Under the Frog

September 1956

Striding down Petõfi Sándor utca, Gyuri saw the sign in the window of the photolab: ‘Lab Technician Required’. This, more than the phone call, brought home the fact that Pataki was gone.

The phone had rung and Gyuri had counted out the crackly silence. He had made it only forty-two seconds before the distant receiver was replaced but it could only have been the forty-five second signal agreed with Pataki. Pataki was out. He had gone to heaven and called from a pearly phone. As if it had been stitched there, Gyuri carried a smile so wide it hurt for the next day, a smile that completely cancelled the mild melancholy he felt at Pataki’s escape: a mild melancholy because he hadn’t wanted to dwell on the probability that he would never see him again.

Pataki was out. It was not only a stinking horseprick in the posterior of the authorities, it was a colossal stinking horseprick. It gave him so much pleasure that he tried not to think about it too much, to ration himself to a few hours’ gloating a day. But this notice cut the floor out from under his satisfaction. Only a fortnight gone and he was missing Pataki acutely. There was no one else in the country who could call him an arsehead with quite the same authority, the authority of a lifetime’s acquaintance.

When he got home, he was glad Elek wasn’t manning the armchair and that his nosiness wouldn’t be snooping around. He was also glad Jadwiga had consented to come to Budapest and that he didn’t have to trudge down to Szeged. Did other people really have to work this hard for happiness? You find world-class love but your beloved lives at the other end of the country. He peered out of the window and inspected the street although it was too early for her to appear. She had insisted that he shouldn’t wait at the station – with her Polish disregard for the passage of clocks, she couldn’t guarantee which train she would catch. But at least there was no more nonsense about her husband. When she returned from Poland after her summer visit, she had been full of news about the riots in her hometown of Poznan. Gyuri had got all the details about that but Jadwiga had been pleasingly reticent on the subject of her husband who seemed to have been airbrushed out of the picture, like Trotsky standing behind Lenin.

The news that Jadwiga was married had caused all his carefully handmade aspirations to shatter like the china in a porcelain shop crashed into by a well-fuelled bomber with a full payload. Gyuri had hoped that his facade indicated the manly resolve he was searching for but couldn’t feel and not the widespread collapse that was dominoeing its way through the regions of his body. He should have expected something like this; it had gone far too smoothly. Jadwiga had talked proudly of her husband. ‘My husband is a writer,’ she said in a way that left no doubt this was the only thing for a quality husband to be. He was writing a book on Polish painting.

They had gone out for a walk anyway. It had been pitch black, cold and windy and there wasn’t much to be seen in Szeged even in the best of daylight but Gyuri enjoyed the walk because despite having the someone-just-trod-on-my-throat sensation, the black environment had given them a duopoly. They were the movers of the universe, the animation in a depeopled darkness. Gyuri had generally considered walking to be one of the most inferior of amusements but that walk with Jadwiga had been infinitely preferable to doing anything else with say, Agnes. Kissing her respectfully on the cheek, he bade her farewell.

On the train back to Budapest, he had juggled two main thoughts. Firstly, that he didn’t care whether she was married or not and secondly (as a consolation prize for his floored morality) the conclusion that it was rather an odd sort of marriage, where you lived hundreds of kilometres, days of travel apart. It didn’t look like a thriving marriage at all, it was a marriage stretched so thin that you couldn’t really notice it.

He had determined to avoid Szeged for a fallow fortnight but the next weekend found himself dashing to the Nyugati station. He invented some nearby athletic activity to justify his presence and sought out Jadwiga. He found her dutiful in the library, asleep. He went out, bought a flower, and returned to leave it on her notebook and to wait for the study-fatigued student to rouse herself, which she did after ten minutes. She was surprised to see the flower and then, looking round, was surprised to see Gyuri. Despite the arguable propriety of the flower, she was pleased. ‘You are a very keen friend,’ she remarked.

This time supper was accepted and Gyuri didn’t regret having to sleep on Solyom Nagy’s floor although its embrace lingered on his back for the next twenty-four hours. The conversation had been agreeable and unremarkable but as with the walk it had been intensely pleasurable. If Pataki had known that his friend had spent the better part of two days travelling in order to have a so-so meal with a side-serving of jejune dialogue, he would have been shocked and incredulous, but Gyuri felt it was time well used. Jadwiga’s husband worked very hard, it turned out, though the admiration with which she wheeled out this information had been a trifle faltering, a little adulterated.

