Under the Frog

September 1949

It was as the tram was on the last stretch of the Margit Bridge that, from the corner of his eye, Gyuri logged the girl sitting on the edge of the railings, and then, the girl that wasn’t sitting there. There was nothing he and the others on the tram who had spotted the suicide bid could do. By the time the tram had stopped and they could have got back to the bridge, the young lady’s fate would be, one way or another, cleared up. It seemed a bit heartless to say ‘Well, there goes another one’ and to shrug one’s shoulders but apart from forming an audience, nothing could have been contributed by returning. People down by the river bank would be doing whatever samaritaning could be done. Besides, Gyuri was late.

Having a suicide dropped in his lap, would of course, be typical of his luck, especially when he was late for work. On the other hand, it would at least be an honourable excuse for tardiness. A sharp picture of the girl stayed with him – eerie how quickly a detailed portrait could imprint. She looked like a country girl, seeking a populous conurbation for taking the exitless exit and not really attractive enough to encourage diving in after her but then if she had been attractive enough to have hordes of men diving in after her, she wouldn’t have had to jump in the first place.

Also, one had to respect suicide as the national pastime, as the vice Hungarian. Gyuri wasn’t up to date on how suicide was progressing under socialism, it could well have been abolished but the popularity of doing-it-yourself couldn’t entirely be laid at the door of Rákosi & Co. For centuries, Hungarians of quality and quantity, who hadn’t managed to be part of Hungarian armies that got wiped out, had been blowing their brains out or uncaging their souls in other ways. Yes, a few idle minutes, some melancholy music and a Hungarian would be trying to unplug himself. And not just the nobility- Hungarian maids in Vienna had been notorious for their fondness for bleaching their entrails.

The tram deposited Gyuri in front of the monstrous Ganz Electrical Works but he was the only one the tram off-loaded who made his way through the entrance of Ganz; all the other workers had arrived much earlier, before the shift had started.

Of course, Gyuri thought, the Hungarian propensity for suicide might stem from their other great proclivity: their love of complaining. Who better to complain to than the chief architect? Go to the top, go meet your maker and give him an earful about the shortcomings of the universe. There was probably a dirty great queue of Hungarians outside God’s office ready to remonstrate.

As Gyuri entered the main yard, he passed a board which was bedecked with amateurish red decorations and which had a heading ‘Socialist Brigades’. Underneath were lesser signs such as ‘ Guernica ’, ‘Dimitrov’ and ‘Béla Kun’, presiding over wonderful production figures and grainy black and white photographs of sheepishly pleased and self-conscious lathe-operators lathe-operating. These photographs didn’t change. Alongside these displays was an elegantly penned scroll, ‘Hungarian-Soviet Friendship Society’, heading a series of ailing black and white photographs of Soviet lathe-operators watching Hungarian lathe-operators lathe-operate with avuncular, elder-brotherly encouragement, and photographs of Hungarian lathe-operators watching Soviet lathe-operators lathe-operate, with younger-brother wide-eyed admiration. There was no seasonal variation in these pictures either.

Not far from these displays, but diametrically opposed to them, on the other side of the yard, was an enormous caricature of US President Harry Truman made out of card. At the foot of this caricature was a board with the inscription ‘FRIENDS OF TRUMAN’ in wobbly calligraphy, and in less bold lettering ‘I’m out to destroy the gains of the people of democratic Hungary, please help me by taking it easy. My thanks.’ On the board, which looked like an old situations vacant notice that used to be hung outside the factory, various names had been inserted. There wasn’t much seasonal variation in this either. Top of the list was Pataki, Tibor, followed by Fischer, Gyorgy (Gyuri could never fathom how Pataki had managed to get top billing once again) with one or two other more mutable names, Nemeth, Sándor or Kovrig, Laszlo. Unknown but agreeable figures to Gyuri.

