Under the Frog

January 1949

They spent the last hour telling camel jokes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was the village priest who then suggested an auto-da-fé.

Again, when it was known that Faragó had his nose pressed to his pillow by an enormous volume of alcohol, anonymous hands set fire to his house in the middle of the night. Faragó must have been in the grip of a true carus because he didn’t lose a snore as the fire charred his front door and then burned to the ground the two neighbouring houses. ‘The priest suggested that?’ observed Gyuri. ‘Who knows?’ Ladányi said. ‘If we had the original text of the commandments, there might well be a footnote concerning exemption in regard to Faragó.’

When Hálás learned that Faragó had signed up to become the local Communist Party Secretary following the changing political wind, it was decided to stop messing about. Faragó was dragged out of his house in the dead of night, dead drunk, a dead weight. His hands were tied behind his back, a rope was thrown over a branch, a noose attached to Faragó’s neck. He was hoisted up, the branch snapped and Faragó’s yells drew a passing Russian patrol that came to investigate.

The outcome of this nocturnal suspension was that Faragó ended up with a blister necklace and a revolver as he sensed there were people who didn’t entirely approve of him.

‘I shoot,’ Faragó had announced in the csárda, ‘and I’m not even going to bother asking any questions afterwards.’ This statement came after the death of the villager credited previously with the six-fold ventilation of Faragó.

The cause of Ladányi’s return was a small vineyard of two hectares well away from Hálás that produced a wine so acrid that Faragó was almost the only person who would drink it. This vineyard had been left to the Church (probably maliciously) although it barely earned enough income to have the altar dusted.

Faragó as first secretary and mayor of the Hálás-Mezo megyer-Murony community had decreed that the vineyard should be removed from the charge of the pushers of the people’s opiate and handed over to the hegemony of the proletariat. The village turned to Ladányi because he was someone who had been to Budapest, who had seen the innards of books, because he had breathed his first lungfuls in Hálás, because he was a fully paid-up member of the Society of Jesus and because he had broken the fifty-egg barrier.

Although he had left the village fifteen years ago and had only been back for one weekend in the interval, Ladányi was still big news and a source of immense pride. How many other places could boast that the village Jew had become a Jesuit? And then there were the reports that meandered back, as Ladányi made his way through his law studies at university, of the omelette jousts and of Ladányi’s participation in the goulash wars that had broken out at the end of the thirties in Budapest ’s restaurants. Ladányi was six foot two and this copious frame in conjunction with a,student’s appetite created an enormous parking space for edibles. He started to pay for his studies and his mother’s upkeep by taking part in eat-outs with a side-bet going to the greatest devourer. His first contests were on the student circuit where the wagers merely covered the cost of the food consumed (usually dittoed three-course meals) but his unflinching digestion soon took him to the big time of the New York Cafe where leading journalists would be hard at work stretching the human capacity for eating omelettes. When Ladányi polished off a forty-five egg omelette with a couple of kilos of onions and ham thrown in for flavour, devastating the drama critic of the Pester Lloyd, who had thrown in his napkin at thirty-eight, Hálás knew all about it. When Ladányi with his custom-built cutlery was invited to Gundel’s to test the new hyperstrength goulash, which was eventually billed as ‘even Ladányi only had three bowls’ and had been certified by the Technical University as containing 30,000 calories, Hálás had all the details (if a month later). When circus strongman Sándor the Savage thought he could take Ladányi with drum cakes, everyone had a good chuckle about that and the Stradivarius violin Ladányi had won.

But Ladányi had hung up his knife and fork, having broken the fifty-egg barrier for the second time, after the editor of the Pesti Hirlap dropped dead on the opposite side of the table, his cardiac arrest not unconnected with the forty-six eggs’ worth of omelette he had just consumed. This abrupt prandial demise and Ladányi’s realisation that he wanted to join the Order brought his gastronomic career to an end, without diminishing his fame in Hálás. So when Faragó heard that Ladányi was coming to plead for the vineyard, he simply issued the challenge ‘Let’s eat it out.’

The population of Hálás was hardly past four hundred, according to Ladányi, and despite the cold and pluvial weather, most of them were gathered outside in the rain waiting for the Jesuit-laden cart to arrive.

