In the kitchen, as Gyuri lined up the ingredients for an omelette, Elek sidled up to whisper his warm admiration: ‘My congratulations.’ Gyuri didn’t want to register pleasure at Elek’s approval but it was pleasing nevertheless. Elek watched Gyuri’s egg-cracking with the admiration of the culinary illiterate. ‘You haven’t heard any more from young Pataki, have you?’ he asked.
Gyuri shook his head.
The fastest motorcycle in Hungary had been the root of Pataki’s departure. Or maybe one of the roots of it. Or maybe, Gyuri continued to reflect, really in the mood to push a metaphor around, just part of the foliage. Who knew?
The motorcycle had been a Motoguzzi, a mountain of a bike. Sándor Bokros had owned it originally. Bokros had, by a series of dazzling commercial speculations, starting in 1945, when there had been a widespread vogue for a really good wash, juggled a dozen bars of soap through ever-augmenting metamorphoses until he had half a dozen fur coats. Then Bokros left the country and went to Italy, where, according to reliable accounts, he had almost willied off his willy and bought the motorcycle. Suddenly, through some incomprehensible mental aberration, Bokros had returned to Hungary on his bike, just as the country’s borders were being sealed so tightly they lost fifty kilometres. Even in Italy there had only been a handful of bikes like that one and for the citizens of Budapest it was like something from Mars. Bokros had two problems: having to cope with an epidemic of adulation and street-enquiry and finding a stretch of road on which he could get out of first gear.
By the time Boleros realised that he should have opted for a totalitarianism that went in for long stretches of immaculate tarmac, it was too late. Everyone assumed it would end in tragedy, either his bike being nationalised, or him dying as a result of not seeing eye to eye with a Hungarian bend but what happened was as unforeseen as you could get. As he was overtaking, on a country road, a tractor with a load of fixed, upturned scythe-fittings on the back, one of the blades slid down, decapitating Bokros. ‘You don’t need much in the way of brains to ride a bike,’ Pataki had said at the funeral, mulling over the bike having carried on for half a kilometre without a head.
‘You’ll like Sándor, everyone does,’ was the way Bokros was always described. His brother, Vilmos, was described as one of those people who was disliked by everyone. Indisputably, Mrs Bokros hadn’t been eating enough affability when Vilmos was conceived. One of the most upsetting aspects about Sándor’s death had been that it meant the fastest motorcycle in the country would be passing into the hands of the loathsome Vilmos.
Vilmos fulfilled a useful function on the Locomotive team: everyone could rally round their dislike of him. Instead of suffering from a selection of grudges and vendettas, Locomotive could use Vilmos as the dustbin of enmity. He hardly ever played in a match because he wasn’t much good and because of one of the standard amusements on the way to a fixture – pushing Vilmos out onto a railway platform as the train was pulling away, ideally when he was wearing only his basketball boots. ‘Where’s Bokros?’ Hepp would ask. ‘We saw him going for a walk in Hatvan/Cegled/Veszprem’, someone would say. Vilmos discovered the only way of ensuring he wasn’t exposed in rather dull parts of the country with poor transportational possibilities was to barricade himself in the toilet until they reached their destination.
It was the week after Gyuri had lost his bet with Bokros on the outcome of the Army vs. Ironworkers football match.
Gyuri had confidently bet on the Army, not understanding why Bokros was being ostensibly that stupid, because he didn’t know as Bokros did that an international match had been fixed for the same day so that the Army was going to be stripped of all its best players. Gyuri was skint at the time but he had had his eye on a leather belt that had also formerly belonged to Sándor, so he had wagered in exchange for the belt, in an excess of colourful hyperbole, that Bokros could crap into his hands if the Ironworkers won. The Ironworkers did, but fortunately, out of the blue, Vilmos had grown a sense of humour.
Naturally, everyone gathered around for the show. Vilmos crouched down, and Gyuri obligingly hunkered down behind him ready to catch the fecal ball. ‘No fumbling,’ was the general exhortation. Honourably, Gyuri waited to settle his debt but Bokros, suddenly the centre of approval for devising such a wonderful entertainment, was laughing so much that he was incapable of invoking the muscular bailiffs to evict some tenants from his bowels.
