Under the frog (21 page)

July 1954

Fuming
at the injustice of a regime that was turning him into an accountant, Gyuri
went along to his English lesson.

Makkai’s
flat was off the Űllői út and – unusually for someone Gyuri visited regularly – only on the second floor. It wasn’t a very spacious flat but as a pre-war
diplomat and current incurable bourgeois, Makkai had a son of the soil, a
toiler for international peace, a student at the Party’s College, billeted
legally, forcibly, permanently in his home.

Makkai
usually let his pet complaint off the leash the moment he opened the door,
berating his lodger as he ushered Gyuri inside.

‘I don’t
mind that he’s a Communist. I don’t mind that he leaves Rákosi’s speeches all
over the place. I don’t mind that he’s an oafish imbecile– after all one should
hesitate to pass judgement on others – but what I can’t stand is that he
stinks. It’s unforgivable. Unforgivable. We had an SS officer dumped on us
during the war, a mass murderer, torturer of infants and so on, one assumes. I
could stomach that, but not this. And don’t think I’m being harsh. It’s not the
didn’t-have-time-this-morning-I-was-in-such-a-rush unwashedness, no, no. This
is the unmistakable reek of a body that doesn’t even have childhood memories of
soap. You can shake hands with the smell.

‘I’ve
tried subtlety: daily eulogies on the joys of running water, leaving fresh
towels prominently in his room, detailing at length the trouble I had
purchasing and installing a new shower-head. Relating a fictitious newspaper
account of how washing regularly could extend your life expectancy by twenty
years. Relating another fictitious newspaper article reporting Comrade Rákosi
stressing the urgency of all good Communists scrubbing their armpits with the
slogan Cleanliness is Next to Sovietness. Nothing. I even tried presenting him
with two superb bars of soap on May Day.’

Makkai
seemed a trifle indiscreet for someone who had to cohabit with a cadre, or
perhaps he saved up his indiscretion for Gyuri. Last year, when Stalin had
died, Gyuri left the College of Accountancy to find Comrade Kompan kneeling in
front of the bust of Stalin in the hallway, weeping quite uncontrollably, in
the way one does when a close family member has died. She had been quite decent
to Gyuri when he had enrolled at the College, pointing out that since he was
class-x, ‘We have our eye on you, Fischer. You’ll have to work twice as hard as
everyone else to make amends for your background.’ She hadn’t meant this in a
malevolent, hectoring fashion, but rather in a forgiving, encouraging way and
she had been only voicing what any Party functionary would have thought after
reading the file that always followed Gyuri around – his moral credentials.

Comrade
Kompan had been so distraught that Gyuri thought perhaps he ought to offer some
solace out of courtesy, but he sensed it wouldn’t work. He had continued on to
his English lesson.

On
reaching Makkai’s flat, he had found Makkai dancing on the table – something,
he divulged to Gyuri, he hadn’t done for over forty years, which was why he
looked so out of practice. He went to the larder and produced a bottle of
champagne. ‘It’s Soviet, sadly – I’ve been keeping it cool for years so I’d be
ready to celebrate.’ The lesson that day had consisted of toasts to the late,
unlamented Joseph Vissarionovich and selecting pejorative epithets. ‘You’re
lucky, you’re young. This can’t go on much longer now,’ said Makkai. ‘And you’ll
be able to make the pilgrimage to pass water on Stalin’s grave. But by the time
you get to the front of the queue you’ll be an old man.’ It was the first time
Gyuri had seen Makkai smile, in the four years of his tuition he had never
glimpsed the woebegotten Makkai enjoying anything. He thought he knew the whole
Makkai, childless widower, glum scholar, whose erudition – far from earning him
esteem and fortune or securing him a comfortable position – was a handicap, as
if he were chained to the decomposing carcass of an elephant. The smile made
Gyuri realise there were whole departments of Makkai he had never glimpsed; it
was like turning a dusty vase stationed on top of a wardrobe for years to
discover the reverse has an unseen design.

When he
heard the news of Stalin’s death, from the radio, Gyuri was shampooing his
hair. Apart from experiencing an intense well-being, his first thought was
whether the whole system would collapse in time for him not to have to take the
exam in Marxism-Leninism he was due to sit the following week. Could he count
on the downfall of Communism or was he actually going to have to read some
Marx?