It was, Gyuri comprehended, the highest accolade you could get. ‘Now I know what the nineteenth century was like,’ he thought. The best thing about visiting a place like Hálás was that it made you very grateful for living in Budapest. Gyuri hadn’t been out of Budapest seven hours and already the charms of electricity, pavement and a greater choice of genetic material were becoming overpowering. For a day, when he got back to Budapest, he would be very happy. Feeling he had grown to the dimensions of a tycoon or a film star, Gyuri stepped off the cart and watched his best shoes (not much to brag about, but the most powerful in his sartorial arsenal) disappear in mud.

They were shown into the csárda, a wooden affair, with a stove in the centre dispensing a little heat into the interior, which was really going to be warmed by the crowd outside funnelling its way in. Ladányi held a whispered confabulation with the village priest in a confessional, sombre manner. As Ladányi’s retinue, Gyuri and Neumann took the brunt of the local hospitality. This, of course, had been in Gyuri’s mind when he agreed to come to Hálás: the countryside meant unrestrained food. They might go short of excitement, but not of eats. Gyuri had firm intentions of swallowing along with Ladányi as long as he could and if people insisted on pressing presents of foodstuffs on them when they departed, Gyuri could put up with that.

The scale and ferocity of peasant cuisine could be overpowering if you were out of training. Gyuri knew how the breakfasts alone could put feeble urban dwellers in hospital. At Erdóváros, the summer he was thirteen, when Gyuri had been entrusted to one of the local families, they poured him a generous pálinka for breakfast along with a brick of fat garnished with a dash of paprika. Thinking well of their liberality, he drank the pálinka before walking out the door into the ground. It had taken his legs hours to remember how to walk but his stomach only a few minutes to evict the solid elements of his meal. That sort of morning fuelling was tolerable only if you had grown up on it and if you had a day in a field ahead of you. Even as an athletic thirteen year-old, harvesting for an hour had given him so much pain in so many places that all he could do was lie in the field and pray for an ambulance, while the heavily pregnant woman who had been working alongside him kindly offered to go and get him a drink.

The hospitality was unleashed straight away. Gyuri hadn’t seen so much food, so much good food since the point when the war had got noticeably war-like, and it was quite possible that he had never seen that much food in an enclosed space ever before. The depressing thing was that he wouldn’t be able to make up for five years’ going hungry in one evening, however hard he tried. Even the expansive Neumann was looking awed by the food, since people had unmistakeable designs of inflicting several servings on them. If Gyuri tried to slow down his consumption, the villagers who had appointed themselves his personal troop of waiters would hover around and if he ate up, the consumed items would be swiftly replaced. Within half an hour of mastication commencing, Gyuri was already seriously worried about parting company with consciousness: surrounding his enormous plate, which had grown a stalagmite of sausage, cured pork, pig cheese and boxing-glove-sized chunks of bread, were two glasses of wine, one red, one white, two glasses of pálinka, apricot and pear, and two glasses of beer in case he got thirsty. Behind him he could hear enraged villagers fighting to get to his side so they could pour out more of their pressings and distillations.

Ladányi was also offered some refreshment and a selection of food but noticeably halfheartedly. No one wanted to wear out his alimentary muscles. He was principally occupied in giving his hand to be kissed by the queue of people that had formed to pay its respects. Ladányi was far from pleased about this, Gyuri could tell, but the villagers’ veneration was reasonable enough, bearing in mind that there were university professors who were terrified of Ladányi, who would duck into doorways to avoid a searching question from Ladányi, a question that would home in on their ignorance. The story Gyuri had heard was that when Ladányi collected his law degree the faculty offered to throw in a doctorate to save everyone’s time.

The concurred time for the blow-out had been five o’clock, but Faragó and his sidekicks didn’t show up till half past. Ladányi’s request to Gyuri for him to come to Hálás to manage any violence hadn’t been made out of concern for his own safety. ‘The villagers would protect me, and that’s exactly what I don’t want. If things turn nasty, I’d like someone from outside, who won’t have to stay there.’ However Gyuri’s apprehension about roughhousing was completely subsumed in his amazement at Faragó’s appearance.

