Under the Frog

November 1955

The man was snoring, snoring so loudly, so rattlingly, that even if one had been over-dosed with tolerance, it would have been too much. Gyuri and the other passengers, only equipped with everyday indulgence, found their forbearance crushed like an aphid under a sledgehammer.

The man had the look of an engineer, something lowly and civil, the pens in his shirtpocket spoke of a rudimentary learning and erudition; the adept way he blew his nose with the aid of his right hand and with one motion hustled the catarrh out of the open window spoke of too much time on building sites. He had got on the train at Budapest and placed his dowdy belongings on the overhead rack, sat down in one of the seats next to the door, leaned his head against the glass and turned on the sleep, instantly, without any preamble.

Within a few seconds the snoring had commenced, as if approaching them from a great distance, faint at first but growing steadily to a prodigious din erupting from the man’s open mouth. Everyone else had looked at each other, first with a sort of tacit amusement that had progressed to bemusement and carried on to irritation. The odd thing about people behaving badly, Gyuri noticed, letting their boorishness slop out onto others, was that it was usually the victims who were embarrassed rather than the perpetrator.

The volume of the snoring was phenomenal. A mild, intermittent rasping might have been bearable but the engineer’s lungs pummelled everyone’s eardrums mercilessly. Also, truthfully, it was most unwelcome to be privy to the detailed internal workings of a corpulent engineer – to have a ringside perspective on his respiratory adventures. There were sporadic lulls, producing an optimistic sense of relief, of the auditory siege being lifted, but these interludes of silence while the snoring caught its breath only made the restored gurgling more serrated.

Gyuri, at the opposite end of the compartment, had no contiguous opportunity to impede the snoring but those closer attempted to trip up the volume. Discreet coughs followed by indiscreet coughs, yells, proddings and shovings didn’t succeed in making him miss a slumbering beat. The woman in the headscarf started clucking loudly, as if giving the traditional imitation of a chicken. The snoring faltered and disappeared under the onslaught of the clucking. ‘It always works with my husband,’ she said proudly but as she did the snoring pulled out into the fast lane again. The man opposite tried trailing a powerful garlic sausage under the sleeper’s nose. Nothing. The engineer snored on blissfully.

The flawless repose, the effortless snoozing excited Gyuri’s admiration as well as irritating him. He could never sleep on trains, or at best, could only achieve a disorientating stupor that was worse than being tired.

The sausage-waver was becoming edgy and aggressive towards the morpheused slob who was wholly indifferent to the implorings and digitings he was getting. If it hadn’t been for the obvious passage of air in and out of his workings, the sleeper’s lack of response would have been rather worrying, so loath was his body to do its job and pass on the complaints.

‘My dear sir, you’re snoring rather loudly,’ said the bespectacled protester, giving another push to the snorer. To flee the palatal thunder, Gyuri left the compartment.

What a gift to be able to sleep like that, he thought. How agreeable to sleep through the entire thing, to only wake up when everything had changed. That was one of the worst things: the boredom. Dictatorship of the proletariat, apart from the abrasive and brutal nature of its despotism, was terribly dull. It wasn’t the sort of tyranny you’d want to invite to a party. Look at the great tyrannies of antiquity: Caligula, Nero, now there was tyranny for you, excess, colour, abundant fornication, stage management, excitement on the loose, panem et circenses. What have we got? brooded Gyuri. Hardly any panem and as for the circenses, only the sort involving people running around wearing red noses.

Not only do I get a dictatorship, fumed Gyuri, but I get a tatty dictatorship, a third rate, a boring dictatorship. I could have stayed in Budapest and watched Boris Godunov, he thought. He had only seen it four times. Another, somewhat unacknowledged triumph of the new order was that you could always watch Boris Godunov any time you wanted to. After all, there were only so many Russian operas to choose from. Róka, entwined with a singer, had acquired an unquenchable taste for opera and had invited Gyuri to accompany him to see his fiancée in action. It was amusing to see all the policemen and steelworkers packed into the front rows of the auditorium, whether they wanted to be there or not. (At Ganz the lathe-turners had drawn lots to allocate the tickets distributed to them by the Party secretary, many preferring to do an extra shift rather than having to face the music.) Gyuri had put in attendance at Boris Godunov the month before so he had decided to go down to Szeged to investigate the party for which Sólyom-Nagy had been acting as harbinger.

