Under the frog (8 page)

Gyuri liked to think he was tough but knew he didn’t have
the resilience for hardship so well-planned, so non-stop; although things were
rough, there was always the prospect of something good happening to you if you
were outside the Army, no matter how remote that prospect might be. In the Army
you weren’t going to be bothered by any comfort, cheer, or anything that could
be classified under the heading pleasant; there would be no appointments with
pleasure.

The others in the exam hall, from a distance anyway, seemed
to be beavering away confidently. Did he look in control to those two rows
back? Gyuri wondered. The first question offered a few footholds, so he
hastened to put something down on paper, before the wisdom he had fished out
slipped away, and in the hope that if some apocalypse should curtail the exam
after ten minutes, he might have enough answer to pass.

He had unrolled as much of the answer to question one as he
could, when a glance to his left established that his gaze had a direct flight
path to the left breast of the young lady there; either she had forgotten to do
up her blouse or the buttons didn’t feel like working but light was taking off
from untextiled skin and crashlanding into Gyuri’s retinas. His loins underwent
a stepping-on, all the mathematical erudition he had convoked was summarily
banished. To deliberately have arranged such an alignment, to visually sidestep
the clothing barrier in other circumstances could have taken hours, but now, at
such a delicate moment, his composure and her mammary impacted. Simultaneously,
he looked away, but it was too late – the chemical heralds hit the road,
stirring up a global ache.

Crippled by this unwarranted intrusion into his concentration,
he returned to the maths and found he was locked out. The second question
scarcely acknowledged his greeting.

Surveying the 180 degree view on his right, Gyuri ruminated
on a group from one of the People’s Colleges. These were the special institutes
where individuals predominantly from the bottom of the bucolic barrel were
crammed with learning to provide the Party with man and womanpower. Peasant
lads, in the main, who had ties fastened around their necks, copies of the
History of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)
stuck in their hands,
along with a ticket to the centre of the universe, Budapest, where
accommodation in some appropriated bourgeois building would be waiting. They
were loud in their endorsements of Marxism, as anyone in their new shoes would
be.

Gyuri needed, as a minimum, three attempted answers to pass
and while he had one attempt and a feint, the remaining questions looked
hermetically sealed, inscrutable. A girl on his right, one of the People’s
College contingent, kept staring over at his paper which Gyuri found droll. How
could she think there was anything worth examining on his laughably blank
paper?

He was coming to the conclusion that glaring at the
questions in the hope they might crack was a waste of time and he might as well
enjoy a display of swagger by walking out and perhaps fooling a few despairing
souls into believing he had done brilliantly, instead of squirming around like
a maggot on a hook.

The People’s girl was still looking at his paper and what
was worse, looking as if she was looking. Being disqualified for cheating wasn’t
going to make much difference to Gyuri but it might to her.

‘I can’t help,’ Gyuri mouthed to her. ‘Don’t look or we’ll
both…’ he drew a finger across his throat. The girl reddened and threw her
regard down onto her own sheets of paper. Now that he had conceded the
mathematical match, Gyuri adjourned to treat himself to a spot of ocular
plundering from the chest of the girl on his left, but was disgruntled to find
that a fold of blouse was now refusing his glance admission, barring any
further visual trespass.

Having decided that he wasn’t going to sit like a cabbage
any longer, he was putting the top back on his pen as a prelude to departure,
when the supervising rays from the invigilator were momentarily diverted and a
square of paper made its way from the row on the right to his desk. Opening up
the paper, Gyuri found it contained a neatly written solution which although he
couldn’t entirely follow it, had such aplomb that he couldn’t doubt its
correctness. He copied out the answer and sauntered out of the exam-hall
knowing he had vaulted the pass, although, with hindsight, he conceded the ant-training and other diversions had drained the blood from his luck.

In the aftermath, several congregations of maths discussions
formed. Numerous people were slumped around, with crumbled faces, as if
auditioning to illustrate the caption ‘despair’. For the first time in his
life, Gyuri felt like going to church to say thank you.

