Under the frog (28 page)

Seated
for once, Gyuri was wondering at what point he should vacate the tram, when at
the other end, a blue-overalled worker suddenly barked at the ticket-inspector:
‘When the state starts paying me valid money, that’s when I’ll have a valid
ticket, okay?’ The ferocity of the outburst was astonishing, much more than one
would have believed the question of a tram ticket could have elicited even in
the most extreme of circumstances. It hushed the whole tram and centred everyone’s
attention in anticipation of some good transport theatre. Ordinarily, people
who weren’t interested in paying or weren’t able to jumped off the tram at the
approach of the authorities, as Gyuri did, like a tree losing its leaves.

The
ticket-inspector had obviously tripped on a long-festering rage. His inquiry
had opened the door to a crowd of resentments, and the rebuff’s raw savagery,
with its billboarded promise of corporeal damage, both imminent and merciless,
persuaded him to move on. Gyuri had only witnessed total refusal once before.
An elderly man, flanked on both sides by enormous, slavering Alsatians that he
was having difficulty restraining, had smiled at the request to produce his
ticket and stated: ‘I honestly don’t feel like paying.’ He hadn’t.

His
dignity imperilled, the ticket-inspector had got off at the Astoria. Looking
out, Gyuri could see slim groups of students milling around with placards. They
had been quiet for a while, cowed by some of the best brutality available on
the planet, but now the Hungarians were back at it again, the national pastime:
complaining. Everyone seemed to be at it. Even the Writers’ Union, the home of
moral malnutrition, was at it, suddenly disclaiming all the things they had
written in the last few years. The Union had pulled its head out of Rákosi’s
arse and now stood blinking in the daylight.

Setting
out for the disciplinary hearing, Gyuri had heard from Laci, Pataki’s younger
brother, that the students from the Technical University were going to hold a
demonstration. ‘You know, a real demonstration; one that was
our
idea.’ There was dispute as to
whether permission had been granted for it or not. Some rulers said yes, some
said no. The students didn’t care apparently.

The
demonstration wouldn’t make any difference to anything. Gyuri hadn’t said so to
Laci, since Laci had been so delighted by the prospect, but he had been tempted
to quote the words of Dr Hepp: ‘Gentlemen, you can turn bearshit upside down.
You can take it for a trip to the Balaton. You can
put it in a nice box with a blue ribbon. You can shout at it or compose an ode
in its honour. It will remain bearshit.’

So what
if they changed the Party leader as they had in Poland? So what if the new
leader vilified the old leader? What if they had a Gero instead of a Rákosi? Or
a Nagy instead of a Gero? They were all turds off the same production line. It
was like making a fuss about changing a light bulb. What if the new leader
blamed everything on the old leader? It was political leapfrog, musical chairs
in the Central Committee. Why get excited by it?

Gyuri’s
view of the morning was soured by his attendance being required at a
disciplinary hearing, but he was cheered up by the AVO incident.

At the
Astoria, an AVO officer got on (uniformed AVO were harder to spot on the
streets now – they seemed ill at ease). He was carrying a smart briefcase
smartly. He exuded a vigorous belief in his importance, it was as if his
importance was flamboyantly doing chin-ups in the tram. A group of labourers
was next to him. Dirty, hardy, work-darkened figures who would no doubt place
head-kicking at the head of their leisure pursuits. You could see it coming.
They took their time, though, eyeing up the officer as the tram rattled along.
At the next stop, one of them leaned over and asked him stentoriously to the
accompaniment of pálinka fumes: ‘Tell me, did you brush your teeth this morning?’

‘What?’
asked the AVO, puzzled by this forewordless inquiry.

‘Did
you brush your teeth this morning?’ insisted his interrogator.’Yes,’ was the
only thing the AVO could think of as a reply.

‘Excellent.
In that case, just this once, you can lick my arse.’

The
detonation of laughter practically blew the AVO officer off the tram. Gyuri
felt privileged to be in at the making of an anecdote that would enliven many
an evening in a kocsma. Carrying his massive discomfiture awkwardly, the AVO
noticed his stop had arrived and alighted.

