Under the Frog

by Tibor Fischer

  Pataki for some time had been trying to raise the subject of getting out. This had meant that Pataki talked about it while Gyuri was in earshot. The subject had become fascinating for Pataki, chiefly because Bánhegyi had been moved to work in the international freight department of the railways. Bánhegyi, like all the Locomotive players, wasn’t actually required to work, but when he popped in to collect his wages he had access to all the information. It was an extremely hazardous way to get out, but then there were only extremely hazardous ways to get out. If it hadn’t been for Jadwiga, if Gyuri had been on his own, he would have given it a go, but he wasn’t willing to expose Jadwiga to the risk, although knowing her, she wouldn’t refuse. He had something to lose. Pataki should have taken up the offer in ’47.

  Pataki insisted that they should hunt down Bánhegyi. ‘I feel like leaving before the doctors catch me.’ Providence was evidently in the mood to grant Pataki his wish because they found Bánhegyi just returning from a dislocation-certifying session with the doctor. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there are trains going out but I can’t be sure where the trains are going to. They chop and change the forms a lot.’ Bánhegyi wanted to wait a few days to study the opportunities, but Pataki wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Thinking about it isn’t going to make it any easier,’ he said. So at midnight they went down to the sidings and breaking the seal on a freight-wagon, prized it open. It was full of shoes. ‘Shoes are risky,’ said Bánhegyi, ‘they can go East or West.’

  ‘Is there anything else available tonight?’ asked Pataki.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fine. This will do.’ He climbed aboard with a bag containing two loaves, cheese, six apples, a bottle of mineral water and three bottles of Czech beer whose last place of residence had been the Fischer flat. ‘Getting drunk is one of the few amusements possible in a dark freight-wagon full of shoes,’ said Pataki defending his choice of company.

  They agreed on means of communication. ‘Even if it’s Siberia, do drop us a postcard,’ urged Gyuri.

  ‘Sure,’ said Pataki. ‘And let my parents know in a day or two. Tell them I would have told them but it’s easier for everyone this way.’ He handed Gyuri an envelope. ‘That’s a blanket apology for them. And tell them not to look for granddad’s wedding ring. I’ve got that. Does anyone know how many years you can get for this?’ He looked at Gyuri. ‘You’re really not coming, are you?’

  ‘Things can’t go on like this much longer.’

  They closed the door and Bánhegyi resealed the wagon with the official implement.

  23rd October 1956

  On his way to the Ministry of Sport (as everyone referred to the National Committee for Physical Education and Sport which liked to pretend it wasn’t a ministry, since a ministry would detract from the atmosphere of amateurism they tried to cultivate) Gyuri spotted a ticket-inspector getting on the tram. Gyuri didn’t have a ticket. He never had a ticket. He had never had a ticket. Gyuri hadn’t paid a filler for public transport since the last years of the war. Furthermore, in all that time he had never even so much as contemplated paying. Not for a moment. This was, firstly, because he didn’t feel like handing over any of his money to the state, however trivial the sum, and secondly, because the trams were normally so crowded, only a risible percentage of his body got in. Most of the time, he had to hang on by one hand, with one foot perched on the running-board, in the company of several similarly positioned citizens and he didn’t feel that such a posture justified payment.

  Seated for once, Gyuri was wondering at what point he should vacate the tram, when at the other end, a blue-overalled worker suddenly barked at the ticket-inspector: ‘When the state starts paying me valid money, that’s when I’ll have a valid ticket, okay?’ The ferocity of the outburst was astonishing, much more than one would have believed the question of a tram ticket could have elicited even in the most extreme of circumstances. It hushed the whole tram and centred everyone’s attention in anticipation of some good transport theatre. Ordinarily, people who weren’t interested in paying or weren’t able to jumped off the tram at the approach of the authorities, as Gyuri did, like a tree losing its leaves.

  The ticket-inspector had obviously tripped on a long-festering rage. His inquiry had opened the door to a crowd of resentments, and the rebuff’s raw savagery, with its billboarded promise of corporeal damage, both imminent and merciless, persuaded him to move on. Gyuri had only witnessed total refusal once before. An elderly man, flanked on both sides by enormous, slavering Alsatians that he was having difficulty restraining, had smiled at the request to produce his ticket and stated: ‘I honestly don’t feel like paying.’ He hadn’t.

