‘Can I go home, then?’ asked Gyuri, feeling he had nothing to lose.
Both of them turned to him with a look that said it would be extremely unwise, extremely unwise to open his mouth again. The receptionist gestured at Gyuri. ‘What do you think he’s doing here? Waiting for a bus?’
‘I don’t care what he’s doing here. He’s not on the list. I’ve told people about this before, you know. We’re not the Hotel Britannia. Your name’s Fischer?’ he asked, addressing Gyuri.
‘Yes.’
He looked lengthily at the list again. ‘You don’t have any aliases or nicknames do you?’
‘No.’
The list was regarded again in the hope it would suddenly divulge a Fischer. ‘You are Hungarian, I take it?’ he asked scanning a violet piece of paper evidently intended for foreigners. Gyuri confirmed his nationality. ‘Well, I’ve got a Fodor, but that’s it, and there aren’t even any Fs on the foreigners’ list.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the receptionist, ‘just stick him downstairs.’
‘It does matter. What’s the point of having a fucking list if people’s fucking names aren’t on it.’
The receptionist seized the clipboard and eyeballed the list with an air of doubting the other’s ability to spot a Fischer even when there was one there. ‘Okay, just take him down.’
‘But we’re full up. I’ve only got the double left.’
Gyuri was led underground and shown into a cell which had a feeble member of the bulb family lighting it and which was predominantly full of gypsy. There were two benches in the cell, both of which were covered by the largest gypsy Gyuri had ever seen, in fact one of the largest people he had ever seen. Like Neumann, but with three or four pillows tied to him. How could anyone get that fat in Hungary? Apart from his striking collection of collops, the gypsy’s left fist had ‘bang’ tattooed b-a-n-g on the topmost phalanges of his fingers and his jowly face had a grid marked on the left side as if someone had been playing noughts and crosses with an exceptionally sharp knife. Gyuri wondered if the gypsy had ever contemplated a career in water-polo.
‘Hello,’ said the gypsy, withdrawing a division of thigh to expose some bench and stretching out a hand. ‘I’m Noughts.’ Then he added beamingly, ‘Pimp.’
Gyuri shook hands and introduced himself. He admired Noughts’s clarity of identity. How should he depict himself: basketball player? Railway employee? Student of life? ‘Fischer, Gyorgy, class alien.’
‘What have they got you in for?’ Noughts inquired.
Gyuri reflected. ‘Nothing really.’
‘If it’s nothing, they’re going to throw the book at you. I reckon they have a quota of ten-year sentences they need to fill. One of my mates in Nyiregyhaza got taken in a few weeks ago. “Nothing personal, Bognar,” they said, “but we have to put someone down for a ten-year stretch, and we know you wouldn’t mind too much, being a stinking gyppo and that. Just sign the confession so we can go home.’”
Noughts was in for obstructing the course of justice. Two AVO men were chasing a kid who had let down the tyres on their car, when they tripped over Noughts who had been recumbent in a stairwell dead drunk after a protracted wedding celebration. Noughts’s lack of consciousness was why he hadn’t been able to implement his usual escape technique: ‘The policemen these days aren’t as well made as they used to be. You just have to sit on them to hear them snapping.’ The terriblest threats of retribution had been issued to Noughts because it had required two arrest teams and a butcher’s van to bring him in.
‘I can’t say I’m looking forward to a stretch. The prisons have really gone downhill,’ complained Noughts. He had been, he elucidated, in most of Hungary ’s penal institutions, including the infamous ‘Star’ prison in Szeged, where Rákosi once spent fifteen years. Rákosi had had a satisfactory library, a cell to himself and an international campaign to obtain his release. Progressive intellectuals from all over Europe had sent telegrams of protest to Hungarian Consuls. Gyuri had seen one from the West Hull Branch of the Friends of the Soviet Union in an exhibition about Rákosi’s life. The telegram had spoken of their ‘emphatic disgust’ at Rákosi’s conviction. Gyuri had reflected that he might well feel more friendly towards the Soviet Union if he lived in West Hull. He had also looked up ‘emphatic’ in his English dictionary, since it was a word he hadn’t come across before. Odd that the progressive intellectuals were so silent about the abounding convictions in Hungary now. Gyuri also had the presentment that progressive intellectuals in West Hull, or anywhere else, wouldn’t be sending any telegrams on his behalf but then Gyuri was ill-disposed towards them anyhow for saving Rákosi from the death-penalty.