At the
Ministry of Sport, Hepp was waiting outside, looking at his watch angrily as if
it were colluding with Gyuri’s tardiness. They weren’t late for the hearing but
Hepp always liked to be ten minutes ahead of events. Gyuri really went out of
his way to be there on the dot for Hepp, because if you weren’t, you’d pay for
it. ‘But we said eleven o’ clock,’ Hepp would say, sincerely bewildered as to
why such a clear agreement hadn’t been respected. And he would keep on saying
it until you feared for your sanity. If you pleaded tram-famine, earthquake,
your home suddenly combusting, Hepp would merely say: ‘Why didn’t you start
earlier?’.

Being
late was incomprehensible to him, dug-up tablets in some ancient tongue. It was
more confusion than anger: ‘But we said eleven o’ clock’. He would repeat this,
on and on, tonally turning it up and down, with the determination of a
code-breaker trying to crack an unbreakable code. Hepp’s solar punctuality never
failed him. As far as anyone knew he had only been late for an appointment once
in his life and that was when Pataki, forewarned Hepp was due at a coaches’
seminar, had slipped into Hepp’s office just as Hepp was getting ready to
leave. Under the cover of some anodyne conversation, Pataki had withdrawn,
palming the key to Hepp’s office door. He had then locked the door from the
corridor and had joined everyone outside, on the other side of the street,
where they had a good view of Hepp’s office. Within minutes Hepp was loudly
ordering them to let him out, shouting at times with great pathos from his
second floor window. Eventually, he prevailed on a passer-by to provide a
ladder but by that point he was an irrecuperable fifteen minutes late.

Matasits
was, naturally enough, behind Gyuri’s appearance in front of the disciplinary
tribunal. It was boring, in a way. Every time Gyuri played a game with Matasits
refereeing, Gyuri would speedily accumulate his five fouls and be sent off
before he could cover the length of the court, whether or not he was actually
doing any fouling or even getting into the ball’s neighbourhood. Matasits’s
compulsion to blow his whistle every time he saw Gyuri had long before made it
clear to Gyuri that Matasits had him down as a bad element, a committed
recidivist.

While
Gyuri would have freely conceded that the referees wouldn’t be voting him the
sportingest player on the nation’s basketball courts, the accruing of this
fictional blame was irritating. No matter how exemplary Gyuri was on court, no
matter how preposterously courteous he was – handing over the ball on a silver
plate to the opposition at the slightest suggestion they had an interest in it,
shunning contact with the opposing players as if they were radioactive lepers,
if Matasits was there, he was off. There was a rumour that Matasits believed
Gyuri responsible for a delivery of two hundred pairs of Soviet spectacles to
his home and was seeking revenge for this insult by freight.

However,
getting to the tribunal was a first for Gyuri. His gift for lurking in the
referees’ blind spots usually enabled him to nobble the opposition with
impunity; he had also developed a prestidigitator’s talent for sending the
referees’ attention the wrong way so he could elbow, grab trousers and tread on
feet under the nose of authority. Hepp would even evaluate the quality of his
fouling during the post-match analysis, ‘adequate’, ‘stylish’ or on the day he
had head-butted Princz (a man who regarded basketball matches as an unlimited
opportunity for the grabbing of testicles) and got Princz stretchered off, ‘world-class’.

However,
with Matasits on the sidelines, Gyuri would stick resolutely, if futilely, to
nobility. But during a match with the Army, which the Army, despite Pataki’s
absence, was scarcely winning, Gyuri and an Army player had gone up for a ball.
The Army player had got the ball and had Gyuri crash to the ground where he had
remained while the Army player winged his way to Locomotive’s basket and dumped
the ball through the ring for two easy points. Like everyone else, Róka had
looked on Gyuri’s collapse as an overly histrionic attempt to get the ball back
‘It’s okay,’ Róka had said to the slumped Gyuri, ‘you can get up now.’

But
Gyuri hadn’t got up because he was firmly unconscious. Matasits booked him for
wilfully obstructing the course of play, saying in all his years of refereeing
he had never seen such blatant fakery and that this was going to the basketball
council, particularly as, when Gyuri had regained contact with the world and
learned what was going on, he had made a groggy attempt to strangle Matasits.

The
tribunal was composed of three inert, overflowingly bored gentlemen behind a
sweeping desk: they looked as if they were left in the room when the tribunal
wasn’t sitting.

