Under the Frog

by Tibor Fischer

  The commanding officer kept telling everyone to disperse and those not immediately in front of him but well within earshot kept telling him he was a wanker. Gyuri, riding high on the crowd’s sum, shouted profanities since it seemed the done thing. The AVO pressed forward. The crowd pressed back, three AVO men went down and there was a joyous shout of ‘I’ve got him in the bollocks’. A stone shattered a window in the Radio building.

  Then there was a burst of fire into the air. The entertainment was over. Gyuri and apparently lots of others thought that dying would be an over-reaction to the Hungarian goalie having fumbled one ball. He ran as fast as he could in the millimetre of space that he had between him and the person in front. The AVO was coming in with the rifle butts. It took a while to unclog the street, but people were soon running away full pelt from the Radio.

  Gyuri, who had been monopolising all his concentration on leaving the vicinity as rapidly as possible, found that Pataki had disappeared. He wasn’t worried that Pataki was one of those lying in the street trying to hold their heads together. He had probably picked up some comely rioter.

  He got home to find Elek listening to the radio denouncing the hooligans who had been running wild in the streets of Budapest. It was nice to be famous.

  ‘I learned something interesting tonight,’ Gyuri recounted to Elek. ‘Hungarians don’t mind dictatorship, but they really hate losing a football match.’

  November 1955

  The man was snoring, snoring so loudly, so rattlingly, that even if one had been over-dosed with tolerance, it would have been too much. Gyuri and the other passengers, only equipped with everyday indulgence, found their forbearance crushed like an aphid under a sledgehammer.

  The man had the look of an engineer, something lowly and civil, the pens in his shirtpocket spoke of a rudimentary learning and erudition; the adept way he blew his nose with the aid of his right hand and with one motion hustled the catarrh out of the open window spoke of too much time on building sites. He had got on the train at Budapest and placed his dowdy belongings on the overhead rack, sat down in one of the seats next to the door, leaned his head against the glass and turned on the sleep, instantly, without any preamble.

  Within a few seconds the snoring had commenced, as if approaching them from a great distance, faint at first but growing steadily to a prodigious din erupting from the man’s open mouth. Everyone else had looked at each other, first with a sort of tacit amusement that had progressed to bemusement and carried on to irritation. The odd thing about people behaving badly, Gyuri noticed, letting their boorishness slop out onto others, was that it was usually the victims who were embarrassed rather than the perpetrator.

  The volume of the snoring was phenomenal. A mild, intermittent rasping might have been bearable but the engineer’s lungs pummelled everyone’s eardrums mercilessly. Also, truthfully, it was most unwelcome to be privy to the detailed internal workings of a corpulent engineer – to have a ringside perspective on his respiratory adventures. There were sporadic lulls, producing an optimistic sense of relief, of the auditory siege being lifted, but these interludes of silence while the snoring caught its breath only made the restored gurgling more serrated.

  Gyuri, at the opposite end of the compartment, had no contiguous opportunity to impede the snoring but those closer attempted to trip up the volume. Discreet coughs followed by indiscreet coughs, yells, proddings and shovings didn’t succeed in making him miss a slumbering beat. The woman in the headscarf started clucking loudly, as if giving the traditional imitation of a chicken. The snoring faltered and disappeared under the onslaught of the clucking. ‘It always works with my husband,’ she said proudly but as she did the snoring pulled out into the fast lane again. The man opposite tried trailing a powerful garlic sausage under the sleeper’s nose. Nothing. The engineer snored on blissfully.

  The flawless repose, the effortless snoozing excited Gyuri’s admiration as well as irritating him. He could never sleep on trains, or at best, could only achieve a disorientating stupor that was worse than being tired.

  The sausage-waver was becoming edgy and aggressive towards the morpheused slob who was wholly indifferent to the implorings and digitings he was getting. If it hadn’t been for the obvious passage of air in and out of his workings, the sleeper’s lack of response would have been rather worrying, so loath was his body to do its job and pass on the complaints.

  ‘My dear sir, you’re snoring rather loudly,’ said the bespectacled protester, giving another push to the snorer. To flee the palatal thunder, Gyuri left the compartment.

