Lt.-Col. Pataki took up Dohányi’s theme of Communism getting ready to put its boot on the throat of decadent bourgeois countries, to stick the bayonet in and twist it about, but in much more refined and dull language for fifteen minutes or so, before expounding further about Stalin, leader of the Peace Front.
If the Lieutenant-Colonel took this seriously, if he believed what he was saying, Gyuri pondered, it was sad. If he didn’t believe the nonsense he was spouting, like a parrot or a khaki gramophone player, that was sad too. Which was sadder? Or maybe you could take the whole scene, all of them assembled in the hut pretending to imbibe the wisdom that the Lt.-Col. was pretending to impart, as an enormously elaborate practical joke. Perhaps one day everyone in Hungary, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Rumania, the Soviet Union and even Albania would wake up one day to hear Stalin shrieking with laughter in the Kremlin: ‘You didn’t think I was serious, did you?’
Living according to bolshevik principles: the idea was as absurd as walking around all day with two fingers stuck up your nose. At least the Church only expected you to turn up once a week, but otherwise was prepared to keep out of your hair. If people’s power only meant a weekly hour-long lecture, Gyuri thought, I could live with it.
Scrutinising the Lieutenant-Colonel, Gyuri inclined to categorising him as a true believer, a moral cripple, ethically stillborn. This would surely be seen as the most lasting, the most magisterial accomplishment of the Hungarian Workers’ Movement: unearthing, rounding up, nurturing so many prize shits. How many supershits could a small country like Hungary yield? A few hundred? A few thousand? No, the Hungarian Working People’s Party’s talent scouts had offered contracts to hundreds of thousands of manshaped turds. Admittedly not all of them would be truly first division brigands, and who knows, maybe there were even people who joined by mistake, thinking they could do some good.
But for the conscripted audience, the ostensibly dull lecture had, in fact, been garnished with the tang of corporeal detente; numerous limbs and muscle installations had had an opportunity of resting, and as they filed away from the political instruction, they wondered if they would be treated to another session.
At the end of the four weeks, everyone was so glad to leave that they couldn’t find the energy to really hate Dohányi as he gave them some parting abuse: ‘I’m sorry to see you barely biped turds leaving. It would have been a better deal for humanity if you had died here, but I don’t suppose you self-propelled dicks will get very far. There’s no need to thank me.’ Gyuri and some of the others vacillated over giving Dohányi some obscenity, but you never could be sure how far military jurisdiction stretched. They settled for some sloppy salutes and ran to the railway station.
Returning to Budapest, Gyuri felt older, wiser, proud of having taken his four weeks without falling to his knees, begging for mercy. The sight of Budapest brought a torrent of excitement and gratitude. A desire to kiss the ground lasted for several seconds when he stepped off the train and the delight in being capitalised lasted until he got to Thököly út, by which time the crowded tram had pressed the last drops of rejoicing out of him.
It was as he strolled down the last section of Thököly út to turn into Dózsa György út, that a figure in a heavily-peopled delicatessen caught his eye. His subconscious elbowed his conscious, and he noticed Pataki in a queue at the counter. He gazed through the window at this spectacle for a few moments, and then, excited and fearful of missing the continuation, he ran into the shop.
There was Pataki, sandwiched between resolute housewives, carrying a shopping basket, a large wicker construction that Gyuri didn’t recognise as an official Pataki family household object.
Pataki’s awareness latched on to Gyuri as he approached. Just for a shaving of a second, there was a general alarm, a call to action, a glimpse of consternation bolting around the corner. If Gyuri hadn’t known Pataki from the age of four, these fleeting, mostly subcutaneous movements couldn’t have been noticed. As it takes a trained expert to judge a counterfeit banknote, so it took a Pataki expert to detect the counterfeit cool, to detect the thinnest recoil, a proton of shame, as if he had been caught extracting his dick from a herbivore.
