He didn’t know much about Szeged but he knew enough, when the slob asked the way to the centre of town, to send him helpfully in the opposite direction.
Treasuring the miniature revenge, Gyuri set off to look for Sólyom-Nagy to fill up the time until the party in the evening.
The search for Sólyom-Nagy meant a lot of crisscrossing the university, making repeated treks to his room and asking randomly for his whereabouts, of which everyone denied all knowledge. By a process of elimination, eventually, Gyuri made his way to the library.
The university library had a duly grave, library-like dumbness, still with the sediment of millennia. Most libraries with their accumulated letters gave Gyuri an oddly reassuring sentiment. It’s okay, the books encouraged wordlessly, we’re here. Out there it might be lunacy piled up to the heavens, rubbish on the rampage, the havoc of mediocrity but we have no truck with stultiloquence; in here, it’s fathoms of culture, the best of the centuries. The Zelks sifted out, the poetasters and bores, the platitude-salesmen booted out. The invertebrates of the past, desiccated, powdered, crumbled, blown away, leaving only the bones of those with spines, those who were fortunate enough to have been backboned before Marx so they had no opportunity to cast aspersions on him and cast themselves into lectoral exile as a result.
The shelves served up the freedom to travel, thousands of escape hatches into countries, eras that Lenin had never heard of and that had never heard of Lenin (‘What happened in 1874?’ Róka had asked him the day before, coaching Gyuri for his Marxism-Leninism exam. ‘1874?’ ‘1874!’ ‘No idea.’ ‘Lenin was four’). Entering a library was always cleansing (as long as you didn’t tamper with anything published after 1945), though Gyuri could never settle down there because after a quarter of an hour or so he would break out into fidgeting, yearning to scratch his backside or stretch his legs, have a coffee, do anything but read. However vehemently he strove to immerse himself in his books, to hold his academic breath, he invariably had to come up for interludal air. When it came to studying he was a sprinter.
Then there was the trouser barking. The discipline and decorum of libraries were somehow great catalysts for the cultivation of amorous propensities. It was exactly because libraries weren’t supposed to be about sex that they were. Gyuri would sit down, soak up a few lines, and then, there she would be. No matter how empty it was, every library seemed to be provided with a young lady. No matter how fascinating the accountancy textbook he was reading, the entire crowd in Gyuri’s control-room would throng around the newcomer. The staid background of a library boosted the pulchritude of even the plainest girl to unbearable levels.
The speculation would begin. Would putting this in that affect the rest of her life? Would you need a machete to work your way through the sub-navel jungle? Density of the venereal grass was a tiresomely recurring theme, the irrigation of the delta, the borders of the areolae. The panel would raise the same questions again and again, until the curiosity made him ache and he was out of breath. If only he could have diverted some of this torrent, he would have been the president of a medium-sized country somewhere. It was perpetual motion. It might slow down but it never stopped. He would sit in the library and the quim styles would rotate: the doormat? the black sheep? the winter tree? the pom-pom? the paintbrush? the chainmail? His vision would tunnel down to mons size.
Ascending the various levels of Szeged University ’s library, Gyuri kept on not seeing Sólyom-Nagy. He remembered that Attila József had been a student there, this making the staircases fractionally more interesting. For some reason Pataki had been very angry about József. Gyuri had caught Pataki kicking a volume of his poetry about. József had been so insanely poor and insane that he had no choice but to become a poet. So poor he couldn’t even afford to starve in a garret and so insane he had thrown himself under a train at a good age, thirty-two, though some might quibble that thirty-two was the outside limit for a young and tragic death, especially since his life had been so unremittingly awful it was hard to understand why he had waited that long.
József had also been the only person with any character, and certainly the only one with any feeling for the Hungarian language, to join the Communist Party, which he had done, driven by an incurable loneliness, in the thirties when the Party was illegal. He had been expelled almost immediately for having the temerity to think, saving himself from iniquity and saving the Party’s record of unblemished imbecility.