  What a gift to be able to sleep like that, he thought. How agreeable to sleep through the entire thing, to only wake up when everything had changed. That was one of the worst things: the boredom. Dictatorship of the proletariat, apart from the abrasive and brutal nature of its despotism, was terribly dull. It wasn’t the sort of tyranny you’d want to invite to a party. Look at the great tyrannies of antiquity: Caligula, Nero, now there was tyranny for you, excess, colour, abundant fornication, stage management, excitement on the loose, panem et circenses. What have we got? brooded Gyuri. Hardly any panem and as for the circenses, only the sort involving people running around wearing red noses.

  Not only do I get a dictatorship, fumed Gyuri, but I get a tatty dictatorship, a third rate, a boring dictatorship. I could have stayed in Budapest and watched Boris Godunov, he thought. He had only seen it four times. Another, somewhat unacknowledged triumph of the new order was that you could always watch Boris Godunov any time you wanted to. After all, there were only so many Russian operas to choose from. Róka, entwined with a singer, had acquired an unquenchable taste for opera and had invited Gyuri to accompany him to see his fiancée in action. It was amusing to see all the policemen and steelworkers packed into the front rows of the auditorium, whether they wanted to be there or not. (At Ganz the lathe-turners had drawn lots to allocate the tickets distributed to them by the Party secretary, many preferring to do an extra shift rather than having to face the music.) Gyuri had put in attendance at Boris Godunov the month before so he had decided to go down to Szeged to investigate the party for which Sólyom-Nagy had been acting as harbinger.

  In the next compartment, a beautiful girl was talking animatedly to a female friend with the bounce of the attractive. With the right looks, a good stock of beauty, you were always going to come out on top, it was the life-belt that would keep you floating on the surface. Sadistically, she licked her lips and dangled her left calf, crossed over her right leg, energetically in a manner and in a brisk rhythm that even someone without Gyuri’s unifilar mind would have found reminiscent of riding the unirail.

  Why, lamented Gyuri, does the beautiful girl never sit in my compartment? Why am I always lumbered with the noisy oaf? Admitting to himself, as he returned to his compartment, as he was old enough to know, that if she had been sitting in the compartment he wouldn’t have been able to craft any conversational grappling-hooks or have the nerve to use them.

  The passenger who had been trying to stop the slob sleeping aloud had finally despaired of polite memos to the snorer’s nervous system. He arranged the sleeper’s hand into overhanging the doorway and then slammed shut the sliding door in a vigorous attempt to guillotine the fingers. The sleeper awoke but only with a mild grunt of surprise as if he had dropped off unexpectedly.,

  ‘So sorry,’ apologised the door-slammer, ‘I seem to have caught your fingers.’ The slamee wasn’t bothered at all. He proceeded to unwrap a rug-sized piece of paper from which he dug out three greasy fried chicken wings which he ate with such gusto and noise that everyone felt they had a molar eye’s view of the mastication. The general relief that came when he had chomped the last of the chicken was promptly dispelled when, on the count of three, sleep was resumed and the slob carried on snoring from where he had left off. Szeged was still two hours away.

  As a putative employee of the railways, Gyuri travelled free, but this didn’t make the trip any less onerous. When you’
re eighteen, you’ll travel to the other side of the earth for a party, he thought, sensing how he needed to talk himself into the pursuit of pleasure now.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Elek had said, struck by a wave of paternity. ‘There is a season to these things. 1911 in my case. In 1911, I couldn’t so much as say hello to a woman without her running away or calling the police. The whole year there was this great wall of China between them and me. Nations, individuals, they all have their ups and downs. Pussy shortage doesn’t last.’ This paternal wisdom might have been more consoling if Elek hadn’t been coiffuring himself prior to some nocturnal escorting of one of his female acquaintances. Pataki had doubtless passed on gleefully to Elek the news of Gyuri’s latest failure, an unprecedented hat trick of romantic flops.