In the next compartment, a beautiful girl was talking animatedly to a female friend with the bounce of the attractive. With the right looks, a good stock of beauty, you were always going to come out on top, it was the life-belt that would keep you floating on the surface. Sadistically, she licked her lips and dangled her left calf, crossed over her right leg, energetically in a manner and in a brisk rhythm that even someone without Gyuri’s unifilar mind would have found reminiscent of riding the unirail.

Why, lamented Gyuri, does the beautiful girl never sit in my compartment? Why am I always lumbered with the noisy oaf? Admitting to himself, as he returned to his compartment, as he was old enough to know, that if she had been sitting in the compartment he wouldn’t have been able to craft any conversational grappling-hooks or have the nerve to use them.

The passenger who had been trying to stop the slob sleeping aloud had finally despaired of polite memos to the snorer’s nervous system. He arranged the sleeper’s hand into overhanging the doorway and then slammed shut the sliding door in a vigorous attempt to guillotine the fingers. The sleeper awoke but only with a mild grunt of surprise as if he had dropped off unexpectedly.,

‘So sorry,’ apologised the door-slammer, ‘I seem to have caught your fingers.’ The slamee wasn’t bothered at all. He proceeded to unwrap a rug-sized piece of paper from which he dug out three greasy fried chicken wings which he ate with such gusto and noise that everyone felt they had a molar eye’s view of the mastication. The general relief that came when he had chomped the last of the chicken was promptly dispelled when, on the count of three, sleep was resumed and the slob carried on snoring from where he had left off. Szeged was still two hours away.

As a putative employee of the railways, Gyuri travelled free, but this didn’t make the trip any less onerous. When you’re eighteen, you’ll travel to the other side of the earth for a party, he thought, sensing how he needed to talk himself into the pursuit of pleasure now.

‘Don’t worry,’ Elek had said, struck by a wave of paternity. ‘There is a season to these things. 1911 in my case. In 1911, I couldn’t so much as say hello to a woman without her running away or calling the police. The whole year there was this great wall of China between them and me. Nations, individuals, they all have their ups and downs. Pussy shortage doesn’t last.’ This paternal wisdom might have been more consoling if Elek hadn’t been coiffuring himself prior to some nocturnal escorting of one of his female acquaintances. Pataki had doubtless passed on gleefully to Elek the news of Gyuri’s latest failure, an unprecedented hat trick of romantic flops.

On Andrássy út, Gyuri, having bumped into István’s wife’s youngest sister, had been introduced to two shapely netball players she had in tow. He had taken advantage of their fortuitous discussion of a new film to propose a joint outing. The film, like all Hungarian films, would be rubbish, but it might help to flush out the girls’ evaluation of him. And the beauty of suggesting the film was that he hadn’t, technically, asked the netball players out, so that a refusal would be a rejection of the film rather than his charms. This appeal to culture was necessary because: his self-confidence was pavement-high, and also, because from such a cursory reading of the netball players’ interest meters he hadn’t been able to ascertain how keen they were to admit him to the two-legged amusement park. Then there was the question of balancing their inclination towards him with his inclination to them; the blonde was more attractive, but on the other hand it would be foolish to pass up the brunette if she were unattached and itchy.

The invitation would act as a form of natural selection; the less eager being less likely to attend, it would be survival of the amorous. Determined to put his fist through his bad luck, Gyuri had also issued a third summons to another aspiring accountant, Ildikó, whom he had got to know in the library by fetching a book for her from a top shelf that she had been struggling to reach.

