Under the Frog

November 1955

It was true that at the age of twenty-five he had never left the country, that he had never got more than three days’ march from his birthplace, no more than a day and a half of horse and carting or one long afternoon’s locomoting. On the other hand, Gyuri mused, how many people could say they had travelled the length and breadth of Hungary naked?

They always travelled naked. He couldn’t remember how or why this started, but it had become the irrefrangible rule for the Locomotive team as they traversed the nation for their matches. They always travelled in their luxury wagon (custom-built by Hungarian railways for the Waffen SS to facilitate them in their Europe-wide art-looting, and well known to the authorities on rolling-stock as a peerless carriage for riding the rails) and they always travelled naked.

Róka, Gyurkovics, Demeter, Bánhegyi and Pataki were playing cards on the mahogany dining-table, an ex-antique (according to Bánhegyi, who had served in his father’s removal business) it had been mutilated out of value by years of liquid rings, inadvertent and advertent lacerations, the burrowing of burning tobacco. Left as an object unsuited for pocketing in time of rout, the table had been proudly kept by the Locomotive team despite its great (if progressively diminishing) value as a symbol of corporate excellence.

Who was grassing? Who was the informer?

Róka was shifting about, as if uncomfortable: because he was being tapped of his money like a rubber tree and because of the commotion in his blood stream.

Basketball, for Róka, was essentially an aid in disseminating his chromosomes across the country. Basketball, and in fact any activity that got Róka out the front door, served as a bridge between him and members of the opposite sex. Abstention from sexual relations for anything longer than twenty-four hours would result in Róka getting extremely agitated, and doing things like running around in small figures of eight, ululating. Even in a habitat like the Locomotive carriage where women were over-represented in the conversation, Róka’s devotion to gamic convolutions was remarkable.

But Róka was too decent to be a brick in their wall.

That is, Róka was good-hearted, and Gyuri, like everyone else, liked him. So it was hard to imagine him as a delator, grassing up the team. Indeed, it was hard to imagine anyone in the team snitching. Except Peter. But as the only card-carrier Peter was surely too obvious. Pataki, he had known from the age when you start knowing. Gyuri couldn’t see any of the team informing. Demeter – too much of a gentleman. Bánhegyi – too jolly. Gyurkovics – too unorganised. And all the others were… singularly uninformer-like. However, Gyuri contemplated, turning the proposition on its head, perhaps it was Róka’s decency that had snared him. If you don’t do this, we do that to your motherfathersisterbrother.

As always, when Róka wasn’t humping, he consoled himself by talking about it: ‘So I explained to her it was okay by me.’ That was Róka. He wasn’t elitist. He was generous, egalitarian. He scorned petty bourgeois concepts such as beauty, desirability, and youth. He was relating his tryst with a recent conquest, a lady whose attractiveness, he emphasised, was in no way impaired by her artificial arm. The denouement of Róka’s anecdote was that the lady had become dismembered and Róka had found himself with an extensive annex to his tool. This, apparently, had occasioned great distress to the lady, despite Rolca’s chivalrous assurances that it could happen to anyone with an artificial arm.

Nevertheless, the chief punchline, Gyuri sensed, hadn’t been reached when the narration was guillotined by Róka’s fury at losing a heavily-wagered hand to Pataki. Gyuri wasn’t playing cards, because he found it boring, and additionally, Pataki always won. They only played for small amounts of money but as he only possessed very small amounts of money, he didn’t see why he should hand it over to Pataki. It was a mysterious process, but an inevitable and obvious one, like droplets of rain guided down a window-pane, how all the currency gravitated towards Pataki. Pataki would lose a hand every now and then but it was at best courtesy and looked more like blatant entrapment.

