Under the frog (22 page)

Showing
them out of the flat, Makkai returned to the theme of his flatmate. ‘He’s doing
a three-year course at the Party College. Three years! I mean how long does it
take to learn to say “Yes, comrade”?’ He insisted on showing Pataki the
interloper’s room to give a more forceful illustration of the magnitude of the stench.
‘What can I do? You don’t know a place where I can buy some powdered glass?’

‘Why
not drop a letter to Andrássy út,’ suggested Pataki, ‘something on the lines of
seeing him hanging around the American Embassy with a false moustache. If you
could get a few dollars to slip under his pillowcase that would be a nice
touch.’

Makkai
had been preparing to laugh but then realised Pataki wasn’t being facetious,
and settled for a nod or two that could be interpreted any way you wanted.

The
tram was empty apart from Gyuri and Pataki but still indisputably public when
Pataki pulled a thin manila folder from the large hold-all he used for hauling
around his photographic paraphernalia. He handed it over to Gyuri. ‘It’s this
year’s belated birthday present,’ he said.

The
file was marked with the AVH acronym, the latest rearrangement of the AVO’s
name, and lower down with a lower-case ‘severely secret’. Inside was Gyuri’s
form, his Ministry of the Interior file, his civic, ideological profile and
worth. His date of birth and name were typed. His date of birth was incorrect
and his middle name was misspelt. The only entry on the file, in a rather
flourishing hand, in blue ink was ‘No particular remarks’. It was the most insulting
assessment he had ever had, leaving the caustic remarks of his schoolteachers
at the starting-line. The police state didn’t think him worth policing, not
interesting enough to merit further consideration.

‘How
did you get this?’ asked Gyuri, feeling distinctly uneasy
holding such an Interior document in his hands.

‘Agnes,
the singing secret policewoman. If you know whom to ask and how to ask you can
get anything you want.’ Pataki, Gyuri knew, in the cursory way he was
acquainted with the female figures that conveyor-belted their way through
Pataki’s bedroom, had had an affair with a typist in the AVO who was also a
singer in the AVO’s all-female choir brought out to croon on special occasions
for the Soviet Ambassador. The reddest of Pataki’s girlfriends, she was also
taking a night-course in scriptwriting at the College of Theatrical and
Cinematic Arts, ‘to help crispen those confessions’ as Pataki had observed.

‘They
didn’t have much to say on the subject of me,’ said Gyuri.

‘Let’s
face it, you don’t join the AVO because you want to work. Mind you, you should
see my file,’ said Pataki, pulling out a folder like a volume of an
encyclopaedia. ‘I never would have guessed they had so many women working for
them, including one very sexy chimney sweep that I briefly met in ’49. I haven’t
read it all,’ Pataki paused to scan a few pages. ‘But there’s definitely
someone grassing on us in Locomotive.’ He fished
into his pocket, and produced a card. ‘But anyway, thanks
to Agnes, I’m well prepared.’ He held an AVO identity card, with his picture
and name.

Gyuri’s
lengthy astonishment had only started its journey into expression when, as the
tram rumbled down the Muzeum Körút, they saw and heard the commotion of a large
crowd around Bródy Sándor utca. ‘It’s not Lenin’s mother’s birthday or
something, is it?’ asked Pataki, although the gathering had an unfamiliarly
unofficial air about it. They got off the tram to have a closer look.

Hundreds
of people were crowded around the headquarters of Hungarian Radio. It quickly
became clear that the crowd was there on account of its displeasure with the
result of the World Cup final. There were periodic bursts of rhythmic chants: ‘We
want justice, we want justice’, and ‘It’s a swindle, swindle, swindle’.

More
than anything else, Gyuri was shocked by the flagrant public expression of
sentiment. It was something he hadn’t seen for years, not since the ’45 elections.
‘Let’s take a closer look,’ said Pataki pushing through the people. The crowd
was surging towards the entrance of the Radio where the AVO were out in a
chain, armed and looking unhappy. Pataki was eager to get to the clashing
point, and despite Gyuri’s reservations, the motion of the crowd kept pushing
him closer to the irascible, gun-toting defenders of state authority.