‘The bread and dripping were outstanding,’ said Noughts continuing his reminiscences about the ‘Star’ prison. ‘It was worth it for the bread and dripping alone.’
Noughts’s soliloquy went on, encompassing other gaol delights, which were punctuated with an exhortation to Gyuri that whenever he got out, one year, two years, ten years, he should hasten without delay to Noughts’s sister who could habitually be found around Rákóczi tér. ‘There’s nothing like it for getting it out of your system.’
The main difference between prison and being out in Hungary, Gyuri ruminated, was that in prison there was less room. That was about it. Less room and a strong smell of unbathed gypsy. As compensation for the ammoniac tentacles growing from Noughts, there was, at least, no portrait of Rákosi in the hall.
Still enjoying a burst of aplomb, Gyuri couldn’t help reviewing the various outcomes of his incarceration, all of which contained generous helpings of more incarceration, pain and pain’s subsidiaries. Gyuri liked to think of himself as quite tough and self-reliant which was why he didn’t like to find himself in circumstances which might amply demonstrate that he wasn’t.
On the wall, someone had scraped ‘I am a member of parliament’: this statement didn’t seem to be worth the trouble on its own – presumably it was an aposiopesis, produced by the author’s untimely removal from the cell. Underneath, in a different style, with a different sharpish instrument, someone had inscribed, ‘I am a member of Újpest football club.’ There was also in faded pencil (remarkable since Gyuri had had all his portable personal and impersonal items removed, as well as his belt and shoelaces) ‘If you can read this, you’re in trouble.’
Well, thought Gyuri, here I am under the frog’s arse. Under the coal-mining frog’s arse indeed, at the very bottom of existence. Nothing could make things worse. Was he going to be entitled to any of those things in life that were accounted as worthwhile or enjoyable? He was twenty. Was he going to get out in time to grab any of the things worth grabbing? Without great satisfaction, he inspected the ledgers of his years. When the venerable poet Arany had reached eighty, according to Pataki, he was asked how he viewed the peaks of his celebrated life, a legend-creating poet, revolutionary, seer, national hero and ornament! ‘A bit more tupping would have been nice’ he replied. This pronouncement hadn’t made it into Arany’s biography. The prospect of having his willy in dry dock for a decade was only marginally less alarming than having all his bones broken or dying unpleasantly, or indeed, pleasantly.
Noughts got tired of his discourse on penal cuisine and the merits of his sister and reclined for some sleep. ‘This can’t go on much longer,’ was revealed on the wall behind him, underneath which, with the true Hungarian desire to have the last word, someone had written ‘It already has’. Would there ever be a new round of Nuremberg trials? Gyuri wondered. Would he be around to see them? What would the AVO say in their defence? ‘We were only obeying ideals.’
It was hard to judge the passage of time, but it seemed to Gyuri that a day had gone without any change or incursion into their cell, apart from the odd commotion at the judas-hole when they were scoped by the guards. There was no sign of food although Gyuri’s appetite had scarpered. ‘It’s my fault they’re not giving us anything to eat,’ apologised Noughts, ‘they can’t bear the
sight of a fat gypsy.’
Having got to the point where he was strapped in, mentally steeled, ready to look a ten-year sentence in the face with equanimity, Gyuri was released.
Judging by the light outside, it was the following morning. No one had said anything in the way of explanation. He had been summoned, given back a portion of his personal effects (not his shoelaces or small change). Gyuri hadn’t taken the trouble of inquiring about the whereabouts of the missing items or the wherefore of his manumittance. Outside, he felt so pleased to see Budapest, Budapest looked so effervescently active, that he half-wished he could be arrested more often.
He was coming to terms with his deliverance when he noticed Elemér, the dogcatching mailed fist of the proletariat, step up to him. Elemér, who was smoking a dawdling cigarette, had clearly been expecting him. ‘Any time,’ was all he said before he walked off. The shock was such that Gyuri had no time to kill him before he vanished. His anger expanded steadily and so intensely he thought the rage was going to pop his skull. Trembling with anger, he made his way home on the tram, and if anyone had so much as brushed against him by accident it would have resulted in an instantaneous, furious, bone-crushing, onslaught.