Tired of trying to crack the problem of the informer, Gyuri settled down to think about being a streetsweeper while he gazed out of the window at the countryside that went past quite lazily despite the train’s billing as an express. The streetsweeper was a sort of cerebral chewing gum that Gyuri popped in on long journeys. A streetsweeper. Where? A streetsweeper in London. Or New York. Or Cleveland; he wasn’t that fussy. Some modest streetsweeping anywhere. Anywhere in the West. Anywhere outside. Any job. No matter how menial, a windowcleaner, a dustman, a labourer: you could just do it, just carry out your job and you wouldn’t need an examination in Marxism- Leninism, you wouldn’t have to look at pictures of Rákosi or whoever had superbriganded their way to the top lately. You wouldn’t have to hear about gambolling production figures, going up by leaps and bounds, higher even than the Plan had predicted because the power of Socialist production had been underestimated. Being a streetsweeper would be quite agreeable, Gyuri reflected. You’d be out in the open, doing healthy work, seeing things. It was the very humility of this fantasy, its frugality that gave the greatest pleasure, since Gyuri hoped this could facilitate its coming to pass. It wasn’t as if he were pestering Providence for a millionaireship or to be handed the presidency of the United States. How could anyone refuse a request to be a streetsweeper? Just pull me out. Just pull me out. Apart from the prevailing political inclemency and the ubiquitous shittiness of life, the simple absurdity of never having voyaged more than two hundred kilometres from the spot where he had bailed out of the womb rankled.

The train went into a slower kind of slow, signalling that they were arriving in Szeged. This was, he knew from his research, 171 kilometres from Budapest.

Just next to the railway station in Szeged was a high, redbrick building which now advertised itself as a hotel. It had been, as everyone knew, one of the most renowned brothels in Hungary before such dens of capitalist iniquity were closed down. Town, gown, yokels in their Sunday best (only worn at church, in a coffin, or at the knocking shop), commercial salesmen and royalty (admittedly only the Balkan variety) had all made their way through its portals.

There was no doubt that it was pure hotel now. The girls would have been dispersed to some more dignified toil. Gyuri recalled the Party Secretary at the Ganz works making quite a ceremony out of it when the factory had taken on four night butterflies. Welcoming the new arrivals, Lakatos had launched into a heated denunciation of how the loathsome capitalist system had dragged these unfortunates into the lustful sweatshops of hypocritical bourgeois depravity. How capitalism had perpetuated the droit de seigneur, how capitalism had taken young male proletarians to be slaughtered in wars for markets and how their sisters were thrust into strumpetry. It had been, especially for Lakatos, a sterling performance. He had obviously read it somewhere; he was probably parroting a section in the Party secretary’s manual, ‘upon receiving former whores on the shopfloor’. The girls had listened to Lakatos’s fulminations demurely, wearing factory overalls. The diatribe had ended with Lakatos wiping the rhetorically-induced sweat from his brow and disappearing into his office while the girls had been led off to learn the ropes.

Within a fortnight the girls had been once again plying their trade inside the huge coils of copper wire the factory spun. That really was the heart of Communism, Gyuri decided: it made it harder for everyone to do what they do.

Róka threw his cards down in disgust as Pataki made off with another hand: ‘In the words of the Grand Provost of Kalocsa after he had had both his legs sheared off by a train, “Aren’t you going to take my dick too?”.’

‘We can talk about that jazz record of yours,’ replied Pataki, patiently shuffling the cards.

Róka, as the son of a prominent Lutheran bishop, was the carriage authority on all matters ecclesiastical, plus Horace’s odes. Every time Róka’s father had seen one of his three children, he had greeted them with a line from Horace; the offspring had been enjoined to respond with the subsequent line, on pain of an imminent clip around the ear. The bishop was not completely severe. A slice of chocolate cake was on offer for anyone who could catch him out on Horace’s texts; Róka claimed he had never eaten chocolate cake until he was sixteen.

Like Gyuri, Róka was class-x. But Róka seemed unperturbed by this, and certainly didn’t allow his political handicap to interfere with his mission in life. Methodically, he scanned the platforms at Szeged station for any woman who had the sort of look on her face which suggested that she might be thinking about a vertical liaison against a secluded wall with a basketball player en route to Makó. Aside from his interminable hormones, Róka had also acquired a haul of excellent (i.e. Western) jazz records that was now almost entirely in Pataki’s clutches, and he was looking out in the hope of a deliverance that might prevent another disc from taking up residence in Pataki’s collection. Róka’s countenance grimly, faultlessly, registered the absence of a woman under sixty at Szeged ’s railway station.