  His dignity imperilled, the ticket-inspector had got off at the Astoria. Looking out, Gyuri could see slim groups of students milling around with placards. They had been quiet for a while, cowed by some of the best brutality available on the planet, but now the Hungarians were back at it again, the national pastime: complaining. Everyone seemed to be at it. Even the Writers’ Union, the home of moral malnutrition, was at it, suddenly disclaiming all the things they had written in the last few years. The Union had pulled its head out of Rákosi’s arse and now stood blinking in the daylight.

  Setting out for the disciplinary hearing, Gyuri had heard from Laci, Pataki’s younger brother, that the students from the Technical University were going to hold a demonstration. ‘You know, a real demonstration; one that was our idea.’ There was dispute as to whether permission had been granted for it or not. Some rulers said yes, some said no. The students didn’t care apparently.

  The demonstration wouldn’t make any difference to anything. Gyuri hadn’t said so to Laci, since Laci had been so delighted by the prospect, but he had been tempted to quote the words of Dr Hepp: ‘Gentlemen, you can turn bearshit upside down. You can take it for a trip to the Balaton. You can put it in a nice box with a blue ribbon. You can shout at it or compose an ode in its honour. It will remain bearshit.’

  So what if they changed the Party leader as they had in Poland? So what if the new leader vilified the old leader? What if they had a Gero instead of a Rákosi? Or a Nagy instead of a Gero? They were all turds off the same production line. It was like making a fuss about changing a light bulb. What if the new leader blamed everything on the old leader? It was political leapfrog, musical chairs in the Central Committee. Why get excited by it?

  Gyuri’s view of the morning was soured by his attendance being required at a disciplinary hearing, but he was cheered up by the AVO incident.

  At the Astoria, an AVO officer got on (uniformed AVO were harder to spot on the streets now – they seemed ill at ease). He was carrying a smart briefcase smartly. He exuded a vigorous belief in his importance, it was as if his importance was flamboyantly doing chin-ups in the tram. A group of labourers was next to him. Dirty, hardy, work-darkened figures who would no doubt place head-kicking at the head of their leisure pursuits. You could see it coming. They took their time, though, eyeing up the officer as the tram rattled along. At the next stop, one of them leaned over and asked him stentoriously to the accompaniment of pálinka fumes: ‘Tell me, did you brush your teeth this morning?’

  ‘What?’ asked the AVO, puzzled by this forewordless inquiry.

  ‘Did you brush your teeth this morning?’ insisted his interrogator.’Yes,’ was the only thing the AVO could think of as a reply.

  ‘Excellent. In that case, just this once, you can lick my arse.’

  The detonation of laughter practically blew the AVO officer off the tram. Gyuri felt privileged to be in at the making of an anecdote that would enliven many an evening in a kocsma. Carrying his massive discomfiture awkwardly, the AVO noticed his stop had arrived and alighted.

  At the Ministry of Sport, Hepp was waiting outside, looking at his watch angrily as if it were colluding with Gyuri’s tardiness. They weren’t late for the hearing but Hepp always liked to be ten minutes ahead of events. Gyuri really went out of his way to be there on the dot for Hepp, because if you weren
’t, you’d pay for it. ‘But we said eleven o’ clock,’ Hepp would say, sincerely bewildered as to why such a clear agreement hadn’t been respected. And he would keep on saying it until you feared for your sanity. If you pleaded tram-famine, earthquake, your home suddenly combusting, Hepp would merely say: ‘Why didn’t you start earlier?’.

  Being late was incomprehensible to him, dug-up tablets in some ancient tongue. It was more confusion than anger: ‘But we said eleven o’ clock’. He would repeat this, on and on, tonally turning it up and down, with the determination of a code-breaker trying to crack an unbreakable code. Hepp’s solar punctuality never failed him. As far as anyone knew he had only been late for an appointment once in his life and that was when Pataki, forewarned Hepp was due at a coaches’ seminar, had slipped into Hepp’s office just as Hepp was getting ready to leave. Under the cover of some anodyne conversation, Pataki had withdrawn, palming the key to Hepp’s office door. He had then locked the door from the corridor and had joined everyone outside, on the other side of the street, where they had a good view of Hepp’s office. Within minutes Hepp was loudly ordering them to let him out, shouting at times with great pathos from his second floor window. Eventually, he prevailed on a passer-by to provide a ladder but by that point he was an irrecuperable fifteen minutes late.

