Under the Frog

by Tibor Fischer

  Makkai usually let his pet complaint off the leash the moment he opened the door, berating his lodger as he ushered Gyuri inside.

  ‘I don’t mind that he’s a Communist. I don’t mind that he leaves Rákosi’s speeches all over the place. I don’t mind that he’s an oafish imbecile- after all one should hesitate to pass judgement on others – but what I can’t stand is that he stinks. It’s unforgivable. Unforgivable. We had an SS officer dumped on us during the war, a mass murderer, torturer of infants and so on, one assumes. I could stomach that, but not this. And don’t think I’m being harsh. It’s not the didn’t-have-time-this-morning-I-was-in-such-a-rush unwashedness, no, no. This is the unmistakable reek of a body that doesn’t even have childhood memories of soap. You can shake hands with the smell.

  ‘I’ve tried subtlety: daily eulogies on the joys of running water, leaving fresh towels prominently in his room, detailing at length the trouble I had purchasing and installing a new shower-head. Relating a fictitious newspaper account of how washing regularly could extend your life expectancy by twenty years. Relating another fictitious newspaper article reporting Comrade Rákosi stressing the urgency of all good Communists scrubbing their armpits with the slogan Cleanliness is Next to Sovietness. Nothing. I even tried presenting him with two superb bars of soap on May Day.’

  Makkai seemed a trifle indiscreet for someone who had to cohabit with a cadre, or perhaps he saved up his indiscretion for Gyuri. Last year, when Stalin had died, Gyuri left the College of Accountancy to find Comrade Kompan kneeling in front of the bust of Stalin in the hallway, weeping quite uncontrollably, in the way one does when a close family member has died. She had been quite decent to Gyuri when he had enrolled at the College, pointing out that since he was class-x, ‘We have our eye on you, Fischer. You’ll have to work twice as hard as everyone else to make amends for your background.’ She hadn’t meant this in a malevolent, hectoring fashion, but rather in a forgiving, encouraging way and she had been only voicing what any Party functionary would have thought after reading the file that always followed Gyuri around – his moral credentials.

  Comrade Kompan had been so distraught that Gyuri thought perhaps he ought to offer some solace out of courtesy, but he sensed it wouldn’t work. He had continued on to his English lesson.

  On reaching Makkai’s flat, he had found Makkai dancing on the table – something, he divulged to Gyuri, he hadn’t done for over forty years, which was why he looked so out of practice. He went to the larder and produced a bottle of champagne. ‘It’s Soviet, sadly – I’ve been keeping it cool for years so I’d be ready to celebrate.’ The lesson that day had consisted of toasts to the late, unlamented Joseph Vissarionovich and selecting pejorative epithets. ‘You’re lucky, you’re young. This can’t go on much longer now,’ said Makkai. ‘And you’ll be able to make the pilgrimage to pass water on Stalin’s grave. But by the time you get to the front of the queue you’ll be an old man.’ It was the first time Gyuri had seen Makkai smile, in the four years of his tuition he had never glimpsed the woebegotten Makkai enjoying anything. He thought he knew the whole Makkai, childless widower, glum scholar, whose erudition – far from earning him esteem and fortune or securing him a comfortable position – was a handicap, as if he were chained to the decomposing carcass of an elephant. The smile made Gyuri realise there were whole departments of Makkai he had never glimpsed; it was like turning a dusty vase stationed on top of a wardrobe for years to discover the reverse has an unseen design.

  When he heard the news of Stalin’s death, from the radio, Gyuri was shampooing his hair. Apart from experiencing an intense well-being, his first thought was whether the whole system would collapse in time for him not to have to take the exam in Marxism-Leninism he was due to sit the following week. Could he count on the downfall of Communism or was he actually going to have to read some Marx?

  His second thought was how to achieve maximum disrespect during the ten minutes’ silence that had been decreed for the next day. When he later saw in the cinema the film tribute of Stalin’s Budapest obsequies, the whole city coming to a halt, grim faced workers frozen on the edge of pavements, grimy railway workers easing off the steam on their engines, entire crowds steeped in black making their way to the enormous statue of Stalin by Hosok Square – when he saw all this, Gyuri regretted that he hadn’t been able to invite a film crew up to his flat to record for posterity the only part of him that was standing to attention, as it was readily interred and disinterred in an old girlfriend, married now but still eager to reminisce.

