Under the frog (24 page)

József
had also been the only person with any character, and certainly the only one
with any feeling for the Hungarian language, to join the Communist Party, which
he had done, driven by an incurable loneliness, in the thirties when the Party
was illegal. He had been expelled almost immediately for having the temerity to
think, saving himself from iniquity and saving the Party’s record of
unblemished imbecility.

Sólyom-Nagy
cast his absence all over the library. Passing one studious lady with a
window-seat, Gyuri’s gaze dovetailed with hers and he realised it was Jadwiga,
the Polish girl he had met the week before, slightly obscured now by glasses.
Having exchanged mute greetings Gyuri moved on to check a few remaining
biblionooks, full of books, devoid of Sólyom-Nagy. Sólyom-Nagy wasn’t such
riveting company but what was he going to do until the evening?

He
retraced his steps to where Jadwiga was reading behind fortifications of books,
thinking that if nothing else Solyom-Nagy and university life should provide
enough conversational substance to cover a coffee. Jadwiga agreed to Gyuri’s
suggestion and spent a few moments packing away the paraphernalia of study with
a thoroughness that caused Gyuri much envy. Bookmarks went into the books,
pencils into a box, the books joined stacks and the notes were herded together
into a pack, then all the academic utensils were brought together into a neat
heap. Jadwiga took her coffee breaks seriously.

In the
café, they split up, Jadwiga holding down a table while Gyuri went off to queue
for the coffees. When he returned with them, the second chair had vanished from
the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jadwiga, as if waking from sleep, ‘I didn’t notice
anyone take it.’ The café was full and Gyuri had to wander around to filch a
seat. Some pale fresher who was guarding a set of chairs lost one to Gyuri, who
was looking sufficiently dangerous and violent as a result of his early rising
not to meet with any protest.

‘So, is
Sólyom-Nagy a good friend of yours?’ Gyuri inquired.

‘No,’
Jadwiga smiled mischievously, ‘I don’t have many good friends.’

She was
studying Hungarian literature. She measured out the conversation, enough to
cover politeness but no more. Gyuri had to squeeze inquisitorially to picture
her background. Her Hungarian was frighteningly good, with only the slightest
accent, almost deliberately maintained to give a little exotic charm; it was
merely a reminder that she shouldn’t be mistaken for a Hungarian. Because it
was true and because praising women had never done up any buttons, Gyuri said:

‘Your
Hungarian is better than most Hungarians. I think you must also have the
distinction of being the only non-Hungarian to learn Hungarian this century.
What made you do it?’

‘My
father was here during the war. It’s a family interest.’ There had been hordes
of Polish soldiers passing through Budapest during the war, Gyuri recalled,
escaping from one front to go and fight on another. Hard, determined men, upset
that they were momentarily unable to kill anyone and puzzling over who should
be first on the slay-list, the Germans or the Russians. Oddly enough in a
region where nations spent most of their time trying to figure out which of their
neighbours they hated the most, the Poles and the Hungarians were
centuries-deep friends. There was even a couplet, available in both languages,
commemorating how much the two nations enjoyed putting the boot in and drinking
together. It seemed a bizarre desire to go to Hungary to learn the language,
but on the other hand, he had tried to get to China, and even Poland, red as it
was, would have made a change. He had been chosen for the fixture in Gdansk the
year before, his smiling face had been on the publicity poster but he had again
been refused a passport. Even Hepp had been surprised by that. Still, Gyuri
certainly felt that he could do something to further Hungarian-Polish
relations. Mentioning the party that was being co-sponsored by Sólyom-Nagy, Gyuri
asked Jadwiga if she would be going.

‘I
haven’t been invited,’ she said, adding to further extinguish Gyuri’s overture,
‘I’m not very keen on parties.’ After allowing a seemly period to elapse after
the consumption of her coffee, Jadwiga rose to resume her studies. Gyuri
accompanied her, on the off-chance that Sólyom-Nagy had surfaced in the
library, though this, he had to concede, was unlikely, unless it was a question
of Sólyom-Nagy smuggling out a few valuable books to find new lives with
fee-paying owners.

