Under the frog (7 page)

The fascination of the ants had run unabated as long as
there was no other distraction from the maths. Mathematics had this to
recommend it, if nothing else: it made everything else, ants, English,
push-ups, ironing, washing-up, beguiling and wonderful. Whole new galaxies of
interests had popped open now that the maths exam was drawing close; anything
unconnected with maths was irresistible.

He rowed back to the boat-house to discover that Pataki had
been sculling up and down the Danube looking for him in a fruitless attempt to
gloat over his revision.

Gyuri lugged the maths books home. He was used to carrying
the heavy weight about as a sort of tandem intellectual and physical toning,
helping his stamina and also, he hoped, the proximity of the knowledge would
help it to spill out on him. There were many dogs in Budapest that weren’t as
well-walked as his maths textbooks. Entering the flat, Gyuri noted that Pataki
wasn’t around, because Elek was on his own. Pataki had taken to frequenting the
Fischer flat, because he found Elek most congenial, as unlike Pataki’s father,
Elek had no objection to Pataki smoking; indeed, he would hoard up cigarettes,
ear-marking sole survivors of a delivery to be reserved for an appearance by
Pataki.

More and more often Gyuri would return from training or a
run to find Elek and Pataki in a nicotine partnership, making the most of
scanty tobacco; Elek usually testifying to the callipygian glories of a set of
buttocks he had encountered as long as four decades ago. Gyuri didn’t smoke.
The odds against him playing first-division basketball were already so great
that he couldn’t afford any handicap however small, so he didn’t begrudge the extrafamilial sharing of the cigarettes.

What was irritating was Elek’s equanimity.

Elek would now be regularly on duty in the large armchair
which was almost the last remnant of their prewar furniture, indeed virtually
the last of their prewar property. Stationing himself in this armchair, abetted
by a cigarette if available, Elek looked unbelievably good for a man completely
ruined. His hair and moustache were so disciplined it was as if they had been
sculpted into place; however the grey pullover which was now the core of his
wardrobe did have two impossible-to-miss holes. Other men having seen all
their assets evaporate overnight, especially having an entire fortune fly by
night, would have protested bitterly at the unseen forces reducing their wealth
to the small change in their trouser pockets. Destitute at the age of sixty,
even allowing for the common denominator of a world war and vast industries of
suffering and misery, you would have expected some cursing and shrieking. A
gnawing of fists. A denouncing of higher powers.

But Elek didn’t issue any unseemly lamentations. He simply
sat in the armchair, at ease, as if enjoying a day off. He tried to resurrect
his fortunes after the war, and more crucially, after the hyper-inflation,
which Hungarians proudly pointed out had been the fastest and greatest in
economic history. Once the inflation was over, Elek went to the bank where he had
deposited millions, emptied his unfrozen account and bought a loaf of bread,
hardly getting any change back. The gutters of Budapest had been clogged with
discarded banknotes, the fallen leaves of an old order.

What tortured Gyuri even more than Elek’s tranquillity, what
racked him night and day, was the sheer inanity of the loss. It could have been
so different, a tiny stash in Switzerland, a loose gold ingot buried in a
field, some well-cached jewellery and things would have been different enough
for them to eat and even eat well. But everything had gone in what would amount
to no more than, at best, an eyebrow raising footnote in abstruse economic
journals.

Funnily enough for a bookie who had made a very good living
out of people losing their money on horses, Elek’s first ventures to recoup
some money saw him going to the track for a string of flutters. Gyuri could
distinctly remember Elek before the war coming home with the takings from the
races (in a small brown suitcase, the money all jumbled up for Elek’s staff to
sort out) and exclaiming: ‘Human folly– it’s the business to be in. You can’t go
wrong.’ His turf accountancy riches had been less the result of his astuteness
than the fact of bookmaking being a virtual monopoly and one of his old army
chums being responsible for handing out the licences. Nevertheless, incited
perhaps by his inside knowledge, Elek remained adamant that the gee-gees would
provide, if not a regular income, a start-up capital for some future, nameless,
hardship-solving enterprise.