Standing outside the cinema, Gyuri congratulated himself on his blunderbussing his misfortune, overcoming his jinx by a concerted human wave attack. However, as the film started with no trace of the girls, so did his perplexity and the choking sensation that he had been stood up in triplicate. By trebling the odds, he had trebled his penalty. And he had had no chance to sell the other three tickets. He had been skint and although Gyurkovics owed him a hundred forints, it was exactly because he had been so hard up that he hadn’t been able to ask for it because it would have looked as if he had been extremely hard up which he didn’t want.

Gazing out the train window, through the snoring, Gyuri could see peasants engaged in doing something autumnally agricultural. Too stupid to find the road to the city, Gyuri chuckled, confidently conurbational. Still, someone had to grow potatoes. And someone had to film them. As part of his acolyteship at the College of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts, Pataki had been out in the countryside, acting as tripod carrier for a newsreel crew he had been assigned to study in action.

They had gone to the village of Zsámbék, the closest representative of hamletness and unabashed bucolicality to Budapest, only an hour’s drive away. The story the newsreel crew was covering was the fourth and a half anniversary of the collective farm which might have been connected with the need of the director, Gáti, to acquire some comradely crates of white wine for his garden parties.

Even in the artistic circles of Budapest, where the entry fee was egomania, Gáti had tantrummed his way to prominence. However, for some reason he had interpreted Pataki’s presence as homage, as a tribute from one eager to learn the secrets of documentary filming from a master, and Gáti warmly took him under his wing although Pataki would far sooner have been rowing. ‘It’s a shithole, this place,’ Gáti said, surveying Zsámbék. ‘I think I voted here in ’47. Mind you I voted everywhere in ’47. How many people can say they voted sixty times in a general election? These three-duck hovels all look the same though. Me and the Second District Communist Youth Committee, we spent the whole day driving around, voting. Bloody tiring, democracy.’ They were standing in the office of the collective farm. Feeling it was time to do some directing, Gáti shouted out of the window at the cameraman who was contemplating various angles: ‘Janos, I want you to capture that feeling of historic achievement, okay?’ Then he returned to glugging rows of local wines. ‘Rule number one: know what you want. Rule number two: good casting. Good casting does all the work for you. I’ve already got the centre character, Uncle Feri. He’s the village elder, as it were, who’s been through decades of suffering, hunger, exploitation etc., etc., but who in his contented old age can comfortably beam on the gains of the people, happy in the knowledge that future generations will never know want or hardship, thanks to the application of scientific socialism etc., etc.’ Gáti emptied the glasses of wine as if pouring them down a sink.

‘Uncle Feri’s the perfect candidate. I found him when I came down last week. Research… research is everything. This yokel is perfect. He’s got a moustache that must be half a metre long. He oozes earthy wit, rustic swagger. Everyone’s Uncle Feri. He thinks he doesn’t want to do it but I’ll make a star of him.’ There were only a couple of glasses left. ‘And remember, rule four: you can never talk too much to your cameraman.’ Gáti leaned out the window: ‘Janos, you finished?’ To Pataki: ‘You’ll go far. You know how to listen.’ To the chairman of the collective farm: ‘Great. We’ll take the lot.’

His arm avuncularly around Pataki, Gáti went out to the fields for key shots. ‘Where’s our Uncle Feri?’ he shouted.

‘Uncle Feri is gravely ill,’ explained the chairman. He had rounded up a selection of aged, gnarled peasants for Gáti to choose from. ‘You see,’ said Gáti to Pataki in what was probably a failed whisper, ‘people always interfere. They all think they know best. They all think they’re film directors. Come on, where’s the coy old bugger?’

The chairman, the mayor and the Party secretary all explained in succession, very apologetically, that old Feri really was very ill and wouldn’t he be satisfied with another, carefully approved, suitably decrepit codger? Gáti just laughed and ordered to be taken to Feri’s abode where the priest was timidly administering the last rites.

‘Cut that out, or we’ll have you nicked,’ said Gáti, who was joking, but it looked to Pataki as if the priest had shat himself. ‘How are you, Uncle Feri?’ said Gáti, giving him a hearty slap which produced no noticeable reaction since Feri was too busy dying. ‘He looks fine to me,’ Gáti pronounced, but the cameraman and Pataki had to laboriously carry Uncle Feri out because none of his body was in working order. Even if Uncle Feri had wanted to issue instructions to his legs, they wouldn’t have paid any attention.