‘Give me a newspaper,’ Bokros had instructed, hoping that reading some of Prime Minister Hegedus’s speech on Hungarian-Soviet relations would induce a state of tranquillity and sphinctal detente but the crowd eventually had to disperse in disappointment.
The following week, Gyuri had missed the preamble of the argument but the bet between Pataki and Bokros had grown out of a furious abuse session. It happened on Margit Island, after a training session and Gyuri entered as Pataki, who had recently been extremely tetchy, was telling Bokros what trash he was. Pataki was angry, and he looked angry, which was unusual in that he didn’t routinely hand out public bulletins on his feelings like that: Bokros, who you would have thought would have been quite used to being called a shit and so on, was greatly incensed.
‘Who do you think you are?’ he spat out. ‘Do you think you’re so great? That you’re so hard?’ Bokros almost ruptured himself getting the word out. ‘You toe the line when it matters.’
‘But I haven’t licked the arse of everyone at the Ministry of Sport, including the doorman.’
‘No, you’re so independent, the changing-room rebel, the revolutionary who’s going to bring everything down with some explosive whispered sarcasm… you haven’t got the guts to speak out. If you think it all stinks why don’t you say so?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Pataki, pointing at the White House across the river. Why doesn’t he just hit Bokros? Gyuri wondered. ‘You’ll have the chance to see what I think if you want. Let’s have a bet. You put up your bike against half of my salary for a year and I’ll run stark naked around the White House and give them a 360 degree view of my fine Hungarian bum.’
‘Done,’ said Bokros, made adamant by his anger and the certitude that Pataki wouldn’t attempt it. But Pataki waved in Gyuri and Bánhegyi. ‘Come on, I want witnesses.’
Gyuri had spent most of his life thinking that Pataki had gone too far, but he hadn’t felt so strongly that his friend was on course to crash head-on with destiny since that time in ’45 when Pataki had said to him: ‘Of course we should try out that revolver. Your mother won’t know. What do you think’s going to happen? The Russians are going to arrest us and have us shot?’
The White House was nominally the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior; it was mostly a haunt for the Hungarian Working People’s Party and the AVO. Some said it was the headquarters of the AVO, but the AVO taking no chances, seemed to have several headquarters: Andrássy út for one, plus a number of villas up in the hills of Budapest where they could beat people up in comfort and tranquillity.
The White House, as the Ministry in its well-appointed riverside location was popularly known, had a marked resemblance to a shoebox. The story went thus: the architect who had been commissioned to design it (not because he was a Party member, but because of his family background – his father had been a dipsomaniac and a worker manque, his mother a moderately successful prostitute, so he was valued as being suitably anti-bourgeois) had, in the recognised tradition of Hungarian architecture, namely boozing and gibbering excitedly, spent both the six months he had been allotted to create a plan and the commission fee, boozing and gibbering, telling everyone he met- building workers, shop assistants, proctologists, swimming pool attendants, paviours, percussion players and a man on the number two tram who was breeding leeches, waiting for their big comeback in medicine – that he had been commissioned to design the Ministry.
The architect was cruelly woken one morning by a phone call from Party headquarters saying they had been looking for him for a week and that he was expected that afternoon
to display the model of the new building and that Rákosi wasn’t in a very good mood. Luckily the architect didn’t have a hangover, as he was still drunk, having only just got to bed after three days’ revelling at a gypsy wedding in Mateszalka. He had enough clarity of mind to realise that he would be shot or if he were lucky he could spend the rest of a short life making uranium pies down a mineshaft under an unfashionable part of Hungary.
Desperately rummaging through his closet, he unearthed a model he had constructed years ago in his student days before the war, for a competition to build a luxury hotel in Lillafiired. The model was quite detailed, though the gothic towers weren’t in keeping with the latest thinking from Moscow but while this model would finish his career as an architect, it might save his life and allow a possibility of further boozing and gibbering. Who knows, Rákosi might even have a thing about gothic towers?