Elek’s excursions to the track were, in the main,
shirt-losing exercises but now and then he must have won since there were
evenings when there was something to eat. More direct action took place too.
One day Gyuri came home to find that his books, all his books, were gone; all
that was remained was a patch of lighter wallpaper ‘I had to sell them,’ Elek
replied to Gyuri’s inquiry: ‘we have to eat you know.’ Which was fine, but Elek
could have asked first, and the galling thing was not that the books were gone
but that whatever the going market value of his library was Elek would have
been bamboozled and only got a tenth of it. Elek’s business sense, if he ever
had any, seemed to have been mislaid somewhere during the war. The grocery shop
that he had run for a month was the best example; it nearly destroyed the
family because they had to rise before dawn to buy stock and not only did they
not make any money, they lost it. They lost a staggering amount, more than if
they had just jettisoned the greens in the street. Grocers weren’t keen on
other people becoming grocers.

Ambitious projects like grocering were behind Elek now, the
armchair was enough. Since Mother died, Elek had demonstrated less of a need to
be seen doing something. There were mysterious absences from time to time,
which spawned packages of food, but Elek treated life largely as a spectator
sport.

This lack of remorse and of pleading to rewrite the script
could be accounted in some quarters as admirable, but Gyuri found himself
unable to applaud: ‘How does it feel to have one of the most sat-on arses in
the universe?’ he inquired after a very forlorn day. Elek shrugged: ‘My father
lost everything,’ he said, as if this were a lucid explanation, appending by
way of conclusion, ‘You’ll dig me up when I’m gone.’

Gyuri hadn’t seen much of his grandfather. Memories of his
grandfather’s visits in his furthest childhood had two components: nice cakes
he wasn’t allowed to touch and a bullet-headed, dangerous-looking old man who
kept asking who Gyuri was. His grandfather had, according to Elek, stood surety
for a friend’s gambling debts. The friend had been unable to pay and instead of
doing the done and honourable thing, passing a bullet through his brains, went
off to Berlin to open a Hungarian restaurant, leaving grandfather to fork out.
But if nothing else Elek and grandfather had handled fortunes. Somehow Gyuri
feared that he wouldn’t be given a fortune to lose.

Nevertheless, Elek’s snap pauperdom had certain benefits for
Gyuri. Having a father who had stepped down from life meant there was no
friction over the exam business. Elek had never been excessively concerned
about Gyuri’s schoolwork; sometimes Gyuri wondered if Elek knew which school he
was attending. In a rare and ephemeral flare of studiousness, Gyuri once asked
Elek to test him on some Latin verbs. ‘Do you know them or not?’ Elek had
queried, and when Gyuri had responded that he thought that he did, Elek had
retorted: ‘Then why do I need to test you?’

Still, Gyuri reflected, as he shaved in the first of his
preparations for his evening out, at least he only had to sit one subject again
to get his matriculation certificate. Next door, while he decapitated his
bristles, he could hear Mr Galantai repeatedly complaining about the
nationalisation of the factories which really must have been exercising him
since it had happened some months ago. ‘This is too much – it can’t go on much
longer.’

Gyuri had no doubt that things would go on for some time
yet. Enough to get him in the Army. This was the sole encouragement to study – and it was a truly major carrot. No pass, no university. No university, yes
Army. Yes to years of not eating, standing out in the rain, digging ditches,
not seeing anyone you knew, anyone you liked, prison with salutes and worse
beds. People preferred to commit suicide before being conscripted as it was
more agreeable to die at home in comfort, rather than truncating your arteries
in some dingy barracks.

It was a good thing that mathematics was the only remaining
weight threatening to drag him down into all that; after all there had been
many fails nuzzling up against him in the exams. Hungarian literature had been
a real case of digging himself out of the grave. Luckily, Botond had been
conducting the oral examination, albeit with a couple of other teachers who
didn’t like him as much, or probably at all. The set text was Arany’s
Toldi.
Either he had never had a copy or he couldn’t find it but the evening before,
when Gyuri had resolved to read a bit, his sudden desire to read Arany was
foiled so he turned up dutifully at the exam to collect a fail.