‘We haven’t blessed Szeged, have we?’ remarked Bánhegyi. It was childish, but cheap, and sometimes amusing. Katona leaned out of a window further along, so he could capture the scene while, as the train pulled out of the station, Róka, Gyurkovics, Demeter and Pataki promoted their posteriors up against the carriage window next to the platform. A gallery of photographs starring bewildered or outraged rail passengers from all over Hungary adorned the carriage walls.

Szeged was a little disappointing. One elderly ticket-inspector got the full blast of the four-bum salute but she remained unmoved. Myopia perhaps, or an overdose of war; it looked very much as if some misfortune had spooned the zest out of her. Or possibly they were inured to basketball teams in Szeged.

Gyuri looked out on the river as they crossed over, still ruminating on the attractions of being a streetsweeper. ‘The border’s too far to walk from here,’ said Pataki, continuing to preside over the impoverishment of his team-mates. ‘Make your break from Makó.’

Gyuri’s aspirations, though he had never opened them up, dripped out over time and had been fully divined by the others. Keeping secrets from those you travelled around with naked wasn’t easy. ‘It’s really not that wonderful out there, Gyuri.’ Gyurkovics kept on repeating this. Gyurkovics was a liar – not in the same league as Pataki but competent. But while Pataki turned on the falsehood principally for entertainment and only used it as a shield at the last resort, with Gyurkovics you knew as soon as his enamels parted, his lying was to exile the truth.

Gyurkovics had got out. In ’47, before the borders had been sealed up tighter than a louse’s arse, Gyurkovics went off to Vienna. It had been about the same time that Gyuri had gone to see Pataki about skipping the country. Wearing newspaper for underwear, Gyuri was spending most of his time worrying about when his next foodstuff would be making its appearance. He had been going upstairs in the hope of catching lunchtime in the Pataki household when he bumped into Pataki coming down the stairway. Pataki was wearing his US Army sunglasses (clandestinely obtained and one of only a dozen pairs in the whole of Hungary). Pataki was better off in that his loins weren’t girded with newsprint and he had a mother and an employed father to assist him in the obtaining of meals. But Gyuri doubted that was the crucial factor. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get out of this country,’ Gyuri had urged. Pataki paused, mentally fingering the proposal. ‘No,’ he said, ‘let’s go rowing.’ That had been that. Gyuri had no doubt that if it had been yes, they would have strolled down to the station without any ado, but it had been no and a saunter to the boathouse.

Gyurkovics however had snapped the homeland umbilical cord, but incredibly had returned six months later, when there were even fewer reasons to return. He had an uncle in Vienna, who from Budapest looked immeasurably rich, having coined it in the shoe business. Many an evening had been spent in the throes of unrestrained envy, but Gyurkovics had reappeared looking gloomy and sporting an unimpressive suit. The rumour had been that only insanity or murder could have brought him back; his brother had passed out the truth. Gyurkovics had demolished the shoe empire. In his suicide note, Gyurkovics’s uncle had written: ‘You have incredible gifts – anyone who can destroy an enterprise built up over forty years with love, diligence, early rising and an unequalled regard for the customer, in the space of a few weeks, has extraordinary talents. I trust that one day these powers will be harnessed for the benefit of mankind.’

Still biding his time with a bit of basketball before redeeming humanity, Gyurkovics played down the West. Probably there were further embarrassments littered around Vienna that he didn’t want any acquaintances to chance on. Besides, this stretch of border around Makó wasn’t worth the effort of crossing it. Who wanted to go to Yugoslavia or Rumania? Both red star affairs. Yugoslavia – a bunch of knife wielding Serbs and Rumania…

Gyuri had been miffed at not going on the Rumanian tour. Okay, Rumania wasn’t really a country, but it wasn’t Hungary and it was infuriating that bourgeois lineage should have deprived him of the trip when crypto-fascists and rotten decadents like Róka and Pataki had gone. They had wanted the team to win, so they couldn’t leave Pataki behind, but they didn’t want anyone too class-x passing the ball to him. By some incomprehensible ministerial process the level of class-x in Róka had been deemed more acceptable than his.

