigaretted dialogue running through Elek’s lewd 4 material. Gyuri made a point of ostentatiously going for a run or loudly doing some housework while they were thus engaged, but it didn’t have any dampening effect.
He decided to press Elek on abroad.
‘What was it like in Vienna?’
Elek had spent a couple of years stationed outside Vienna as an Austro-Hungarian officer and gentleman before the Big One that had vaporised the Strudel Empire.
‘I don’t remember much now,’ said Elek. ‘It was a long time ago. I remember the sex but that’s about it. That’s the odd thing about Vienna: all that culture, all those libraries, piano recitals, all that learning, all that Mozart was here, all the elaborate chocolate and patisserie and the women were interested in only one thing. If I hadn’t been twenty it would have killed me.
‘There was one lady, the wife of a distinguished geologist, who was still vigorous enough to carry out his conjugal duties. I timed myself one day. From ten in the morning to three in the afternoon: five hours. I thought she might say stop or ask for an intermission, but no. We only abandoned the mission because her husband was coming back with some very gripping granite. When I got out into the street I had to call for a taxi because my body had gone on strike. Then I found out that someone else from the regiment was leaving his calling cards there as well – the husband challenged him to a duel and I had to act as his second. You would have thought she could have read a book or gone to a museum every now and then.’
‘I don’t think I’ll be getting to Vienna for a while,’ Gyuri remarked.
‘Oh, I’m sure you will. This can’t go on much longer. You realise you and István are my last hopes.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The only sort of success I can anticipate now is sitting in a café regaling my cronies with tales of my sons’ successes. I’m counting on you for some reflected glory and a modest income. You don’t want your old father to be stuck in a café with nothing to boast about?’
‘So you’re going into sitting around full-time?’
‘I’m working up to it. But don’t forget you have no excuses: you’re at the perfect age for disaster. Physical peak. Flexible. Durable. A good reservoir of optimism. Nineteen is the ideal age for misfortune. You can fight back. And things change. Nothing lasts forever. Hungary has had some bizarre moments in its history. Mongols, Turks wandering in and out. Our friend Horthy, a regent without a king, an admiral without a sea. But Rákosi. The one thing I can confidently predict as a non-starter in Hungary is a Jewish King. I’m willing to bet that you won’t last long at Ganz, and that you will have a good laugh about all this.’
‘How much are you willing to bet?’ Gyuri asked, sensing easy money.
‘We can negotiate a figure.’ At this point Elek was racked by a caravan of coughs of lung-ripping ferocity. ‘The trouble is,’ he continued weakly, ‘I’m not going to be around to collect at this rate. But you still have no excuse for not achieving stupendous prosperity. Think of all that bringing-up your mother lavished on you.’
Gyuri decided to tackle some of the housework. Nothing substantial, but tossing a coin to domesticity, Gyuri entered the waiting-room for washing-up and exposed some plates to running water. Considering how little they had to eat, there was an alarming quantity of dirty crockery.
‘I told her for months to go to the doctor. For months. You know what she said, “I can’t go. I haven’t got a slip.” I don’t suppose it would have made a lot of difference,’ Elek volunteered.
Suddenly, Gyuri wished they hadn’t started to converse.
August 1950
They estivated outside Tatabánya.
The peasants out in the fields, on account of what they had endured or because of some innate earthiness, evinced no great surprise to see half a dozen naked and tanned figures strolling through their sunflowers. ‘Basketball players,’ they muttered.
Pataki was in the lead, wearing his sunglasses, striding out in his basketball boots, a map neatly folded under his arm. Although they got plenty of exercise at the training camp where Locomotive had been invited to act as resident sparring partner for the National team, they were full of kicks, and at Pataki’s instigation had gone out for an afternoon constitutional in order to ascertain that the surrounding countryside was as boring as it looked. So far it was.
Most of the vicinity was flat and obvious, but Pataki steered them to a distant clump of greenery, a copse on a series of mounds, with a huge patch of baldness on top. The view from this hillock corroborated their worst fears: the total absence of anything that could be loosely accounted exciting or notable in the neighbourhood. ‘So, gentlemen, there it is: the countryside. The place for those fond of vegetable antics. The abode of bucolic delights as celebrated by millennia of illustrious poets, who, in my opinion, were either heavily bribed by wealthy farmers eager to boost their standing, or gibberingly demented,’ concluded Pataki.
