Under the Frog

September 1948

The ant-training had been typical. Gyuri knew he should be studying much harder. Unlike all previous exams, whose certificates of importance he had never found convincing, this was frighteningly, windpipe-constrictingly important, and he really should have been studying much harder. He had wanted to study much harder. The intention had been beautifully formed, it had been everything an intention should be, but it remained an understudy, never getting on stage.

He had rowed out on his own to a quiet stretch of Margit Island with a whole boatful of textbooks, leaving no clue as to his whereabouts. It was just him and the mathematics. One on one. Lying in the heat of the elderly summer, Gyuri opened the books to lay himself bare to calculus, to bask in the equations, but while his tan deepened, somehow his erudition didn’t. He felt cheated. Like jumping off a cliff, he had hurled himself at the distant algebra, but instead of plummeting down to impact with those formulae, he just hovered above, aloft, some covert anti-gravity repelling him from the maths.

Relishing the unrationed sunshine, he succumbed to a bout of ant-shepherding. Prior to this, his only dealings with ants had been stepping on them, either by accident or squashing them when they invaded his possessions or edibles. He had partitioned himself at the intersection of a number of formic caravan routes and spent the better part of three hours devising olympianly a series of obstacles and tests for the ants with the aid of twigs, leaves and extracts from his lunch sandwiches. He toyed with the idea of becoming a great entomologist, a world-leading zoologist. As far as he knew, biology was an area unpolluted by Marx though some of his disciples, like Lysenko, had tried to make up for Marx’s silence on the phyla.

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

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

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

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

What was irritating was Elek’s equanimity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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