He certainly thanked his immediate saviour. He was in good
form with her since she was so unattractive that there could be no question of
making an overture and he could relax. Pataki appeared, closing in and frowning
to see Gyuri wasting verbal effort on a young lady lagging so far behind the
pack of beauty. Pataki, of course, hadn’t failed any of his exams. He had
strolled down to the exams, dipping into a textbook or two as he walked,
packing bites of knowledge into his cheeks like a hoarding hamster and then
spitting them out at the examiners. By the time he walked out of the exam, he
already knew less than when he walked in. In basketballing terms it was like a
one-armed blindman throwing the ball, the ball hitting the ring, circling
around, wobbling, teetering but then finally slumping into the net. Lucky, very
lucky, travelling to the border between luck and miracle, but two points
nevertheless.

Gyuri could see Pataki taking his time, lining up a whole
afternoon’s witticisms about his poor choice of female interlocutors, but it
wasn’t going to bother him. ‘Thanks again for the help,’ said Gyuri as his
valediction, ‘you must be phenomenally good at maths.’

‘Oh no,’ said the girl modestly and endearingly, ‘they gave
us all the answers last week. We had plenty of time to learn them.’

* * *

They took the watch to the brothel. His mother’s watch which
had incredibly not ended up on a Soviet Army arm, which was probably the only
pre-liberation timepiece left in Hungary and which had once been worth an awful
lot, was on that particular evening enough for two beachings, one for himself
and one for Pataki.

Gyuri had been fervently determined to celebrate and to have
the much-respected good time but once the negotiations over the gold watch’s
weight in harlots were over, Gyuri felt oddly detached, as if he’d left his
dick at home. He would never have believed he could appraise so academically
femaleness being exposed.

Whores were so often associated with ugliness, sadness and
debasement but the girl who had introduced herself as Timea was young,
vivacious and if not intelligent had an alertness that could pass for it. ‘You’re
very beautiful,’ Gyuri remarked, repeating the observations of his eyes. ‘Oh,
my breasts are much too small,’ she replied as she continued to undress for
work. It wasn’t true. She had the sort of beauty that removed the possibility
of difficulties; she could have had anything she wanted from hordes of men
genuflecting in submission. Her employment in the brothel was strange, since
you would have thought she could have easily bagged a couple of millionaires to
have a less demanding lifestyle.

Considering the inordinate amounts of time he spent in
contemplation of four-legging, Gyuri found it hard to account for the sudden
amputation of his desire. Watching Timea was delightful, worth the money in
itself but a curiously abstract experience like admiring some art in a museum.
Gyuri suggested that Pataki go first.

It was terrible. His callousness had simply packed up on
him: out of order. He was annoyed with himself for wanting to do it, and at the
same time, he knew that once he was out of range of the brothel, he would be
annoyed with himself for not doing it. When Pataki re-emerged, all he could
suggest was that they should leave. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Pataki
expostulated. ‘You can’t throw away a perfectly good fuck!’ He returned to
claim the unused coitus.

Gyuri learned there are people who can take their deceased
mother’s watch to a brothel and there are people who can’t. And if you’re one
of those who can’t, you can’t. It was an expensive lesson and one that was not
likely to have any future applications because he wasn’t going to have any more
deceased mothers or deceased mothers’ watches.

He wished Pataki would hurry up. He wanted to go home since
he had the feeling he was going to cry.

January 1949

They spent the last hour telling camel jokes.

‘The new Foreign Legion officer arrives at the fort in the
middle of the Sahara desert,’ explained Ladányi. ‘And he’s being given the
introductory tour by the sergeant and he listens attentively but eventually he
says: “This is all very interesting, Sergeant but there’s a rather delicate
matter I’d like to inquire about. We’re going to be out here for years. I mean
what does one do when the
juices
start to build up?” “Well, sir,” says the
sergeant pointing to a camel tethered in the yard, “when an officer is missing
the ladies’ company, that’s what we have Daisy, the regimental camel for.” The
new officer is rather shocked to hear this but says nothing. Months elapse and
finally after a year in the Sahara, he snaps, runs screaming across the yard
and flings himself on the camel. As he’s pumping away, the sergeant comes up
and coughs discreetly. “It’s none of my business, sir, but the other officers
prefer to ride Daisy to the brothel in the next village.’”