The next weekend saw Gyuri becoming a real expert on the Budapest-Szeged rail link. Individual haystacks and trees were recognised on the way down. Gyuri hadn’t let Elek in on the reason for his travelling down to Szeged but it was obvious that it wasn’t Gyuri’s passion for the local architecture. ‘Have fun,’ Elek had said in the way that parents do, convinced that their offspring were engrossed in incessant debauchery the moment they set foot outside the front door.

Jadwiga was again surprised to see him. ‘You take friendship very seriously indeed,’ she observed. They went to supper and the cinema which vacuumed Gyuri’s pockets clean. Posting a birthday card to her grandfather, Jadwiga asked Gyuri if his grandparents were still alive; this annoyed him slightly because she asked the same question during their first walk and thus it was obvious she didn’t store away everything he said in the way that he noted down her words for future examination, building up a dossier on her. ‘My grandfather was in what the Germans called Auschwitz. The Jews don’t like to mention how many Poles died there. My grandfather survived, I think, because he’s a persistent man: a very persistent man. He taught me the value of persistence too.’

Reviewing the proceedings, Gyuri was astonished how much pleasure could be had without taking off any clothes and with a moat of oxygen dividing him from the castle he wanted to storm. He had listened politely when she had made reference several times to her husband not writing dutifully enough to her, though this had been presented more as a general critique of men. The travel was a nuisance though. Gyuri wished they could provide a gymnasium in the train so he could do some athletic training. He opened an accountancy textbook and he and the print stared sullenly at each other for a while. The travel was eating up a lot of his time.

The next weekend he was spared the purgatory of hours of travel because Jadwiga came up to Budapest to visit some fellow Polish students, to whom in the end she barely said hello. It was an unusual situation for Gyuri. He had never shown anyone around Budapest before, indeed he had never had the inclination to do so. Jadwiga had only spent half-days in Budapest in transit to Szeged, so he had to shake his brains for an itinerary.

He took Jadwiga up to the Gellert Hill where there was the Statue of Liberty, a woman reaching out above herself with her arms at full stretch as if reaching for something on a top shelf. Into her grip had been lowered some amorphous burden, perhaps palm fronds, perhaps oversized laurels, certainly something of heavy significance weighing down on the sprightly dame, who nevertheless effected a transcendental expression.

You could see the statue from most parts of the city and from the statue’s foot you had a panoramic view of Budapest. The Statue of Liberty had been originally intended as a memorial to Admiral Horthy’s son, a fighter pilot who like most Hungarians of his age had died around the Don but before it had been erected there had been a change of government and of uniforms in the street. Purged of its dynastic and political past, charged up with the ideology of a new age, it had been stuck on top of the Gellert Hill to act as a spiritual beacon.

As a supplement to the Statue of Liberty, perhaps as an additional ideological boost to compensate for the statue’s ignominious beginnings, was a smaller, clumsier statue of a Soviet soldier, known locally, Gyuri explained, as the Unknown Watch-Thief.

Situated underneath the Statue of Liberty, less visible and not tampering with the skyline, the rather morose Soviet soldier, scowling from being left on duty for so many years, had an inscription: ‘From the grateful Hungarian people’.

‘I assure you the Poles are far more grateful,’ said Jadwiga.

Bánhegyi had, as always when he ran out of cash, dislocated his shoulder (he could dis-and relocate his joints at will), gone to the doctor, collected a cheque from the insurance company (despite the fact that he would be out on court bullying the ball the day after) and invited everyone to the restaurant at the Keleti railway station. Jadwiga impressed everyone with her Hungarian (Róka refused to believe she was Polish) and also with the way she dealt with an enormous plate of wienerschnitzel and a liberal portion of calf’s brains. Gyuri caught glances of admiration from the team and Róka in a state of extreme perturbation had to leave twice for ‘fresh air’.

