Under the frog (15 page)

Usually,
tired after the day’s training, Gyuri would plunge into blackness as soon as he
made contact with his mattress despite its high ranking in intractability. The
training was demanding, and as always, Gyuri had to do twice as much as anyone
else. Some people have athleticism handed to them on a tray, others have to
sweat to get up to scratch. Hitting sixty push-ups had caused him dreadful
suffering while Pataki could do it on demand while conducting a conversation on
any theme you’d care to name. He had been born with explosives in his muscles,
even his tongue.

When
Gyuri returned from the first instalment of the morning’s training, a run
around the lake, gasping from the blow of such a brutal introduction to the
day, Pataki would be lazily bestirring himself, often having a contemplative
cigarette on the porch of their hut. Pataki could get away with this, because
he could always deliver on court. ‘I know life is unfair, I don’t dispute that,’
Gyuri would gasp, ‘but does it really have to be this sort of industrial
strength unfair?’

Pataki’s
rightful place was in the National team, not playing opposite them to give them
a good workout. He had been invited to play with the junior squad years earlier
when still at school, but was turfed out after a few months. Not for slackness
in training or for any other basketballing deficiency but thanks to the light
in Hármati’s eye. ‘She’s the light of my eye,’ Hármati would say in an
exaggerated, overparental manner of his daughter, Piroska. Pataki’s falling out
with Hármati, the coach of the National team, had its root in Hármati walking
in when Pataki was deflowering Piroska on a horrifically valuable Louis Quinze
chaise-longue that Hármati had personally plundered from the debris of a
neighbouring and deceased family’s bombed flat. ‘It was the mess on the sofa
that did it,’ Pataki maintained. However, Pataki’s charm and undeniable talents
would have boomeranged him back after a nominal banishment had it not been for
Hármati walking in again to discover Pataki having a foam bath with some
highly-prized bath crystals brought back, by hand, from a trip to Italy, and
with Hármati’s other daughter, Noemi. Fortunately for Pataki it was a flat
designed with two doors to every room, and his speed enabled him to stay ahead
of Hármati for six circuits of the premises, before he could gather up his garb
and exit. ‘It’s bad enough being caught with your trousers down but when you
have to dry yourself first…’ Pataki reflected later, adding, ‘I think it was
the bath crystals that really upset him.’

Pataki
had just found out about his speed one day and found it there whenever he
needed it. If Gyuri didn’t run every day, he’d slow up and balloon; if he didn’t
play ball every day, his edge would blunt but Pataki could wander onto court
after a month in a Parisian restaurant and still be able to whizz down
infallibly to dunk the ball in the basket. There had to be a good reason for
Pataki to stir and training wasn’t one of them. ‘We’re not paid to train, we’re
paid to win,’ was his reaction to Hepp’s supplications to hone his abilities.
Hepp had no real choice but to put up with Pataki; he usually didn’t keep a
close eye on him during training, so that his non-cooperation wouldn’t grate.
On the other hand, Hepp had managed on one unforgettable occasion to persuade
Pataki to run the 1500. Pataki must have had his mind on something else when
Hepp had explained that the Locomotive athletics team was runnerless for the
1500 metres at an upcoming meet and had pleaded with Pataki to run it to avoid
the ignominy of a no-show.

Gyuri
was there on the day which introduced Pataki to effort. He could remember the
uncomprehending shock that had appeared on Pataki’s face after the first lap
and a half when it gradually became apparent to Pataki, that unlike shooting
the length of a basketball court, the 1500 would involve that most daunting of
things, labour. He came in fifth in a field of six, arriving at the finishing
line with his customary collected features exploded into a morass of leering
agony. After minutes of gasping for breath on the dearly-embraced ground,
Pataki finally announced: ‘I thought I was going to die. These runners are out
of their minds, how can they do this for a living? My track career is over.’

Gyuri
had been very glad to witness Pataki stumble on a new world of experience, to
see him dust off his will-power. Money, however, always got him going. The
sprinters at the camp had already lost the more interesting portion of their
worldly goods to Pataki as they always did when they challenged him. The
sprinters, the 100 boys who trained with zealotic fervour, who stretched, bent,
and twanged muscles for hours, who ran everywhere, lifted weights, ate
carefully, and went to bed early and did nothing that didn’t further their aim
of doing the 100 faster, couldn’t believe that Pataki could best them in a
dash.