There was a rectangular stone some four feet high on the summit, which Pataki, having consulted the map, announced was an object of significant trigonometrical value. If it hadn’t been on the map, they probably wouldn’t have bothered; but how often do you get a chance to destroy a landmark? The stone was recalcitrant and astonishingly heavy, but with the help of a few sturdy branches as levers, they eventually upended it and had the pleasure of watching it robustly tumble down a good way. Feeling satisfied with their afternoon’s work sabotaging the Hungarian state, they headed back to the camp.
‘Has the new Hungary overcome the old three-layered class system of workers, bourgeoisie and nobility?’ Róka asked, swiftly providing the answer (before anyone thought he was posin
g a serious question). ‘Not quite. There are still three classes in the new Hungary: those who have been to prison, those who are in prison and those who are going to prison.’
On their way back, Pataki saluted with the map a young peasant girl whose face would have been ugly on a young peasant boy. Joke civility, Gyuri noted, but another week of the camp and the gauche, sack-wrapped girls would start looking like beauty queens.
Usually, tired after the day’s training, Gyuri would plunge into blackness as soon as he made contact with his mattress despite its high ranking in intractability. The training was demanding, and as always, Gyuri had to do twice as much as anyone else. Some people have athleticism handed to them on a tray, others have to sweat to get up to scratch. Hitting sixty push-ups had caused him dreadful suffering while Pataki could do it on demand while conducting a conversation on any theme you’d care to name. He had been born with explosives in his muscles, even his tongue.
When Gyuri returned from the first instalment of the morning’s training, a run around the lake, gasping from the blow of such a brutal introduction to the day, Pataki would be lazily bestirring himself, often having a contemplative cigarette on the porch of their hut. Pataki could get away with this, because he could always deliver on court. ‘I know life is unfair, I don’t dispute that,’ Gyuri would gasp, ‘but does it really have to be this sort of industrial strength unfair?’
Pataki’s rightful place was in the National team, not playing opposite them to give them a good workout. He had been invited to play with the junior squad years earlier when still at school, but was turfed out after a few months. Not for slackness in training or for any other basketballing deficiency but thanks to the light in Hármati’s eye. ‘She’s the light of my eye,’ Hármati would say in an exaggerated, overparental manner of his daughter, Piroska. Pataki’s falling out with Hármati, the coach of the National team, had its root in Hármati walking in when Pataki was deflowering Piroska on a horrifically valuable Louis Quinze chaise-longue that Hármati had personally plundered from the debris of a neighbouring and deceased family’s bombed flat. ‘It was the mess on the sofa that did it,’ Pataki maintained. However, Pataki’s charm and undeniable talents would have boomeranged him back after a nominal banishment had it not been for Hármati walking in again to discover Pataki having a foam bath with some highly-prized bath crystals brought back, by hand, from a trip to Italy, and with Hármati’s other daughter, Noemi. Fortunately for Pataki it was a flat designed with two doors to every room, and his speed enabled him to stay ahead of Hármati for six circuits of the premises, before he could gather up his garb and exit. ‘It’s bad enough being caught with your trousers down but when you have to dry yourself first…’ Pataki reflected later, adding, ‘I think it was the bath crystals that really upset him.’
Pataki had just found out about his speed one day and found it there whenever he needed it. If Gyuri didn’t run every day, he’d slow up and balloon; if he didn’t play ball every day, his edge would blunt but Pataki could wander onto court after a month in a Parisian restaurant and still be able to whizz down infallibly to dunk the ball in the basket. There had to be a good reason for Pataki to stir and training wasn’t one of them. ‘We’re not paid to train, we’re paid to win,’ was his reaction to Hepp’s supplications to hone his abilities. Hepp had no real choice but to put up with Pataki; he usually didn’t keep a close eye on him during training, so that his non-cooperation wouldn’t grate. On the other hand, Hepp had managed on one unforgettable occasion to persuade Pataki to run the 1500. Pataki must have had his mind on something else when Hepp had explained that the Locomotive athletics team was runnerless for the 1500 metres at an upcoming meet and had pleaded with Pataki to run it to avoid the ignominy of a no-show.
Gyuri was there on the day which introduced Pataki to effort. He could remember the uncomprehending shock that had appeared on Pataki’s face after the first lap and a half when it gradually became apparent to Pataki, that unlike shooting the length of a basketball court, the 1500 would involve that most daunting of things, labour. He came in fifth in a field of six, arriving at the finishing line with his customary collected features exploded into a morass of leering agony. After minutes of gasping for breath on the dearly-embraced ground, Pataki finally announced: ‘I thought I was going to die. These runners are out of their minds, how can they do this for a living? My track career is over.’