Pataki had been quiet. His mutism amply expressed his high regard for Jadwiga. Gyuri would have been worried about the possibility of competition from Pataki were it not for his conviction that he was backed by destiny this time. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve drilled for the white oil yet?’ Pataki inquired. Gyuri snorted as an all-purpose reaction which contained amusement, denial, confirmation and contempt, hoping that Pataki would select whichever element would shut him up. Everyone else was evidently assuming that he had full access and this had been quite satisfying, since reputation is only one step away from the real thing. ‘I think you’re going to make it this time,’ Pataki appended.

As he railwayed down to Szeged the subsequent weekend, he tried to think of some good pretext to cover his trip, at the same time thanking providence that he worked for the railways which made such a long-distance liaison financially possible. Jadwiga didn’t seem surprised to see him nor did she bother to ask for any explanation of his presence in Szeged.

Gyuri had still not met Jadwiga’s room-mate Magda, but had developed a great affection for her solely on the strength of her absences. As they sat in the room, Gyuri wondered how to elegantly polevault from friendship into a more clasping form of love. He checked his watch. By six o’ clock, he resolved, he would be entangled in her garments or out. He had put in the miles. This deadline kept shifting steadily like the horizon as time progressed and he remained frozen in a posture of warm cordiality opposite her.

A clock’s far-off chiming entered quietly during a caesura in their conversation. ‘It’s eight o’clock and you haven’t pounced,’ she commented. ‘You men are such frail creatures.’

They closed in to fit their urges together. The main thing, he pondered, hugging her thankfully was that she felt it too; if he had made no inroads on her heart, that would have been unbearable.They clung to each other as if they were tumbling through outer space. Two supplementary conclusions made themselves comfortable in his thoughts: that by holding her he had captured everything he wanted in life and that he had got to the end of pleasure. ‘Switch off the light,’ she breathed. Just before he alighted on her in the darkness, she halted him, and from the bed she reached up to draw back the curtain; her naked body was instantly coated with moonlight. How did she learn that?

They sweated out the loneliness and after the gasps of surprise and exertion, prostrated themselves on each other. That’s something that can’t be wrenched from your possession, Gyuri reflected. Money in the unrobbable bank. Whatever happens now, I’ve won.

Jadwiga’s husband, it turned out, was a bastard.

On the orders of his ball-gripping lust, Gyuri kept looking out of the window, and just when he thought he was going to swoon with expectation, Jadwiga appeared. She was walking at a furious pace, he noted, a woman with a purpose, the weekly week-long separation eliciting the same concupiscent smouldering from her. One of her most endearing features was the way she would take her clothes off as if they were on fire, leaving them where they dropped, without a thought for any sartorial suffering that might occur, and plunging into bed as if it were a cool pond of water. The other women had, no matter how high the flame was under them, been fearful of creases and had taken time out to utilise a hanger or a chair to drape their attire.

Gyuri saw her shape through the smoked opaque glass of the front-door and he thought how lucky he was to have such a visitor. Virtually ignoring him, she made for the bedroom, casting off her dress and stumbling on her knickers, fell flat on her face on the bed. ‘Come inside,’ she commanded at the end of the crumpled clothes-trail.

A part-time god, Gyuri ruminated in a bout of lyricism, 1 loosed off liquid lightning in my private thunderstorm. Jadwiga rose to go to the bathroom, and Gyuri perceived a fructiferous droplet dash along her thigh towards her ankle. He wanted to make her pregnant. He wanted to make her pregnant. What was going on? He couldn’t believe he felt like that but you can’t beat biology, he concluded.

Furthermore, it was very, very unlikely that he would achieve anything more important or significant than this, making one person feel full happiness, manufacturing a roomful of ecstasy, even if it were only a bubble in a gloomy ocean. It seemed a mundane pinnacle for a life, a trite climax for a biography, a flippant line for a gravestone – ‘did some worthwhile willying’. But was there anything else that had given him the same reward of joy and plenitude? The oldest trap had opened and snapped shut and he didn’t mind at all.

‘There goes the best moment of my life,’ he said to the absent Jadwiga. Which story had it been where the devil offers a man the chance to stop time, to slam on the brakes at a point of his own choosing, but the man can’t decide when to say when? Gyuri had had intimations of love before, but looking at Jadwiga, he realised that was a prospect that could last him for eternity, whatever went on outside the walls. He didn’t care who the general-secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party was or whether or not socialism was being built outside or whether people were swinging around in the trees. He had his portable universe, his mobile self-sufficiency. This sort of satisfaction could bog down a man with great aims, but since he had never got around to preparing any, Gyuri felt ready to sink back and enjoy it.