But he
could, by challenging them to 50 metres. Sprinters who didn’t know Pataki
joyfully stumped up the cash for the bet (and those who did know him stumped up
petulantly) and then saw nothing but Pataki’s back. Over thirty metres he was
so explosive, so swift, so straight out of the jungle, that no one could get
close. By fifty, the professionals would have closed with him but they’d still
be a sternum behind. The pattern, when Pataki, for amusement and not forints,
had been dared to run the full hundred, was that before sixty the sprinters
would have a nose ahead, by eighty they were clear and by the hundred Pataki
could see their soles.

Rónai,
an Olympic 100-metre bronze winner, was the one least able to come to grips
with Pataki’s kick start. Year after year, he had been vanquished by Pataki at
training sessions, at meets, on Margit Island and once inside the bar at the
Opera. Fanatical, even by the whole-hearted standards of the sprinters, Rónai
had the obsessive nature of a marathon runner. At the camps, he was a largely
solitary figure who seemed to regard conversation as, at best, impinging on his
training program or, at worst, blatant sabotage, and he could, to anyone not
directly involved in the perfection of his leg movements, begrudge even a ‘good
morning’. He would, even if waiting at a bus stop or in a queue for the cinema
(not that he went very often), be bending and flexing muscles, or if refraining
from using them would be plotting new techniques to lick them into shape.

Rónai
was up before everyone else, in clement and inclement weather, trotting around,
relishing the extra time he was putting in, that was putting him ahead of the
others still in bed in Budapest and elsewhere, pushing himself and thinking
about the next exertion. The world for Rónai was a conglomeration of various
training possibilities that could enable him to load more ammunition into his legs
in time for the ‘52 Olympics in Helsinki. Some of his mattress partners, miffed
by his monomania, had let slip that when it came to bed, Rónai was less
concerned with the merchant of pleasure knocking on his door, than in
disciplining sets of muscles through a series of awkward and convoluted
couplings that would last until he had counted out the required number of
muscular contractions, the signal for a different constellation of brawn to
come into service. ‘It’s so moving,’ one netball player recounted, ‘having
gluteus maximus whispered in your ear.’

Rónai
had lost heavily to Pataki, money, various edibles and a magnetic pocket-chess
set he had obtained in London during the ’48 Olympics. He couldn’t leave Pataki
alone; the very sight of Pataki lounging around made him twitch. He had come
close to Pataki, very close, losing a number of runs by the breadth of a vest,
and one even ended in a dead heat according to the adjudicators. But parity
wasn’t good enough for Rónai. It wasn’t acceptable for him that a mere
basketball player, who wasn’t even in the National team to boot, who was
regularly to be found loafing around, gassing, playing cards, drinking Czech
beer and being hunted by his coach, that such a ramshackle athlete could best a
sprinter who hadn’t drunk a Czech beer since 1946. ‘Beer,’ he had pronounced
publicly, ‘is for the weak. There are seven people around a campfire, they all
put a hand into the flames. One by one, they pull back. The one who leaves his
hand in the longest is the world champion.’ A man who never failed to exercise
his ears before he went to sleep didn’t give up easily.

‘Quick,
give me some cigarettes,’ Pataki would say when he saw Rónai approaching,
lighting up two together to compose the veritable picture of the prodigal sportsman.
Two weeks into the camp, Rónai had lost all his money and any objects of value,
including a pair of remarkable German toe-nail clippers and a less remarkable
phial of Bulgarian rose-water, though the judging of the races had been made
more difficult, as after the first few defeats Rónai insisted on running after
dark when no one else was likely to be about. It was always tight, Rónai at
Pataki’s heels like a fleshed-out shadow, but the nipple-length losses were an
awful gulf to Rónai, an abyss that became progressively more uncrossable.

One
night Gyuri and Pataki entered the camp canteen to find Rónai entombed by empty
Czech beer bottles, shouting out as if to the human race: ‘It’s too unfair.
There’s no point. It’s all fixed.’ It had never occurred to Rónai that there
were people who couldn’t be bothered to put a hand into the fire. It made Gyuri
feel a lot better, and perhaps Rónai too, though he still kept losing to
Pataki.