He left
the building without Sólyom-Nagy but with Jadwiga’s room number at the student
hostel which she had imparted with only the slimmest hesitation. It never did
any harm to know where intriguing Polish women were located. She was, he
guessed, nineteen, twenty, but she had a spiritual weight well in advance of
her years and a flirtation technique that was superb in handing out the
sparsest of clues.

Gyuri
wandered around Szeged, not seeing Sólyom-Nagy at all. Szeged, as Hungarian
towns went, was quite large: it took five minutes to walk from one end to the
other, but it was still peculiar that he hadn’t bumped into Sólyom-Nagy. Had he
got the date wrong? Was Sólyom-Nagy in Budapest? When in doubt, have lunch – which he did standing up in a butcher’s, working his way through a csabai
sausage with bread and a miserable mustard that marred his gusto. After lunch,
he decided to have another lunch, after which he returned to the university to
prowl for Sólyom-Nagy. He did the now familiar circuit of the dormitory, the
grounds, the library.

He
knocked on Jadwiga’s door. He heard the sounds of occupancy. ‘I missed you,’ he
said as she opened the door. She scrutinised him for a long second, then
admitted him. ‘I hope you like tea,’ she said, ‘because that’s all I can offer
you.’ As a veteran of impecuniosity, Gyuri immediately read penury in her room.
It was clinically smart, causing Gyuri to admire once again the miraculous
ability women had to automatically instil order, having that morning stumbled
through various items on his bedroom floor, items which had certainly been
there when he had started his accountancy studies.

It was
as Jadwiga picked up a kettle to boil the water that Gyuri received two
co-nascent bulletins from the back-room boys. One thought, how elegant and
graceful she was, how she made picking up a kettle touchingly, triumphantly
erotic. Optically revisiting her bosom, arms and legs, he appreciated how lithe
and athletic she was. Lucky: she had the sort of slender age-resistant frame that
would provide the same conjugal scenery at forty as at sixteen.

The
second thing that barged into Gyuri’s attention was the certitude that he
wanted to marry her. That was surprising. He had never felt wedlockish before;
indeed the idea of an additional bond to Hungary, anything that would make his
flight less streamlined, was anathema. So this was what it felt like. But here
it was, unannounced, without any warning, no throat-clearing – the notion that
he wanted to get married, as precisely defined and as urgent as a craving for
chocolate cake. Was he going crazy? He pondered this development while Jadwiga
boiled the water on the gas ring down the corridor. Old Szocs had been right.

On the
wall was a roughly-hewn wooden crucifix, the sort of thing a pious peasant with
time on his hands would do. Maybe Stalin was dead, maybe this was 1955 after
all, but this was tantamount to having a two-metre marble horseprick deposited
outside the Rector’s office. Clearly, it wasn’t just Jadwiga’s breasts that
were firm. Gyuri welcomed the audacity, but wondered whether there would be
theological tape interfering with the expedition down south?

In a
way, Gyuri regretted having the tea and the rather wretched biscuit that
Jadwiga offered him since he had the feeling he was consuming half her worldly
goods; the tea she had had to scoop out of the bottom of a tin and the biscuit,
he suspected, had been stored up for a special occasion, which he wasn’t. An
offer of supper, as long as he could find a ridiculously cheap restaurant, was
doubly required.

‘Could
you help me with the window?’ she asked. ‘It’s a bit stuffy in here.’ She was
standing by the window, pushing against its stuckness. How did she do it? The
request couldn’t have been more exciting if she had asked him to take off all
her clothes. The window didn’t need that much persuading, but even if it had
been nailed down, it would have been shooting open, Gyuri was experiencing such
vigour.

Jadwiga
still wouldn’t relent on the party, or having supper. ‘I’m behind with my work,’
she said steadfastly. This refusal didn’t bother Gyuri unduly. Intuitively, he
sensed that it wasn’t powered by a desire to extricate herself from his
company. Her regimented books testified to her earnestness. Unusually for
someone at university, she was interested in her studies. The biscuit, lone and
sagging as it had been, prevented Gyuri from being discouraged. He felt their
lines were converging, not staying parallel. This was love at the first cup of
tea.

He
withdrew to let her study for a while and to craft some advances. Sólyom-Nagy
was now back in his room. He apologised for his absence owing to several trips
to collect fluid supplies for the evening.