‘No one’s going to believe us,’ Neumann whispered to Gyuri who concurred with a nod. No amount of assertions that what they were saying was strictly in the bounds of veracity would help, Gyuri knew, when he saw Faragó walk in; no one back in ’ Pest would believe them. Faragó rolled in with two lanky lackeys, a pistol tucked into his waistband. His hue was so ghastly that Gyuri could imagine corpses being dissected by medical students looking fresher. Faragó was drunk. He stank. His suit, a pinstripe, looked as if it had been buried, circa 1932, and only dug up the day before; in any case it clashed with the string vest he had on underneath. His tie was the most successful part of his outfit; it made an eyecatching belt.

The hatred that rose when Faragó entered was so solid, so sinewed, Gyuri was surprised that Faragó was able to walk in. He realised he was going to be treated to something special that evening.

It was hate at first sight for Gyuri which made him reflect that Faragó must have taken the villagers on an almost endless argosy to undreamed-of lands of human anger. This was the absolute zero of human turpitude. He deserved to be exhibited, but it was probably for the best that he was shackled to Hálás. ‘I thought we had it tough,’ observed Neumann taking in Faragó, ‘but the rest of the country should write a thank you letter to Hálás for keeping him here.’ Gyuri had been teasing Ladányi on the train down about how the Church should surely adapt and adopt a forgiving attitude to Faragó and gladly renounce worldly possessions. Smiling quietly, too capable to be caught red-handed with any unjesuit emotions, Ladányi had replied: ‘Whether or not we should have such properties is a good question, as is what should be done with them, but they shouldn’t be handed over to bandits. And while our Lord did enjoin us to turn the other cheek, it should be borne in mind that he never met Faragó.’

‘So the black beetle has come to be crushed by the people’s power?’ roared Faragó, missing the chair he had been aiming to sit on and vanishing from sight. Installed in the chair with the assistance of his seconds, he continued his welcome address. ‘As first Secretary of the Hungarian Communist… the… er… the Hungarian Working People’s Party of the Hálás-Mezómegyer-Murony community and as mayor and as Chairman of the ‘Dizzy with Success’ collective farm, in the words of Comrade Stalin, reporting on the work of the Central Committee to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU(B).’ Here Faragó petered out ideologically, paused and having run out of things to say, reached for his pistol to illustrate a point and shot himself in the leg. To general disappointment, it was the wooden leg.

‘And,’ Faragó resumed, ‘and in a scientific manner, with a bolshevik tempo, I’m going to eat you into the ground.’ He snapped his fingers and the proprietor of the csárda approached the table and erected an enormous balance with scales. ‘They used that in the Békés county fried-chicken championships,’ someone interjected in Gyuri’s ear, as the proprietor measured out two vast bowls of steaming bean soup for the kick-off. Ladányi had said nothing more than ‘good evening’ so far, while Faragó continued to glasshead, letting everyone see his thoughts. ‘You’re trying to impress us, aren’t you? You think you can carry on sucking the blood of the people, you leech in a dog collar?’ Here Faragó halted as his eye chanced upon the village gypsy standing in the front row with a good view of the proceedings. Emitting a thoracic-cleaning rasp, Faragó then expectorated a slab of phlegm so huge and forceful that the unsuspecting gypsy was knocked sideways. ‘No gypsies,’ Faragó elaborated. Which Gyuri found odd since Faragó looked more gypsy than the village gypsy, with an extended stomach of such paunchity you might think he had a huge watermelon stuffed under his vest; his nose had gone in for extra growth as well, hanging like an overripe raspberry. Gut and conk were unimpeachable witnesses to Faragó’s feasting in lean times; he saw himself as an omnivore, as a megalovore, for whom eating was a measure of virility. Faragó had no doubt he would leave his opponent stalled on the first course.

Ladányi said grace and Faragó retaliated by clenching his fist and growling the communists’ salutation: ‘Freedom!’. It was obvious who the crowd was backing on this occasion, Gyuri thought, as the two contestants started to shovel in the bean soup but it wasn’t always easy to sort out who to back in the Rome vs. Moscow conflict. The Church in Hungary was heading for a kicking indisputably. Mindszenty, the Cardinal, was stuck in a nick somewhere in Budapest, while they adjusted the charges to get a good fit (Gábor Pétér, the head of the AVO, had been a tailor): spying for the Americans, plotting to bring back the Habsburg monarchy, breeding Colorado beetles, sneering at socialist realist novels. And they must have had the survivors from the scriptwriting teams from Hungary ’s prewar film industry on contract to concoct the evidence, because no policeman could invent as fantastically as that.