As Jadwiga started recovering her clothing, Elek returned and for some obscure reason (he only ever visited Gyuri’s bedroom on average twice a year) wandered in to catch the whole story of her skin. Mumbling apologies from the other side of the door, Elek retreated to his armchair, like a parrot to its perch, as if that would render him inconspicuous and inoffensive.

Unhindered by Elek’s entrance, Jadwiga carried on with her dressing. Her poise made a contrast with Tünde’s hysterics when Elek had found her torso exhibited in the shower. She had yelled as if her life was in danger and threw her arms tightly over the regions acknowledged to be of most interest to men, to staunch the flow of libidinous material. Tünde’s behaviour had been excessive; despite living in an age when the public baring of bodies was frowned on, her physique was as well-viewed as the Statue of Liberty and in particular the parts she was shielding with her hands, making fleshy fig leaves, had been as relentlessly fingered as the timetable at the Keleti railway station. But for some reason Tünde believed that all-lung hysterics was the pertinent reaction of a well-brought-up girl to an unannounced guest. Jadwiga’s nakedness hadn’t blinked.

Gyuri loved her alert breasts. He loved her runner’s legs (she had dabbled in sprinting) paradisiac containers of aphrodisiac. He loved her sagacious buttocks that had settled the entire subject of good buttocking. He loved her lips, the well-marked borders of her mouth; he loved her felicitating soles and all on them. He couldn’t see anything that let the view down. Perhaps that was the symptom of fully-defined love: like a great work of art, nothing could be docked, interjected or tampered with. If the Creator had come to him with a special offer of restyling, ‘For you, Gyuri, I can change anything you’d like: a little more leg? another helping of breast? blonder hair? darker hair? more ear lobe? younger? older? wittier? graver? repainted eyes? American passported?’ Gyuri realised that he would just reply: ‘We’ll stop here.’ He wouldn’t change a hair, not a pore, not one particle more, not one particle less, because then she wouldn’t be she. And it was no use trying to make up his mind about which sector bested the others; he couldn’t judge Jadwiga’s beauties’ contest, because her components kept leapfrogging over each other, grabbing his favour. Then he knew that he had jettisoned the world. That he was marooned on the planet Jadwiga.

Although not Jadwiga’s first foray into the flat, it was the first time she had met Elek who had taken up employment as a night-watchman at the Laszlo hospital (an occupation that suited him since it involved a lot of sitting and doing nothing and gave him complete freedom to speculate on what he would do with the money he was counting on winning in the lottery). So, after the full-frontal introduction, time was set aside for a formal hand-kissing which Elek did with a snap of the heels.

In the kitchen, as Gyuri lined up the ingredients for an omelette, Elek sidled up to whisper his warm admiration: ‘My congratulations.’ Gyuri didn’t want to register pleasure at Elek’s approval but it was pleasing nevertheless. Elek watched Gyuri’s egg-cracking with the admiration of the culinary illiterate. ‘You haven’t heard any more from young Pataki, have you?’ he asked.

Gyuri shook his head.

The fastest motorcycle in Hungary had been the root of Pataki’s departure. Or maybe one of the roots of it. Or maybe, Gyuri continued to reflect, really in the mood to push a metaphor around, just part of the foliage. Who knew?

The motorcycle had been a Motoguzzi, a mountain of a bike. Sándor Bokros had owned it originally. Bokros had, by a series of dazzling commercial speculations, starting in 1945, when there had been a widespread vogue for a really good wash, juggled a dozen bars of soap through ever-augmenting metamorphoses until he had half a dozen fur coats. Then Bokros left the country and went to Italy, where, according to reliable accounts, he had almost willied off his willy and bought the motorcycle. Suddenly, through some incomprehensible mental aberration, Bokros had returned to Hungary on his bike, just as the country’s borders were being sealed so tightly they lost fifty kilometres. Even in Italy there had only been a handful of bikes like that one and for the citizens of Budapest it was like something from Mars. Bokros had two problems: having to cope with an epidemic of adulation and street-enquiry and finding a stretch of road on which he could get out of first gear.

