Under the frog (10 page)

Ladányi
said grace and Faragó retaliated by clenching his fist and growling the
communists’ salutation: ‘Freedom!’. It was obvious who the crowd was backing on
this occasion, Gyuri thought, as the two contestants started to shovel in the
bean soup but it wasn’t always easy to sort out who to back in the Rome
vs.
Moscow conflict. The Church in
Hungary was heading for a kicking indisputably. Mindszenty, the Cardinal, was
stuck in a nick somewhere in Budapest, while they adjusted the charges to get a
good fit (Gábor Pétér, the head of the AVO, had been a tailor): spying for the
Americans, plotting to bring back the Habsburg monarchy, breeding Colorado
beetles, sneering at socialist realist novels. And they must have had the
survivors from the scriptwriting teams from Hungary’s prewar film industry on
contract to concoct the evidence, because no policeman could invent as
fantastically as that.

It was
hard to sympathise with the Cardinal, Gyuri reflected, because Mindszenty was a
buffoon, however wronged. The Catholic Church in Hungary wasn’t topheavy with
brilliance. It would be so nice to have a real choice, fumed Gyuri. It was like
Hungary being between Germany and the Soviet Union. What sort of choice was
that? Which language would you like your firing squad to speak? In these
circumstances, of course, a brilliant Cardinal might not be any more useful.
Being clever and far-sighted wasn’t always of use. Does it help being the
clever pig on the way to the abattoir?

Stupidity
could be quite advantageous now and then. Mind you, stupidity (with which he
was well-equipped) hadn’t done Mindszenty any favours either. If you’re falling
off a cliff, the quality of the brains that are going to get dashed doesn’t
hugely count.

When
Gyuri discussed the position of the Church, Ladányi was grave but not worried
but it was very hard to imagine Ladányi worried about anything. Being burned at
the stake would all be part of a day’s work for him, even if other clerics
would jib at the prospect. It was hard to imagine Father Jenik, for instance,
gearing up for martyrdom, much as Gyuri liked him. Jenik firmly held to the
philosophy of getting the best out of things: why had God created first-class
hotels if he didn’t intend us to use them? Just after the Russians had tied
down Budapest, Jenik had taken the entire scout troop out into the countryside.
The hundred kilometre trip had taken two days by a train that had gone so
slowly that, when one of the younger boys had fallen out of the open-doored
wagons, one of the older boys had plenty of time to climb down from the train
roof, rescue him and throw him back on. Jenik had led the troop to a village
where he had some tenuous kinship, and had begun to spin a yarn, relying
heavily on hyperbole, expounding at length the horrors and degradations of war
and how sadly the tender youths in front of them had been marked. Jenik wasn’t
lying, but he wasn’t doing anything to restrain misunderstanding. Father Jenik,
who had been laughing all the way down on the train, and whom Gyuri suspected
as the original begetter of Ladányi’s camel jokes, had become sombre and
pained. His discourse on the ordeals of war had been rolling along for quite a
while before Gyuri realised that Jenik was talking about the troop. Jenik had
his hand on Papp’s shoulder as he conjured up the tortures of hunger and
deprivation. Papp did look as if he had been constructed out of
knitting-needles glued together, shudderingly thin and haggard, despite the
fact his father was a butcher and he and his family got more meat than all the
carnivores in Budapest zoo. Tears had peeped out of peasant eyes, and until
Hálás, Gyuri had never eaten so much at one go. That night he had had the firm
belief he would never need to eat again as long as he lived, and he wandered
around in the dark, keeping his legs moving in a desperate attempt to festinate
digestion and to eschew puking, to grind down the anvil in his stomach.

However,
in other ways Father Jenik was the traditional avuncular priest, always rolling
up your sleeve to check your spiritual pulse, working his way through the club
regulations: attendance at mass, confessions, observance of holy days. Ladányi
would never mention religion, unless you brought it up or it cropped up
naturally in the course of conversation. There was no badgering, no
impresario-like push to get bums on seats, no ticking off a list with Ladányi.
He seemed unconcerned whether you turned up or not and this was what was so
pernicious. Gyuri had dropped church much in the same way as he had stopped
believing in Santa Claus; there came a point where it was impossible to take it
seriously. And that was what was so worrying about Ladányi. He was so clever,
he had a bird’s eye view of everyone’s actions – even Pataki wouldn’t try
modifying reality with Ladányi, because Ladányi would have read your diary
before you’d written it. Gyuri couldn’t help feeling when he was doing
something totally trivial like cleaning the bathtub or buying some groceries
that it was all part of some master-plan, that cleaning the bathtub and buying
groceries were all part of Ladányi’s machinations (it was just that he was unaware
of it) and that one day he would wake up wearing black with a white collar.