The reason for Gyuri’s amazement was that Pataki never went shopping. Never. For certain masculine accessories such as clothes etc., yes, but then that sort of shopping wasn’t done in a shop but by cajoling acquaintances to produce the required item through barter, bribery, blackmail or begging. Even when Pataki was at a more malleable age, at six or seven, he had stubbornly refused to run out to the shops, no matter what the incentives or threats. Though Pataki had never publicly proclaimed it as a policy decision, there was a clear implication that going to the shops was one of the things you didn’t do, that it was an infringement of rowing time, a blight on male dignity. When Gyuri went off to collect the dress from Angyalföld, Pataki had said nothing, but his silence was eloquent: you’re my friend, so I won’t dwell on this deplorable lapse, this sad weakness.
Pataki was the chief exponent of ‘snatch the snatch’, of amatory hitting and running for the rowing-boat. Gyuri didn’t have the black and white evidence yet, but he had the feeling that Pataki’s waiting for some cheese was a sign of doctrinal collapse, that his mulierosity had got him distaffed.
‘How was the Army?’ Pataki greeted him, impeccably casual, as if they were meeting in the sports hall and not at the cheese-counter. ‘I hope they offered you a generalship?’
‘It was everything you’d expect,’ said Gyuri unable to contain himself and going for the jugular question. ‘Doing some errands for your mother, are you?’
‘No. Bea asked me to get a few things for lunch,’ replied Pataki. It was Pataki, in one way, at his greatest. The flawless tones of mundane, routine queuing, as if he were simply standing in a queue talking about standing in a queue and not utter capitulation, the unbridled massacre of a young lifetime’s precepts.
So it was Bea.
When Pataki had been thrown out of the College of Accountancy it hadn’t come as a surprise to anyone concerned. He had only found out about the exams by accident. He was walking past the College when he had been overcome by the need for a leak and he had fortuitously discovered the exam lists on his way to the gents. He had pleaded with Gyuri to remind him of the subjects he was supposed to be studying – was it the light industrial inventory course or the advanced cost analysis? He was so far gone, even cheating couldn’t have helped him.
Pataki had then rapidly obtained a place at the College for Theatrical and Cinematic Arts. Ironically, this hadn’t been for the outstanding performance that freed him from the clutches of the Army, which had snapped him up the minute he had been jettisoned by the College of Accountancy. He had feigned a dud cartilage which required him to walk around with an inflexible leg, all the time, for six weeks, a marathon acting feat that demanded rigorous verisimilitude twenty-four hours a day, thespianism without respite – though it was true that the potential savagery of the non-commissioned critics was a great encouragement in maintaining a correct impaired cartilage posture. A friendly doctor whom István had lined up removed a healthy cartilage from Pataki’s right knee and he got his discharge from the Army. Before his knee had time to heal properly Pataki was in at the College of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts to study photography and thus exempt once again from military service.
Bea’s existence had been gradually revealed, more by Pataki’s absences than her presence. But Pataki was finally caught, having informed everyone that he was going to get some developing agents, in tandem with Bea on a bench overlooking the Danube.
Gyuri and Róka spotted them as they were completing a run around Margit Island.
The vigour of her hello, the choreography of Bea’s movements, the mellifluousness of her voice that made every syllable stand on its own feet, the projection of her posture would have convicted Bea of being an apprentice actress, without the production of her student identity card. Discovering Bea and Pataki on the benc
h was rather startling because Pataki’s stated policy was that sitting around on park benches was for simpletons or failures.
‘You don’t mind if we join you?’ said Gyuri sitting down on the grass next to the bench. He and Róka fastened onto Pataki and Bea, surmising that this would be of some hindrance, embarrassment or annoyance to Pataki, whose demeanour was one of affability as if there could be nothing more natural and agreeable than all of them sitting there watching the Danube. ‘Been saving up for my present, have you?’ asked Gyuri, taking advantage of Pataki’s corneredness to remind him about the non-appearance of his birthday present, then ten days overdue. Pataki writhed, too briefly for anyone but a seasoned Pataki-watcher to behold, and then handed over, to Gyuri’s surprise, a neatly wrapped volume (it must have been wrapped by someone else). ‘We were just out shopping for it,’ said Pataki. There was no doubt it was intended as Gyuri’s birthday present but Pataki’s reluctance in handing it over soon became understandable.