His
second thought was how to achieve maximum disrespect during the ten minutes’
silence that had been decreed for the next day. When he later saw in the cinema
the film tribute of Stalin’s Budapest obsequies, the whole city coming to a
halt, grim faced workers frozen on the edge of pavements, grimy railway workers
easing off the steam on their engines, entire crowds steeped in black making
their way to the enormous statue of Stalin by Hosok Square – when he saw all
this, Gyuri regretted that he hadn’t been able to invite a film crew up to his
flat to record for posterity the only part of him that was standing to
attention, as it was readily interred and disinterred in an old girlfriend,
married now but still eager to reminisce.

Gyuri
watched that newsreel several times, because there was one wide shot of the
crowds around the Stalin statue which had microscopically featured his bedroom
window, enabling him, with some imagination, to relive the joy of his
only-just-off-camera mourning.

But
Stalin’s death, although derangingly enjoyable, hadn’t changed things much.
Rákosi was a little less cocky and Nagy became Prime Minister. Gyuri heard
rumours that people were being cleared out of the prisons, but Stalin stood
monumentally on. The eight metre bronze statue, planted on the site of a church
that had been demolished at the end of the war, was the main feature visible
from Gyuri’s bedroom window and he had taken the positioning of the statue as a
personal horseprick from Fate. Nagy, of course, was different to Rákosi. He had
a moustache. Rákosi didn’t. Also, Nagy wasn’t completely bald. But the Stalin
statue statued on, sodomising the Budapest skyline, sundering any remaining
dignity from a city still recovering from its postwar hangover.

This
evening, Makkai appeared at the doorway of his flat without any doorbell
prompting. ‘Three-two to the Germans,’ he said, ‘it must be a fix.’ Completely
enraged by auditing, frustrated and bored with his accountancy course, in a
stupor of fed-upness, Gyuri hadn’t been paying attention to the World Cup Final
that was engrossing everyone else, Hungary
vs.
West Germany. He certainly hadn’t
been in the mood for his English lesson but as Makkai had no phone he hadn’t
had any means of cancelling it, so he turned up so as not to offend Makkai, who
was a connoisseur of courtesy and did enjoy giving language lessons. Makkai
didn’t charge very much for two hours although it was still a strain on Gyuri’s
resources. But Gyuri felt that for Makkai teaching had less to do with the
money (although he certainly needed it) than with importing an audience into his
flat and that for a while he was taken seriously. Out on the street he was
another pensioner, an old fart with no position, no clout, no job, no money,
but in the instructing chair he was a skilled keeper of deep intellectual
treasures.

These
infusions of esteem were vital to Makkai who would shed a few years during the
course of his revelations about English syntax, pronunciation and life in
England where he had once worked at the Hungarian embassy. ‘A marvellous
building. We couldn’t have afforded it, but it was an inheritance from the
Habsburgs. We got the old Habsburg building in London, the Austrians got Paris
and the Czechs were very pleased about getting the building in Berlin. That’ll
teach them.’

Gyuri
sat down and waited for Pataki who had suddenly decided that he should start
learning English as well. Pataki had also decided that the ideal method for him
to learn would be to sit in on Gyuri’s lessons. Gyuri had reminded Pataki that
he was fairly advanced in his acquaintance with the English language but this
hadn’t deterred Pataki who had assured him he would pick up the gist easily.

‘Three-two,’
Makkai repeated, stunned by the result of the football match, dumbfounded as
everyone else in Hungary was, apart from Gyuri who was too preoccupied with the
misery of accountancy. Along with the rest of the football team, Puskás, the
man with the unstoppable feet and the golden toes, was the sole repository of
national pride. Hungary, in accounting terms, had only one thing to its credit – Puskás the footballing genius. He was tubby, he looked a joke (even more than
Pataki he would have nothing to do with training) but once he was on a football
pitch he saw things that no one else did and would end up unfailingly whacking
the ball into the net. The rest of the team was talented but Puskás was the
diminutive giant of the side. They had even destroyed the English five-one, so
everyone had been confident that the Germans would be vanquished in the final.

‘They
must have been bought off. The Germans must have offered some bribe. They must
have offered the government a loan or something. The team must have been
ordered to lose,’ said Makkai.