This pillorying was attributable chiefly to the reluctance of Pataki and himself to come to work any earlier than was truly necessary to avoid dismissal. Gyuri didn’t care too much about President Truman’s friendship (though he did wonder if he ever got to the United States whether the amity would stand him in good stead there), largely because there were few additional penalties to having your name publicly associated with the President of the United States (and Gombás could deal with them). The juxtaposition of names was clearly deemed by the agit-prop department to be sufficiently shameful to obviate the need for further reprimand.

Being class-x, being a class alien, Gyuri really couldn’t be much worse off; he was starting from the back of the queue for the goodies (had there been any in the first place). Apart from the obvious problems of having class-x stamped on the moral credentials you had to produce every time you wanted a job, a place at university or more or less anything, what was so grossly unfair and infuriating about being labelled as the son of a bourgeois family, was that Elek was so profoundly, all-round unbourgeois. Aside from the profession of bookmaking not being the most highly regarded of careers in canapé circles, there was the whole weight of the old morphinist’s behaviour: molesting widows and chambermaids, carrying a cosh, shooting up. He had always instructed his employees to call him Elek (which in itself had been tantamount to membership of the Communist Party in the eyes of his fellow capitalists) and gave them afternoons off if the weather had been outstandingly good or if he felt like treating his torticollis with some morphine (although it had been evident for years that the dope didn’t do his neck any good – just as the hypnotist had failed but Elek had only given him one go. The hypnotist had brandished his pendulum and chanted ‘You are in a deep, deep sleep’ for ten minutes after which Elek had said ‘No, I’m not. Are you planning to charge for this?’). And then, when he lost all his money, instead of trying to recoup his losses, going out to toil dutifully in the respectable bourgeois way, Elek just sat around contentedly in his armchair, wearing his lacunar pullover, his neck cricked, grappling with the theoretical questions of how to get a cigarette. Bourgeois and Elek didn’t mix. Agreed: he had some money at one point, but that had been a long time ago, before Gyuri was old enough to use it.

‘What I’m giving you is priceless,’ Elek had said, holding court in his armchair that morning. ‘I’m giving you your independence. You’re making your own way. You owe me nothing. Whatever you achieve you can say “I made it on my own”. You’re not weighed down by an over-solicitous father. You have no towering figure of paternal success to intimidate you. How many people can say that? You’re a talented acorn that can grow without fear of the shade of a great oak.’

The curious thing about Elek was that the less active he became, the less he slept, thus ensuring his availability to give Gyuri the benefit of his thoughts as Gyuri got ready to go to work. ‘You see, István, for example, will always have the disadvantages of everything that money could buy.’ István, in practice, was bearing up beneath that burden rather well. He had returned at the end of ’45, with a dozen chums who disembarked from the prisoner of war camp in Denmark where they had been guarding themselves, carrying two thousand cigarettes and fluent in fifteen languages. Before things grimmed up, István had managed to get a job in the Ministry of Agriculture where he had got to know everything there was to know about sugar. Because he was unobtrusively junior and because they had to retain some people at the Ministry who knew something about agriculture, he had been magnanimously tolerated.

István had laughed about it all, as he did about everything. Always of a jovial disposition, he had returned from his years on the Russian front, with one important souvenir: the inability to get worked up about things that weren’t three years on the Russian front. You could tell István things like, you had gone to a restaurant and contracted hepatitis, you were going to be conscripted into the army, you had just been jilted by the girl who was more important to you at that moment than life and that you wanted to fold up and die, and István would just chuckle or if you looked really miserable, guffaw loudly.

István had reappeared in Budapest the day after they had been burgled.There hadn’t been much left to steal after the Red Army had manoeuvred back and forth across the flat a couple of times and furniture had been traded for food. István had walked in as if he had just returned from the corner-shop to find Gyuri dazed by the inexhaustibility of their misfortune. István immediately went out again, and the next morning all the missing items were piled up outside the front door with a note apologising that the dust pan left wasn’t the original but hoping the replacement would live up to expectations and wishing the family good health. The only other survivor from István’s artillery unit it turned out, was one of the master burglars of Budapest who had been greatly peeved to hear that his commanding officer’s family should have suffered such an indignity. There was only one question that István asked when you started to reconstruct some tribulation: ‘What did you do about it?’