To add
to Gyuri’s discomfiture, they had arrived just at the moment when the
commanding officer was about to lose his temper. What the crowd was after,
Gyuri couldn’t work out. Whether they considered the Radio a more tangible
representative of power than the parliament and thus a target to vent their
anger on, or whether they wanted to broadcast something, he couldn’t discern.
Perhaps it was the commentary on the match they objected to. The commanding
officer of the AVO detachment was repeating very loudly, again and again: ‘This
is the last time. I’m telling you, move back and go home.’

‘This
is the last time I’m telling you, you’re a wanker,’ shouted a man squashed next
to Gyuri. The crowd was very angry and surprisingly sure of itself, bearing in
mind the AVO were carrying guns and the crowd had nothing but its fury, and the
AVO men patently fell into the category of crowd-shooters.

The
commanding officer kept telling everyone to disperse and those not immediately
in front of him but well within earshot kept telling him he was a wanker.
Gyuri, riding high on the crowd’s sum, shouted profanities since it seemed the
done thing. The AVO pressed forward. The crowd pressed back, three AVO men went
down and there was a joyous shout of ‘I’ve got him in the bollocks’. A stone
shattered a window in the Radio building.

Then
there was a burst of fire into the air. The entertainment was over. Gyuri and
apparently lots of others thought that dying would be an over-reaction to the
Hungarian goalie having fumbled one ball. He ran as fast as he could in the
millimetre of space that he had between him and the person in front. The AVO
was coming in with the rifle butts. It took a while to unclog the street, but
people were soon running away full pelt from the Radio.

Gyuri,
who had been monopolising all his concentration on leaving the vicinity as
rapidly as possible, found that Pataki had disappeared. He wasn’t worried that
Pataki was one of those lying in the street trying to hold their heads
together. He had probably picked up some comely rioter.

He got
home to find Elek listening to the radio denouncing the hooligans who had been
running wild in the streets of Budapest. It was nice to be famous.

‘I
learned something interesting tonight,’ Gyuri recounted to Elek. ‘Hungarians
don’t mind dictatorship, but they really hate losing a football match.’

November 1955

The man
was snoring, snoring so loudly, so rattlingly, that even if one had been
over-dosed with tolerance, it would have been too much. Gyuri and the other
passengers, only equipped with everyday indulgence, found their forbearance
crushed like an aphid under a sledgehammer.

The man
had the look of an engineer, something lowly and civil, the pens in his
shirtpocket spoke of a rudimentary learning and erudition; the adept way he
blew his nose with the aid of his right hand and with one motion hustled the
catarrh out of the open window spoke of too much time on building sites. He had
got on the train at Budapest and placed his dowdy belongings on the overhead
rack, sat down in one of the seats next to the door, leaned his head against
the glass and turned on the sleep, instantly, without any preamble.

Within
a few seconds the snoring had commenced, as if approaching them from a great
distance, faint at first but growing steadily to a prodigious din erupting from
the man’s open mouth. Everyone else had looked at each other, first with a sort
of tacit amusement that had progressed to bemusement and carried on to
irritation. The odd thing about people behaving badly, Gyuri noticed, letting
their boorishness slop out onto others, was that it was usually the victims who
were embarrassed rather than the perpetrator.

The
volume of the snoring was phenomenal. A mild, intermittent rasping might have
been bearable but the engineer’s lungs pummelled everyone’s eardrums
mercilessly. Also, truthfully, it was most unwelcome to be privy to the
detailed internal workings of a corpulent engineer – to have a ringside
perspective on his respiratory adventures. There were sporadic lulls, producing
an optimistic sense of relief, of the auditory siege being lifted, but these
interludes of silence while the snoring caught its breath only made the
restored gurgling more serrated.

Gyuri,
at the opposite end of the compartment, had no contiguous opportunity to impede
the snoring but those closer attempted to trip up the volume. Discreet coughs
followed by indiscreet coughs, yells, proddings and shovings didn’t succeed in
making him miss a slumbering beat. The woman in the headscarf started clucking
loudly, as if giving the traditional imitation of a chicken. The snoring
faltered and disappeared under the onslaught of the clucking. ‘It always works
with my husband,’ she said proudly but as she did the snoring pulled out into
the fast lane again. The man opposite tried trailing a powerful garlic sausage
under the sleeper’s nose. Nothing. The engineer snored on blissfully.