Sólyom-Nagy cast his absence all over the library. Passing one studious lady with a window-seat, Gyuri’s gaze dovetailed with hers and he realised it was Jadwiga, the Polish girl he had met the week before, slightly obscured now by glasses. Having exchanged mute greetings Gyuri moved on to check a few remaining biblionooks, full of books, devoid of Sólyom-Nagy. Sólyom-Nagy wasn’t such riveting company but what was he going to do until the evening?
He retraced his steps to where Jadwiga was reading behind fortifications of books, thinking that if nothing else Solyom-Nagy and university life should provide enough conversational substance to cover a coffee. Jadwiga agreed to Gyuri’s suggestion and spent a few moments packing away the paraphernalia of study with a thoroughness that caused Gyuri much envy. Bookmarks went into the books, pencils into a box, the books joined stacks and the notes were herded together into a pack, then all the academic utensils were brought together into a neat heap. Jadwiga took her coffee breaks seriously.
In the café, they split up, Jadwiga holding down a table while Gyuri went off to queue for the coffees. When he returned with them, the second chair had vanished from the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jadwiga, as if waking from sleep, ‘I didn’t notice anyone take it.’ The café was full and Gyuri had to wander around to filch a seat. Some pale fresher who was guarding a set of chairs lost one to Gyuri, who was looking sufficiently dangerous and violent as a result of his early rising not to meet with any protest.
‘So, is Sólyom-Nagy a good friend of yours?’ Gyuri inquired.
‘No,’ Jadwiga smiled mischievously, ‘I don’t have many good friends.’
She was studying Hungarian literature. She measured out the conversation, enough to cover politeness but no more. Gyuri had to squeeze inquisitorially to picture her background. Her Hungarian was frighteningly good, with only the slightest accent, almost deliberately maintained to give a little exotic charm; it was merely a reminder that she shouldn’t be mistaken for a Hungarian. Because it was true and because praising women had never done up any buttons, Gyuri said:
‘Your Hungarian is better than most Hungarians. I think you must also have the distinction of being the only non-Hungarian to learn Hungarian this century. What made you do it?’
‘My father was here during the war. It’s a family interest.’ There had been hordes of Polish soldiers passing through Budapest during the war, Gyuri recalled, escaping from one front to go and fight on another. Hard, determined men, upset that they were momentarily unable to kill anyone and puzzling over who should be first on the slay-list, the Germans or the Russians. Oddly enough in a region where nations spent most of their time trying to figure out which of their neighbours they hated the most, the Poles and the Hungarians were centuries-deep friends. There was even a couplet, available in both languages, commemorating how much the two nations enjoyed putting the boot in and drinking together. It seemed a bizarre desire to go to Hungary to learn the language, but on the other hand, he had tried to get to China, and even Poland, red as it was, would have made a change. He had been chosen for the fixture in Gdansk the year before, his smiling face had been on the publicity poster but he had again been refused a passport. Even Hepp had been surprised by that. Still, Gyuri certainly felt that he could do something to further Hungarian-Polish relations. Mentioning the party that was being co-sponsored by Sólyom-Nagy, Gyuri asked Jadwiga if she would be going.
‘I haven’t been invited,’ she said, adding to further extinguish Gyuri’s overture, ‘I’m not very keen on parties.’ After allowing a seemly period
to elapse after the consumption of her coffee, Jadwiga rose to resume her studies. Gyuri accompanied her, on the off-chance that Sólyom-Nagy had surfaced in the library, though this, he had to concede, was unlikely, unless it was a question of Sólyom-Nagy smuggling out a few valuable books to find new lives with fee-paying owners.
He left the building without Sólyom-Nagy but with Jadwiga’s room number at the student hostel which she had imparted with only the slimmest hesitation. It never did any harm to know where intriguing Polish women were located. She was, he guessed, nineteen, twenty, but she had a spiritual weight well in advance of her years and a flirtation technique that was superb in handing out the sparsest of clues.