Botond was sitting with his feet up on the table. The other
teachers’ faces were strongly broadcasting that this detracted from the decorum
of the occasion but Botond was the head of the Hungarian Department and what
was more was unchallengeable in Hungarian literature. He had read everything
twice, and when it came to poetry could recite nearly every published verse. If
you were lucky, if something sparked him off, he would enter a Hidassy-like
trance and declaim flawlessly for twenty minutes, giving the class a
much-needed break. As befitted someone deeply implicated with art, Botond had
long unruly hair, so remorselessly unruly that pupils and staff suspected he
engineered his coiffure to look like a starfish every morning.

‘Well, fischer,’ Botond had said jovially staring up at the
ceiling, tapping a cuspid with the earpiece of his spectacles, probably running
through some juicy texts at the back of the cerebral shop while he was going
through the tedious business of testing the pupils. ‘It’s always a pleasure to
see you, but I regret that you’ll have to give us some of
Toldi
before we can let you go.’

‘To be honest, I can’t,’ Gyuri owned up. ‘I’m sorry; but I
don’t know any.’

‘Ha, ha. Always modest. Always modest. Any section, just
fire away.’

‘No honestly. I don’t want to waste your time,’ Gyuri had
insisted.

‘Exam nerves, eh? All right, just recite any one of your
favourite poems.’

It was a reasonable request, but it caught Gyuri by
surprise. He rifled his literary knowledge but the drawer was empty. ‘No, sir,
I’m afraid I can’t recite anything.’

‘Ha, ha, Fischer, your sense of humour will get you into
trouble one day. I’ll put you down for a pass. Send in the next candidate,
please.’ Botond was extremely avuncular to everyone (except those who evinced a
sincere enmity to poetry). He was one of the few masters who was liked, a
fondness fuelled by the biographical information, passed on year after year,
that Botond had got drunk with all the major figures working the Hungarian
language since the turn of the century. He had starved with Ady in Paris (‘Bandi
and I were arguing who should peel the potato for supper’) and with eight other
unwashed and less posteritied Hungarians shared one bed on a shift basis in an
unheated garret, got drunk with all the major literary figures again, punched
Picasso in an argument over prosody and was, despite his senior teaching post,
available at short notice for drinks with any major (or minor for that matter)
literary figures left after two world wars and a plethora of emigration.
Literary criticism was more compelling when you knew that your teacher had
dragged the author out of a bar by his legs.

No, Botond was not the type to hand out a fail lightly,
especially since he still owed Elek a five figure sum.

Once out of the exam, in the corridor, with post-incident
clarity, it did occur to Gyuri that there was one poem he could have rounded
up, by Botond’s old pal, Ady, on the pleasure of seeing the Gare de l’Est in
Paris; one of Ady’s most appealing themes being that the noblest prospect a
Hungarian could see was the way out of Hungary. Good but sozzled poet. István
had been in Érmindszent, Ady’s birthplace, during the war and had been
surprised to find not so much as a plaque to Ady’s memory, whereas, by
comparison, Hungary was littered with commemorative notices such as ‘Petófi
walked past here’ and ‘Petófi almost walked past here’. When István pointed out
this omission to a local the rejoinder was ‘Why should we put up a monument to
a second-generation alcoholic?’

The maths exam was first thing the next morning but it was
too craven to stay in, despite the frittering away of time caused by the
afternoon’s ant-circus. Elek was in the armchair, in some difficulty without a
cigarette. As Gyuri was heading out, Elek caught him in the back with ‘You’re
going to love the Army’.

* * *

The first time he sat the mathematics exam, he had prudently
taken the precaution of smuggling in the textbook. The main reason he failed at
the first attempt was because he hadn’t known enough to know he hadn’t known
enough. Gyuri dipped into the textbook in the hope of succour, but had found
its pages totally unintelligible. He angrily registered that if he had worked a
bit harder he would have been able to cheat properly.

The second time around, his preparations at least gave him
enough expertise to understand the questions, even if the answers weren’t
jumping into view. It was possible for him to do something about these
questions, even if it was like fighting a forest-fire with a thimbleful of
water. An all-pervasive desperation not to do military service saturated his
being. He had seen a group of conscripts the previous week, ideally cast for
the role of a chainless chain-gang, miserable, bones veiled in skin, carrying a
loaf of bread that had long ago lost its credibility in the civilian world,
that required a pickaxe rather than a knife.