The present was a book, Hungarian Writers on Mátyás Rákosi, a volume issued to commemorate Rákosi’s sixtieth birthday in March. ‘It’s what I always wanted,’ said Gyuri, using one of his subtlest sarcasms, since only minimal irony was called for. The anthology was self-evidently not only something Gyuri didn’t have the slightest interest in, it was a gift that he had no more intention of taking home than he had of sticking a serrated blade through his palm. Pataki had probably bought it to read himself and catch up on the latest in literary goings-on.
The book was a collection of pieces by leading Hungarian writers which might as well have been titled Arse-Licking in 35 Variations. The only real literary ability called into action was to minimise the degradation and shame in composing a panegyric on the bald orang-utan who happened to be Prime Minister and the first Secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party. You could imagine them sitting around in the comforts of the Writers’ Union saying to each other: ‘No, no, Zoli, I’m not distinguished enough to make a contribution to the book. I’m sure Józsi or Laci can knock out something.’
Bea was attractive, though by no means the fairest to be Patakied, and her theatrical nature prompted Gyuri to read out the first work from the book, a poem by Zoltán Zelk. Zelk at his best was well, appalling. Curiously, Pataki, normally merciless in his critical judgements on poetry, always went easy on Zelk, although he had claimed he could train any reasonably intelligent dog to compose better verses than Zelk, by picking out words from a hat.
‘Comrade Rákosi is sixty,
No other words required,
If I write it down,
You’ll know instantly,
Comrade Rákosi is sixty.’
Perhaps because of Gyuri’s skilful inflections in reading, Róka started to cry with laughter. Mastering his mirth, he was handed a stanza by his muse: ‘Comrade Rákosi is an arse, no other words required, if I write it down, you’ll know instantly, Comrade Rákosi is an arse.’
‘Oh, don’t be unfair,’ chided Bea gently ‘Rákosi’s a good old soul, he’s why I joined the Party.’ This only added fuel to the fire. Both Gyuri and Róka laughed to the point of pain, doubled up on the ground, much to Bea’s puzzlement, since she hadn’t intended to be funny, since she wasn’t joking.
Pataki made good their escape before any offence occurred. ‘We’re going to the cinema. We’d better be off.’ He and Bea sauntered away to the bus stop. Bea’s parting words made it clear however that she was quite genuine in her admiration for Rákosi. ‘He’s done a lot of good for this country.’ Róka was quite shocked- although he was indiscriminate in assisting women with their orgasms, this bounty was coupled with an austere, petrous morality that forbade any form of intercourse with the Party. Bea struck Gyuri as someone who hadn’t thought too much about Rákosi & Co. – as someone who hadn’t thought too much about anything. For her the Party meant social occasions, meetings, songs, speeches, set texts.
‘What is he doing?’ Róka asked persistently, largely rhetorically.
‘Isn’t it about time the Party showed him a good time?’ replied Gyuri, flicking through the homage to Rákosi, wondering whether he could find anyone stupid enough to barter something for the book. There was only one bona fide cadre in Locomotive- Péter, a peasant lad from Kecskemét, who was bullishly in favour of the new order as well anyone might be who had been rescued from a region where the most dramatic event was the sluggish production of oxygen by the local verdure. Peter was always attending courses, radiating optimism and socialist zest for life. He would have been ideal for one of those photographs where young Hungarians look on proudly and wistfully at the brand new achievements of people’s power. Moreover, Peter was always ferrying around books such as Stalin: A Short Biography (‘not short enough’, others would remark) and in moments of leisure he would work his way through ponderously underlining passages that he deemed to contain bonus significance. Might Peter be willing to exchange some of those delightfully tasty objects that he received from his solicitous relatives for this outstanding literary work?
‘But,’ said Róka, ‘what is he doing?’