Predestination
was not something to which Hepp subscribed. He was out to humble and humiliate
Hármati’s National team and he had a suitcase full of plans to bring this
about. ‘You’re probably too young to understand this,’ said Hepp addressing the
team, ‘but the real tragedy of life, the most appalling fact you will have to
face in this existence is that there is no substitute for hard work’ – and
flourishing rolls of documents – ‘and using the right plan.’

The
sight of Hepp threatening a Stalin shift of training threw a panic through the
team – they had been counting on a month of sunbathing and exploring the
plentiful cuisine prepared for the sportsmen and women representing the
Hungarian nation. Pataki took Hepp aside: ‘Look, we get the message: you want
to do the National boys?’ ‘Yes,’ conceded Hepp. ‘Okay, here’s the proposition,’
urged Pataki, ‘We’ll train hard, but, and the boys have asked me to approach
you on their behalf, but if we can forego the above-the-call-of-duty stuff, we
guarantee,
I
guarantee that at the last match of the camp, at the display when
all the big cheeses are there, I guarantee that we’ll beat them. But, believe
me, the team will fray if we overdo it. Remember what the water-polo player
said at the brothel after he paid for eight girls, but only employed five, “This
is ridiculous. I managed all eight this morning.’”

To
universal surprise, Hepp entered into the Pataki pact. Pataki could be
persuasive, of course. Aside from the effortlessness of his lying, he knew
which key could open which person; he was the master locksmith of character.
Take the way he had wriggled out of the copper wire fiasco at Ganz by claiming
he had been
borrowing
some for a Lieutenant-Colonel
in the AVO who had discreetly asked him to acquire some for various secret
projects. ‘They’re conducting electrical experiments.’ The security people
might well have caught a whiff of bullshit but who was going to take the risk
of vexing a Lieutenant-Colonel, however infinitesimal the risk, over a bit of
rotten wire? Pataki had walked away with a stern injunction to stick to proper
channels.

Gyuri
suspected that Hepp may have had other reasons, apart from Pataki’s cajolery,
for acquiescing but Pataki had unwound Hepp, and given the rest of the team a
summary level of activity (except for Gyuri who couldn’t afford to let any hour
pass without exploiting it).

Gyuri
was ushered out of sleep’s antechamber by a procession of loud bumps, which his
ejected senses slowly situated as emanating from the bunk above him. Craning
out of his bed, he realised that unless Pataki had suddenly developed a
brilliant ventriloquist act and grown a large pale bottom, he had enticed some
female company back to their hut. It was outrageous – here they were in a
Communist dictatorship, on the verge of World War Three, in the middle of the
night and Pataki had the gall to enjoy himself and invade his sleep.

‘God’s
dick,’ was about all Gyuri could think of in his irate daze, not fully
reconnected to his imaginative facilities.

‘There’s
really no need to be polite,’ insisted Pataki, not missing a beat. ‘Don’t pay
the slightest attention to us. Pretend we aren’t here. Feel free to carry on
with your sleep.’

Not
confident in the resilience of the bunkbeds in the face of love’s vibrations
Gyuri threw his mattress onto the floor, where he would be a safe distance from
any collapsing reposery. ‘If you tie a torch to it, you’ll be able to see what
you’re doing,’ he counselled.

At dawn’s
entry, Gyuri awoke, feeling more sleepy than when he had started. It was a
morning he immediately recognised as one he wanted nothing to do with, a day
that revealed itself, that flagrantly exposed itself as a day which wouldn’t
allow him to get anywhere. Gyuri found himself thinking, without any side-dish
of shame, about why he hadn’t joined the Communist Party. That was where his
life had taken the wrong turn, he decided. Deciding where his life had gone
wrong was something that took up a lot of his leisure time and he was convinced
that he had pinpointed the chairman of the error board. If only he could send
back a message to his younger self to sign up, if only he had accidentally
walked into a Party office and inadvertently dropped his signature on an
application form.

Now, of
course, apart from the bad taste it would leave in his soul, his participation
in the Communist movement would be as welcome as a bonfire in an ammunition
dump. He had as much chance of joining as a blue whale had, assuming it could
make its way to Budapest. But back in ’45 or ’