Under the frog (19 page)

At
home, he discovered the note he had left on the kitchen table for Elek, looking
unread. Where was the old goat? he wondered as he ripped up the note. Elek
entered at that moment, sniffed and commented ebulliently on Gyuri’s malodorous
condition after the AVO’s cold sauna: ‘Communism doesn’t prevent washing, you
know.’ Gyuri never told anyone.

August 1952

It had
only been a month but if he never achieved anything else in his life, that
month would be achievement enough.

The
camp had been at Böhönye but they had been met at Pécs rail way station by the
sergeant-major who had been specially selected to shape up the university
students during the four weeks he had charge of them, to mould them into lusty
officers. The sergeant-major was in no way perturbed by the centuries-old
tradition of sergeant-majors being sadistic, aggressive and very loud. From the
start, he was out to prove he could be far worse than anything they might have
imagined.

‘We’re
going to be fighting World War Three soon,’ was his opening gambit. Like all
soldiers he wasn’t too enamoured of peace – it didn’t give the military the
respect and resources it considered it so richly deserved. But a peace which
was simply a build-up to a world conflict was something the sergeant-major
could stomach.

‘You
are turds. Unspeakable turds … whom I am obliged to transmogrify into barely
useful turds. My philosophy: my philosophy is to make life for you so
unpleasant you will find war an agreeable recreation, a bit of light relief,
and that you will die in a manner that will not disgrace the fine traditions of
the Hungarian Army.’ (Which is about all Hungarian armies have ever managed to
do, Gyuri thought.)

‘I
expect some of you will be committing suicide. Indeed I will consider my work a
failure if some of you turds don’t try a bit of wrist-slashing. And if you don’t
do the job properly, we’re willing to help; attempted suicide is punishable by
death.’ To be fair to the sergeant-major, he at least looked as if he knew something
about soldiering: large, vigorous, confident, gnarled, the sort of person you
were glad was on your side. A bastard but a competent bastard. ‘It’s all right,
having a shaky officer when you’re in barracks,’ Tamás had told Gyuri at Ganz. ‘It’s
not important there if it takes him two hours to find out which way up the map
should be, but when you get to the front, you need someone good, or you get
jacked. We had one officer called Kocsis. The funny thing was he had always
wanted to be an officer, he came from a military family but even after going
through the Ludovika, he couldn’t direct piss into a bucket, let alone direct a
military operation. Within an hour of getting us to the front, he got us pinned
down, and he was killed straight away by some Soviet who got through our
defences, infiltrating brilliantly in a Hungarian uniform, speaking fluent
Hungarian and having lived in Budapest for thirty years.’

The
sergeant-major’s first threat: ‘When we get to our base, you will become
acquainted with the parade ground. You will become so well-acquainted that if
by some unheard-of miracle you survive, you’ll remember every crack when you’re
ninety.’ Here, the sergeant who had been delegated as assistant, whispered into
the SM’s ear, what they were to learn later, that Böhönye didn’t have a parade
ground. ‘There’ll be plenty of drill,’ the SM continued, ‘so that, from a great
distance the Imperialists might accidentally mistake you for soldiers.’

The
military had not lost its fondness for cow pats. What Böhönye did have was
meadows, so they practised their ceremonial march, with bayonets fixed and
resting on the shoulder of the person in front. On a level parade ground, this
could have been an impressive sight of co-ordination and martial display. In a
meadow full of cow dung and hollows it was a massive exercise in ear-removal.
The first to lose his aural equilibrium was Gyongyosi, a lawyer, who being a
lawyer deserved it. He wasn’t going to be produced in any show trials after
that.

The
month was bad, very bad. But a month only being a month as such, it couldn’t be
unbearably bad. Most of the time was spent on the usual military tricks of
making you try and do half an hour’s worth of doing in five minutes. And
Dohányi, the SM, who never told them his name (‘I don’t want you to think of me
as a person, just as a fucking bastard’) was very keen on making people run
around in full gear, with twenty pounds of kit, wearing a gas mask. The odd
thing about gas masks, Gyuri reflected, when you thought about how they were
designed for you to breathe through, was that they were virtually impossible
for you to breathe through, particularly when doing anything more arduous than
standing still.