The
lesson should have started five minutes previously but there was still no sign
of Pataki. Makkai decided to indulge in a cup of coffee, Brazilian coffee
routed into Budapest by a cousin living in Koln. ‘I was lucky. The customs
people only stole half of it, normally the whole package disappears,’ commented
Makkai. ‘Of course, I may be unfair to the customs, perhaps it was the postman
who stole it.’ Gyuri’s polite refusal only lasted as far as the second offer.

The
English lessons had been going well. Gyuri had reached the point where he could
boldly open a book and the page would hold no secrets for him. There might be
murkiness and fleeting confusion but there would be no huge catch of meaning
that could escape him. This rather pleased him: after all, his studies had been
carried out on an intermittent basis, in the evenings when he was often
half-dead from basketball. The main appeal of English was, he supposed, that it
was only spoken by rotten imperialists, filthy bastards such as the bloated
Wall Street Capitalists or the conniving British empire-builders. The appeal
was that English was not only not compulsory like Russian, but that it was
rather hard to study anywhere since it was viewed as lax, sullying,
unsalubrious – unlike the bracing, cleansing cyrillic script.

Gyuri
had taken a number of exams in Russian which consisted of having a firm grip on
phrases such as ‘Have the Steelworkers’ Trade Union delegates arrived yet,
Comrade?’ or ‘How is the hegemony of the proletariat today?’ You could almost
pass the exam by supplying a plethora of ‘comrades’ into the text or the
conversation. Gyuri was proud of the fact that he had the lowest passes
possible and that he had forgotten everything by the time he walked out from
the exam, his self-collapsing knowledge gone.

His
English had only really been put to the test once, when a basketball coach from
Manchester University came to visit and Gyuri was nominated to transmit
understanding between the guest and his hosts. He had been horrified to
discover that he didn’t understand a single word, not a single word the man was
saying, so much so that he took aside the man from the Ministry and checked
with him that the visitor really spoke English.
‘He should do,’ came the reply, ‘he’s a Scot.’ Gyuri resorted to inventing
questions and statements approximately the length of the Scotsman’s speaking.
Both sides ended up satisfied.

‘Here,’
said Makkai, handing over the coffee; it was strong enough to encaffeinate at
five paces, dark, aromatic with abroad. Brazil, thought Gyuri taking a sip,
lots of coffee, beach, Hungarian fascists. Despite the Hungarians, Brazil
wouldn’t be such a bad destination.

There
was still no sign of Pataki who had never taken much interest in time and its
regulated passage. Even if he had been sovietised to the point of having a
dozen wrist-watches on his arm he couldn’t have kept an appointment. His lack
of synchronisation with the rest of the country had become more pronounced
since Bea had forsaken him. Pataki had never admitted it. He never conceded
that Bea had dumped him, had dropped him from a great height, but Bea’s opening
a liaison with one of Hungary’s most senior, most influential, most monied
actors had coincided with Pataki staying in bed for three days, unable to
muster enough courage to brush his teeth or even to join Elek for a
tête-à-tête. ‘Come on,’ Gyuri urged after Pataki had remained connected to his
bed for forty-eight hours, ‘pull yourself together and let’s go rowing.’ Pataki
turned over onto his other side so that his melancholy would be unblemished by
Gyuri.

‘Frankly,
I can’t see the point of being conscious. It’s more trouble than it’s worth,’
Pataki had replied. ‘Be a man,’ Gyuri reiterated, ‘look how often I get the
elbow.’

‘Yes,
but you’re used to it,’ had been the response.

Even
Hepp had been unable to persuade Pataki to get vertical but he rose on the
third day and Gyuri spotted him bouncing down the street dribbling a basketball
with an air of haste. ‘What happened?’ he had asked.

‘I got
an erection.’

Twenty
minutes late, Pataki entered, saying ‘Three-two to the Germans. It must have
been fixed.’ Pataki and Makkai traded indignation on the infamy and turpitude
of the age, much to Gyuri’s annoyance. However, once the lesson began, he
regained his equilibrium and began to enjoy Pataki’s absolute bafflement at a
language of which he didn’t understand a word, as Makkai yet again cruised the
olfactory vocabulary of English, drawing on thirty adjectives to portray the
miasmatic nature of his lodger’s crannies. Gyuri could tell that Pataki wouldn’t
be back in a hurry.