Matasits
kicked off. ‘Esteemed tribunal, we are dealing here with a debaser of what is
most sacred to man.’ He read badly from notes. Gyuri settled down, judging from
the depth of Matasits’s sheets that it would be a long haul. Matasits had been
leaning on his dictionary. In a number of rehashes, he denounced Gyuri as the
fountain of all evil, a homicidal neanderthal, who wandered around the court on
his knuckles, only employing his limited power of speech to heap abuse on duly
empowered officials. To Matasits’s gaugeable and progressive disappointment,
the tribunal didn’t gasp with horror but took notes emotionlessly albeit
diligently. Having counted on something on the lines of a burning at the stake,
with a little quartering thrown in for good measure, Matasits left the room,
dejected at the coolness of his reception. The bored faces buoyed Gyuri a
little, although he had a strong awareness of how even bored people could
really disembowel a career.

Then it
was Hepp’s turn: ‘Gentlemen, while I can in no way whatsoever condone Fischer’s
behaviour, I should like to point out that he has been under enormous,
enormous,
pressures. His mother died
recently, and this bereavement combined with his voluntary coaching at the
Ferencvaros orphanage, in addition to his outstanding work-record at his place
of employment…’ It was good stuff, though Gyuri wasn’t sure there was an
orphanage in Ferencvaros.

To
conclude, he was asked to stand and make any additional mitigation. ‘I’d like
to apologise, gentlemen, for wasting your valuable time and I can assure you
this will be the last time you will see me in such circumstances– ’ The tribunal
could endure no more. They were paid to sit, not to listen. It was lunch time
and Gyuri was cut off by the man in the middle. ‘Fine of fifty forints’ was the
verdict. Gyuri, overwhelmed by the modesty of the fine, had a rash impulse to
offer to round it up to a hundred if he could punch Matasits in the mouth.

‘Aren’t
you going to the demonstration?’ Hepp asked outside. ‘Everyone else seems to
be.’

‘If I
thought it could make the slightest difference, I’d be leading it.’

Gyuri
debated whether to go to work. It was a short debate. The Feather Processing
Enterprise could do without him for an afternoon. It had done pretty well
without him in the two months he had been there. Hepp had fixed a job for him
there; as a good amateur basketball player, Gyuri needed a job. Once he had
qualified as an accountant he resolved he should have a position with more
status, more prospects and more pay than knocking out the occasional morse code
for the railways.

The
post of planner had been wangled for him at the Feather Processing Enterprise.
Obviously, one didn’t want a job where there was a danger of work but it would
have been nice to have had stimulating or glamorous surroundings in which to
collect one’s wages.

All
Gyuri had done in his two months of employment, out of curiosity, was to take
the figures supplied by the Ministry stipulating the amounts the factory should
be producing according to the Five Year Plan, and divide these totals by the
number of units in the factory. Then, having discovered the unit production
figures he added it all up again to get the production figure desired by the
Plan. What was actually happening in the factory, he didn’t know. Gyuri doubted
that anyone knew or even wanted to know. Most of the little time that he was in
his office, his fellow economist, Zalan, and he, would flick matches (fired
from the abrasive strip on the matchbox) at each other’s desks, taking bets on
which stacks of paper would ignite.

He had
only got the Plan details by accident after he encountered Fekete, the director
of the Feather Processing Enterprise, as he was belting down a corridor with a
couple of fishing-rods. He recognised Fekete because he had been a celebrated
all-in wrestler before the war, known as ‘The Fat Boa’. The rumour was he had
lent money to members of the Central Committee in the days of their illegality,
when they shared the same boarding-house.

‘Pleased
to meet you,’ Fekete had said, shaking his hand warmly and giving the
rippling-biceped smile of a former showman. ‘I’m in a terrible rush, but a copy
of the Plan is in my office. Do help yourself.’ That was the only time Gyuri
saw Fekete mainly because Fekete only came into the office when he needed was a
convenient site for his extramarital ventures, and also because there wasn’t
anything to discuss.

Gyuri
went to Fekete’s office and with the aid of one of his secretaries who had come
in that day to water the plants, searched it thoroughly. No sign of the Plan.
Because he was new to the job, feeling inquisitive, and slightly intoxicated by
his responsibility, Gyuri decided to phone the Ministry to get some
information.