Gáti strode on to find a good spot while Pataki, the cameraman and the chairman transported Uncle Feri who was light as peasants went but still an uncomfortable burden. ‘This is it,’ said Gáti, surrounded by burgeoning husks of corn. ‘This filmically says it all,’ he announced as the peasant-porters struggled up.

‘Yes,’ interposed the chairman, ‘but this doesn’t belong to the collective. This belongs to Levai. He jumped out of the window at the meeting when everyone had to sign over their land.’

Gáti wasn’t bothered. Fortunately, there was a wooden gate they could leave Uncle Feri leaning against, since his legs wouldn’t have supported him.

‘Okay, roll,’ called Gáti. ‘Now, Uncle Feri, how old are you?’

Uncle Feri didn’t say anything- he seemed to be concentrating on breathing.

‘How old is he?’ Gáti asked the chairman.

‘I don’t know. Seventy something.’

‘Okay, so, Uncle Feri,’ continued Gáti, ‘how does it feel to see the achievements of the new Hungary?’ Uncle Feri still failed to respond. Gáti tried another question: ‘Uncle Feri, how do you feel gazing on the wonderful changes that have taken place here in Zsámbék?’ Uncle Feri remained mute. Pataki had no doubt that if Uncle Feri had had the power of locomotion he would have walked off by now. But all he could manage to do was to cling onto the gate. Gáti patiently let the camera turn, waiting for Uncle Feri’s views. After a minute or so, Uncle Feri started to cry.

‘This is great,’ exclaimed Gáti, ‘he’s moved to tears by the successes of people’s democracy. Get a close-up. We can write into it.’ Pataki found Gáti’s explanation unconvincing and reasoned that Uncle Feri’s weeping was caused by his dying in a field, on camera.

According to Pataki, Uncle Feri survived his moment of posterity but not for long. Well-mannered, he waited till he was returned home before pegging out while Gáti loaded up the van with crates of wine, reiterating ‘Did you see that moustache?’

Knowing what you wanted helped a lot, reflected Gyuri.

What are your ambitions?’ Makkai had asked him the first time he had gone to him for English lessons when he had revealed to Gyuri that, at the age of four, he had been placed on a bareback horse in (as Makkai claimed) the traditional Magyar fashion to test his fortune and fortitude. The question had made Gyuri realise that he didn’t have any ambitions as such, just a wish- to get out. It seemed embarrassing somehow not to have ambitions, a sort of lack of social grace, an ignominious shortcoming. Something like billionaire or ruler of the planet would be nice though. He wouldn’t refuse that. Perhaps his failure to have gone shopping amongst the stalls of ambition was due to Elek’s forgetting to place him on a saddleless horse when he was four.

Gyuri had been hoping that the slob would remain asleep and overshoot Szeged, but with the same precision the driver of the train used to bring the carriages alongside the platform, the slob timed the moment to eject from sleep. By this stage, Gyuri was the only one left in the compartment, the others having fled under the relentless bombardment of zeds.

He didn’t know much about Szeged but he knew enough, when the slob asked the way to the centre of town, to send him helpfully in the opposite direction.

Treasuring the miniature revenge, Gyuri set off to look for Sólyom-Nagy to fill up the time until the party in the evening.

The search for Sólyom-Nagy meant a lot of crisscrossing the university, making repeated treks to his room and asking randomly for his whereabouts, of which everyone denied all knowledge. By a process of elimination, eventually, Gyuri made his way to the library.

The university library had a duly grave, library-like dumbness, still with the sediment of millennia. Most libraries with their accumulated letters gave Gyuri an oddly reassuring sentiment. It’s okay, the books encouraged wordlessly, we’re here. Out there it might be lunacy piled up to the heavens, rubbish on the rampage, the havoc of mediocrity but we have no truck with stultiloquence; in here, it’s fathoms of culture, the best of the centuries. The Zelks sifted out, the poetasters and bores, the platitude-salesmen booted out. The invertebrates of the past, desiccated, powdered, crumbled, blown away, leaving only the bones of those with spines, those who were fortunate enough to have been backboned before Marx so they had no opportunity to cast aspersions on him and cast themselves into lectoral exile as a result.