  Gyuri watched that newsreel several times, because there was one wide shot of the crowds around the Stalin statue which had microscopically featured his bedroom window, enabling him, with some imagination, to relive the joy of his only-just-off-camera mourning.

  But Stalin’s death, although derangingly enjoyable, hadn’t changed things much. Rákosi was a little less cocky and Nagy became Prime Minister. Gyuri heard rumours that people were being cleared out of the prisons, but Stalin stood monumentally on. The eight metre bronze statue, planted on the site of a church that had been demolished at the end of the war, was the main feature visible from Gyuri’s bedroom window and he had taken the positioning of the statue as a personal horseprick from Fate. Nagy, of course, was different to Rákosi. He had a moustache. Rákosi didn’t. Also, Nagy wasn’t completely bald. But the Stalin statue statued on, sodomising the Budapest skyline, sundering any remaining dignity from a city still recovering from its postwar hangover.

  This evening, Makkai appeared at the doorway of his flat without any doorbell prompting. ‘Three-two to the Germans,’ he said, ‘it must be a fix.’ Completely enraged by auditing, frustrated and bored with his accountancy course, in a stupor of fed-upness, Gyuri hadn’t been paying attention to the World Cup Final that was engrossing everyone else, Hungary vs. West Germany. He certainly hadn’t been in the mood for his English lesson but as Makkai had no phone he hadn’t had any means of cancelling it, so he turned up so as not to offend Makkai, who was a connoisseur of courtesy and did enjoy giving language lessons. Makkai didn’t charge very much for two hours although it was still a strain on Gyuri’s resources. But Gyuri felt that for Makkai teaching had less to do with the money (although he certainly needed it) than with importing an audience into his flat and that for a while he was taken seriously. Out on the street he was another pensioner, an old fart with no position, no clout, no job, no money, but in the instructing chair he was a skilled keeper of deep intellectual treasures.

  These infusions of esteem were vital to Makkai who would shed a few years during the course of his revelations about English syntax, pronunciation and life in England where he had once worked at the Hungarian embassy. ‘A marvellous building. We couldn’t have afforded it, but it was an inheritance from the Habsburgs. We got the old Habsburg building in London, the Austrians got Paris and the Czechs were very pleased about getting the building in Berlin. That’ll teach them.’

  Gyuri sat down and waited for Pataki who had suddenly decided that he should start learning English as well. Pataki had also decided that the ideal method for him to learn would be to sit in on Gyuri’s lessons. Gyuri had reminded Pataki that he was fairly advanced in his acquaintance with the English language but this hadn’t deterred Pataki who had assured him he would pick up the gist easily.

  ‘Three-two,’ Makkai repeated, stunned by the result of the football match, dumbfounded as everyone else in Hungary was, apart from Gyuri who was too preoccupied with the misery of accountancy. Along with the rest of the football team, Puskás, the man with the unstoppable feet and the golden toes, was the sole repository of national pride. Hungary, in accounting terms, had only one thing to its credit – Puskás the footballing genius. He was tubby, he looked a joke (even more than Pataki he would have nothing to do with training) but once he was on a football pitch he saw things that no one else did and would end up unfailingly whacking the ball into the net. The rest of the team was talented but Puskás was t
he diminutive giant of the side. They had even destroyed the English five-one, so everyone had been confident that the Germans would be vanquished in the final.

  ‘They must have been bought off. The Germans must have offered some bribe. They must have offered the government a loan or something. The team must have been ordered to lose,’ said Makkai.

  The lesson should have started five minutes previously but there was still no sign of Pataki. Makkai decided to indulge in a cup of coffee, Brazilian coffee routed into Budapest by a cousin living in Koln. ‘I was lucky. The customs people only stole half of it, normally the whole package disappears,’ commented Makkai. ‘Of course, I may be unfair to the customs, perhaps it was the postman who stole it.’ Gyuri’s polite refusal only lasted as far as the second offer.

