Under the frog (33 page)

When
Gyuri arrived at the Corvin, as always there were lots of groups congregated
outside the cinema; the necessity to be out on the street hadn’t diminished.
People wanted to see history with their own eyes. The anti-tank gun was still
out by the entrance with a sign ‘retained by popular demand’ propped up on the
barrel; people were still carrying their weapons, despite the call for people
to start handing them in. Jankó, the commander of the Corvin’s single anti-tank
battery, was hobbling about on his wooden leg and didn’t look as if he would be
paying heed. He had a rifle in his hand, a greatly-prized AK-47, the latest
Soviet assault rifle, slung over his back, a holstered pistol and a bayonet
peeking out of the top of the boot on his good foot. Indisputably a man who was
afraid of missing an opportunity of killing some Russians, Jankó had certainly
done a faultless job on the anti-tank gun, six tanks burst open like popcorn,
one shot apiece. Not surprisingly in a man with such homicidal proficiency and
a knack for the gadgets of death, he had a mean set to his face. Gyuri could
imagine him working as a rat-catcher, getting a kick out of killing small
mammals, until larger, more Soviet ones came along.

Jadwiga,
true to form, was nowhere to be seen where she should have been seen. Gyuri
glanced in at a few of the meetings that were taking place, but he couldn’t see
her. Now the fighting was over, people were doing one of two things, either
holding meetings or painting the old national insignia on everything. The
meetings, initially bracing and euphoric, were lurching towards tedium. The
absence of free association had been wearing, but it was like not reading a
book for five years and then trying to read five at the same time to make up.
Creedal orgies, nationwide.

All
sorts of organisations were coming into existence; the old political parties
carrying on from mid-sentence where they stopped in 1947 and all sorts of
societies for political prisoners, for students, for office workers, for
economists, for revolutionary water-polo players. The old joke about two
Hungarians on a desert island resulting in three political parties had been
enacted in earnest. There was probably already an association of one-legged
freedom-fighters for Jankó to join.

Gyuri
sauntered around the Corvin yard. The faces of the fighters were young, most of
them not out of their teens (he again felt somewhat obsolete); they were
working-class generally and well, most of them not too bright. But then would
anyone intelligent spend their leisure time taunting Soviet tanks? No, the
educated, intelligent people chiefly stayed at home producing pamphlets and let
the poor and stupid do the dying for them, coming out to wave the flags at
appropriate moments.

The
Corvin was in the sort of district that appreciated a good fight, whether it
was with rival football supporters or the Red Army. Gyuri kept expecting to see
Tamás; the Corvin was his sort of event, and there could be no doubt that if
Tamás were alive, Russians would be dying. But there were so many other
thriving locations apart from the Corvin to choose from. Still, familiar faces
were at the Corvin; he had seen Noughts, arguing with two girls kitted out with
submachine-guns. Gyuri had said hello but suspected that Noughts hadn’t placed
him, Noughts having played a larger role as Gyuri’s cellmate, than Gyuri with
his walk-on part on Noughts’s stage.

Gyuri
kept expecting to see Pataki as well. Backs, profiles, haircuts, overcoats,
remote forms would imitate Pataki or give off Patakiness. He imagined Pataki
might be on his way back to Hungary, he wouldn’t want to miss this. One man
coming out of the parliament resembled Pataki so closely, moved so much like
him, that Gyuri was getting the joy and the greetings ready and only the
absence of any recognition in the irises of the impostor gave him away at the
last moment…

In the
end, far down the Űllői út by some scenic rubble, Gyuri found Jadwiga having
her picture taken by a couple of Western photographers. They seemed to have a
fondness for attractive women with weapons. Gyuri didn’t like this at all.
Jadwiga was merely handing out one of her polite smiles, her toothy calling
card, but they weren’t to know that.

Gyuri
came up to glower at the photographers at close quarters but they had already
finished and were on the move to their next snap. Viktor the Soviet deserter
and another Pole, whom Gyuri thought was called Witold, were leaning on the
husk of a tank, where they had been watching the photo session.