The shelves served up the freedom to travel, thousands of escape hatches into countries, eras that Lenin had never heard of and that had never heard of Lenin (‘What happened in 1874?’ Róka had asked him the day before, coaching Gyuri for his Marxism-Leninism exam. ‘1874?’ ‘1874!’ ‘No idea.’ ‘Lenin was four’). Entering a library was always cleansing (as long as you didn’t tamper with anything published after 1945), though Gyuri could never settle down there because after a quarter of an hour or so he would break out into fidgeting, yearning to scratch his backside or stretch his legs, have a coffee, do anything but read. However vehemently he strove to immerse himself in his books, to hold his academic breath, he invariably had to come up for interludal air. When it came to studying he was a sprinter.

Then there was the trouser barking. The discipline and decorum of libraries were somehow great catalysts for the cultivation of amorous propensities. It was exactly because libraries weren’t supposed to be about sex that they were. Gyuri would sit down, soak up a few lines, and then, there she would be. No matter how empty it was, every library seemed to be provided with a young lady. No matter how fascinating the accountancy textbook he was reading, the entire crowd in Gyuri’s control-room would throng around the newcomer. The staid background of a library boosted the pulchritude of even the plainest girl to unbearable levels.

The speculation would begin. Would putting this in that affect the rest of her life? Would you need a machete to work your way through the sub-navel jungle? Density of the venereal grass was a tiresomely recurring theme, the irrigation of the delta, the borders of the areolae. The panel would raise the same questions again and again, until the curiosity made him ache and he was out of breath. If only he could have diverted some of this torrent, he would have been the president of a medium-sized country somewhere. It was perpetual motion. It might slow down but it never stopped. He would sit in the library and the quim styles would rotate: the doormat? the black sheep? the winter tree? the pom-pom? the paintbrush? the chainmail? His vision would tunnel down to mons size.

Ascending the various levels of Szeged University ’s library, Gyuri kept on not seeing Sólyom-Nagy. He remembered that Attila József had been a student there, this making the staircases fractionally more interesting. For some reason Pataki had been very angry about József. Gyuri had caught Pataki kicking a volume of his poetry about. József had been so insanely poor and insane that he had no choice but to become a poet. So poor he couldn’t even afford to starve in a garret and so insane he had thrown himself under a train at a good age, thirty-two, though some might quibble that thirty-two was the outside limit for a young and tragic death, especially since his life had been so unremittingly awful it was hard to understand why he had waited that long.

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.

The police story was better. ‘I left the party five minutes before the police arrived’ made better narration than ‘I left the party five minutes before two actresses stripped naked.’

As Gyuri approached the student hostel, he could see a light in what he surmised was Jadwiga’s room. That was all you needed: a lit window in the distance, the knowledge that there was something there, something to work for. The company of a dwarfy hope.

He knocked civilisedly on Jadwiga’s door. ‘I have an important consignment of vernacular Hungarian for you,’ he said as she opened up. She studied him thoughtfully with much-read eyes, then backed away in a silent invitation to enter. She closed the door. Gyuri sat down on the bed of her still absent room-mate, while Jadwiga sat opposite him. Tired from her studying, she appraised him as if she hadn’t seen him before, slightly narrowing her eyes as if trying to focus better. Then she said with a half-smile: ‘We must talk.’ A pause. ‘We can be friends… but no more.’

‘You have a boyfriend?’ asked Gyuri, feeling exceptionally confident that any competition could be trampled underfoot, obliterated effortlessly. He was intoxicated with the certainty that he was on to a winner. He liked everything about her, the way she spoke, the way she sat, the way she handled him. Perfection. She paused again.

‘No.’ With the full smile. ‘I have a husband.’