By the time Boleros realised that he should have opted for a totalitarianism that went in for long stretches of immaculate tarmac, it was too late. Everyone assumed it would end in tragedy, either his bike being nationalised, or him dying as a result of not seeing eye to eye with a Hungarian bend but what happened was as unforeseen as you could get. As he was overtaking, on a country road, a tractor with a load of fixed, upturned scythe-fittings on the back, one of the blades slid down, decapitating Bokros. ‘You don’t need much in the way of brains to ride a bike,’ Pataki had said at the funeral, mulling over the bike having carried on for half a kilometre without a head.

‘You’ll like Sándor, everyone does,’ was the way Bokros was always described. His brother, Vilmos, was described as one of those people who was disliked by everyone. Indisputably, Mrs Bokros hadn’t been eating enough affability when Vilmos was conceived. One of the most upsetting aspects about Sándor’s death had been that it meant the fastest motorcycle in the country would be passing into the hands of the loathsome Vilmos.

Vilmos fulfilled a useful function on the Locomotive team: everyone could rally round their dislike of him. Instead of suffering from a selection of grudges and vendettas, Locomotive could use Vilmos as the dustbin of enmity. He hardly ever played in a match because he wasn’t much good and because of one of the standard amusements on the way to a fixture – pushing Vilmos out onto a railway platform as the train was pulling away, ideally when he was wearing only his basketball boots. ‘Where’s Bokros?’ Hepp would ask. ‘We saw him going for a walk in Hatvan/Cegled/Veszprem’, someone would say. Vilmos discovered the only way of ensuring he wasn’t exposed in rather dull parts of the country with poor transportational possibilities was to barricade himself in the toilet until they reached their destination.

It was the week after Gyuri had lost his bet with Bokros on the outcome of the Army vs. Ironworkers football match.

Gyuri had confidently bet on the Army, not understanding why Bokros was being ostensibly that stupid, because he didn’t know as Bokros did that an international match had been fixed for the same day so that the Army was going to be stripped of all its best players. Gyuri was skint at the time but he had had his eye on a leather belt that had also formerly belonged to Sándor, so he had wagered in exchange for the belt, in an excess of colourful hyperbole, that Bokros could crap into his hands if the Ironworkers won. The Ironworkers did, but fortunately, out of the blue, Vilmos had grown a sense of humour.

Naturally, everyone gathered around for the show. Vilmos crouched down, and Gyuri obligingly hunkered down behind him ready to catch the fecal ball. ‘No fumbling,’ was the general exhortation. Honourably, Gyuri waited to settle his debt but Bokros, suddenly the centre of approval for devising such a wonderful entertainment, was laughing so much that he was incapable of invoking the muscular bailiffs to evict some tenants from his bowels.

‘Give me a newspaper,’ Bokros had instructed, hoping that reading some of Prime Minister Hegedus’s speech on Hungarian-Soviet relations would induce a state of tranquillity and sphinctal detente but the crowd eventually had to disperse in disappointment.

The following week, Gyuri had missed the preamble of the argument but the bet between Pataki and Bokros had grown out of a furious abuse session. It happened on Margit Island, after a training session and Gyuri entered as Pataki, who had recently been extremely tetchy, was telling Bokros what trash he was. Pataki was angry, and he looked angry, which was unusual in that he didn’t routinely hand out public bulletins on his feelings like that: Bokros, who you would have thought would have been quite used to being called a shit and so on, was greatly incensed.

‘Who do you think you are?’ he spat out. ‘Do you think you’re so great? That you’re so hard?’ Bokros almost ruptured himself getting the word out. ‘You toe the line when it matters.’

‘But I haven’t licked the arse of everyone at the Ministry of Sport, including the doorman.’

‘No, you’re so independent, the changing-room rebel, the revolutionary who’s going to bring everything down with some explosive whispered sarcasm… you haven’t got the guts to speak out. If you think it all stinks why don’t you say so?’

‘I’ll show you,’ said Pataki, pointing at the White House across the river. Why doesn’t he just hit Bokros? Gyuri wondered. ‘You’ll have the chance to see what I think if you want. Let’s have a bet. You put up your bike against half of my salary for a year and I’ll run stark naked around the White House and give them a 360 degree view of my fine Hungarian bum.’