For a Jesuit, Ladányi had an astonishingly good fund of
camel jokes. Gyuri and Neumann could hardly get any in. Ladányi was rather
hogging the camel section but it was a very long journey, and Gyuri certainly
didn’t have enough camel jokes at his disposal to cover a fraction of the trip
to Hálás.

Ladányi had been a little vague at first about what he had
to attend to in Hálás, the hamlet where he had been born and raised. ‘I might
need a bodyguard,’ he had said to Gyuri. Gyuri would have been glad to do a favour
for Ladányi anyway but it was flattering to be thought of as large and
dangerous (though Gyuri had brought Neumann along in the event of any bona fide
bodyguarding being required. As a water-polo player and a very large person,
Neumann was going to have the last punch on any subject. Gyuri had seen
Neumann, when two drunk and quite large firemen had merrily announced that they
were going to thrash the living daylights out of him, pick them up and throw
them across Rákoczi út where they had hit a wall with unpleasant bone-breaking
sounds. It had to be some sort of record, but sadly throwing firemen wasn’t a
recognised sport.)

‘The new Foreign Legion recruit arrives at the fort in the
middle of the Sahara desert,’ Ladányi resumed. ‘And he’s being shown the ropes
by an old sweat, and he finally summons up the courage to ask the question that’s
on his mind. “Look,” he asks, “we have to spend years out here, what do you do
about the
urges?”
“‘What we do,” the old sweat elucidates, “is we go out, find a bunch of
bedouin, ambush them and find relief with their camels.” So time passes, the
troops go out into the desert, they hide behind a sand dune and bushwhack some
bedouins. The old sweat immediately runs down towards the camels and the new
recruit asks: “What’s the rush? There are plenty of camels for everyone.” “Yes,
but you want to get a good-looking one.”‘

At the railway station at Békéscsaba, a wiry, behatted
peasant who kissed Ladányi’s hand, was waiting for them. A cart, luxurious by
local standards, but bottom-grating for an hour’s journey – the time the
deferential peasant assured them it would take to reach Hálás, conveyed them.

Going back to his origins didn’t seem to excite Ladányi
greatly, but as Gyuri surveyed the territory, where the shoe was still seen as
a daring new fashion idea, where only the sound of crops growing disturbed the
peace, he could comprehend the lack of enthusiasm. There was nothing to be said
about the landscape apart from that it started where the sky finished.

Ladányi was coming home because of Comrade Faragó. Faragó
had been, apparently, an egregious feature of life in Hálás for a long time.
Ladányi had vivid memories of him although he left Hálás at fourteen to study
in Budapest. ‘Faragó was both the village idiot and the village thief. In a
small place like Hálás you have to double up,’ Ladányi recounted. But the small
village had great tolerance for homegrown trouble.

The war and the Arrow Cross changed that. October 1944 was
the last time the villagers of Hálás had expected to see Faragó. He had evolved
from subsistence misdemeanours such as sunflower-stealing, apricot-rustling and
abducting pigs, to running the district Nazi franchise. Ladányi didn’t expand
on what Faragó had been up to. ‘You don’t want to know.’

Hálás’s citizens had not expected to see Faragó again after
October 1944 as that was when he had been shot in the chest six times and taken
by cart to the mortuary in Békéscsaba where the police deposited inexplicable
and unclaimed cadavers. It was still a time when stray bodies attracted
bureaucracy; a little later no one would have bothered.

It was when they put Faragó on the slab at Békéscsaba that
he began to complain, quite loudly for a corpse, that he wanted a drink.

The villagers were very surprised to see him again. ‘You
gave me a revolver with only six shots, is it my fault?’ a reproachful voice
was heard in the csárda. This hadn’t been the first attempt on Faragó’s life. A
month earlier, as Faragó was enjoying the hospitality of a ditch which was a
lot closer to where he had got leg-bucklingly drunk than home, sleeping soundly
in the cold, someone had chucked in a grenade to keep him company. The grenade
had failed to get rid of Faragó, though it did get rid of his left leg but even
this didn’t slow him down in his duties for his German mentors, hence the
subsequent target practice.