Rumania hadn’t had a good press though. Years before, Józsi from the ground floor had returned from a summer holiday visiting relatives in Transylvania and recounted in horrified tones: ‘They actually fuck ducks. I’m not joking, I saw it’. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pataki had riposted, ‘it must have been a goose.’ Józsi had seemed genuinely aghast and when you thought about how all the great Hungarian generals, all the true hard men of Hungarian history had come from Transylvania, it seemed plausible that rising in the morning to discover your neighbour with his breeches around his ankles making some fowl howl could toughen you up.

Gyuri had also quizzed István, who had been the last soldier out of Kolozsvar, ‘the last but the fastest’, about Rumania. István just laughed and carried on laughing. Elek, who had taken the Orient Express to do business in Bucharest before the war, when he heard that Gyuri was angling to get on the Rumanian tour, commented: ‘My son is an imbecile. This is the cruellest blow.’

Still, Gyuri was subjected to an air of distinct smugness as the others made their preparations to depart for Rumania. Róka managed to acquire a Rumanian phrase, which he went round chanting all day, which, he believed, translated roughly as ‘put your hole on my pole’. Pataki packed extra toilet paper and took a small, aged guide book on Rumanian gastronomic delights.

They went, they saw, they lost, but at least they came back. Gyuri had met the returning train at the Keleti railway station.

Róka was the first off. Always reedy, he had noticeably lost weight, a skeleton painted a white skin colour, totally out of place for August. ‘Let me put it this way,’ Róka summed up, ‘if you gave me the choice of spending two weeks in the waiting room here at the Keleti, with nothing to eat, or a night in Bucharest’s best hotel, I wouldn’t have to think very hard about it.’

They had lost the two matches they played. Largely because Pataki had been out of action. Pataki, who had never had a day’s illness in his life (the closest he had got to being ill was when he had invented ailments to dodge various duties), who had only ever come into contact with doctors for the obligatory check-ups on all players, had spent the duration of his stay in Bucharest, on his knees, spewing incessantly, vilely betrayed by his sphincter muscles, bowing to the lords of disgorgement, hugging different immobiles in his bathroom suite, pleading for divine intercession. The others had had ruthless alimentary disruptions but had just succeeded in getting out on court; the Locomotive players had all felt as if their legs were encased in lead casks – they bitterly regretted getting possession of the ball since that forced them to run or try to do something. They would have happily forfeited the match at half-time, if it hadn’t been for a fervent appeal to national honour and auroral threats of unprecedented strength by Hepp. Despite losing irremediably from the first second (or perhaps because of it) Locomotive were soundly booed by the crowd and one of the darts thrown by the spectators had skewered Szabolcs’s ear.

When Demeter, as acting captain (on account of Pataki’s indisposition), had offered to trade tops with the opposing captain as was the custom with international fixtures, the Rumanian had insisted on haggling, with the result that Demeter ended up with three unwanted Rumanian tops and the Rumanians left congratulating themselves on having gulled the Hungarians.

‘I never thought we were going to get back alive,’ Róka had said, kissing the platform. On the home leg of the fixture, they had had their revenge, beating the Rumanian Railway Workers’ Union but only by two points, a puny margin, acutely disappointing when one took into account that Róka’s brother, who was in charge of the kitchens at the hotel where the Rumanian team was staying, had applied injudicious amounts of rat poison to their goulash.

The train rolled into Makó, the last stop for both the train and the Locomotive team. They were due to play the Makó Meat-Processors that afternoon. There was a minor abattoir in Makó which helped to supply flesh to the salami factory in Szeged. Their opposition was entirely drawn from the small-bone cleaning unit of this abattoir.

No one was there to greet them at the station, but Makó wasn’t really big enough to make finding anything too much of a problem. They arrived at a school sports hall for the match to find the meat-processors out on court, clumping about in what had the appearance of a desperate attempt to learn how to play basketball half an hour before play was due to commence.

As they were changing, Hepp gave the team a pocket edition of his pre-match exhortation. It definitely wasn’t needed, since they knew without setting eyes on the meat-processors that they couldn’t be any good. Unknown, provincial teams couldn’t be any good, since any hot player would be immediately siphoned up, lured into the grasp of one of the big teams that could offer huge betterments. This was a friendly match to appraise the meat-processors, a newly formed team, who had probably lined up the first-division Locomotive via political channels. A Makó Party secretary had phoned another Party secretary to whom he had slipped a crate of salamis, who would in turn phone another Party secretary, a soon-to-be proud owner of a crate of salamis, and so on, till at the end of the chain Locomotive chugged into town.

