Under the frog (11 page)

What
had befallen Fodor in the end, whether he had grown weary of his sadistic
evangelism, Gyuri didn’t know. Gyuri had last seen him at a school trip to the
cinema where they had been locked in. You could tell it was a Soviet film when
they locked you in. The school had taken over an enormous balcony in the cinema
which descended in a series of plateaus. Fodor had vaulted over what he had
thought was the edge of one of these sections, in fact the end of the balcony.
Just before he disappeared from view, there had been a nanosecond’s worth of
expression on his face: why isn’t there any balcony here?

Along
with a couple of others, Gyuri had selflessly volunteered to take Fodor and his
broken legs to hospital, thereby avoiding the feats of Sergei, who
single-handedly repulsed the invading Germans in between repairing his tractor
to produce a bumper harvest. Either for fear of ridicule or in pursuit of fresh
souls, Fodor never returned.

‘You
don’t say much, do you?’ Faragó observed to Ladányi, with the implication that
Ladányi was unfairly reserving energy for eating. Even if Faragó had had more
fight, the switch to chocolate ice cream was the end. A large chicken’s weight
behind Ladányi, Faragó had chosen the sweet to which Ladányi was most partial;
Ladányi’s nickname in the troop, ‘Iceman’, came from his mythical disposal of
chocolate ice cream, in the days before he had signed up with Jesus. Gyuri
wondered whether Ladányi had mentioned to anyone back at Jesuit headquarters
that he was popping down to the countryside to out-eat a Party Secretary.
However laudable the goal, in an atmosphere of austerity where quips such as ‘Isn’t
that the second meal you’ve had this week, Father?’ abounded, this sort of
indecorous gourmandise, however much a part of Christian soldiering, must have
run the risk of some gruelling rosary work.

‘What
would you like me to say?’ inquired Ladányi politely, keeping a spoon full of
ice cream from its destination. The whole village was craning forward now, as
Faragó was visibly floundering, gazing with resentment at his bowl of ice
cream.

‘As the
saying goes,’ said Faragó fighting for air, ‘there isn’t room for two bagpipe
players in the same inn. We, the working class… we, the instrument of the
international proletariat… we will defend the gains of the people…’ Here Faragó
jammed, fell off his chair and as if gagging on his propaganda, spilled his
stomach on the floor. It looked very much to Gyuri like a job for the last
rites.

Ladányi
didn’t seemed worried. ‘There are some documents Father Orso has ready for you
to sign, I believe,’ he said. The village priest crouched down and offered a
pen to Faragó who was sprawled on the floor as if he were thinking about doing
a push-up. Saturninely he scrawled a mark on the paper, and, supine, was lugged
out inexpertly by the rest of the party cell, limbs lolling.

During
their post-micturition conversation, the elderly peasant had also told Gyuri: ‘Take
the most rotten individual imaginable and there will always be someone, usually
very stupid, but not always, who’ll say no, no, he’s simply misunderstood.
Misquoted. Even with murderers, when they write about them in the newspapers,
they have a wife or a mother who says he’s not bad, he’s a lovely boy when you
get to know him. You ask anyone here to say anything in favour of Faragó; ask
people who’ve known him all their lives to say one thing to his credit, just
one courtesy, one thank you, one favour – you’ll find the people of this
village as quiet as melons in long grass. His own mother, if Faragó was waiting
to be executed, would only say things like “Make that noose tighter” or “Is it
permissible to tip the hangman?’”

Wiping
his mouth with an embroidered napkin, Ladányi stood up briskly as if he had
been having a quick snack between important engagements. ‘Well, we have to go
now. God bless you all.’ Another hour of hand-kissing and loading up gifts onto
the cart followed, but Ladányi resolutely insisted that they should depart
since they had an opportunity of catching a train which would get them to
Budapest in the morning.

By
moonlight, Ladányi looked remarkably thin. Gyuri felt somewhat queasy during
the bumpy cart-ride and he was astonished that Ladányi didn’t have any
inclination to deswallow. It would be months, Gyuri was convinced, before he
would want to eat again. Neumann broke the peregrinational hush: ‘Does that
agreement really mean anything? Forgive me for saying so but Faragó looks as if
he would roger his grandmother for the price of a drink, or even for free.’

‘Look,’
replied Ladányi, ‘what we did tonight was to act out a morality play. I was
asked to come. I couldn’t refuse. I doubt if it will make any difference, not
because of Comrade Faragó being probity-free, but because of everything else in
the country. This was one night of miniature victory in what will be long years
of defeat. I hope it will have some importance for the people in Hálás.’