Gyuri wandered around Szeged, not seeing Sólyom-Nagy at all. Szeged, as Hungarian towns went, was quite large: it took five minutes to walk from one end to the other, but it was still peculiar that he hadn’t bumped into Sólyom-Nagy. Had he got the date wrong? Was Sólyom-Nagy in Budapest? When in doubt, have lunch – which he did standing up in a butcher’s, working his way through a csabai sausage with bread and a miserable mustard that marred his gusto. After lunch, he decided to have another lunch, after which he returned to the university to prowl for Sólyom-Nagy. He did the now familiar circuit of the dormitory, the grounds, the library.
He knocked on Jadwiga’s door. He heard the sounds of occupancy. ‘I missed you,’ he said as she opened the door. She scrutinised him for a long second, then admitted him. ‘I hope you like tea,’ she said, ‘because that’s all I can offer you.’ As a veteran of impecuniosity, Gyuri immediately read penury in her room. It was clinically smart, causing Gyuri to admire once again the miraculous ability women had to automatically instil order, having that morning stumbled through various items on his bedroom floor, items which had certainly been there when he had started his accountancy studies.
It was as Jadwiga picked up a kettle to boil the water that Gyuri received two co-nascent bulletins from the back-room boys. One thought, how elegant and graceful she was, how she made picking up a kettle touchingly, triumphantly erotic. Optically revisiting her bosom, arms and legs, he appreciated how lithe and athletic she was. Lucky: she had the sort of slender age-resistant frame that would provide the same conjugal scenery at forty as at sixteen.
The second thing that barged into Gyuri’s attention was the certitude that he wanted to marry her. That was surprising. He had never felt wedlockish before; indeed the idea of an additional bond to Hungary, anything that would make his flight less streamlined, was anathema. So this was what it felt like. But here it was, unannounced, without any warning, no throat-clearing – the notion that he wanted to get married, as precisely defined and as urgent as a craving for chocolate cake. Was he going crazy? He pondered this development while Jadwiga boiled the water on the gas ring down the corridor. Old Szocs had been right.
On the wall was a roughly-hewn wooden crucifix, the sort of thing a pious peasant with time on his hands would do. Maybe Stalin was dead, maybe this was 1955 after all, but this was tantamount to having a two-metre marble horseprick deposited outside the Rector’s office. Clearly, it wasn’t just Jadwiga’s breasts that were firm. Gyuri welcomed the audacity, but wondered whether there would be theological tape interfering with the expedition down south?
In a way, Gyuri regretted having the tea and the rather wretched biscuit that Jadwiga offered him since he had the feeling he was consuming half her worldly goods; the tea she had had to scoop out of the bottom of a tin and the biscuit, he suspected, had been stored up for a special occasion, which he wasn’t. An offer of supper, as long as he could find a ridiculously cheap restaurant, was doubly required.
‘Could you help me with the window?’ she asked. ‘It’s a bit stuffy in here.’ She was standing by the window, pushing against its stuckness. How did she do it? The request couldn’t have been more exciting if she had asked him to take off all her clothes. The window didn’t need that much persuading, but even if it had been nailed down, it would have been shooting open, Gyuri was experiencing such vigour.
Jadwiga still wouldn’t relent on the party, or having supper. ‘I’m behind with my work,’ she said steadfastly. This refusal didn’t bother Gyuri unduly. Intuitively, he sensed that it wasn’t powered by a desire to extricate herself from his company. Her regimented books testified to her earnestness. Unusually for someone at university, she was interested in her studies. The biscuit, lone and sagging as it had been, prevented Gyuri from being discouraged. He felt their lines were converging, not staying parallel. This was love at the first cup of tea.
He withdrew to let her study for a while and to craft some advances. Sólyom-Nagy was now back in his room. He apologised for his absence owing to several trips to collect fluid supplies for the evening.
The party was held at the Theatre. Gyuri who had thought he had seen professionally debauched festivities in Budapest had anticipated a more provincial level of bacchanalia but he had to concede that that night in Szeged was nothing but arrestable and immoral behaviour. It was indisputably the fastest social event he had ever attended. There was a hip-bath on stage in which Sólyom-Nagy mixed what he billed as the largest cocktail ever fashioned in Hungary, a triumph of socialist planning involving Albanian brandy, ice cream, vodka and other things that no one could or would identify.