Thus there was no need for Hepp to flex his admonitions, but the thing about Hepp, which could be quite irritating at times, was that he was a professional: he took his job seriously despite the fact that ten million other people in Hungary didn’t. He was good in every way as a coach, manager and mentor of the team, but he did have one grave fault. He always got up at 4.30 in the morning, and after fifty years on the earth, still couldn’t grasp that other people didn’t. His direst threat was circuit training at 5 a.m.

One morning, not long after he had joined Locomotive, and not long after he had burned his bed, Gyuri woke up on the floor with the awful knowledge that Hepp was expecting him at 5.30 for some track work in what was a bottomless black October freeze. Wondering why so much of existence consisted of getting up in the cold dark to do something you didn’t like, he resolved he wasn’t having it. Normally Gyuri was exemplary about training, indeed, that was why he had burned his bed, in an attempt to incinerate his laziness. It hadn’t been a great bed, but it had been serviceable, it had worked, and lying there in the mornings Gyuri had found its temptations preferable to running about in the winter. He lay there in its fortifying warmth and comfort, thinking about the training he should have been doing, repeatedly previewing it instead of doing it. Gyuri knew he had to train, and train much harder than anyone else because he was a self-made athlete, unlike someone like Pataki who was a natural. To get the rewards that accrued from basketball, Gyuri had to work.

That was why he had lugged the bed down to the courtyard and burned it with a sprinkling of petrol, to make sure that his will wouldn’t buckle in the future. The neighbours hadn’t batted an eye, because, by that point, if they hadn’t had their throats slit as they slept by Gyuri or Pataki, categorised as the crazies of the block, that was good enough for them.

Gyuri placed his hopes on a groundsheet and the floor encouraging him to get up briskly and to log a few hours’ exercise before the other preoccupations of the day. But even the floor could grow on you. And that morning, he had thought ‘you can’t rush reality’ and dived back into sleep, having written off Hepp’s proposed cross-arctic running. The doorbell rang at around six (as it would turn out). Elek, who was up, even though he had no convincing reason to be, opened the door to Hepp. Hepp handed Elek his card, which he always carried – ‘Dr Ferenc Hepp, Doctor of Sport’- and asked to be shown to Gyuri’s room. Lying, Gyuri lied reflexively that he was ill, whereupon Elek expressed surprise as Gyuri hadn’t mentioned feeling poorly the previous evening. This somehow removed the sparse vestiges of veracity from Gyuri’s statement.

‘Well,’ Hepp had said good-naturedly, ‘if you can manage to triumph over this unwellness, if you can bring your body to heel, because a hard mind makes a hard body, and get to the track in twenty minutes and do ten more laps than the others, to show this illness you’re not going to take it lying down, I think I can do you a commensurate favour: I can sign your military deferment papers.’ That had been quintessential Hepp. Other coaches would have sent someone else round to threaten him but Hepp was unwavering in doing things himself.

‘It goes without saying you’re going to win this match,’ said Hepp, ‘so I’m not going to say it. These meat-processors have undoubtedly got webbed toes and if they’re in basketball gear, it’s because they brought their mothers to help them change. I don’t want to be accused of being unreasonable, I don’t want to be the target of petulant rumblings but gentlemen, I have to insist on a twenty-point victory.

‘They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but as far as I’m concerned that’s exactly what it’s there for – this bunch couldn’t find themselves in the dark. So I have to insist, even allowing for your not inconsiderable indolence, I have to insist on a twenty-point, no, a thirty-point margin of victory. Otherwise it’s sit-ups in the City Park on the rainiest five o’ clock in the morning that I can find.’

Hepp then erected his blackboard, which he always carried around, and chalked up a few plays, selected from his notebook as thick as a hammer-thrower’s thigh (Gyuri once glimpsed a play with a number as high as 602). This was often the hardest part of any match, paying attention to Hepp’s schemes, since, certainly when dealing with a collection of small-bone pickers, the required tactic was simply to get hold of the ball, pass it to Pataki and watch him obligingly run down the court and propel it into the basket. This was a tactic stunningly effective against all but the top three or four teams in the first division who had the brains, talent, speed or foresight to impede this model operation.