  On Andrássy út, Gyuri, having bumped into István’s wife’s youngest sister, had been introduced to two shapely netball players she had in tow. He had taken advantage of their fortuitous discussion of a new film to propose a joint outing. The film, like all Hungarian films, would be rubbish, but it might help to flush out the girls’ evaluation of him. And the beauty of suggesting the film was that he hadn’t, technically, asked the netball players out, so that a refusal would be a rejection of the film rather than his charms. This appeal to culture was necessary because: his self-confidence was pavement-high, and also, because from such a cursory reading of the netball players’ interest meters he hadn’t been able to ascertain how keen they were to admit him to the two-legged amusement park. Then there was the question of balancing their inclination towards him with his inclination to them; the blonde was more attractive, but on the other hand it would be foolish to pass up the brunette if she were unattached and itchy.

  The invitation would act as a form of natural selection; the less eager being less likely to attend, it would be survival of the amorous. Determined to put his fist through his bad luck, Gyuri had also issued a third summons to another aspiring accountant, Ildikó, whom he had got to know in the library by fetching a book for her from a top shelf that she had been struggling to reach.

  Standing outside the cinema, Gyuri congratulated himself on his blunderbussing his misfortune, overcoming his jinx by a concerted human wave attack. However, as the film started with no trace of the girls, so did his perplexity and the choking sensation that he had been stood up in triplicate. By trebling the odds, he had trebled his penalty. And he had had no chance to sell the other three tickets. He had been skint and although Gyurkovics owed him a hundred forints, it was exactly because he had been so hard up that he hadn’t been able to ask for it because it would have looked as if he had been extremely hard up which he didn’t want.

  Gazing out the train window, through the snoring, Gyuri could see peasants engaged in doing something autumnally agricultural. Too stupid to find the road to the city, Gyuri chuckled, confidently conurbational. Still, someone had to grow potatoes. And someone had to film them. As part of his acolyteship at the College of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts, Pataki had been out in the countryside, acting as tripod carrier for a newsreel crew he had been assigned to study in action.

  They had gone to the village of Zsámbék, the closest representative of hamletness and unabashed bucolicality to Budapest, only an hour’s drive away. The story the newsreel crew was covering was the fourth and a half anniversary of the collective farm which might have been connected with the need of the director, Gáti, to acquire some comradely crates of white wine for his garden parties.

  Even in the artistic circles of Budapest, where the entry fee was egomania, Gáti had tantrummed his way to prominence. However, for some reason he had interpreted Pataki’s presence as homage, as a tribute from one eager to learn the secrets of documentary filming from a master, and Gáti warmly took him under his wing although Pataki would far sooner have been rowing. ‘It’s a shithole, this place,’ Gáti said, surveying Zsámbék. ‘I think I voted here in ’47. Mind you I voted everywhere in ’47. How many people can say they voted sixty times in a general election? These three-duck hovels all look the same though. Me and the Second District Communist Youth Committee, we spent the whole day driving around, voting. Bloody tiring, democracy.’ They were standing in the office of the collective farm. Feeling it was time to do some directing, Gáti shouted out of the window at the cameraman who was contemplating various angles: ‘Janos, I want you to capture that feeling of historic achievement, okay?’ Then he returned to glugging rows of local wines. ‘Rule number one: know what you want. Rule number two: good casting. Good casting does all the work for you. I’ve already got the centre character, Uncle Feri. He’s the village elder, as it were, who’s been through decades of suffering, hunger, exploitation etc., etc., but who in his contented old age can comfortably beam on the gains of the people, happy in the knowledge that future generations will never know want or hardship, thanks to the application of scientific socialism etc., etc.’ Gáti emptied the glasses of wine as if pouring them down a sink.

  ‘Uncle Feri’s the perfect candidate. I found him when I came down last week. Research… research is everything. This yokel is perfect. He’s got a moustache that must be half a metre long. He oozes earthy wit, rustic swagger. Everyone’s Uncle Feri. He thinks he doesn’t want to do it but I’ll make a star of him.’ There were only a couple of glasses left. ‘And remember, rule four: you can never talk too much to your cameraman.’ Gáti leaned out the window: ‘Janos, you finished?’ To Pataki: ‘You’ll go far. You know how to listen.’ To the chairman of the collective farm: ‘Great. We’ll take the lot.’

  His arm avuncularly around Pataki, Gáti went out to the fields for key shots. ‘Where’s our Uncle Feri?’ he shouted.