‘How
long do you think this will last?’ asked Gyuri, not sure that he actually
wanted to hear the answer.

‘Not
long,’ pronounced Ladányi. ‘I’d say about forty years or so. You have to wait
for the barbarians to get old, to become soft barbarians.’

This
wasn’t an answer Gyuri wanted to hear, particularly coming from Ladányi. ‘Time
to leave the country.’

‘Not at
all. Firstly, as I’m sure you know, it’s not easy to get out any more, and
secondly, and I should point out this is not an idea patented by the Church,
matter doesn’t matter. It’s not physical conditions that count, but your
opinion of them. Take the farmer in the small village in the middle of China
who is the happiest man in the world because he has two pigs and no one else in
the village has got one. Living isn’t like basketball, it’s not a question of
points, but what’s here.’ Gyuri saw Ladányi touch his forehead with his
forefinger. ‘You only lose if you give up– and if you give up you deserve to
lose. In basketball, you can be beaten. Otherwise you can only be beaten if you
agree to it. You’re lucky, you’re very lucky. We’re living in testing circumstances;
unless you’re very dull, you should want to be stretched.’

Thanks
for the totalitarianism, Stalin. Gyuri doubted that he would enjoy a prison
cell as much as Ladányi. ‘A ticket to Paris would be more fun,’ he retorted ‘Couldn’t
I book a few prayers for that?’

‘I’ll
be delighted to forward your request, but don’t be too specific, or you might
get it. One should pray for the best. Maybe you’ll be happier here than in
Paris.’

‘I’m
prepared to take that risk. Anything to escape from record-breaking lathe-operators.’

‘Yes,
this cult of the worker is a bit wearing. Ironic that it sprang chiefly from a
fat, free-loading German academic who never had a job in his life, but just
sponged off his acquaintances and who indulged in such very bourgeois practices
as impregnating the chamber-maid. And so boring. People often overlook the work
of a poor carpenter who chose fishermen as his company.’

They
rattled on in the cart for a while.

‘The
greatest irony about Marx’s influence is that his books are unreadable,’ Ladányi
mused. ‘Perhaps his appeal lies in his unintelligibility, a sort of mysticism
through statistics and the wages of textile workers. People will have a good
laugh about it one day. But, unfortunately, there are people who believe it,
not the ones who’ve joined now, but those who joined before the war, when the
movement was illegal. They believe in it and as Church history amply shows
crazy ideas can take a long time to die out.’

‘I
think it’s a process I’d like to watch closely from a café in New York. I might
even find it funny from that distance.’

‘Me
too,’ chorused Neumann.

‘The
desire to travel is part of your age. You’ve never been out of Hungary, have
you? Be careful, people can become very fond of their prisons, you know.’

They
arrived at the station in the nick of time to catch the train back to Budapest.
Neumann, who had the priceless gift of being able to sleep on trains, bedded
down in another compartment on some unclaimed seats, while Ladányi took out a
book – the
Analects
of Confucius. ‘Is it any good?’ Gyuri questioned. ‘Life is too short
for good books,’ said Ladányi, ‘one should only read great books.’ ‘How can you
tell if it’s great?’ ‘If it’s been around for a couple of thousand years, that’s
usually a good sign. This isn’t bad. Some of us younger ones have been told to
study Chinese. Our superiors think it’s a growing market. Every year a Jesuit
gets a letter containing his orders. I have a feeling they may be getting us
out of the country. I think that’s wrong, but that’s where the vow of obedience
comes in.’

Gyuri
hadn’t been to church since he was fourteen when his mother dragged him to the
Easter Mass. Naturally, he had attempted to get in touch with God on several
subsequent occasions when he had thought he was going to die but always on the
spot, away from church precincts. This was surely the real boon of a religious
upbringing: it gave you a number to ring in emergencies, which was some
consolation, even if no one answered. Gyuri had met with the various arguments
for God’s existence from his partisans, proof through design (‘that’s what I
call a well-made universe’), the craftsmanship of the universe (it did seem to
be an awful lot of trouble for a practical joke) or Pascal’s way of looking at
it, a hundred francs on God each way. But, all in all, the best argument he had
come across for taking Jesus’s shilling was that the sharpest razor, Ladányi
believed it.