  Matasits was, naturally enough, behind Gyuri’s appearance in front of the disciplinary tribunal. It was boring, in a way. Every time Gyuri played a game with Matasits refereeing, Gyuri would speedily accumulate his five fouls and be sent off before he could cover the length of the court, whether or not he was actually doing any fouling or even getting into the ball’s neighbourhood. Matasits’s compulsion to blow his whistle every time he saw Gyuri had long before made it clear to Gyuri that Matasits had him down as a bad element, a committed recidivist.

  While Gyuri would have freely conceded that the referees wouldn’t be voting him the sportingest player on the nation’s basketball courts, the accruing of this fictional blame was irritating. No matter how exemplary Gyuri was on court, no matter how preposterously courteous he was – handing over the ball on a silver plate to the opposition at the slightest suggestion they had an interest in it, shunning contact with the opposing players as if they were radioactive lepers, if Matasits was there, he was off. There was a rumour that Matasits believed Gyuri responsible for a delivery of two hundred pairs of Soviet spectacles to his home and was seeking revenge for this insult by freight.

  However, getting to the tribunal was a first for Gyuri. His gift for lurking in the referees’ blind spots usually enabled him to nobble the opposition with impunity; he had also developed a prestidigitator’s talent for sending the referees’ attention the wrong way so he could elbow, grab trousers and tread on feet under the nose of authority. Hepp would even evaluate the quality of his fouling during the post-match analysis, ‘adequate’, ‘stylish’ or on the day he had head-butted Princz (a man who regarded basketball matches as an unlimited opportunity for the grabbing of testicles) and got Princz stretchered off, ‘world-class’.

  However, with Matasits on the sidelines, Gyuri would stick resolutely, if futilely, to nobility. But during a match with the Army, which the Army, despite Pataki’s absence, was scarcely winning, Gyuri and an Army player had gone up for a ball. The Army player had got the ball and had Gyuri crash to the ground where he had remained while the Army player winged his way to Locomotive’s basket and dumped the ball through the ring for two easy points. Like everyone else, Róka had looked on Gyuri’s collapse as an overly histrionic attempt to get the ball back ‘It’s okay,’ Róka had said to the slumped Gyuri, ‘you can get up now.’

  But Gyuri hadn’t got up because he was firmly unconscious. Matasits booked him for wilfully obstructing the course of play, saying in all his years of refereeing he had never seen such blatant fakery and that this was going to the basketball council, particularly as, when Gyuri had regained contact with the world and learned what was going on, he had made a groggy attempt to strangle Matasits.

  The tribunal was composed of three inert, overflowingly bored gentlemen behind a sweeping desk: they looked as if they were left in the room when the tribunal wasn’t sitting.

  Matasits kicked off. ‘Esteemed tribunal, we are dealing here with a debaser of what is most sacred to man.’ He read badly from notes. Gyuri settled down, judging from the depth of Matasits’s sheets that it would be a long haul. Matasits had been leaning on his dictionary. In a number of rehashes, he denounced Gyuri as the fountain of all evil, a homicidal neanderthal, who wandered around the court on his knuckles, only employing his limited power of speech to heap abuse on duly empowered officials. To Matasits’s gaugeable and progressive disappointment, the tribunal didn’t gasp with horror but took notes emotionlessly albeit diligently. Having counted on something on the lines of a burning at the stake, with a little quartering thrown in for good measure, Matasits left the room, dejected at the coolness of his reception. The bored faces buoyed Gyuri a little, although he had a strong awareness of how even bored people could really disembowel a career.