The
bulk of the agony revolved around unending physical exertion. Even for Gyuri,
as a professional amateur athlete, it was demanding. For the students who had
been more sedentary, it produced the effect Dohányi was after: intense pain,
shock, disbelief at how much physical punishment the body could take in twenty-four
hours. ‘Sleep is bourgeois,’ pronounced Dohányi, before sending them out on
all-night manoeuvres with the sergeant. Most of the group developed an air of
aghastness after the second day, as if they were permanently being punched in
the stomach. At moments of excruciating physical effort, running with a
stretcherful of hypothetically wounded soldiers for example, Gyuri recalled a
painting he had recently seen of a soldier lying down in a comfortable field,
reading pensively, surrounded by comatosely relaxed brothers-in-arms. The
painting was entitled: ‘Soldier reading, surrounded by his brothers-in-arms.’
Dohányi would have shot anyone he found lying around pensively or reading.

Despite
Dohányi doing his best to make things as horrific as possible, he was cruelly
let down by the weather which was regulation summer issue, warm and
invigorating. The heat was sometimes cumbersome but the summer didn’t permit
suicidal misery. Dohányi’s torments which would have been unsupportable and
shattering in a cold muddy winter were kept digestible. He became visibly
frustrated by the lack of breakdown. Standing by Bencze, the architect, who had
collapsed in a meadow under a rucksack full of ammunition and who was
floundering on the grass, rather as if he were feebly trying to swim across the
meadow, incapable of getting to his feet, Dohányi shouted sympathetically: ‘Had
enough? Want a rest? Desert! Then I can have you shot.’ Dohányi kept on
counselling desertion, to no avail, but he always repeated the punchline: ‘I’ll
have you shot. Why should you waste the Imperialists’ time?’

The
Imperialists were another classic Dohányi theme, from a man whose knowledge of
world affairs was based on the few months when he had travelled out of Hungary
to kill people. ‘The Imperialists are coming. Any day now, we’re going to have
number three. Third time lucky. Of course, you barely uniformed turds won’t
make any difference but we don’t want you wetting yourselves in civilian
shelters, distressing the populace. The best thing you can do when the war
starts is dig a hole, jump in, and fill it up.’

So
where were the American Imperialists? The British Imperialists? Or even the
German ones? They had been promised Imperialists for years on end, Gyuri
thought angrily. What were the Imperialists playing at? He had carefully
rehearsed the phrase with which he would greet the American invaders: ‘What
kept you? Let me take you to many interesting Communists I am sure you will be
eager to shoot.’

The
whole camp and the idea of the camp was a complete waste of time courtesy of
the people who had given Hungary such impressive ideas as the
centrally-controlled economy where you had to work your way through dozens of
barriers to find the man at the ministry who was responsible for getting you
some extra bolts only to find he was on holiday. Apart from confirming their
suspicions about which end of a rifle the bullet emerged from, the heroic sons
of democratic Hungary had learned only one other thing: a formative hatred of
the Army. The futility of the training was doubled in Gyuri’s case: although
the camp was devised to render them sturdy leaders of men, Gyuri, being
class-x, wouldn’t be allowed to be an officer, so the most he could ever be was
the best-trained corporal in the People’s Army.

The
political classes were for once extremely welcome although they were raw
tedium. Everyone looked forward to them because you could sit down, not be
shouted at and not have to worry about donning a gas mask. Dohányi would stand
to one side, fuming conspicuously at this respite from his meticulously
conceived diet of ordeal.

The
political officer was called Lieutenant-Colonel Tibor Pataki, a fact that Gyuri
fully intended to tease Pataki about when he returned to Budapest, away from
the military and the countryside where all you had was a choice of grass and
excrement served up in a variety of styles. Lt.-Col. Pataki obviously did a lot
of this sort of instruction – he had been chauffeured into the camp hot from
another engagement, and his monotonous, unfaltering flow suggested regular
practice.