It was what you did about it, not the blubbering, that interested István. István came back for the peace, got married, got a job, got a flat. His most annoying habit was his way of making life look easy. His application and down-to-earthness were such that it was hard to believe he was related in any way to Elek. Where had he got it from? Why didn’t he have any? Gyuri pondered. István was capable of sorting out anything, of making the best of the worst, which was why Gyuri couldn’t understand what had made him come back to Hungary and what had made him stay there. István seemed capable of anything, except perhaps getting Elek a proper job.

‘Have you just given up then?’ Gyuri had demanded of Elek.

‘Given up? Given up what? Tennis? Smoking? Horse-racing? My studies in Sanskrit? I’m an old fart, you know,’ Elek remarked checking the length of each bristle of his moustache in a pocket mirror. ‘You can’t expect too much. You, the healthy, vigorous son with his whole life ahead of him should be thinking of supporting his valetudinarian father.’

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’

‘Does it bother me? Yes. No. You may be surprised to hear that when I was growing up it wasn’t the summit of my ambitions to end up in an armchair wearing a grey pullover with holes in it. I confess I was thinking more in terms of excessive luxury. But I do enjoy disappointing people by not being suicidally miserable.’

Elek should have considered a post as a Party secretary, Gyuri reflected, with his gift of the gab and his inclination for doing nothing. After the war they would have taken anyone. Not now. Now, they were hanging the Communists they already had.

Sulyok, the foreman, was doing one of his readings to Gyuri’s workmates when Gyuri finally arrived to do his day’s work. This discovery made Gyuri very pleased that he had arrived late. The main reason that Gyuri had such a surfeit of nonchalance about tardiness was that he and Pataki had been given jobs at the factory by Gombás himself, the deputy director of the works, and people knew this. An Olympic medallist, a weight-lifter whose efforts had been rewarded with a tasty sinecure at the Ganz works, Gombás was keen to build up the works’ basketball team, to propel them into the first division. Thus Pataki and Gyuri, as Pataki’s personal ball-passer, were invited to join the team and to spend a little time at the works. Gyuri got on well with Gombás and liked him, not just because he had provided Gyuri with the job and evasion of the army but also because Gombás was an affable type and Gyuri rather admired his open-handed perversion. What Gyuri rather admired was that, while other men would have been vein-openingly ashamed of their peccadillo, Gombás was charmingly frank and unrepentant about his penchant for girls teetering on pubescence. His office was spacious, sequestered and complete with shower. There, girls hand-picked by Gombás on his travels in the provinces and brought to Budapest for ‘intensive training’ received his ‘personal tuition’. Gyuri was always expecting to see some enraged parent or the police march into Gombás’s office, but so far it seemed the arrangement had upset no one and there was always the possibility, as Pataki had pointed out, that if fellatio ever became an Olympic event, Hungary would clean up.

Every now and then, Sulyok would feel obliged to give a reading from the Party newspaper which of course had the same content as the other papers but there were some fascinating variations in the punctuation. Considering how boring ‘Free People’ was on the page, and how people would only think about reading it in the most desperate circumstances of tedium, it was hard to see why it was thought that having Sulyok crawl through a passage, adding new layers of dullness, would render it more memorable.

The extract that morning was from ‘Party Worker’, a fortnightly journal that was even more tightly controlled by boredom than ‘Free People’. It was as if they specially selected the dreariest bits from ‘Free People’, excised any microscopically colourful vestiges, and then published the whole thing as ‘Party Worker’.

Sulyok was just finishing an article by Revai on the executions of Rajk and his band. Rajk had been convicted of working on behalf of not only the British and American intelligence services (in addition to a distinguished career as a police informer when the Communist Party had been proscribed) but also doing a bit of moonlighting for Marshall Tito and his filthy Yugoslav deviationists. Why wasn’t he working for Walt Disney as well? Gyuri was tempted to ask. Probably because being Minister of the Interior had taken up too much of his time, Gyuri answered himself. It had been rather amusing to see Rajk hang, there was a shapely irony in the Minister of the Interior, the man who had so lovingly built up the Communist state, who had nourished the secret police, being the first to jig on air when they ran short of non-Communists.