Gyuri had been very glad to witness Pataki stumble on a new world of experience, to see him dust off his will-power. Money, however, always got him going. The sprinters at the camp had already lost the more interesting portion of their worldly goods to Pataki as they always did when they challenged him. The sprinters, the 100 boys who trained with zealotic fervour, who stretched, bent, and twanged muscles for hours, who ran everywhere, lifted weights, ate carefully, and went to bed early and did nothing that didn’t further their aim of doing the 100 faster, couldn’t believe that Pataki could best them in a dash.
But he could, by challenging them to 50 metres. Sprinters who didn’t know Pataki joyfully stumped up the cash for the bet (and those who did know him stumped up petulantly) and then saw nothing but Pataki’s back. Over thirty metres he was so explosive, so swift, so straight out of the jungle, that no one could get close. By fifty, the professionals would have closed with him but they’d still be a sternum behind. The pattern, when Pataki, for amusement and not forints, had been dared to run the full hundred, was that before sixty the sprinters would have a nose ahead, by eighty they were clear and by the hundred Pataki could see their soles.
Rónai, an Olympic 100-metre bronze winner, was the one least able to come to grips with Pataki’s kick start. Year after year, he had been vanquished by Pataki at training sessions, at meets, on Margit Island and once inside the bar at the Opera. Fanatical, even by the whole-hearted standards of the sprinters, Rónai had the obsessive nature of a marathon runner. At the camps, he was a largely solitary figure who seemed to regard conversation as, at best, impinging on his training program or, at worst, blatant sabotage, and he could, to anyone not directly involved in the perfection of his leg movements, begrudge even a ‘good morning’. He would, even if waiting at a bus stop or in a queue for the cinema (not that he went very often), be bending and flexing muscles, or if refraining from using them would be plotting new techniques to lick them into shape.
Rónai was up before everyone else, in clement and inclement weather, trotting around, relishing the extra time he was putting in, that was putting him ahead of the others still in bed in Budapest and elsewhere, pushing himself and thinking about the next exertion. The world for Rónai was a conglomeration of various training possibilities that could enable him to load more ammunition into his legs in time for the ‘52 Olympics in Helsinki. Some of his mattress partners, miffed by his monomania, had let slip that when it came to bed, Rónai was less concerned with the merchant of pleasure knocking on his door, than in disciplining sets of muscles through a series of awkward and convoluted couplings that would last until he had counted out the required number of muscular contractions, the signal for a different constellation of brawn to come into service. ‘It’s so moving,’ one netball player recounted, ‘having gluteus maximus whispered in your ear.’
Rónai had lost heavily to Pataki, money, various edibles and a magnetic pocket-chess set he had obtained in London during the ’48 Olympics. He couldn’t leave Pataki alone; the very sight of Pataki lounging around made him twitch. He had come close to Pataki, very close, losing a number of runs by the breadth of a vest, and one even ended in a dead heat according to the adjudicators. But parity wasn’t good enough for Rónai. It wasn’t acceptable for him that a mere basketball player, who wasn’t even in the National team to boot, who was regularly to be found loafing around, gassing, playing cards, drinking Czech beer and being hunted by his coach, that such a ramshackle athlete could best a sprinter who hadn’t drunk a Czech beer since 1946. ‘Beer,’ he had pronounced publicly, ‘is for the weak. Th
ere are seven people around a campfire, they all put a hand into the flames. One by one, they pull back. The one who leaves his hand in the longest is the world champion.’ A man who never failed to exercise his ears before he went to sleep didn’t give up easily.
‘Quick, give me some cigarettes,’ Pataki would say when he saw Rónai approaching, lighting up two together to compose the veritable picture of the prodigal sportsman. Two weeks into the camp, Rónai had lost all his money and any objects of value, including a pair of remarkable German toe-nail clippers and a less remarkable phial of Bulgarian rose-water, though the judging of the races had been made more difficult, as after the first few defeats Rónai insisted on running after dark when no one else was likely to be about. It was always tight, Rónai at Pataki’s heels like a fleshed-out shadow, but the nipple-length losses were an awful gulf to Rónai, an abyss that became progressively more uncrossable.
One night Gyuri and Pataki entered the camp canteen to find Rónai entombed by empty Czech beer bottles, shouting out as if to the human race: ‘It’s too unfair. There’s no point. It’s all fixed.’ It had never occurred to Rónai that there were people who couldn’t be bothered to put a hand into the fire. It made Gyuri feel a lot better, and perhaps Rónai too, though he still kept losing to Pataki.
Under the Frog Page 11