The
party was held at the Theatre. Gyuri who had thought he had seen professionally
debauched festivities in Budapest had anticipated a more provincial level of
bacchanalia but he had to concede that that night in Szeged was nothing but
arrestable and immoral behaviour. It was indisputably the fastest social event
he had ever attended. There was a hip-bath on stage in which Sólyom-Nagy mixed
what he billed as the largest cocktail ever fashioned in Hungary, a triumph of
socialist planning involving Albanian brandy, ice cream, vodka and other things
that no one could or would identify.

Within
half an hour of the hipbath opening for business, there were people unable to
prise themselves off the floor. Gyuri had only one small glass which he sipped
pensively and he was very glad he hadn’t emptied it down his neck like the
others. It already seemed to him that the stage had grown a vicious slope.

Agnes
was there, whom Gyuri hadn’t seen for years. That was the problem with a small
country: you were always walking into your past. Gyuri had heard that she had
gone to Szeged to study. For a lengthy period of time Gyuri had asked her
out. Pataki had been squiring her best friend, Elvira. Gyuri asked,
Agnes ducked. ‘She always goes out with the friend of whoever’s going out with
Elvira,’ Pataki had encouraged, insisting that Agnes had already indicated her
approval of Gyuri’s merits.

However,
whenever Gyuri proposed some social union, Agnes always produced some excuse.
There was no untreated refusal. She never gave the same excuse twice and they
ranged from hair-washing to one twenty-minute apology featuring an escaped lion
from Budapest Zoo where her brother was the deputy Party Secretary. Gyuri
remembered that the plot began with an attempt to shift elephant shit in a more
socialist and scientific manner, applying only the strictest of Marxist-Leninist principles. It was without doubt the longest alibi Gyuri had endured,
and, since he doubted that Agnes’s imagination was up to it, probably true, but
at the end of it she said that, sadly, she couldn’t go to the cinema. Gyuri
would have taken off his chasing shoes long before if it hadn’t been for Pataki’s
protestations that he had approval from flight control. ‘Just ask her out,’ he
censured impatiently.

Finally,
after listening to dozens of instalments about Agnes’s crammed time, since she
wasn’t the sort to engender rabid desire, Gyuri had let it drop. After all,
Gyuri had reasoned, if it was going to be unrequited love and regular
humiliation, it might as well be unrequited love and regular humiliation at the
hands of a prodigiously attractive female, which would be a shade less humiliating.
‘You don’t know how to ask. You just don’t know how to ask,’ Pataki had
commented.

Agnes
seemed sorry about past misunderstandings, as she was crying, as indeed many
people were. The acceleration from initial jocularity to maudlin impotence had
been phenomenal. An hour after the kick-off at eight o’clock, there
was already a three o’clock in the morning atmosphere.

‘I’m so
sorry, Gyuri,’ she sobbed. Her contrition seemed genuine because she kept
repeating this with her head slumped on Gyuri’s chest. He assumed her grief was
to do with her rejections of him, though it was hard to tell. At the behest of
hormonal petition, Gyuri thought about a bareback waltz against a sequestered
wall somewhere but discarded the idea. He didn’t want to gain admission to the
club because there was no one on duty at the door, and besides, although part
of him was already working on self chastisement for not taking what was offered
to him on the tray of his sternum, he realised that he’d rather be with
Jadwiga. He’d rather be sitting with Jadwiga chatting about some Hungarian
writer, than taking a tongue tour of Agnes, or indeed any other highly
acquiescent lady. You always get what you want when you don’t want it, he
concluded, dumping Agnes into a more comfortable bit of aisle where she could
continue her soliloquy.

He left
and was braced by the cool night air which swept out some of the alcoholic
debris left by Sólyom-Nagy’s concoction. He learned later from Sólyom-Nagy that
two actresses who had been dancing on a prop coffin, had, shortly after Gyuri’s
departure, taken off all their clothes. There had been no risk of them being
voted the most beautiful women in Szeged, or indeed the most beautiful women at
the party, but still, whoever got tired of naked actresses? Sólyom-Nagy had
also reported the arrival of the police who were summoned because of a group
jumping out of the theatre bar, a drop of twenty feet to the pavement below, as
the result of some inebriated logic. The neighbours complained to the police
because of the loud noise made by the jumpers as they laughed raucously about
their broken ankles.