‘Done,’ said Bokros, made adamant by his anger and the certitude that Pataki wouldn’t attempt it. But Pataki waved in Gyuri and Bánhegyi. ‘Come on, I want witnesses.’

Gyuri had spent most of his life thinking that Pataki had gone too far, but he hadn’t felt so strongly that his friend was on course to crash head-on with destiny since that time in ’45 when Pataki had said to him: ‘Of course we should try out that revolver. Your mother won’t know. What do you think’s going to happen? The Russians are going to arrest us and have us shot?’

The White House was nominally the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior; it was mostly a haunt for the Hungarian Working People’s Party and the AVO. Some said it was the headquarters of the AVO, but the AVO taking no chances, seemed to have several headquarters: Andrássy út for one, plus a number of villas up in the hills of Budapest where they could beat people up in comfort and tranquillity.

The White House, as the Ministry in its well-appointed riverside location was popularly known, had a marked resemblance to a shoebox. The story went thus: the architect who had been commissioned to design it (not because he was a Party member, but because of his family background – his father had been a dipsomaniac and a worker manque, his mother a moderately successful prostitute, so he was valued as being suitably anti-bourgeois) had, in the recognised tradition of Hungarian architecture, namely boozing and gibbering excitedly, spent both the six months he had been allotted to create a plan and the commission fee, boozing and gibbering, telling everyone he met- building workers, shop assistants, proctologists, swimming pool attendants, paviours, percussion players and a man on the number two tram who was breeding leeches, waiting for their big comeback in medicine – that he had been commissioned to design the Ministry.

The architect was cruelly woken one morning by a phone call from Party headquarters saying they had been looking for him for a week and that he was expected that afternoon to display the model of the new building and that Rákosi wasn’t in a very good mood. Luckily the architect didn’t have a hangover, as he was still drunk, having only just got to bed after three days’ revelling at a gypsy wedding in Mateszalka. He had enough clarity of mind to realise that he would be shot or if he were lucky he could spend the rest of a short life making uranium pies down a mineshaft under an unfashionable part of Hungary.

Desperately rummaging through his closet, he unearthed a model he had constructed years ago in his student days before the war, for a competition to build a luxury hotel in Lillafiired. The model was quite detailed, though the gothic towers weren’t in keeping with the latest thinking from Moscow but while this model would finish his career as an architect, it might save his life and allow a possibility of further boozing and gibbering. Who knows, Rákosi might even have a thing about gothic towers?

As he was dreaming up some brazen lies to accompany the model, he didn’t pay the necessary attention to pulling on his trousers and he keeled over, crushing the model beyond redemption and the most epic of his falsehoods.

Spotting a shoebox skulking in the closet, he remembered the words of his professor: ‘All the best ideas are accidents.’ (The professor had got the commission to build the Ethnography Museum because he had copied down the wrong address for a prospective client who wanted a layout for a cakeshop and had ended up on the doorstep of the head of the museum committee who had been won over by his gibbering.) Seizing the shoebox and drawing some windows on it, he started to improvise a speech making copious reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat. ‘I could have brought an elaborate model but surely in an era when the working people dictate…’

Then there was the Szell story. Every time Gyuri looked at the White House he recalled it. Szell and his father specialised in food-processing equipment and he had insisted that they had received a decree to install two king-sized meat-grinders in the basement of the White House, obviously to mince up those particularly difficult corpses for the fishes. Of course, both Szell and his father were inveterate liars. If they were facing a firing squad and you were to ask them, ‘Do you want your lives to be spared?’ they’d be forced to answer ‘No’. On the other hand, you could see how an ample meat grinder could come in handy and it was a good way of turning the blue Danube red.

Gyuri, Bánhegyi, Róka and even, in the end, Bokros, all tried to dissuade Pataki from executing the wager, but Pataki was, even in the bright sunshine, almost incandescent with anger. Bokros attempted to jolly down the situation, perhaps realising that the consequences of such an action might well injure even himself. ‘No,’ said Pataki walking off, ‘tomorrow, at twelve.’

Worried, Gyuri pondered how to divert Pataki from taunting the White House with his buttocks. Talking him out of it directly wouldn’t work and Gyuri was unsure which style of machination would have the desired effect. It was like lacking the right-sized spanner to undo a bolt; simple if you had the right tool, otherwise impossible.There was a formula of words that would make Pataki laugh and go rowing but Gyuri couldn’t think of the combination.