When
they reached Budapest, Ladányi thanked Gyuri and Neumann for their support. It
was the last time Gyuri would see Ladányi. Gyuri had no inkling of that, but
years afterwards, re-examining the scene, he suspected that Ladányi knew. ‘Don’t
forget what I said about good books. And read the Bible occasionally. It’s had
some good reviews, you know.’ Ladányi’s tone in this farewell admonition was
not that of a salesman, or a friend recommending a good read, but rather that
of a visitor handing a prisoner a loaf of bread with a file in it.

September 1949

It was
as the tram was on the last stretch of the Margit Bridge that, from the corner
of his eye, Gyuri logged the girl sitting on the edge of the railings, and
then, the girl that wasn’t sitting there. There was nothing he and the others on
the tram who had spotted the suicide bid could do. By the time the tram had
stopped and they could have got back to the bridge, the young lady’s fate would
be, one way or another, cleared up. It seemed a bit heartless to say ‘Well,
there goes another one’ and to shrug one’s shoulders but apart from forming an
audience, nothing could have been contributed by returning. People down by the
river bank would be doing whatever samaritaning could be done. Besides, Gyuri
was late.

Having
a suicide dropped in his lap, would of course, be typical of his luck,
especially when he was late for work. On the other hand, it would at least be
an honourable excuse for tardiness. A sharp picture of the girl stayed with him – eerie how quickly a detailed portrait could imprint. She looked like a
country girl, seeking a populous conurbation for taking the exitless exit and
not really attractive enough to encourage diving in after her but then if she
had been attractive enough to have hordes of men diving in after her, she wouldn’t
have had to jump in the first place.

Also,
one had to respect suicide as the national pastime, as the vice Hungarian.
Gyuri wasn’t up to date on how suicide was progressing under socialism, it
could well have been abolished but the popularity of doing-it-yourself couldn’t
entirely be laid at the door of Rákosi & Co. For centuries, Hungarians of
quality and quantity, who hadn’t managed to be part of Hungarian armies that
got wiped out, had been blowing their brains out or uncaging their souls in other
ways. Yes, a few idle minutes, some melancholy music and a Hungarian would be
trying to unplug himself. And not just the nobility– Hungarian maids in Vienna
had been notorious for their fondness for bleaching their entrails.

The
tram deposited Gyuri in front of the monstrous Ganz Electrical Works but he was
the only one the tram off-loaded who made his way through the entrance of Ganz;
all the other workers had arrived much earlier, before the shift had started.

Of
course, Gyuri thought, the Hungarian propensity for suicide might stem from
their other great proclivity: their love of complaining. Who better to complain
to than the chief architect? Go to the top, go meet your maker and give him an
earful about the shortcomings of the universe. There was probably a dirty great
queue of Hungarians outside God’s office ready to remonstrate.

As
Gyuri entered the main yard, he passed a board which was bedecked with
amateurish red decorations and which had a heading ‘Socialist Brigades’.
Underneath were lesser signs such as ‘Guernica’, ‘Dimitrov’ and ‘Béla Kun’,
presiding over wonderful production figures and grainy black and white
photographs of sheepishly pleased and self-conscious lathe-operators
lathe-operating. These photographs didn’t change. Alongside these displays was
an elegantly penned scroll, ‘Hungarian-Soviet Friendship Society’, heading a
series of ailing black and white photographs of Soviet lathe-operators watching
Hungarian lathe-operators lathe-operate with avuncular, elder-brotherly
encouragement, and photographs of Hungarian lathe-operators watching Soviet
lathe-operators lathe-operate, with younger-brother wide-eyed admiration. There
was no seasonal variation in these pictures either.

Not far
from these displays, but diametrically opposed to them, on the other side of
the yard, was an enormous caricature of US President Harry Truman made out of
card. At the foot of this caricature was a board with the inscription ‘FRIENDS
OF TRUMAN’ in wobbly calligraphy, and in less bold lettering
‘I’m out to destroy the
gains of the people of democratic Hungary, please help me by taking it easy. My
thanks.’
On
the board, which looked like an old situations vacant notice that used to be
hung outside the factory, various names had been inserted. There wasn’t much
seasonal variation in this either. Top of the list was Pataki, Tibor, followed
by Fischer, Gyorgy (Gyuri could never fathom how Pataki had managed to get top
billing once again) with one or two other more mutable names, Nemeth, Sándor or
Kovrig, Laszlo. Unknown but agreeable figures to Gyuri.