  The English lessons had been going well. Gyuri had reached the point where he could boldly open a book and the page would hold no secrets for him. There might be murkiness and fleeting confusion but there would be no huge catch of meaning that could escape him. This rather pleased him: after all, his studies had been carried out on an intermittent basis, in the evenings when he was often half-dead from basketball. The main appeal of English was, he supposed, that it was only spoken by rotten imperialists, filthy bastards such as the bloated Wall Street Capitalists or the conniving British empire-builders. The appeal was that English was not only not compulsory like Russian, but that it was rather hard to study anywhere since it was viewed as lax, sullying, unsalubrious – unlike the bracing, cleansing cyrillic script.

  Gyuri had taken a number of exams in Russian which consisted of having a firm grip on phrases such as ‘Have the Steelworkers’ Trade Union delegates arrived yet, Comrade?’ or ‘How is the hegemony of the proletariat today?’ You could almost pass the exam by supplying a plethora of ‘comrades’ into the text or the conversation. Gyuri was proud of the fact that he had the lowest passes possible and that he had forgotten everything by the time he walked out from the exam, his self-collapsing knowledge gone.

  His English had only really been put to the test once, when a basketball coach from Manchester University came to visit and Gyuri was nominated to transmit understanding between the guest and his hosts. He had been horrified to discover that he didn’t understand a single word, not a single word the man was saying, so much so that he took aside the man from the Ministry and checked with him that the visitor really spoke English. ‘He should do,’ came the reply, ‘he’s a Scot.’ Gyuri resorted to inventing questions and statements approximately the length of the Scotsman’s speaking. Both sides ended up satisfied.

  ‘Here,’ said Makkai, handing over the coffee; it was strong enough to encaffeinate at five paces, dark, aromatic with abroad. Brazil, thought Gyuri taking a sip, lots of coffee, beach, Hungarian fascists. Despite the Hungarians, Brazil wouldn’t be such a bad destination.

  There was still no sign of Pataki who had never taken much interest in time and its regulated passage. Even if he had been sovietised to the point of having a dozen wrist-watches on his arm he couldn’t have kept an appointment. His lack of synchronisation with the rest of the country had become more pronounced since Bea had forsaken him. Pataki had never admitted it. He never conceded that Bea had dumped him, had dropped him from a great height, but Bea’s opening a liaison with one of Hungary’s most senior, most influential, most monied actors had coincided with Pataki staying in bed for three days, unable to muster enough courage to brush his teeth or even to join Elek for a tête-à-tête. ‘Come on,’ Gyuri urged after Pataki had remained connected to his bed for forty-eight hours, ‘pull yourself together and let’s go rowing.’ Pataki turned over onto his other side so that his melancholy would be unblemished by Gyuri.

  ‘Frankly, I can’t see the point of being conscious. It’s more trouble than it’s worth,’ Pataki had replied. ‘Be a man,’ Gyuri reiterated, ‘look how often I get the elbow.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re used to it,’ had been the response.

  Even Hepp had been unable to persuade Pataki to get vertical but he rose on the third day and Gyuri spotted him bouncing down the street dribbling a basketball with an air of haste. ‘What happened?’ he had asked.

  ‘I got an erection.’

  Twenty minutes late, Pataki entered, saying ‘Three-two to the Germans. It must have been fixed.’ Pataki and Makkai traded indignation on the infamy and turpitude of the age, much to Gyuri’s annoyance. However, once the lesson began, he regained his equilibrium and began to enjoy Pataki’s absolute bafflement at a language of which he didn’t understand a word, as Makkai yet again cruised the olfactory vocabulary of English, drawing on thirty adjectives to portray the miasmatic nature of his lodger’s crannies. Gyuri could tell that Pataki wouldn’t be back in a hurry.

  Showing them out of the flat, Makkai returned to the theme of his flatmate. ‘He’s doing a three-year course at the Party College. Three years! I mean how long does it take to learn to say “Yes, comrade”?’ He insisted on showing Pataki the interloper’s room to give a more forceful illustration of the magnitude of the stench. ‘What can I do? You don’t know a place where I can buy some powdered glass?’

  ‘Why not drop a letter to Andrássy út,’ suggested Pataki, ‘something on the lines of seeing him hanging around the American Embassy with a false moustache. If you could get a few dollars to slip under his pillowcase that would be a nice touch.’