Róka’s bewilderment might have been greater if he had known that Pataki’s father, an accountant who had wandered into social democracy, had spent 1951 tied up in an AVO basement. Pataki’s father had only told Pataki and Pataki had only told Gyuri. Gaspar had been picked up in the regulation fashion in January, asked to come to Andrássy út as a witness.
His suspicions had been aroused when they tied him up from shoulder to toe in a sort of all-encompassing rope strait-jacket, a hemp cocoon, and deposited him in an unlit basement for what was probably a week. After that he was unwrapped in an interrogation suite, punched in the mouth and admonished:
‘Confess something. Surprise us. Entertain us.’
All Gaspar could do was to say there must have been some mistake and then emit a few ouches as they tried to punch-start him into admission. He was thrown back into the basement with the verdict: ‘Who arrested that boring bastard?’ He stayed there for the rest of the year, eating by pushing his face into the billy-can that was introduced from time to time into the cell. He felt like an envelope waiting to be opened in someone’s in-tray. There were dribs and drabs of conversation he heard emanating from outside: ‘Don’t you need a social democrat, Jeno?’ ‘What do you think this is, 1950?’ ‘What about an accountant?’ ‘Well, I certainly don’t need one. You’ve been greedy again, haven’t you? Remember what Belkin said, never arrest more than you need, it just creates paperwork.’
Every six weeks or so, Gaspar was taken for a wash. On one occasion he shared a shower with someone who looked remarkably like Janos Kadar, the former Communist Minister of the Interior. He even sounded like Kadar. ‘How much longer can this go on?’ asked the Kadar lookalike. Gaspar hadn’t been able to think of anything to say in the circumstances.
Finally, just before Christmas, someone came into the basement, untied him and said, ‘Piss off, we need this cell.’ Luckily for Gaspar one of Budapest ’s five taxis was passing outside (‘I get most of my trade here,’ the driver had informed him), as the walk from the basement to the street had bankrupted his muscles.
Never an outgoing fellow in the first place, Gaspar had become even more armchair-bound than Elek, flattened by the physical ordeal, by the shame of imprisonment and the additional humiliation of having been adjudged too dull to be stuck into a conspiracy.
To the boys, Pataki presented his relations with Bea with a bluff ‘The Party has screwed me, now I’m screwing the Party’, but now, as he waited with Pataki for three decas of Anikó cheese, Gyuri realised it was all over. On the one hand, he wished he had his diary with him so he could pencil in whole months’ worth of vilification, mockery and needling. The quality of the material that he had struck in finding Pataki with a shopping basket promised an almost unlimited quantity of ridicule, from one-liners to epic-length denunciations. ‘There I was, walking down Thököly út…’. On the other hand however, Gyuri felt so
rrowful. Pataki had assumed heroic status in the battle of the sexes, invincible, unconquerable, immune to the ailments that floored others, and here was the mighty mightily fallen, ozymandiased with a shopping-basket. Pataki had become a mortal.
Huge jars of pickled gherkins lined the walls of the shop, lording it over smaller jars of apricot conserve. Any level surface in the shop had these crammed glass jars. They were what you could find all over Hungary, in all the one-room shops: pickled gherkins and apricot conserve. If you liked pickled gherkins and apricot conserve a lot, you were in the right country. Abundant pickled gherkins and apricot conserve were quite an accomplishment, Gyuri mused, as Hungary got on with the second half of the twentieth century.
That was the sort of organic stagnation, displayed stasis, obedience under clear glass that they would like from people, stacked in their homes, products that didn’t require attention, that wouldn’t be troubled by the languors of the system of distribution, that would just exist docilely on the shelf until needed.
July 1954
Fuming at the injustice of a regime that was turning him into an accountant, Gyuri went along to his English lesson.
Makkai’s flat was off the Űllői út and – unusually for someone Gyuri visited regularly – only on the second floor. It wasn’t a very spacious flat but as a pre-war diplomat and current incurable bourgeois, Makkai had a son of the soil, a toiler for international peace, a student at the Party’s College, billeted legally, forcibly, permanently in his home.
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