Perhaps
because of his order, perhaps because of his Ladányiness, Ladányi operated
quietly. The summer before, in an excess of compliance, Gyuri had offered
Katalin Takács to pick up her new dress from the dressmaker. It was bruited by
her changing room companions that she had no pubic hair. So he journeyed out to
the dressmaker, helping to dress the girl he wanted to undress to verify the
canard about her cat.

The
favour was a double goodwill since the dressmaker lived in the Angyalföld, off
the Váci út. It was said that when the American Liberators had carpet-bombed
Angyalföld at the end of ’44 by mistake as they searched for the factories on
Csepel Island, no one had minded because no one could tell the difference. It
was also maintained that both the Waffen SS and the Red Army had stayed out of
the Angyalföld because they hadn’t wanted any trouble.

Although
Gyuri knew Budapest well, he had never ventured into the Angyalföld and was
flabbergasted to discover that the stories were true. Having quit the tram, he
passed people lying in gutters, like piles of autumnal leaves in smarter
quarters, booze having severed their relations with the known universe. As he walked
along, he was regarded with an unconcealed hatred by groups of natives milling
around; reflexive dislike and aggression he had experienced before but never
with such cannibalistic fervour. Gyuri had considered, before setting out that
morning, pocketing a knife on account of Angyalföld’s notoriety but as he
turned the corner into Jasz utca, he couldn’t help noticing two men fighting
with what could only be described as cutlasses, long heavy swords of the type
favoured by Hollywood pirates. A semi-circle of barefoot spectators were
monitoring, not greatly impressed by the quality of the hacking. Carrying a
knife wouldn’t have helped, the result would have been that he would have had
his knife stolen as a supplement to getting stabbed, and a good knife like
everything else was hard to get in those days.

Gyuri
had lots of time to ruminate on how his untimely, unremarked demise on the
streets of the Angyalföld would be due to his yearning to let his gaze ski down
Katalin’s smooth slopes, killed by curiosity about a bald cat. He had also
ruminated on his way up to the fifth floor, how people he visited always lived
on the fifth floor of liftless buildings. The dressmaker, a sprightly lady of
eighty plus, clearly of the work-twelve-hours-a-day-till-you-drop variety, and
who was cosily unaware of what went on in the rest of Angyalföld, congratulated
Gyuri on the cut of his trousers. The trousers were the last pair of Elek’s
Savile Row trousers, indeed the only fully-qualified trousers that Elek had
left, lent to Gyuri since Elek had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t
getting out of bed that day, or that should he rise, he wouldn’t be progressing
beyond the armchair. The dressmaker bustled away to prepare the dress for its
journey while Gyuri reflected how sad it was that she couldn’t bequeath her
industry to him.

It was
as he rushed back to the tram that he chanced on Ladányi talking with some of
the Angyalföld’s denizens patiently listening to him. They patently considered
Ladányi as someone who had stepped down from the moon. Ladányi seemed slightly
peeved at being caught in the act of doing good, but he accompanied Gyuri to
the tram and reluctantly disclosed that he haunted Angyalföld before the first
mass of the day. It was the sheer lunacy of his faith, Gyuri thought, that
enabled Ladányi to leave with all his physical workings intact. Greatly
relieved at having emerged from Angyalföld with his functions uninhibited,
Gyuri was waiting outside the Nyugati
station to change trams to deliver the dress, when a group of five youths his
age came up and one, without any preamble, with a pair of scissors, swiftly cut
the tie Gyuri was wearing, the last of Elek’s silk ties, the last of Elek’s
ties and the only tie then residing in the Fischer household. The trimmer then
handed over the snipped sections to Gyuri with the invocation: ‘Cerulean’.

At that
point Gyuri recalled there was a vogue in Budapest, particularly amongst those
who went round in fists of five, for prowling the boulevards with a pair of
scissors to amputate ties and then to say ‘cerulean’. The tie hadn’t been a
great tie, the design hadn’t really been to Gyuri’s taste and there had been of
late a painfully visible soup stain on it, but the desire to punch the
scissor-operator in the mouth had been quite breathtaking in its intensity,
especially since he was clearly expecting Gyuri to have a laugh over the
dividing of his tie. Gyuri thought how much he would enjoy punching him in the
mouth, then he thought how much he wouldn’t enjoy getting it back as a fivefold
minimum. He resorted to what he hoped was a look of contempt. The five got on
the next tram remarking
how some people had no sense of humour.

* * *

When,
at Faragó’s suggestion, they switched to chocolate ice cream, Gyuri knew it was
all over.