Jadwiga
was wearing her quilted Soviet jacket, the pelt of a dead Soviet soldier, Gyuri
thought bleakly. He had taken weapons from the dead internationalists, but
weapons were somehow faithless, they didn’t belong to anyone, they were just
carried. Jadwiga’s blue jacket, approximately a third of her small wardrobe,
had got ripped to shreds on the 26th as they were crawling along under Soviet
fire at the Corvin. The noise of the tanks, more than anything else, had been
terrifying. It was no more dangerous, rationally, than being shot at by
infantry but it sounded more dangerous. When Jankó fired the anti-tank gun in
reply, Gyuri had believed he was going to die of fear. As he lay on the ground,
using muscles he had been unaware of to propel himself into the pavement,
impressed more forcefully than if an elephant had been standing on him, he
pondered how it would only take one of the hundreds of bullets zooming through
the Corvin to unanchor him from the continuum, and wondered why everybody didn’t
just run away, Jadwiga was only upset by her jacket failing her in combat
conditions, and tattering during her sniping. During one of her shopping
expeditions in the lulls to collect ammunition and weapons from inoperative
Soviets, she had returned with the tough jacket.

‘So how
is the great optimist?’ she said to Gyuri. Jadwiga had sided of course with
Elek in the morning, insisting that the Red Army had had enough and that Gyuri
didn’t want to face up to the fact that he was now free to do whatever he
wanted since he could no longer reach for the handy excuse of an inane,
dictatorial regime preventing him from being a great success.

‘Budapest
today, Warsaw next week. Right, Witold?’ Witold nodded in agreement. Then she
added in Russian: ‘Moscow, let’s be realistic, one month.’ Viktor grinned in
approval.

‘That’s
why they have to stop it here,’ said Gyuri. ‘This can’t go on much longer’

‘You’re
so miserable,’ Jadwiga remonstrated. ‘I hope our children will have none of
that. When I will tell them how stupid their father was, they’ll laugh.’

Having
secured a promise from her that she would return home soon, Gyuri started back
for Damjanich utca. Passing by a bookshop that had puked out its contents into
the street, it occurred to him the household was short of paper, and because he
wanted to carry out a scientific experiment, Gyuri gathered up a few volumes
that hadn’t been burned or only just nibbled by the flames.

At
home, relaxed on the loo, he tried out the books. Revai, the Party ideologue,
was disappointing. It was an imposing volume,
We Knew How to Use
Freedom
(684pp), but the paper was too shiny to merit the diploma of bottom-wiping.
Meray, the journalist who had fearlessly invented and then exposed American
atrocities in Korea in his illustrated
Testimony
(213 pp) looked promising.
Gyuri had no idea what had really happened in Korea but he was quite willing to
stake his life that the only things in the book that weren’t downright lies
were the author’s name and the commas. Nevertheless, Meray afforded a greater degree
of absorbency. Coming to Rákosi’s
Selected Speeches and Articles
(559pp), there was still a
perceptible failure to carry out the work in hand. The most effective nether
napkin was Rákosi’s
The Turning Point
(359pp), an earlier offering, from 1946, on coarse
paper which almost worked.

Gyuri
was trying to enjoy his sojourn at the hindquarters’ headquarters with extracts
from these books but although the idea had been highly pleasing, the reality
wasn’t as satisfactory. The Communists couldn’t even hack it as toilet paper.
You could imagine Rákosi, forecasting that people might well one day seize his
books with a hankering to convert them into arse-fodder, ordering that his
works should be printed on the most unaccommodating of paper. Still, it would
make an amusing paragraph when he wrote to Pataki.

Where
were Revai, Rákosi and the others? Gyuri wondered. Where were all those
bastards, the beloved favourite sons of the people? The Russians probably had
them tucked away in the basement of their Embassy, in storage for future
necessity, labelled ‘spare dictators’.

The
last book Gyuri turned to was in English,
Eastern Europe in the
Socialist World
by Hewlett Johnson who was supposed to be the Dean of Canterbury. The book was
a paean to the Socialist order. Either the book was a forgery, or else the Dean
must have been caught wanking off small boys in Warsaw and blackmailed into
writing this, thought Gyuri, because no one could be stupid enough to write
things like this of their own volition.