Within half an hour of the hipbath opening for business, there were people unable to prise themselves off the floor. Gyuri had only one small glass which he sipped pensively and he was very glad he hadn’t emptied it down his neck like the others. It already seemed to him that the stage had grown a vicious slope.
Agnes was there, whom Gyuri hadn’t seen for years. That was the problem with a small country: you were always walking into your past. Gyuri had heard that she had gone to Szeged to study. For a lengthy period of time Gyuri had asked her out. Pataki had been squiring her best friend, Elvira. Gyuri asked, Agnes ducked. ‘She always goes out with the friend of whoever’s going out with Elvira,’ Pataki had encouraged, insisting that Agnes had already indicated her approval of Gyuri’s merits.
However, whenever Gyuri proposed some social union, Agnes always produced some excuse. There was no untreated refusal. She never gave the same excuse twice and they ranged from hair-washing to one twenty-minute apology featuring an escaped lion from Budapest Zoo where her brother was the deputy Party Secretary. Gyuri remembered that the plot began with an attempt to shift elephant shit in a more socialist and scientific manner, applying only the strictest of Marxist-Leninist principles. It was without doubt the longest alibi Gyuri had endured, and, since he doubted that Agnes’s imagination was up to it, probably true, but at the end of it she said that, sadly, she couldn’t go to the cinema. Gyuri would have taken off his chasing shoes long before if it hadn’t been for Pataki’s protestations that he had approval from flight control. ‘Just ask her out,’ he censured impatiently.
Finally, after listening to dozens of instalments about Agnes’s crammed time, since she wasn’t the sort to engender rabid desire, Gyuri had let it drop. After all, Gyuri had reasoned, if it was going to be unrequited love and regular humiliation, it might as well be unrequited love and regular humiliation at the hands of a prodigiously attractive female, which would be a shade less humiliating. ‘You don’t know how to ask. You just don’t know how to ask,’ Pataki had commented.
Agnes seemed sorry about past misunderstandings, as she was crying, as indeed many people were. The acceleration from initial jocularity to maudlin impotence had been phenomenal. An hour after the kick-off at eight o’clock, there was already a three o’clock in the morning atmosphere.
‘I’m so sorry, Gyuri,’ she sobbed. Her contrition seemed genuine because she kept repeating this with her head slumped on Gyuri’s chest. He assumed her grief was to do with her rejections of him, though it was hard to tell. At the behest of hormonal petition, Gyuri thought about a bareback waltz against a sequestered wall somewhere but discarded the idea. He didn’t want to gain admission to the club becau
se there was no one on duty at the door, and besides, although part of him was already working on self chastisement for not taking what was offered to him on the tray of his sternum, he realised that he’d rather be with Jadwiga. He’d rather be sitting with Jadwiga chatting about some Hungarian writer, than taking a tongue tour of Agnes, or indeed any other highly acquiescent lady. You always get what you want when you don’t want it, he concluded, dumping Agnes into a more comfortable bit of aisle where she could continue her soliloquy.
He left and was braced by the cool night air which swept out some of the alcoholic debris left by Sólyom-Nagy’s concoction. He learned later from Sólyom-Nagy that two actresses who had been dancing on a prop coffin, had, shortly after Gyuri’s departure, taken off all their clothes. There had been no risk of them being voted the most beautiful women in Szeged, or indeed the most beautiful women at the party, but still, whoever got tired of naked actresses? Sólyom-Nagy had also reported the arrival of the police who were summoned because of a group jumping out of the theatre bar, a drop of twenty feet to the pavement below, as the result of some inebriated logic. The neighbours complained to the police because of the loud noise made by the jumpers as they laughed raucously about their broken ankles.
The police story was better. ‘I left the party five minutes before the police arrived’ made better narration than ‘I left the party five minutes before two actresses stripped naked.’
As Gyuri approached the student hostel, he could see a light in what he surmised was Jadwiga’s room. That was all you needed: a lit window in the distance, the knowledge that there was something there, something to work for. The company of a dwarfy hope.
Under the Frog Page 18