  Makkai had been preparing to laugh but then realised Pataki wasn’t being facetious, and settled for a nod or two that could be interpreted any way you wanted.

  The tram was empty apart from Gyuri and Pataki but still indisputably public when Pataki pulled a thin manila folder from the large hold-all he used for hauling around his photographic paraphernalia. He handed it over to Gyuri. ‘It’s this year’s belated birthday present,’ he said.

  The file was marked with the AVH acronym, the latest rearrangement of the AVO’s name, and lower down with a lower-case ‘severely secret’. Inside was Gyuri’s form, his Ministry of the Interior file, his civic, ideological profile and worth. His date of birth and name were typed. His date of birth was incorrect and his middle name was misspelt. The only entry on the file, in a rather flourishing hand, in blue ink was ‘No particular remarks’. It was the most insulting assessment he had ever had, leaving the caustic remarks of his schoolteachers at the starting-line. The police state didn’t think him worth policing, not interesting enough to merit further consideration.

  ‘How did you get this?’ asked Gyuri, feeling distinctly uneasy holding such an Interior document in his hands.

  ‘Agnes, the singing secret policewoman. If you know whom to ask and how to ask you can get anything you want.’ Pataki, Gyuri knew, in the cursory way he was acquainted with the female figures that conveyor-belted their way through Pataki’s bedroom, had had an affair with a typist in the AVO who was also a singer in the AVO’s all-female choir brought out to croon on special occasions for the Soviet Ambassador. The reddest of Pataki’s girlfriends, she was also taking a night-course in scriptwriting at the College of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts, ‘to help crispen those confessions’ as Pataki had observed.

  ‘They didn’t have much to say on the subject of me,’ said Gyuri.

  ‘Let’s face it, you don’t join the AVO because you want to work. Mind you, you should see my file,’ said Pataki, pulling out a folder like a volume of an encyclopaedia. ‘I never would have guessed they had so many women working for them, including one very sexy chimney sweep that I briefly met in ’49. I haven’t read it all,’ Pataki paused to scan a few pages. ‘But there’s definitely someone grassing on us in Locomotive.’ He fished into his pocket, and produced a card. ‘But anyway, thanks to Agnes, I’m well prepared.’ He held an AVO identity card, with his picture and name.

  Gyuri’s lengthy astonishment had only started its journey into expression when, as the tram rumbled down the Muzeum Körút, they saw and heard the commotion of a large crowd around Bródy Sándor utca. ‘It’s not Lenin’s
mother’s birthday or something, is it?’ asked Pataki, although the gathering had an unfamiliarly unofficial air about it. They got off the tram to have a closer look.

  Hundreds of people were crowded around the headquarters of Hungarian Radio. It quickly became clear that the crowd was there on account of its displeasure with the result of the World Cup final. There were periodic bursts of rhythmic chants: ‘We want justice, we want justice’, and ‘It’s a swindle, swindle, swindle’.

  More than anything else, Gyuri was shocked by the flagrant public expression of sentiment. It was something he hadn’t seen for years, not since the ’45 elections. ‘Let’s take a closer look,’ said Pataki pushing through the people. The crowd was surging towards the entrance of the Radio where the AVO were out in a chain, armed and looking unhappy. Pataki was eager to get to the clashing point, and despite Gyuri’s reservations, the motion of the crowd kept pushing him closer to the irascible, gun-toting defenders of state authority.

  To add to Gyuri’s discomfiture, they had arrived just at the moment when the commanding officer was about to lose his temper. What the crowd was after, Gyuri couldn’t work out. Whether they considered the Radio a more tangible representative of power than the parliament and thus a target to vent their anger on, or whether they wanted to broadcast something, he couldn’t discern. Perhaps it was the commentary on the match they objected to. The commanding officer of the AVO detachment was repeating very loudly, again and again: ‘This is the last time. I’m telling you, move back and go home.’

  ‘This is the last time I’m telling you, you’re a wanker,’ shouted a man squashed next to Gyuri. The crowd was very angry and surprisingly sure of itself, bearing in mind the AVO were carrying guns and the crowd had nothing but its fury, and the AVO men patently fell into the category of crowd-shooters.