It was hard to sympathise with the Cardinal, Gyuri reflected, because Mindszenty was a buffoon, however wronged. The Catholic Church in Hungary wasn’t topheavy with brilliance. It would be so nice to have a real choice, fumed Gyuri. It was like Hungary being between Germany and the Soviet Union. What sort of choice was that? Which language would you like your firing squad to speak? In these circumstances, of course, a brilliant Cardinal might not be any more useful. Being clever and far-sighted wasn’t always of use. Does it help being the clever pig on the way to the abattoir?

Stupidity could be quite advantageous now and then. Mind you, stupidity (with which he was well-equipped) hadn’t done Mindszenty any favours either. If you’re falling off a cliff, the quality of the brains that are going to get dashed doesn’t hugely count.

When Gyuri discussed the position of the Church, Ladányi was grave but not worried but it was very hard to imagine Ladányi worried about anything. Being burned at the stake would all be part of a day’s work for him, even if other clerics would jib at the prospect. It was hard to imagine Father Jenik, for instance, gearing up for martyrdom, much as Gyuri liked him. Jenik firmly held to the philosophy of getting the best out of things: why had God created first-class hotels if he didn’t intend us to use them? Just after the Russians had tied down Budapest, Jenik had taken the entire scout troop out into the countryside. The hundred kilometre trip had taken two days by a train that had gone so slowly that, when one of the younger boys had fallen out of the open-doored wagons, one of the older boys had plenty of time to climb down from the train roof, rescue him and throw him back on. Jenik had led the troop to a village where he had some tenuous kinship, and had begun to spin a yarn, relying heavily on hyperbole, expounding at length the horrors and degradations of war and how sadly the tender youths in front of them had been marked. Jenik wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t doing anything to restrain misunderstanding. Father Jenik, who had been laughing all the way down on the train, and whom Gyuri suspected as the original begetter of Ladányi’s camel jokes, had become sombre and pained. His discourse on the ordeals of war had been rolling along for quite a while before Gyuri realised that Jenik was talking about the troop. Jenik had his hand on Papp’s shoulder as he conjured up the tortures of hunger and deprivation. Papp did look as if he had been constructed out of knitting-needles glued together, shudderingly thin and haggard, despite the fact his father was a butcher and he and his family got more meat than all the carnivores in Budapest zoo. Tears had peeped out of peasant eyes, and until Hálás, Gyuri had never eaten so much at one go. That night he had had the firm belief he would never need to eat again as long as he lived, and he wandered around in the dark, keeping his legs moving in a desperate attempt to festinate digestion and to eschew puking, to grind down the anvil in his stomach.

However, in other ways Father Jenik was the traditional avuncular priest, always rolling up your sleeve to check your spiritual pulse, working his way through the club regulations: attendance at mass, confessions, observance of holy days. Ladányi would never mention religion, unless you brought it up or it cropped up naturally in the course of conversation. There was no badgering, no impresario-like push to get bums on seats, no ticking off a list with Ladányi. He seemed unconcerned whether you turned up or not and this was what was so pernicious. Gyuri had dropped church much in the same way as he had stopped believing in Santa Claus; there came a point where it was impossible to take it seriously. And that was what was so worrying about Ladányi. He was so clever, he had a bird’s eye view of everyone’s actions – even Pataki wouldn’t try modifying reality with Ladányi, because Ladányi would have read your diary before you’d written it. Gyuri couldn’t help feeling when he was doing something totally trivial like cleaning the bathtub or buying some groceries that it was all part of some master-plan, that cleaning the bathtub and buying groceries were all part of Ladányi’s machinations (it was just that he was unaware of it) and that one day he would wake up wearing black with a white collar.

Perhaps because of his order, perhaps because of his Ladányiness, Ladányi operated quietly. The summer before, in an excess of compliance, Gyuri had offered Katalin Takács to pick up her new dress from the dressmaker. It was bruited by her changing room companions that she had no pubic hair. So he journeyed out to the dressmaker, helping to dress the girl he wanted to undress to verify the canard about her cat.

The favour was a double goodwill since the dressmaker lived in the Angyalföld, off the Váci út. It was said that when the American Liberators had carpet-bombed Angyalföld at the end of ’44 by mistake as they searched for the factories on Csepel Island, no one had minded because no one could tell the difference. It was also maintained that both the Waffen SS and the Red Army had stayed out of the Angyalföld because they hadn’t wanted any trouble.