Ladányi
and Faragó had warmed up with a couple of litres of bean soup before moving on
to the main course – fried chicken – its consumption meticulously measured on the
scales. ‘We in Hálás have always been famous for our fried chicken,’ Faragó
rambled on, ‘and now under socialism, the fried chicken is even more fried.’ He
reached for a plate of slender green tubes. ‘The paprika is optional,’ he
announced loading a couple into his mouth.

Three
kilos into the chicken, Faragó began to sweat, though whether this was due to
gastronomic exertion or the calorific effects of the paprika it was hard to
judge. He was also beginning to look uneasy, perhaps because it was dawning on
him that the reports of the Jesuit’s unearthly wolfing had some foundation.
Faragó was oozing effort while Ladányi was methodically and calmly stripping
drumsticks with such ease that he hadn’t taken the trouble of dialling his
willpower yet.

‘I’m
just going to shake the snake,’ Gyuri informed Neumann. He was becoming
increasingly anxious about losing contact with several outposts of his body.
Draining two of the four glasses of pálinka awaiting his attention, he made his
way out of the csárda into the sheltering darkness and voided the burning
liquid from his mouth in an aerosol flurry to dodge some of the enormity of
Hálás’s hospitality. A standard peasant, an elderly gent with the inevitable
black hat that peasants had stapled to their heads and a massive handlebar
moustache, came to join him in watering the planet. ‘Good evening, sir,’ said
the peasant, causing Gyuri to note that only countryfolk could be so courteous
while airing their dick. Conversation turned to Faragó as Gyuri was in no hurry
to go back in and be the victim of further largesse; he was curious about
Faragó’s track record. ‘I hear he did some appalling things during the war?’

‘You
don’t want to know, sir. Some things should never be repeated, just forgotten.
Satan himself is his coach.’

Gyuri
waited outside as long as he could without triggering a search party and
re-entered to find Ladányi and Faragó crossing the ten kilo mark, Faragó in
discomfort, Ladányi still emitting a lean, keen look. A barrel of pigs’
trotters in aspic was dumped in front of Gyuri and he wondered how on earth he
was going to eat any. ‘You didn’t like the smoked goose, did you?’ asked one
woman accusingly and woundedly, although Gyuri estimated he had had six
respectable helpings. Neumann next to him wasn’t saying much, but he wasn’t
demonstrating any signs of suffering (however, he had sixteen stone to upkeep).
The village must have gathered every bit of food for ten miles around. Gyuri
could only regret that his stomach wasn’t up to it, that it had left its
office, put up the ‘out to lunch’ sign and wasn’t doing any more business.

To
round off his other distasteful qualities, Faragó had a bad cold and as he
handed over his handkerchief to the deputy Party secretary to place on the
stove to dry, Gyuri felt another surge of sympathy for the villagers. They had
a straightforward, soily existence which if you liked that sort of thing could
be quite pleasant. No wonder they were filled with hatred for Faragó;
bewildered by their misfortune, it was like having a plague of locusts or a
dragon deciding to set up home with you. ‘Why us?’ the elderly peasant had
implored. ‘A whole world to be a stinking horseprick in and he’s never lost
sight of Hálás. Why?’

The
eating had now long since left pleasure behind. It was no longer a question of
appetite, but a question of will, which was why Gyuri knew Ladányi would win,
and knowing Ladányi, would end up recruiting Faragó as an altar boy.
Conversion. It was funny how people could, while changing completely, remain
the same. Fodor, at school, for example, for whom getting into trouble had not
been a by-product of his activity but his sole activity, who had been almost as
much of a nuisance as Keresztes, had, without warning, got a bad attack of the
Holy Ghost. At first there was a suspicion that it was an elaborate and unfunny
stunt, but Fodor was so unswerving in handing out leaflets to remind how Jesus
wanted a word, that everyone realised that he had gone evangelist for real:
preaching was his latest irritation tool. Fodor caught Gyuri hanging around in
a corridor one day. ‘Jesus Christ came to be your saviour, He died for your
sins. You must acclaim Him and surrender to His teachings,’ Fodor urged, and
then continued, more quietly, really savouring the next bit, ‘you’ve been
warned now. You’ve had the message, you’ve got no excuse. If you ignore it, you’ll
burn. In hell. For eternity.’ Fodor had then marched off with a satisfied air.
This was the appealing part of the job for Fodor, going around with a sawn-off
version of the scriptures and looking forward to the infidels being infinitely
ignited. Gyuri had also seen Fodor
in the Körút, on a soap-box, giving a sermon to the unheeding passers-by, a
glint of delight in his eye at the prospect of the mass fry-up that was coming.
Fodor didn’t want anyone to be able to reach for some mitigation when they
stood in the pearly dock, saying no one had explained the Nazarene contract to
them. Then Fodor could chime out: ‘Liar! Liar! I told him, I told him. Let him
burrrnnnn.’