* * *

It was
the largest park in Hamburg, full of ducks, but he still couldn’t manage to
catch one. Ducks were brainier and faster than they looked and Pataki was
disadvantaged by having to keep looking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t
arrested. He was sure there would be some by-law protecting German ducks from
hungry refugees. He tried improvising traps with string and dry bread, he tried
netting them with his overcoat, he tried a straight grab and wring. As it got
dark, Pataki resigned himself to dining on boiled eggs again. He had explored
all the options for cooking eggs and somehow boiled seemed the least
dispiriting. Eggs were far better than nothing but after months of unrelenting
eggs, non-egg edibles had deployed an unprecedented fascination.

But, as
he strolled past an off-licence, Pataki snapped and resolved to blow a little
money. Two beers to celebrate the Revolution. There was one pinguid German in
front of him at the counter who stupidly seemed to be buying more beer than he
could possibly carry. As the man struggled to find a way of managing his
impossible load, Pataki was about to ask for two bottles of beer, when a hand
landed on his shoulder. He turned to see a long-haired figure behind him say in
German: ‘I’m a Hungarian, let me buy you a drink.’ Insane? Drunk?
Uncontrollably gregarious? Just Hungarian?

‘I’m
Hungarian too, and I’ll let you buy me a drink,’ Pataki responded in the mother
tongue. His host was called Kineses and he was evidently a man used to going to
great lengths for company. His room was virtually above the boozery, so they
repaired there to drink. Kineses was very pleased he didn’t need to employ his
appallingly accented German and that he could really get loquacious. Kineses
had been in West Germany for over three years. He had done some work as an
artist’s model, but a vogue for abstract expressionism had dried up most of his
employment and he was now working as factotum in one of the liveliest brothels.
‘It was all very German. There was an interview. They asked whether I had any
previous experience of working in a knocking-shop. They were perfectly serious;
they were terrified of taking on unqualified help. What do you do?’

‘I’m
the head of the postage-stamp acquisition department in a bank,’ replied
Pataki. ‘I’m the one they send down to the post-office.’ They drank to the
revolution.

‘I
tried to go back yesterday. Got as far as the Austrian border,’ said Kineses. ‘But
the Austrians wouldn’t let me in. They were convinced there were enough
Hungarians in Hungary. Mind you, I don’t know why I wanted to go back so badly
when I think of the trouble I had getting out. I had to waltz through the
minefields. What about you?’

‘My
personalised railwagon. You must have wanted to get out quite badly to go out
that way.’

‘I didn’t
have much choice really. That always makes things easier. You see, I’d walked
out of a place called Recsk, a labour camp.’ Kineses outlined the inspiration
behind Recsk. ‘Lots of people helped with my escape. It took us months to
scrape together a guard’s uniform. It was very cheeky, very dramatic. A big
brass neck, a dark winter evening, bored, dim guards and I was out. I just
walked out. There was no hope of staying at liberty in Hungary so I knew I had
to leave.

‘We all
thought it important that the world should know about Recsk. I memorised
everyone’s name, their date of birth, occupation and the city they lived in. I
was working on the addresses when the uniform was completed.’

‘So
what did the world say?’ asked Pataki.

‘Nothing
much. Walk out of a labour camp, that’s heroic; walk out of a labour camp
and
walk through an Iron Curtain
and you’ll find you’ve walked round the moral globe and it’s not heroic, but
extremely suspicious. Everyone was very polite, but I had the impression they
thought I was on a payroll somewhere in Moscow.’ (Pataki remembered his
debriefers: ‘Ach, Herr Pataki, we understand you are saying you were sent out
by the AVO but we have been told by people who were sent out by the AVO that
people who are sent out by the AVO are told to say that they have been sent out
by the AVO.’ The meeting had been a stalemate; he was staying in the country
but without a generous salary from the security services.)

‘Are
you going to go back?’ Kineses inquired.

‘When I
leave, I leave.’

* *

‘You
don’t think I should tell him?’ Jadwiga asked.

‘No.
Best not to interfere in that sort of emotional traffic,’ Elek answered.

‘But
there can’t be any doubt; the documents were very clear.’

Elek
looked unhappy. ‘The documents might have been very clear. But you didn’t
really know Pataki. He was as fast off the court as on. His sun-bathing stunt
outside their front door would have been a hard one to talk his way out of but
he’s slippery. The AVO might have
thought
he was working for them, but he probably agreed just
to get out.’ He lit a long-saved
cigarette. ‘And I bet he got an advance out of them.’