Although Gyuri knew Budapest well, he had never ventured into the Angyalföld and was flabbergasted to discover that the stories were true. Having quit the tram, he passed people lying in gutters, like piles of autumnal leaves in smarter quarters, booze having severed their relations with the known universe. As he walked along, he was regarded with an unconcealed hatred by groups of natives milling around; reflexive dislike and aggression he had experienced before but never with such cannibalistic fervour. Gyuri had considered, before setting out that morning, pocketing a knife on account of Angyalföld’s notoriety but as he turned the corner into Jasz utca, he couldn’t help noticing two men fighting with what could only be described as cutlasses, long heavy swords of the type favoured by Hollywood pirates. A semi-circle of barefoot spectators were monitoring, not greatly impressed by the quality of the hacking. Carrying a knife wouldn’t have helped, the result would have been that he would have had his knife stolen as a supplement to getting stabbed, and a good knife like everything else was hard to get in those days.

Gyuri had lots of time to ruminate on how his untimely, unremarked demise on the streets of the Angyalföld would be due to his yearning to let his gaze ski down Katalin’s smooth slopes, killed by curiosity about a bald cat. He had also ruminated on his way up to the fifth floor, how people he visited always lived on the fifth floor of liftless buildings. The dressmaker, a sprightly lady of eighty plus, clearly of the work-twelve-hours-a-day-till-you-drop variety, and who was cosily unaware of what went on in the rest of Angyalföld, congratulated Gyuri on the cut of his trousers. The trousers were the last pair of Elek’s Savile Row trousers, indeed the only fully-qualified trousers that Elek had left, lent to Gyuri since Elek had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t getting out of bed that day, or that should he rise, he wouldn’t be progressing beyond the armchair. The dressmaker bustled away to prepare the dress for its journey while Gyuri reflected how sad it was that she couldn’t bequeath her industry to him.

It was as he rushed back to the tram that he chanced on Ladányi talking with some of the Angyalföld’s denizens patiently listening to him. They patently considered Ladányi as someone who had stepped down from the moon. Ladányi seemed slightly peeved at being caught in the act of doing good, but he accompanied Gyuri to the tram and reluctantly disclosed that he haunted Angyalföld before the first mass of the day. It was the sheer lunacy of his faith, Gyuri thought, that enabled Ladányi to leave with all his physical workings intact. Greatly relieved at having emerged from Angyalföld with his functions uninhibited, Gyuri was waiting outside the Nyugati station to change trams to deliver the dress, when a group of five youths his age came up and one, without any preamble, with a pair of scissors, swiftly cut the tie Gyuri was wearing, the last of Elek’s silk ties, the last of Elek’s ties and the only tie then residing in the Fischer household. The trimmer then handed over the snipped sections to Gyuri with the invocation: ‘Cerulean’.

At that point Gyuri recalled there was a vogue in Budapest, particularly amongst those who went round in fists of five, for prowling the boulevards with a pair of scissors to amputate ties and then to say ‘cerulean’. The tie hadn’t been a great tie, the design hadn’t really been to Gyuri’s taste and there had been of late a painfully visible soup stain on it, but the desire to punch the scissor-operator in the mouth had been quite breathtaking in its intensity, especially since he was clearly expecting Gyuri to have a laugh over the dividing of his tie. Gyuri thought how much he would enjoy punching him in the mouth, then he thought how much he wouldn’t enjoy getting it back as a fivefold minimum. He resorted to what he hoped was a look of contempt. The five got on the next tram remarking how some people had no sense of humour.

When, at Faragó’s suggestion, they switched to chocolate ice cream, Gyuri knew it was all over.

Ladányi and Faragó had warmed up with a couple of litres of bean soup before moving on to the main course – fried chicken – its consumption meticulously measured on the scales. ‘We in Hálás have always been famous for our fried chicken,’ Faragó rambled on, ‘and now under socialism, the fried chicken is even more fried.’ He reached for a plate of slender green tubes. ‘The paprika is optional,’ he announced loading a couple into his mouth.

Three kilos into the chicken, Faragó began to sweat, though whether this was due to gastronomic exertion or the calorific effects of the paprika it was hard to judge. He was also beginning to look uneasy, perhaps because it was dawning on him that the reports of the Jesuit’s unearthly wolfing had some foundation. Faragó was oozing effort while Ladányi was methodically and calmly stripping drumsticks with such ease that he hadn’t taken the trouble of dialling his willpower yet.