So alarmed was Gyuri that he even took the step of talking to Elek about Pataki’s planned run. Elek wasn’t taken aback; he showed no consternation at the prospect of losing his partner in nicotine, indeed he maintained his armchair aloofness. ‘I suppose you’ll be getting arrested with him, will you? They say prison is character-forming. Mind you, my character was already formed when they put me inside in Bucharest.’

‘You were in jail?’

‘Only for a few days. Bribery’

‘Bribery? Who did you bribe?’

‘No, the problem was I hadn’t bribed anyone. They were very upset.’

‘Look, Pataki’ll be in for more than few days.’

‘It’s very hard to work out why people do things. Back in Vienna, when I was in the Army, one of my friends ended up in a furious row over something trifling. The positioning of napkins in the officers’ mess – something like that. But he challenged this other fellow to a duel. We all took turns trying to get them to call it off. Apart from the chance of someone getting killed, duelling was furiously prohibited and droves of careers could have dropped dead like flies. The thing everyone was terrified of was losing face, so I put my arm round him and said “Józsi, this is a stupid misunderstanding. Grown men don’t behave like this. Honour’s honour, but you can’t shoot a fellow officer over a napkin.” I thought I was doing a good job when he looked at me and I can still remember this vividly, he was so passionate. “No,” he said to me. “You don’t understand. I want to blow his brains out.” Nothing to do with the napkin, of course, just the usual traffic jam on the thigh of a Viennese fraulein.

‘I’ll talk to Pataki if you want but I don’t think it’ll make any difference. These lunacies-in-waiting are usually readied well in advance, like all the best off-the-cuff remarks. It was the same with me resigning my commission; it had all the appearance of an extempore fed-upness but it had been in training for a considerable while. That was my problem with the Army, I just couldn’t take it seriously and that’s what they couldn’t forgive me for. I suppose people in any profession who don’t carry the due reverence are in trouble. But the whole military was a joke. Every time they get something good going they throw it open to the amateurs anyway and then a natural soldier sticks out like an oak in a meadow.

‘I’ll talk to Pataki if you want. But I’ll be surprised if he’ll listen. You never did.’

But that evening Pataki was nowhere to be found for dissuasion, so, at the appointed time they gathered on the Margit Bridge. Bokros had a pale, posthumous look since he wasn’t going to gain however the day went. He implored Pataki to refrain from his task. If he’d offered the bike, that might have tilted it, but he didn’t. ‘Better stay here’ Pataki suggested, entrusting Gyuri to look after the shortly-to-be-forfeited motorcycle.

‘This could take some time,’ Pataki said, trotting off towards the White House with the ease of a ruthless athlete. He was wearing his black tracksuit, until he reached the embankment adjacent to the Ministry.

From their vantage point on the bridge, Gyuri and Bokros watched as Pataki reduced his attire to Locomotive-style basketball boots. He looked tanned, relaxed and even from hundreds of metres away his muscles had precise definition. A superb musculature, Gyuri thought, recalling how Pataki had been in line to be the model for the naked proletarian Adonis-figure on the back of the new twenty-forint note. They had been looking for a striking example of the new Hungarian might and the artist had gone for Neumann who made a much more towering symbol of resurgence, justice and truth, of socialist invincibility and grit, and perhaps because Pataki had asked for money. ‘They’re not getting my pecs for free.’

All around the building there were guards. People weren’t exactly encouraged to walk past the Ministry. While on the one hand, the AVO felt it only right to have ostentatiously lavish headquarters by the Danube, the drawback to having a headquarters was that people knew where to find you, which obviously made the AVO slightly uneasy.

The guards were drowsy and clearly not accustomed to doing their job. Pataki had drawn up to the main entrance before they became noticeably stirred and perplexed by this challenge to workers’ power. Then one of the guards had the idea of chasing Pataki and the others thought this might be worth trying and followed his example. The guards were well armed, but not well legged. By judiciously using his acceleration, Pataki zipped ahead of them, dodging any newcomers, maintaining a few tantalising metres between himself and his collection of pursuers. He spurted round the corner of the Ministry taking a wake of guards with him, leaving the frontage of the White House deguarded, motionless and summery.