  Then it was Hepp’s turn: ‘Gentlemen, while I can in no way whatsoever condone Fischer’s behaviour, I should like to point out that he has been under enormous, enormous, pressures. His mother died recently, and this bereavement combined with his voluntary coaching at the Ferencvaros orphanage, in addition to his outstanding work-record at his place of employment…’ It was good stuff, though Gyuri wasn’t sure there was an orphanage in Ferencvaros.

  To conclude, he was asked to stand and make any additional mitigation. ‘I’d like to apologise, gentlemen, for wasting your valuable time and I can assure you this will be the last time you will see me in such circumstances- ’ The tribunal could endure no more. They were paid to sit, not to listen. It was lunch time and Gyuri was cut off by the man in the middle. ‘Fine of fifty forints’ was the verdict. Gyuri, overwhelmed by the modesty of the fine, had a rash impulse to offer to round it up to a hundred if he could punch Matasits in the mouth.

  ‘Aren’t you going to the demonstration?’ Hepp asked outside. ‘Everyone else seems to be.’

  ‘If I thought it could make the slightest difference, I’d be leading it.’

  Gyuri debated whether to go to work. It was a short debate. The Feather Processing Enterprise could do without him for an afternoon. It had done pretty well without him in the two months he had been there. Hepp had fixed a job for him there; as a good amateur basketball player, Gyuri needed a job. Once he had qualified as an accountant he resolved he should have a position with more status, more prospects and more pay than knocking out the occasional morse code for the railways.

  The post of planner had been wangled for him at the Feather Processing Enterprise. Obviously, one didn’t want a job where there was a danger of work but it would have been nice to have had stimulating or glamorous surroundings in which to collect one’s wages.

  All Gyuri had done in his two months of employment, out of curiosity, was to take the figures supplied by the Ministry stipulating the amounts the factory should be producing according to the Five Year Plan, and divide these totals by the number of units in the factory. Then, having discovered the unit production figures he added it all up again to get the production figure desired by the Plan. What was actually happening in the factory, he didn’t know. Gyuri doubted that anyone knew or even wanted to know. Most of the little time that he was in his office, his fellow economist, Zalan, and he, would flick matches (fired from the abrasive strip on the matchbox) at each other’s desks, taking bets on which stacks of paper would ignite.

  He had only got the Plan details by accident after he encountered Fekete, the director of the Feather Processing Enterprise, as he was belting down a corridor with a couple of fishing-rods. He recognised Fekete because he had been a celebrated all-in wrestler before the war, known as ‘The Fat Boa’. The rumour was he had lent money to members of the Central Committee in the days of their illegality, when they shared the same boarding
-house.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Fekete had said, shaking his hand warmly and giving the rippling-biceped smile of a former showman. ‘I’m in a terrible rush, but a copy of the Plan is in my office. Do help yourself.’ That was the only time Gyuri saw Fekete mainly because Fekete only came into the office when he needed was a convenient site for his extramarital ventures, and also because there wasn’t anything to discuss.

  Gyuri went to Fekete’s office and with the aid of one of his secretaries who had come in that day to water the plants, searched it thoroughly. No sign of the Plan. Because he was new to the job, feeling inquisitive, and slightly intoxicated by his responsibility, Gyuri decided to phone the Ministry to get some information.

  He talked to three people before he realised that simply finding out what he was supposed to be doing would exhaust him and would be going well beyond the call of duty. Gyuri counted, for his own amusement, that he explained twenty-two times that he was phoning from the Feather Processing Enterprise and he wished to obtain correct and up-to-date figures for the Plan, finally, he was connected to a voice whose hostility and reticence convinced him that he had at last reached the right person in the right department.

  ‘You expect me to tell you all this on the phone?’ reiterated the irate voice. ‘How do I know you’re not an American spy?’

  ‘Look at it this way,’ said Gyuri, chewing over this epistemological doubt, ‘would an American spy tell you to fuck your mother?’

  Ashamed of having tried to do his job, Gyuri had sauntered out of the plant. Passing through the guard’s lodge at the entrance, his eye had been drawn to the vigilant defender of proletarian power vivisecting some dog-ends on his table to frankenstein together a new cigarette. Gyuri noticed that the guard was tearing off a leaf of paper from a document entitled, The Hungarian Feather Processing Enterprise: Revised Five-Year Plan Figures, 1955.