  ‘Uncle Feri is gravely ill,’ explained the chairman. He had rounded up a selection of aged, gnarled peasants for Gáti to choose from. ‘You see,’ said Gáti to Pataki in what was probably a failed whisper, ‘people always interfere. They all think they know best. They all think they’re film directors. Come on, where’s the coy old bugger?’

  The chairman, the mayor and the Party secretary all explained in succession, very apologetically, that old Feri really was very ill and wouldn’t he be satisfied with another, carefully approved, suitably decrepit codger? Gáti just laughed and ordered to be taken to Feri’s abode where the priest was timidly administering the last rites.

  ‘Cut that out, or we’ll have you nicked,’ said Gáti, who was joking, but it looked to Pataki as if the priest had shat himself. ‘How are you, Uncle Feri?’ said Gáti, giving him a hearty slap which produced no noticeable reaction since Feri was too busy dying. ‘He looks fine to me,’ Gáti pronounced, but the cameraman and Pataki had to laboriously carry Uncle Feri out because none of his body was in working order. Even if Uncle Feri had wanted to issue instructions to his legs, they wouldn’t have paid any attention.

  Gáti strode on to find a good spot while Pataki, the cameraman and the chairman transported Uncle Feri who was light as peasants went but still an uncomfortable burden. ‘This is it,’ said Gáti, surrounded by burgeoning husks of corn. ‘This filmically says it all,’ he announced as the peasant-porters struggled up.

  ‘Yes,’ interposed the chairman, ‘but this doesn’t belong to the collective. This belongs to Levai. He jumped out of the window at the meeting when everyone had to sign over their land.’

  Gáti wasn’t bothered. Fortunately, there was a wooden gate they could leave Uncle Feri leaning against, since his legs wouldn’t have supported him.

  ‘Okay, roll,’ called Gáti. ‘Now, Uncle Feri, how old are you?’

  Uncle Feri didn’t say anything- he seemed to be concentrating on breathing.

  ‘How old is he?’ Gáti asked the chairman.

  ‘I don’t know. Seventy something.’

  ‘Okay, so, Uncle Feri,’ continued Gáti, ‘how does it feel to see the achievements of the new Hungary?’ Uncle Feri still failed to respond. Gáti tried another question: ‘Uncle Feri, how do you feel gazing on the wonderful changes that have taken pl
ace here in Zsámbék?’ Uncle Feri remained mute. Pataki had no doubt that if Uncle Feri had had the power of locomotion he would have walked off by now. But all he could manage to do was to cling onto the gate. Gáti patiently let the camera turn, waiting for Uncle Feri’s views. After a minute or so, Uncle Feri started to cry.

  ‘This is great,’ exclaimed Gáti, ‘he’s moved to tears by the successes of people’s democracy. Get a close-up. We can write into it.’ Pataki found Gáti’s explanation unconvincing and reasoned that Uncle Feri’s weeping was caused by his dying in a field, on camera.

  According to Pataki, Uncle Feri survived his moment of posterity but not for long. Well-mannered, he waited till he was returned home before pegging out while Gáti loaded up the van with crates of wine, reiterating ‘Did you see that moustache?’

  Knowing what you wanted helped a lot, reflected Gyuri.

  What are your ambitions?’ Makkai had asked him the first time he had gone to him for English lessons when he had revealed to Gyuri that, at the age of four, he had been placed on a bareback horse in (as Makkai claimed) the traditional Magyar fashion to test his fortune and fortitude. The question had made Gyuri realise that he didn’t have any ambitions as such, just a wish- to get out. It seemed embarrassing somehow not to have ambitions, a sort of lack of social grace, an ignominious shortcoming. Something like billionaire or ruler of the planet would be nice though. He wouldn’t refuse that. Perhaps his failure to have gone shopping amongst the stalls of ambition was due to Elek’s forgetting to place him on a saddleless horse when he was four.

  * * *

  Gyuri had been hoping that the slob would remain asleep and overshoot Szeged, but with the same precision the driver of the train used to bring the carriages alongside the platform, the slob timed the moment to eject from sleep. By this stage, Gyuri was the only one left in the compartment, the others having fled under the relentless bombardment of zeds.