After a longer time than seemed possible, Pataki reemerged from the rear of the building and made his finishing line his starting point where he had left his tracksuit, looking satisfied that he had encircled the White House with his buttocks as his uniformed retinue caught up with him. The guards having apprehended Pataki’s unhidden hide were uncertain what to do. Finally a blanket and then a police van swallowed Pataki.

‘Oh, well,’ Bokros summed up. ‘The engine needs a rebore anyway.’

Most of the Locomotive team had decided to visit relatives in the countryside, to take lengthy hikes in the hills, or to reside at someone else’s address for a few days. Gyuri waited for the retributional spill-over at home, braced for interrogation and ready with a four-dimensional denial.

Five days after Pataki had blasted the White House with both his buttocks, Gyuri returned home to find Pataki about to take a shower. He was a bit stinky and his hair needed combing but otherwise he looked remarkably intact. ‘I hope you’ve brought your own soap, you free-loading bastard,’ Gyuri remonstrated and then unable to combat his curiosity any longer: ‘What happened?’

‘What do you mean?’ Pataki shouted from the shower ‘What do you mean, what happened?’

Pataki was soaping himself and Gyuri could see Pataki wasn’t going to give him the story just like that. ‘I thought the talent scouts from the AVO signed you up.’

‘Oh, that. Isn’t it obvious? I’m insane. Would anyone sane run naked around the Ministry of the Interior? You’re looking at an escaped lunatic. Could you fix me something to eat? We nutters eat the same sort of thing as you sane people.’

Pataki came into the kitchen, reading a letter which had been posted just before his escapade. The letter was from the Ministry of Sport informing him that his application for a scholarship abroad had been turned down. A slogan had been rubber-stamped further down the page, below the terse refusal: ‘Fight for Peace’.

‘Look at this,’ said Pataki waving the letter in disgust. ‘How can they expect me to live in a country where they put idiotic rubbish like this on every letter? I’m off.’

Pataki for some time had been trying to raise the subject of getting out. This had meant that Pataki talked about it while Gyuri was in earshot. The subject had become fascinating for Pataki, chiefly because Bánhegyi had been moved to work in the international freight department of the railways. Bánhegyi, like all the Locomotive players, wasn’t actually required to work, but when he popped in to collect his wages he had access to all the information. It was an extremely hazardous way to get out, but then there were only extremely hazardous ways to get out. If it hadn’t been for Jadwiga, if Gyuri had been on his own, he would have given it a go, but he wasn’t willing to expose Jadwiga to the risk, although knowing her, she wouldn’t refuse. He had something to lose. Pataki should have taken up the offer in ’47.

Pataki insisted that they should hunt down Bánhegyi. ‘I feel like leaving before the doctors catch me.’ Providence was evidently in the mood to grant Pataki his wish because they found Bánhegyi just returning from a dislocation-certifying session with the doctor. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there are trains going out but I can’t be sure where the trains are going to. They chop and change the forms a lot.’ Bánhegyi wanted to wait a few days to study the opportunities, but Pataki wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Thinking about it isn’t going to make it any easier,’ he said. So at midnight they went down to the sidings and breaking the seal on a freight-wagon, prized it open. It was full of shoes. ‘Shoes are risky,’ said Bánhegyi, ‘they can go East or West.’

‘Is there anything else available tonight?’ asked Pataki.

‘No.’

‘Fine. This will do.’ He climbed aboard with a bag containing two loaves, cheese, six apples, a bottle of mineral water and three bottles of Czech beer whose last place of residence had been the Fischer flat. ‘Getting drunk is one of the few amusements possible in a dark freight-wagon full of shoes,’ said Pataki defending his choice of company.

They agreed on means of communication. ‘Even if it’s Siberia, do drop us a postcard,’ urged Gyuri.

‘Sure,’ said Pataki. ‘And let my parents know in a day or two. Tell them I would have told them but it’s easier for everyone this way.’ He handed Gyuri an envelope. ‘That’s a blanket apology for them. And tell them not to look for granddad’s wedding ring. I’ve got that. Does anyone know how many years you can get for this?’ He looked at Gyuri. ‘You’re really not coming, are you?’

‘Things can’t go on like this much longer.’

They closed the door and Bánhegyi resealed the wagon with the official implement.