But there in Makó, it was hard to attend to Hepp’s phenomenally involved machinations. You had to put one or two into action, regardless of whether you needed to or whether there would be any benefit from using it, such as collaring a couple of points. Hepp was the coach, and basketball was better than a real job where you were expected to work for the money they didn’t give you. A certain amount of explaining away was possible – ‘Doc, the marking on Pataki was too fierce, we couldn’t use the Casino egg play…’ – but if there wasn’t some evidence of orders being obeyed, Hepp’s favourite remedy for disregard of his specially-bound leather notebook was half an hour of stadium steps and it didn’t make any difference how fit you were, your legs would become solid outposts of pain.

And of course there were times when Hepp’s scheming won matches, such as the Great Technical University Massacre, when the better team hadn’t been allowed to win because of Hepp’s plays. When the end whistle had blown, the Technical University team had stood on court, unmoving, unable to believe they had been beaten, viciously beaten, by a team five places further down in the division. But it wasn’t so much to do with the winning, as with control. Gyuri had learned from his own coaching in the gimnáziums that the greatest part of the pleasure was seeing the invisible strings pulled, relishing the remote control, like being a theatre director or a general. You wanted to recognise your handiwork.

Róka, as was the custom, went out alone onto the court with the gramophone player. They all knew that this showmanship was wasted in Makó, but this was the point of being professional amateurs – you went on with the show even if there was no one to watch, or if the spectators were too thick to appreciate it. The gramophone player was István’s. István and the gramophone player were about all that was left of the Hungarian Second Army. István had got the portable gramophone player as a present from Elek when he set off to the front in ’41. Gyuri had no idea how much it had cost, but fortunes were involved; there had been German generals who didn’t have the sort of musical recreation enjoyed by the Hungarian artillery lieutenant. The Hungarian Second Army, like all Hungarian armies, had the unfortunate habit of getting wiped out. István returned, flayed and dented by shrapnel, even though 200,000 other Hungarians didn’t. Even more miraculously, the gramophone player had been returned home months later by one of István’s comrades-in-arms. István had no objections to Gyuri permanently borrowing it.

Róka put on one of the jazz records, to the sound of which Locomotive trooped out and started their warm-up, bouncing around and sinking baskets. The records they performed to were all of American origin, which could have been tricky, but before they had thrown away a load of records presented to them by one of the visiting Soviet railway teams, they had steamed off the labels and refixed them on the jazz records. So the Western decadents were then camouflaged by rubrics such as ‘Lenin is Amongst Us’, ‘Our Steam Engine’, and the biggest hit ‘In the Front-Line Forest’ performed by the Song and Dance Ensemble of the Soviet Army (the original credits for the jazz had been long forgotten). Any snooping eyes would only meet estimable red cyrillic whatever the reports of their ears.

The small-bone cleaners were visibly taken aback by this. Somehow, Gyuri felt, they weren’t going to break into the big time of big-bone cleaning. One of them loped up and announced that they could only provide one referee. ‘My other uncle couldn’t come.’

A towering player, some six foot six, the Meats’ not-so-secret secret weapon, lined up with Pataki for the jump-off, pouring down a look of smug contempt on the five inches shorter Pataki. It was funny – the Meats thought they were going to win.

They were very surprised when Pataki disappeared with the ball but instead of whizzing downcourt to deposit it in the boardbank as was his wont, he passed it back to Gyuri. For a bit of fun, Gyuri tried to drop the bomb, taking a shot from under his basket at the opposition basket. Normally, this was only attempted as a desperate measure with only seconds to go before the end of a match. The odds practically blocked the ball going in but as Gyuri knew the match was Locomotive’s anyway, even if they’d only been playing two men, he had a go. The ball flew across the court and shot through the net without touching the ring or the backboard. Any experienced player would have diagnosed it as magnificent, once in a career cheek, but the Meats were flummoxed and rocketed from bucolic swagger to abject panic. Instead of piling on Pataki (not that it would have greatly hindered him) they crowded around Gyuri. After Pataki had eased his way through to ten straight dunkings as if he were practising on an empty court, the twenty points hinted to the Meats that they should keep an eye on Pataki but this was of little help. The Secret Weapon lumbered about trying to pillage passes to Pataki but he was too big an opportunity for gravity to pass up and Pataki always got higher or lower faster to pluck the ball.