As he was dreaming up some brazen lies to accompany the model, he didn’t pay the necessary attention to pulling on his trousers and he keeled over, crushing the model beyond redemption and the most epic of his falsehoods.
Spotting a shoebox skulking in the closet, he remembered the words of his professor: ‘All the best ideas are accidents.’ (The professor had got the commission to build the Ethnography Museum because he had copied down the wrong address for a prospective client who wanted a layout for a cakeshop and had ended up on the doorstep of the head of the museum committee who had been won over by his gibbering.) Seizing the shoebox and drawing some windows on it, he started to improvise a speech making copious reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat. ‘I could have brought an elaborate model but surely in an era when the working people dictate…’
Then there was the Szell story. Every time Gyuri looked at the White House he recalled it. Szell and his father specialised in food-processing equipment and he had insisted that they had received a decree to install two king-sized meat-grinders in the basement of the White House, obviously to mince up those particularly difficult corpses for the fishes. Of course, both Szell and his father were inveterate liars. If they were facing a firing squad and you were to ask them, ‘Do you want your lives to be spared?’ they’d be forced to answer ‘No’. On the other hand, you could see how an ample meat grinder could come in handy and it was a good way of turning the blue Danube red.
Gyuri, Bánhegyi, Róka and even, in the end, Bokros, all tried to dissuade Pataki from executing the wager, but Pataki was, even in the bright sunshine, almost incandescent with anger. Bokros attempted to jolly down the situation, perhaps realising that the consequences of such an action might well injure even himself. ‘No,’ said Pataki walking off, ‘tomorrow, at twelve.’
Worried, Gyuri pondered how to divert Pataki from taunting the White House with his buttocks. Talking him out of it directly wouldn’t work and Gyuri was unsure which style of machination would have the desired effect. It was like lacking the right-sized spanner to undo a bolt; simple if you had the right tool, otherwise impossible.There was a formula of words that would make Pataki laugh and go rowing but Gyuri couldn’t think of the combination.
So alarmed was Gyuri that he even took the step of talking to Elek about Pataki’s planned run. Elek wasn’t taken aback; he showed no consternation at the prospect of losing his partner in nicotine, indeed he maintained his armchair aloofness. ‘I suppose you’ll be getting arrested with him, will you? They say prison is character-forming. Mind you, my character was already formed when they put me inside in Bucharest.’
‘You were in jail?’
‘Only for a few days. Bribery’
‘Bribery? Who did you bribe?’
‘No, the problem was I hadn’t bribed anyone. They were very upset.’
‘Look, Pataki’ll be in for more than few days.’
‘It’s very hard to work out why people do things. Back in Vienna, when I was in the Army, one of my friends ended up in a furious row over something trifling. The positioning of napkins in the officers’ mess – something like that. But he challenged this other fellow to a duel. We all took turns trying to get them to call it off. Apart from the chance of someone getting killed, duelling was furiously prohibited and droves of careers could have dropped dead like flies. The thing everyone was terrified of was losing face, so I put my arm round him and said “Józsi, this is a stupid misunderstanding. Grown men don’t behave like this. Honour’s honour, but you can’t shoot a fellow officer over a napkin.” I thought I was doing a good job when he looked at me and I can still remember this vividly, he was so passionate. “No,” he said to me. “You don’t understand. I want to blow his brains out.” Nothing to do with the napkin, of course, just the usual traffic jam on the thigh of a Viennese fraulein.
‘I’ll talk to Pataki if you want but I don’t think it’ll make any difference. These lunacies-in-waiting are usually readied well in advance, like all the best off-the-cuff remarks. It was the same with me resigning my commission; it had all the appearance of an extempore fed-upness but it had been in training for a considerable while. That was my problem with the Army, I just couldn’t take it seriously and that’s what they couldn’t forgive me for. I suppose people in any profession who don’t carry the due reverence are in trouble. But the whole military was a joke. Every time they get something good going they throw it open to the amateurs anyway and then a natural soldier sticks out like an oak in a meadow.