At home, he discovered the note he had left on the kitchen table for Elek, looking unread. Where was the old goat? he wondered as he ripped up the note. Elek entered at that moment, sniffed and commented ebulliently on Gyuri’s malodorous condition after the AVO’s cold sauna: ‘Communism doesn’t prevent washing, you know.’ Gyuri never told anyone.
August 1952
It had only been a month but if he never achieved anything else in his life, that month would be achievement enough.
The camp had been at Böhönye but they had been met at Pécs rail way station by the sergeant-major who had been specially selected to shape up the university students during the four weeks he had charge of them, to mould them into lusty officers. The sergeant-major was in no way perturbed by the centuries-old tradition of sergeant-majors being sadistic, aggressive and very loud. From the start, he was out to prove he could be far worse than anything they might have imagined.
‘We’re going to be fighting World War Three soon,’ was his opening gambit. Like all soldiers he wasn’t too enamoured of peace – it didn’t give the military the respect and resources it considered it so richly deserved. But a peace which was simply a build-up to a world conflict was something the sergeant-major could stomach.
‘You are turds. Unspeakable turds… whom I am obliged to transmogrify into barely useful turds. My philosophy: my philosophy is to make life for you so unpleasant you will find war an agreeable recreation, a bit of light relief, and that you will die in a manner that will not disgrace the fine traditions of the Hungarian Army.’ (Which is about all Hungarian armies have ever managed to do, Gyuri thought.)
‘I expect some of you will be committing suicide. Indeed I will consider my work a failure if some of you turds don’t try a bit of wrist-slashing. And if you don’t do the job properly, we’re willing to help; attempted suicide is punishable by death.’ To be fair to the sergeant-major, he at least looked as if he knew something about soldiering: large, vigorous, confident, gnarled, the sort of person you were glad was on your side. A bastard but a competent bastard. ‘It’s all right, having a shaky officer when you’re in barracks,’ Tamás had told Gyuri at Ganz. ‘It’s not important there if it takes him two hours to find out which way up the map should be, but when you get to the front, you need someone good, or you get jacked. We had one officer called Kocsis. The funny thing was he had always wanted to be an officer, he came from a military family but even after going through the Ludovika, he couldn’t direct piss into a bucket, let alone direct a military operation. Within an hour of getting us to the front, he got us pinned down, and he was killed straight away by some Soviet who got through our defences, infiltrating brilliantly in a Hungarian uniform, speaking fluent Hungarian and having lived in Budapest for thirty years.’
The sergeant-major’s first threat: ‘When we get to our base, you will become acquainted with the parade ground. You will become so well-acquainted that if by some unheard-of miracle you survive, you’ll remember every crack when you’re ninety.’ Here, the sergeant who had been delegated as assistant, whispered into the SM’s ear, what they were to learn later, that Böhönye didn’t have a parade ground. ‘There’ll be plenty of drill,’ the SM continued, ‘so that, from a great distance the Imperialists might accidentally mistake you for soldiers.’
The military had not lost its fondness for cow pats. What Böhönye did have was meadows, so they practised their ceremonial march, with bayonets fixed and resting on the shoulder of the person in front. On a level parade ground, this could have been an impressive sight of co-ordination and martial display. In a meadow full of cow dung and hollows it was a massive exercise in ear-removal. The first to lose his aural equilibrium was Gyongyosi, a lawyer, who being a lawyer deserved it. He wasn’t going to be produced in any show trials after that.
The month was bad, very bad. But a month only being a month as such, it couldn’t be unbearably bad. Most of the time was spent on the usual military tricks of making you try and do half an hour’s worth of doing in five minutes. And Dohányi, the SM, who never told them his name (‘I don’t want you to think of me as a person, just as a fucking bastard’) was very keen on making people run around in full gear, with twenty pounds of kit, wearing a gas mask. The odd thing about gas masks, Gyuri reflected, when you thought about how they were designed for you to breathe through, was that they were virtually impossible for you to breathe through, particularly when doing anything more arduous than standing still.