Bias, the like of which none of the Locomotive players had seen, flabbergasting bias from the referee which gave the Meats impunity to foul, trip and punch, along with several completely unwarranted penalty throws, resulted in a final score of 68-32 to Locomotive. It seemed obvious that the total export capacity of Hungary ’s salami industry would be needed to thrust the Meats into the first division.

The pleasure of the good result that Hepp was looking forward to had been greatly marred by the referee’s behaviour, going for his whistle whenever someone from Locomotive neared the ball. Hepp went over to the referee to discuss the one hundred and eight infractions of correct refereeing he had noted down during the course of the match. Gyuri could tell by the look on the referee’s face that he didn’t realise that he really was going to have to go through the one hundred and eight points one by one in exacting and atomic detail.

Hepp’s persistence was one of the pillars of Locomotive’s high ranking in the league but despite all his cunning, expertise and drive, there was no way he could push Locomotive into beating the Army’s team, which had the championship trophy riveted down in its clubhouse, as there was no need to move it. The Army’s strengths were self-evident: an infinity of boons for its sporters, innumerable facilities, the ability to draft anyone they wanted and above all, the bonus that playing for the Army meant that you didn’t have to be in the Army (the real one where you didn’t eat, lived out in sub-zero temperatures and dug ditches). In fact one of the most agreeable ways of avoiding the Army – a pastime that, after bonking, was the major preoccupation for healthy young Hungarian males – was to join the Army.

The life of the Army’s basketball players, as indeed of all its sporting practitioners, was cushy. On the first day they might go as far as to show you what a rifle looked like but that was as far as military science went for the sporters. Anyone who played in the first division had a nominal job handed out by their club, the duties being mainly collecting your wages (there were also the little brown envelopes at the clubhouse containing ‘calorie money’). For example, Gyuri had visited his place of employment on numerous occasions and had learned the Morse code in the course of his railway career. In the Army, shamateurism reached full speed; the only duty that impinged on the Army’s athletes was putting on a uniform once in a while. Plus, if you were of an international standard, a high rank and a fat salary were thrust on you. Puskás, the football genius, not only had a car, but a chauffeur.

In their changing room, Locomotive were joined by their vanquished opponents. The atmosphere was not one of sporting benevolence and fraternity; the hope of obtaining some home-brewed pálinka, as often happened on trips to the provinces, was dashed. The demeanour and conduct of the small-bone boys was indisputably bunko; you would have thought they could contain their surly clod-hopping to their own changing room but they couldn’t stay away from the excitement from Budapest: ergo, there was nothing else to do that weekend in Makó except bait the Locomotive team.

The Meats had chosen Demeter as the principal subject of their attentions. Demeter was tall and aristocratic, as befitted someone who came from a long line of tall aristocrats. Whether because seven hundred years of appearances behoved him to do so, or whether it emanated from his nature, Demeter emitted a constant poise: you could imagine him being bombed and pulled out from a pile of rubble without a hair out of place. If you were wearing a dinner jacket and Demeter was stark naked, you’d still feel underdressed.

Demeter was also excessively equitable, which was why he hadn’t responded to the Meats’ unimaginative abuse. If it had been Pataki or Katona, or indeed any other member of the team on the receiving end, fugitive teeth would already have been scuttling across the floor. Why was it always the friendly matches that ended up unfriendly? thought Gyuri looking around the changing room for some handy blunt instrument such as a length of iron piping.

The universal punch-up Gyuri expected didn’t in fact come to pass. The Meats’ spokesman was working his way through a loop of observations such as ‘You think you’re pretty good, don’t you?’ and ‘You think your shit doesn’t stink, eh?’ As he was engaged in this, Demeter adjusted his tie, and then, with such purpose the movement seemed slow, administered a slap resoundingly on the spokesman’s face. Not a punch but an open-handed rebuke, without any follow up. Demeter then carried on packing up his kit-bag. The Meats flocked out in silence – rather as a martial artist was reputed to be able to summon fatal strength to one finger, so Demeter had conduited a crushing amount of contempt into that slap that had incontrovertibly spelt out their fourth-divisionness in all aspects of life. The irony was that it was Demeter who insisted on politely bidding farewell to their hosts.