‘I’m just going to shake the snake,’ Gyuri informed Neumann. He was becoming increasingly anxious about losing contact with several outposts of his body. Draining two of the four glasses of pálinka awaiting his attention, he made his way out of the csárda into the sheltering darkness and voided the burning liquid from his mouth in an aerosol flurry to dodge some of the enormity of Hálás’s hospitality. A standard peasant, an elderly gent with the inevitable black hat that peasants had stapled to their heads and a massive handlebar moustache, came to join him in watering the planet. ‘Good evening, sir,’ said the peasant, causing Gyuri to note that only countryfolk could be so courteous while airing their dick. Conversation turned to Faragó as Gyuri was in no hurry to go back in and be the victim of further largesse; he was curious about Faragó’s track record. ‘I hear he did some appalling things during the war?’

‘You don’t want to know, sir. Some things should never be repeated, just forgotten. Satan himself is his coach.’

Gyuri waited outside as long as he could without triggering a search party and re-entered to find Ladányi and Faragó crossing the ten kilo mark, Faragó in discomfort, Ladányi still emitting a lean, keen look. A barrel of pigs’ trotters in aspic was dumped in front of Gyuri and he wondered how on earth he was going to eat any. ‘You didn’t like the smoked goose, did you?’ asked one woman accusingly and woundedly, although Gyuri estimated he had had six respectable helpings. Neumann next to him wasn’t saying much, but he wasn’t demonstrating any signs of suffering (however, he had sixteen stone to upkeep). The village must have gathered every bit of food for ten miles around. Gyuri could only regret that his stomach wasn’t up to it, that it had left its office, put up the ‘out to lunch’ sign and wasn’t doing any more business.

To round off his other distasteful qualities, Faragó had a bad cold and as he handed over his handkerchief to the deputy Party secretary to place on the stove to dry, Gyuri felt another surge of sympathy for the villagers. They had a straightforward, soily existence which if you liked that sort of thing could be quite pleasant. No wonder they were filled with hatred for Faragó; bewildered by their misfortune, it was like having a plague of locusts or a dragon deciding to set up home with you. ‘Why us?’ the elderly peasant had implored. ‘A whole world to be a stinking horseprick in and he’s never lost sight of Hálás. Why?’

The eating had now long since left pleasure behind. It was no longer a question of appetite, but a question of will, which was why Gyuri knew Ladányi would win, and knowing Ladányi, would end up recruiting Faragó as an altar boy. Conversion. It was funny how people could, while changing completely, remain the same. Fodor, at school, for example, for whom getting into trouble had not been a by-product of his activity but his sole activity, who had been almost as much of a nuisance as Keresztes, had, without warning, got a bad attack of the Holy Ghost. At first there was a suspicion that it was an elaborate and unfunny stunt, but Fodor was so unswerving in handing out leaflets to remind how Jesus wanted a word, that everyone realised that he had gone evangelist for real: preaching was his latest irritation tool. Fodor caught Gyuri hanging around in a corridor one day. ‘Jesus Christ came to be your saviour, He died for your sins. You must acclaim Him and surrender to His teachings,’ Fodor urged, and then continued, more quietly, really savouring the next bit, ‘you’ve been warned now. You’ve had the message, you’ve got no excuse. If you ignore it, you’ll burn. In hell. For eternity.’ Fodor had then marched off with a satisfied air. This was the appealing part of the job for Fodor, going around with a sawn-off version of the scriptures and looking forward to the infidels being infinitely ignited. Gyuri had also seen Fodor in the Körút, on a soap-box, giving a sermon to the unheeding passers-by, a glint of delight in his eye at the prospect of the mass fry-up that was coming. Fodor didn’t want anyone to be able to reach for some mitigation when they stood in the pearly dock, saying no one had explained the Nazarene contract to them. Then Fodor could chime out: ‘Liar! Liar! I told him, I told him. Let him burrrnnnn.’

What had befallen Fodor in the end, whether he had grown weary of his sadistic evangelism, Gyuri didn’t know. Gyuri had last seen him at a school trip to the cinema where they had been locked in. You could tell it was a Soviet film when they locked you in. The school had taken over an enormous balcony in the cinema which descended in a series of plateaus. Fodor had vaulted over what he had thought was the edge of one of these sections, in fact the end of the balcony. Just before he disappeared from view, there had been a nanosecond’s worth of expression on his face: why isn’t there any balcony here?