‘I’ll talk to Pataki if you want. But I’ll be surprised if he’ll listen. You never did.’
But that evening Pataki was nowhere to be found for dissuasion, so, at the appointed time they gathered on the Margit Bridge. Bokros had a pale, posthumous look since he wasn’t going to gain however the day went. He implored Pataki to refrain from his task. If he’d offered the bike, that might have tilted it, but he didn’t. ‘Better stay here’ Pataki suggested, entrusting Gyuri to look after the shortly-to-be-forfeited motorcycle.
‘This could take some time,’ Pataki said, trotting off towards the White House with the ease of a ruthless athlete. He was wearing his black tracksuit, until he reached the embankment adjacent to the Ministry.
From their vantage point on the bridge, Gyuri and Bokros watched as Pataki reduced his attire to Locomotive-style basketball boots. He looked tanned, relaxed and even from hundreds of metres away his muscles had precise definition. A superb musculature, Gyuri thought, recalling how Pataki had been in line to be the model for the naked proletarian Adonis-figure on the back of the new twenty-forint note. They had been looking for a striking example of the new Hungarian might and the artist had gone for Neumann who made a much more towering symbol of resurgence, justice and truth, of socialist invincibility and grit, and perhaps because Pataki had asked for money. ‘They’re not getting my pecs for free.’
All around the building there were guards. People weren’t exactly encouraged to walk past the Ministry. While on the one hand, the AVO felt it only right to have ostentatiously lavish headquarters by the Danube, the drawback to having a headquarters was that people knew where to find you, which obviously made the AVO slightly uneasy.
The guards were drowsy and clearly not accustomed to doing their job. Pataki had drawn up to the main entrance before they became noticeably stirred and perplexed by this challenge to workers’ power. Then one of the guards had the idea of chasing Pataki and the others thought this might be worth trying and followed his example. The guards were well armed, but not well legged. By judiciously using his acceleration, Pataki zipped ahead of them, dodging any newcomers, maintaining a few tantalising metres between himself and his collection of pursuers. He spurted round the corner of the Ministry taking a wake of guards with him, leaving the frontage of the White House deguarded, motionless and summery.
After a longer time than seemed possible, Pataki reemerged from the rear of the building and made his finishing line his starting point where he had left his tracksuit, looking satisfied that he had encircled the White House with his buttocks as his uniformed retinue caught up with him. T
he guards having apprehended Pataki’s unhidden hide were uncertain what to do. Finally a blanket and then a police van swallowed Pataki.
‘Oh, well,’ Bokros summed up. ‘The engine needs a rebore anyway.’
Most of the Locomotive team had decided to visit relatives in the countryside, to take lengthy hikes in the hills, or to reside at someone else’s address for a few days. Gyuri waited for the retributional spill-over at home, braced for interrogation and ready with a four-dimensional denial.
Five days after Pataki had blasted the White House with both his buttocks, Gyuri returned home to find Pataki about to take a shower. He was a bit stinky and his hair needed combing but otherwise he looked remarkably intact. ‘I hope you’ve brought your own soap, you free-loading bastard,’ Gyuri remonstrated and then unable to combat his curiosity any longer: ‘What happened?’
‘What do you mean?’ Pataki shouted from the shower ‘What do you mean, what happened?’
Pataki was soaping himself and Gyuri could see Pataki wasn’t going to give him the story just like that. ‘I thought the talent scouts from the AVO signed you up.’
‘Oh, that. Isn’t it obvious? I’m insane. Would anyone sane run naked around the Ministry of the Interior? You’re looking at an escaped lunatic. Could you fix me something to eat? We nutters eat the same sort of thing as you sane people.’
Pataki came into the kitchen, reading a letter which had been posted just before his escapade. The letter was from the Ministry of Sport informing him that his application for a scholarship abroad had been turned down. A slogan had been rubber-stamped further down the page, below the terse refusal: ‘Fight for Peace’.
‘Look at this,’ said Pataki waving the letter in disgust. ‘How can they expect me to live in a country where they put idiotic rubbish like this on every letter? I’m off.’
Under the Frog Page 20