The bulk of the agony revolved around unending physical exertion. Even for Gyuri, as a professional amateur athlete, it was demanding. For the students who had been more sedentary, it produced the effect Dohányi was after: intense pain, shock, disbelief at how much physical punishment the body could take in twenty-four hours. ‘Sleep is bourgeois,’ pronounced Dohányi, before sending them out on all-night manoeuvres with the sergeant. Most of the group developed an air of aghastness after the second day, as if they were permanently being punched in the stomach. At moments of excruciating physical effort, running with a stretcherful of hypothetically wounded soldiers for example, Gyuri recalled a painting he had recently seen of a soldier lying down in a comfortable field, reading pensively, surrounded by comatosely relaxed brothers-in-arms. The painting was entitled: ‘Soldier reading, surrounded by his brothers-in-arms.’ Dohányi would have shot anyone he found lying around pensively or reading.
Despite Dohányi doing his best to make things as horrific as possible, he was cruelly let down by the weather which was regulation summer issue, warm and invigorating. The heat was sometimes cumbersome but the summer didn’t permit suicidal misery. Dohányi’s torments which would have been unsupportable and shattering in a cold muddy winter were kept digestible. He became visibly frustrated by the lack of breakdown. Standing by Bencze, the architect, who had collapsed in a meadow under a rucksack full of ammunition and who was floundering on the grass, rather as if he were feebly trying to swim across the meadow, incapable of getting to his feet, Dohányi shouted sympathetically: ‘Had enough? Want a rest? Desert! Then I can have you shot.’ Dohányi kept on counselling desertion, to no avail, but he always repeated the punchline: ‘I’ll have you shot. Why should you waste the Imperialists’ time?’
The Imperialists were another classic Dohányi theme, from a man whose knowledge of world affairs was based on the few months when he had travelled out of Hungary to kill people. ‘The Imperialists are coming. Any day now, we’re going to have number three. Third time lucky. Of course, you barely uniformed turds won’t make any difference but we don’t want you wetting yourselves in civilian shelters, distressing the populace. The best thing you can do when the war starts is dig a hole, jump in, and fill it up.’
So where were the American Imperialists? The British Imperialists? Or even the G
erman ones? They had been promised Imperialists for years on end, Gyuri thought angrily. What were the Imperialists playing at? He had carefully rehearsed the phrase with which he would greet the American invaders: ‘What kept you? Let me take you to many interesting Communists I am sure you will be eager to shoot.’
The whole camp and the idea of the camp was a complete waste of time courtesy of the people who had given Hungary such impressive ideas as the centrally-controlled economy where you had to work your way through dozens of barriers to find the man at the ministry who was responsible for getting you some extra bolts only to find he was on holiday. Apart from confirming their suspicions about which end of a rifle the bullet emerged from, the heroic sons of democratic Hungary had learned only one other thing: a formative hatred of the Army. The futility of the training was doubled in Gyuri’s case: although the camp was devised to render them sturdy leaders of men, Gyuri, being class-x, wouldn’t be allowed to be an officer, so the most he could ever be was the best-trained corporal in the People’s Army.
The political classes were for once extremely welcome although they were raw tedium. Everyone looked forward to them because you could sit down, not be shouted at and not have to worry about donning a gas mask. Dohányi would stand to one side, fuming conspicuously at this respite from his meticulously conceived diet of ordeal.
The political officer was called Lieutenant-Colonel Tibor Pataki, a fact that Gyuri fully intended to tease Pataki about when he returned to Budapest, away from the military and the countryside where all you had was a choice of grass and excrement served up in a variety of styles. Lt.-Col. Pataki obviously did a lot of this sort of instruction – he had been chauffeured into the camp hot from another engagement, and his monotonous, unfaltering flow suggested regular practice.
‘It is, of course, Generalissimo Stalin, who has given us life, that we salute, and the triumph of Stalinian strategy in the Great Patriotic War that we take as our guiding precept but it is above all the Hungarian edition of the works of Stalin, a new invincible weapon in our hands, that will enable us to model ourselves on the glorious Stalinian Soviet Army.’ This was all without a breath, and in front of a mounted, hazy photograph of a Soviet officer looking knowingly and professionally down the gun barrel proffered by a Soviet infantryman, smirkingly proud and confident of the unbesmirched state of his rifling. That photograph was to the left of Lieutenant-Colonel Pataki. To his right was a grey, hard-to-distinguish photograph of small figures in a line, carrying banners with indecipherable slogans. This picture was bottomed: ‘Peace Demonstration, London.’
Under the Frog Page 14