Along with a couple of others, Gyuri had selflessly volunteered to take Fodor and his broken legs to hospital, thereby avoiding the feats of Sergei, who single-handedly repulsed the invading Germans in between repairing his tractor to produce a bumper harvest. Either for fear of ridicule or in pursuit of fresh souls, Fodor never returned.

‘You don’t say much, do you?’ Faragó observed to Ladányi, with the implication that Ladányi was unfairly reserving energy for eating. Even if Faragó had had more fight, the switch to chocolate ice cream was the end. A large chicken’s weight behind Ladányi, Faragó had chosen the sweet to which Ladányi was most partial; Ladányi’s nickname in the troop, ‘Iceman’, came from his mythical disposal of chocolate ice cream, in the days before he had signed up with Jesus. Gyuri wondered whether Ladányi had mentioned to anyone back at Jesuit headquarters that he was popping down to the countryside to out-eat a Party Secretary. However laudable the goal, in an atmosphere of austerity where quips such as ‘Isn’t that the second meal you’ve had this week, Father?’ abounded, this sort of indecorous gourmandise, however much a part of Christian soldiering, must have run the risk of some gruelling rosary work.

‘What would you like me to say?’ inquired Ladányi politely, keeping a spoon full of ice cream from its destination. The whole village was craning forward now, as Faragó was visibly floundering, gazing with resentment at his bowl of ice cream.

‘As the saying goes,’ said Faragó fighting for air, ‘there isn’t room for two bagpipe players in the same inn. We, the working class… we, the instrument of the international proletariat… we will defend the gains of the people…’ Here Faragó jammed, fell off his chair and as if gagging on his propaganda, spilled his stomach on the floor. It looked very much to Gyuri like a job for the last rites.

Ladányi didn’t seemed worried. ‘There are some documents Father Orso has ready for you to sign, I believe,’ he said. The village priest crouched down and offered a pen to Faragó who was sprawled on the floor as if he were thinking about doing a push-up. Saturninely he scrawled a mark on the paper, and, supine, was lugged out inexpertly by the rest of the party cell, limbs lolling.

During their post-micturition conversation, the elderly peasant had also told Gyuri: ‘Take the most rotten individual imaginable and there will always be someone, usually very stupid, but not always, who’ll say no, no, he’s simply misunderstood. Misquoted. Even with murderers, when they write about them in the newspapers, they have a wife or a mother who says he’s not bad, he’s a lovely boy when you get to know him. You ask anyone here to say anything in favour of Faragó; ask people who’ve known him all their lives to say one thing to his credit, just one courtesy, one thank you, one favour – you’ll find the people of this village as quiet as melons in long grass. His own mother, if Faragó was waiting to be executed, would only say things like “Make that noose tighter” or “Is it permissible to tip the hangman?’”

Wiping his mouth with an embroidered napkin, Ladányi stood up briskly as if he had been having a quick snack between important engagements. ‘Well, we have to go now. God bless you all.’ Another hour of hand-kissing and loading up gifts onto the cart followed, but Ladányi resolutely insisted that they should depart since they had an opportunity of catching a train which would get them to Budapest in the morning.

By moonlight, Ladányi looked remarkably thin. Gyuri felt somewhat queasy during the bumpy cart-ride and he was astonished that Ladányi didn’t have any inclination to deswallow. It would be months, Gyuri was convinced, before he would want to eat again. Neumann broke the peregrinational hush: ‘Does that agreement really mean anything? Forgive me for saying so but Faragó looks as if he would roger his grandmother for the price of a drink, or even for free.’

‘Look,’ replied Ladányi, ‘what we did tonight was to act out a morality play. I was asked to come. I couldn’t refuse. I doubt if it will make any difference, not because of Comrade Faragó being probity-free, but because of everything else in the country. This was one night of miniature victory in what will be long years of defeat. I hope it will have some importance for the people in Hálás.’

‘How long do you think this will last?’ asked Gyuri, not sure that he actually wanted to hear the answer.

‘Not long,’ pronounced Ladányi. ‘I’d say about forty years or so. You have to wait for the barbarians to get old, to become soft barbarians.’