‘It is,
of course, Generalissimo Stalin, who has given us life, that we salute, and the
triumph of Stalinian strategy in the Great Patriotic War that we take as our
guiding precept but it is above all the Hungarian edition of the works of
Stalin, a new invincible weapon in our hands, that will enable us to model
ourselves on the glorious Stalinian Soviet Army.’ This was all without a
breath, and in front of a mounted, hazy photograph of a Soviet officer looking
knowingly and professionally down the gun barrel proffered by a Soviet
infantryman, smirkingly proud and confident of the unbesmirched state of his
rifling. That photograph was to the left of Lieutenant-Colonel Pataki. To his
right was a grey, hard-to-distinguish photograph of small figures in a line,
carrying banners with indecipherable slogans. This picture was bottomed: ‘Peace
Demonstration, London.’

Lt.-Col.
Pataki took up Dohányi’s theme of Communism getting ready to put its boot on
the throat of decadent bourgeois countries, to stick the bayonet in and twist
it about, but in much more refined and dull language for fifteen minutes or so,
before expounding further about Stalin, leader of the Peace Front.

If the
Lieutenant-Colonel took this seriously, if he believed what he was saying,
Gyuri pondered, it was sad. If he didn’t believe the nonsense he was spouting,
like a parrot or a khaki gramophone player, that was sad too. Which was sadder?
Or maybe you could take the whole scene, all of them assembled in the hut pretending
to imbibe the wisdom that the Lt.-Col. was pretending to impart, as an
enormously elaborate practical joke. Perhaps one day everyone in Hungary, in
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Rumania, the Soviet Union and even Albania
would wake up one day to hear Stalin shrieking with laughter in the Kremlin: ‘You
didn’t think I was serious, did you?’

Living
according to bolshevik principles: the idea was as absurd as walking around all
day with two fingers stuck up your nose. At least the Church only expected you
to turn up once a week, but otherwise was prepared to keep out of your hair. If
people’s power only meant a weekly hour-long lecture, Gyuri thought, I could
live with it.

Scrutinising
the Lieutenant-Colonel, Gyuri inclined to categorising him as a true believer,
a moral cripple, ethically stillborn. This would surely be seen as the most
lasting, the most magisterial accomplishment of the Hungarian Workers’
Movement: unearthing, rounding up, nurturing so many prize shits. How many
supershits could a small country like Hungary yield? A few hundred? A few
thousand? No, the Hungarian Working People’s Party’s talent scouts had offered
contracts to hundreds of thousands of manshaped turds. Admittedly not all of
them would be truly first division brigands, and who knows, maybe there were
even people who joined by mistake, thinking they could do some good.

But for
the conscripted audience, the ostensibly dull lecture had, in fact, been garnished
with the tang of corporeal detente; numerous limbs and muscle installations had
had an opportunity of resting, and as they filed away from the political
instruction, they wondered if they would be treated to another session.

At the
end of the four weeks, everyone was so glad to leave that they couldn’t find
the energy to really hate Dohányi as he gave them some parting abuse: ‘I’m
sorry to see you barely biped turds leaving. It would have been a better deal
for humanity if you had died here, but I don’t suppose you self-propelled
dicks will get very far. There’s no need to thank me.’ Gyuri and some of the
others vacillated over giving Dohányi some obscenity, but you never could be
sure how far military jurisdiction stretched. They settled for some sloppy
salutes and ran to the railway station.

Returning
to Budapest, Gyuri felt older, wiser, proud of having taken his four weeks
without falling to his knees, begging for mercy. The sight of Budapest brought
a torrent of excitement and gratitude. A desire to kiss the ground lasted for
several seconds when he stepped off the train and the delight in being
capitalised lasted until he got to Thököly út, by which time the crowded tram
had pressed the last drops of rejoicing out of him.

It was
as he strolled down the last section of Thököly út to turn into Dózsa György
út, that a figure in a heavily-peopled delicatessen caught his eye. His
subconscious elbowed his conscious, and he noticed Pataki in a queue at the
counter. He gazed through the window at this spectacle for a few moments, and
then, excited and fearful of missing the continuation, he ran into the shop.

There
was Pataki, sandwiched between resolute housewives, carrying a shopping basket,
a large wicker construction that Gyuri didn’t recognise as an official Pataki
family household object.