The
flawless repose, the effortless snoozing excited Gyuri’s admiration as well as
irritating him. He could never sleep on trains, or at best, could only achieve
a disorientating stupor that was worse than being tired.

The
sausage-waver was becoming edgy and aggressive towards the morpheused slob who
was wholly indifferent to the implorings and digitings he was getting. If it
hadn’t been for the obvious passage of air in and out of his workings, the
sleeper’s lack of response would have been rather worrying, so loath was his
body to do its job and pass on the complaints.

‘My
dear sir, you’re snoring rather loudly,’ said the bespectacled protester,
giving another push to the snorer. To flee the palatal thunder, Gyuri left the
compartment.

What a
gift to be able to sleep like that, he thought. How agreeable to sleep through
the entire thing, to only wake up when everything had changed. That was one of
the worst things: the boredom. Dictatorship of the proletariat, apart from the
abrasive and brutal nature of its despotism, was terribly dull. It wasn’t the
sort of tyranny you’d want to invite to a party. Look at the great tyrannies of
antiquity: Caligula, Nero, now there was tyranny for you, excess, colour,
abundant fornication, stage management, excitement on the loose,
panem et circenses.
What have we got? brooded
Gyuri. Hardly any
panem
and as for the
circenses,
only the sort involving people
running around wearing red noses.

Not
only do I get a dictatorship, fumed Gyuri, but I get a tatty dictatorship, a
third rate, a boring dictatorship. I could have stayed in Budapest and watched
Boris Godunov,
he thought. He had only seen it
four times. Another, somewhat unacknowledged triumph of the new order was that
you could always watch
Boris Godunov
any time you wanted to. After all, there were only so
many Russian operas to choose from. Róka, entwined with a singer, had acquired
an unquenchable taste for opera and had invited Gyuri to accompany him to see
his fiancée in action. It was amusing to see all the policemen and steelworkers
packed into the front rows of the auditorium, whether they wanted to be there
or not. (At Ganz the lathe-turners had drawn lots to allocate the tickets
distributed to them by the Party secretary, many preferring to do an extra
shift rather than having to face the music.) Gyuri had put in attendance at
Boris Godunov
the month before so he had
decided to go down to Szeged to investigate the party for which Sólyom-Nagy had
been acting as harbinger.

In the
next compartment, a beautiful girl was talking animatedly to a female friend
with the bounce of the attractive. With the right looks, a good stock of
beauty, you were always going to come out on top, it was the life-belt that
would keep you floating on the surface. Sadistically, she licked her lips and
dangled her left calf, crossed over her right leg, energetically in a manner
and in a brisk rhythm that even someone without Gyuri’s unifilar mind would have
found reminiscent of riding the unirail.

Why,
lamented Gyuri, does the beautiful girl never sit in my compartment? Why am I
always lumbered with the noisy oaf? Admitting to himself, as he returned to his
compartment, as he was old enough to know, that if she had been sitting in the
compartment he wouldn’t have been able to craft any conversational
grappling-hooks or have the nerve to use them.

The
passenger who had been trying to stop the slob sleeping aloud had finally
despaired of polite memos to the snorer’s nervous system. He arranged the
sleeper’s hand into overhanging the doorway and then slammed shut the sliding
door in a vigorous attempt to guillotine the fingers. The sleeper awoke but
only with a mild grunt of surprise as if he had dropped off unexpectedly. ,

‘So
sorry,’ apologised the door-slammer, ‘I seem to have caught your fingers.’ The
slamee wasn’t bothered at all. He proceeded to unwrap a rug-sized piece of
paper from which he dug out three greasy fried chicken wings which he ate with
such gusto and noise that everyone felt they had a molar eye’s view of the
mastication. The general relief that came when he had chomped the last of the
chicken was promptly dispelled when, on the count of three, sleep was resumed
and the slob carried on snoring from where he had left off. Szeged was still
two hours away.

As a
putative employee of the railways, Gyuri travelled free, but this didn’t make
the trip any less onerous. When you’re eighteen, you’ll travel to the other
side of the earth for a party, he thought, sensing how he needed to talk
himself into the pursuit of pleasure now.