This wasn’t an answer Gyuri wanted to hear, particularly coming from Ladányi. ‘Time to leave the country.’

‘Not at all. Firstly, as I’m sure you know, it’s not easy to get out any more, and secondly, and I should point out this is not an idea patented by the Church, matter doesn’t matter. It’s not physical conditions that count, but your opinion of them. Take the farmer in the small village in the middle of China who is the happiest man in the world because he has two pigs and no one else in the village has got one. Living isn’t like basketball, it’s not a question of points, but what’s here.’ Gyuri saw Ladányi touch his forehead with his forefinger. ‘You only lose if you give up- and if you give up you deserve to lose. In basketball, you can be beaten. Otherwise you can only be beaten if you agree to it. You’re lucky, you’re very lucky. We’re living in testing circumstances; unless you’re very dull, you should want to be stretched.’

Thanks for the totalitarianism, Stalin. Gyuri doubted that he would enjoy a prison cell as much as Ladányi. ‘A ticket to Paris would be more fun,’ he retorted ‘Couldn’t I book a few prayers for that?’

‘I’ll be delighted to forward your request, but don’t be too specific, or you might get it. One should pray for the best. Maybe you’ll be happier here than in Paris.’

‘I’m prepared to take that risk. Anything to escape from record-breaking lathe-operators.’

‘Yes, this cult of the worker is a bit wearing. Ironic that it sprang chiefly from a fat, free-loading German academic who never had a job in his life, but just sponged off his acquaintances and who indulged in such very bourgeois practices as impregnating the chamber-maid. And so boring. People often overlook the work of a poor carpenter who chose fishermen as his company.’

They rattled on in the cart for a while.

‘The greatest irony about Marx’s influence is that his books are unreadable,’ Ladányi mused. ‘Perhaps his appeal lies in his unintelligibility, a sort of mysticism through statistics and the wages of textile workers. People will have a good laugh about it one day. But, unfortunately, there are people who believe it, not the ones who’ve joined now, but those who joined before the war, when the movement was illegal. They believe in it and as Church history amply shows crazy ideas can take a long time to die out.’

‘I think it’s a process I’d like to watch closely from a café in New York. I might even find it funny from that distance.’

‘Me too,’ chorused Neumann.

‘The desire to travel is part of your age. You’ve never been out of Hungary, have you? Be careful, people can become very fond of their prisons, you know.’

They arrived at the station in the nick of time to catch the train back to Budapest. Neumann, who had the priceless gift of being able to sleep on trains, bedded down in another compartment on some unclaimed seats, while Ladányi took out a book – the Analects of Confucius. ‘Is it any good?’ Gyuri questioned. ‘Life is too short for good books,’ said Ladányi, ‘one should only read great books.’ ‘How can you tell if it’s great?’ ‘If it’s been around for a couple of thousand years, that’s usually a good sign. This isn’t bad. Some of us younger ones have been told to study Chinese. Our superiors think it’s a growing market. Every year a Jesuit gets a letter containing his orders. I have a feeling they may be getting us out of the country. I think that’s wrong, but that’s where the vow of obedience comes in.’

Gyuri hadn’t been to church since he was fourteen when his mother dragged him to the Easter Mass. Naturally, he had attempted to get in touch with God on several subsequent occasions when he had thought he was going to die but always on the spot, away from church precincts. This was surely the real boon of a religious upbringing: it gave you a number to ring in emergencies, which was some consolation, even if no one answered. Gyuri had met with the various arguments for God’s existence from his partisans, proof through design (‘that’s what I call a well-made universe’), the craftsmanship of the universe (it did seem to be an awful lot of trouble for a practical joke) or Pascal’s way of looking at it, a hundred francs on God each way. But, all in all, the best argument he had come across for taking Jesus’s shilling was that the sharpest razor, Ladányi believed it.

When they reached Budapest, Ladányi thanked Gyuri and Neumann for their support. It was the last time Gyuri would see Ladányi. Gyuri had no inkling of that, but years afterwards, re-examining the scene, he suspected that Ladányi knew. ‘Don’t forget what I said about good books. And read the Bible occasionally. It’s had some good reviews, you know.’ Ladányi’s tone in this farewell admonition was not that of a salesman, or a friend recommending a good read, but rather that of a visitor handing a prisoner a loaf of bread with a file in it.