They had to hunt around for Hepp before they could leave, but they located him eventually, somewhat out of breath- he had run a mile down the road pursuing the referee who had taken to his bicycle at point forty-eight. Hepp was in excellent condition for his age, indeed he was in good shape for someone twenty years younger, and he could have carried on much further had it not been for the awareness that his strictures were not being accepted constructively.

Returning to Szeged to spend the night, the bulk of Locomotive opted for an inspection of the town’s main square to see if there was a restaurant willing to serve them. They remembered that they had run out of a restaurant in the centre of town without paying the bill, doing a Zrinyi, as it was known in the Locomotive ranks, in memory of the great Hungarian general Miklós Zrinyi, who had rushed out of his castle, admittedly to do battle with a Turkish force that outnumbered him ten times (to be completely wiped out). They remembered they had zrinyied out of a restaurant, but having been so legless and brainless they couldn’t remember which one (they had been so inebriated only half the team could walk, and had only made good their escape by locking the staff in the kitchen). But what was the point of being away from home if you didn’t behave disgracefully? They chose the restaurant on the left hand side of the square, where having reassured the management they weren’t anything to do with water-polo they were shown to a table. ‘When I hear the word water-polo,’ said the head waiter, ‘I know it means… refurbishment, hospital, the police, a loss of teeth… years of painfui, slow recovery.’

Hepp was busy back at the hotel, writing letters about the one hundred and eight points to everyone even remotely connected with the governing of basketball and some to people who weren’t. ‘I definitely think you should write to the Ministry,’ Pataki had said, knowing that Hepp’s epistolary exertions would save the team from a few hours of post-match analysis which on previous occasions had driven people to climbing out of windows to evade Hepp.

Gyuri had gone off to the main post office to see about a phone call to Budapest. Three days before, he had been stopped in the street by a striking Swedish girl who asked for directions to the Museum of Fine Arts. The miracle of such an encounter, of a girl who was from the outside and who was good-looking, just walking up to him without any advance notice from fate, had stupefied him and he almost let her go without assaying further acquaintance. She was visiting Budapest for some youth festival organised by one of the countless peace committees but that was immaterial. She was a two-legged ticket out of Hungary and worth a four hour wait for a phone-call. Stay calm, reasoned Gyuri, stay calm for a few more days and then if she hasn’t fallen insanely in love with me, there’s always the expedient of falling at her feet, pleading for marriage, offering half of his salary for life, offering anything, to kill people she didn’t like, to beg desperately and shamelessly.

Bugger the informer, he concluded entering the post office, I’m breaking out. Joining the queue for phone calls, a familiar figure in front of him was mnemonically focused into recognition. It was Sólyom-Nagy, the champion shoplifter of the Minta school. Sólyom-Nagy’s prowess at pilfering, mostly chocolate bars, had been such that the entire third year, as a result of the gargantuan amounts of cut-price Sólyom-Nagy-supplied chocolate they had consumed, had been unable to view a bar without feeling ill. Although they had lost touch, Gyuri had got on well with Sólyom-Nagy and had been very grateful to him for specially stealing a multi-faceted penknife, subsequently lost when Keresztes, who had said he just wanted to borrow it for a minute, had left it in a gypsy at the fairground.

Sólyom-Nagy, it transpired, was studying Hungarian literature at the university in Szeged. ‘This is Jadwiga, by the way,’ he said indicating a slim girl next to him who was letting her boredom with waiting show. The surname was something Polish that Gyuri didn’t bother trying to retain but he was disappointed that Jadwiga didn’t seem more delighted to meet him. One didn’t get anywhere by overlooking introductions to women. However, according to the instant classification of the back-room boys in Gyuri’s cranium, Jadwiga only scored a keep-on-file anyway and he had more pressing Swedish women to phone.

It took a portly three hours to get through to Budapest and she wasn’t at the student hostel. It was going to be hard work becoming a streetsweeper in Stockholm.