Gyuri had no idea what the true facts of the hangings were but there could be no doubt that what was in the papers was a load of absolute bollocks, since it came from the people who specialised in absolute bollocks, the Hungarian Working People’s Party.

‘But with the disposal of the conspirators, our considerable victory will augment our strength and decisiveness, in order to finish the tasks waiting ahead for us,’ Revai’s article concluded. The only joke Gyuri could remember about Rajk was that he had been appointed to the government because they needed someone at hand in case documents needed to be signed on a Saturday. Rákosi, Gero, Farkas and Revai, the quartet imported from Moscow to run Hungary were all Jews, or at least were considered to be Jews, since as far as Gyuri was aware no one had caught them at the synagogue. The Moscow quartet was giving the chosen people the sort of publicity they hadn’t had since they voted to nail Christ to some bits of wood.

When he had started his readings, Sulyok had sometimes tried to initiate discussion about the exciting articles he read out, since discussion, as long as it concurred with the party line, looked more democratic. ‘There’s nothing as fucking democratic as a good discussion, comrades,’ Sulyok had insisted. The problem that he faced was that most of his audience was on piece-rates, and although the money was contemptible, especially for someone with a family, contemptible money was still better than no money. Others might have shared Gyuri’s editorial doubts but the upshot was that no one wanted to engage Sulyok in debate. Today, Sulyok didn’t try to elicit comment, but reached for a thin red paperback entitled ‘They Were Heroes’, evidently a collection of biographies of the people whose names were rapidly appearing throughout Budapest and elsewhere as streets: Communist martyrs. There was an inaudible, invisible gasp of horror from Sulyok’s audience who had assumed their ordeal over. Obviously Sulyok was making a point for someone’s benefit. This was real ideological overtime. But for whose benefit? Everyone gathered around was well below Sulyok on the ladder of advancement, so he couldn’t be currying favour from anyone there, but perhaps he had deduced that someone present was informing to someone upstairs. The bonus martyr did seem a bit overindulgent. Nevertheless, it didn’t make that much difference to Gyuri if he was standing there listening to Sulyok, doing nothing, instead of standing at his job, doing nothing there.

‘Thus, Ferenc Rózsa, one of the outstanding leaders of the Communist Party, finally perished heroically in the torture-chamber,’ Sulyok terminated his reading with a note of finality of the sort reserved for the end of a children’s bedtime story.

‘Sorry,’ said Pataki interrupting the respectful silence, ‘this was last week, was it?’

‘No,’ said Sulyok, shocked. ‘It was 1942.’

‘Oh. I see. It was the fascists who killed him. Listen, could you read that passage about him being tortured to death again? It’s worth hearing one more time.’ Gyuri wished Pataki didn’t have to be so Pataki all the time. Pataki had said all this with the seemingly straight face of someone curious to learn more about the setbacks of the workers’ movement, but Gyuri couldn’t believe that Pataki’s luck would be everlasting. The first day at work, Pataki had helped himself to a long length of copper wiring. ‘The State owes me,’ he asserted. Anyone else would have waited a few days to familiarise himself with the layout before sticking something to their fingers. And it wasn’t as if Pataki was in abject need- he always had supper waiting for him at home.

‘No, regrettably, comrades, we don’t have the time,’ Sulyok apologised, ‘The imperialists don’t rest; remember we have to harden our work discipline.’

‘Why not harden a horseprick up your arse?’ commented Tamás, not too softly, as he and Gyuri strolled back to the electrical engines. Loud enough to be heard, but quiet enough for Sulyok to be able to ignore it. Tamás could get away with this – who wanted to die? Tamás was incredibly good at killing people; he had a couple of Iron Crosses and an Order of Lenin to prove it.

He had been a great hit during the war, in a number of armies, starting with the Hungarians. He didn’t mind being dropped alone behind enemy lines, not eating anything but the odd rat whose head he had to bite off, sitting in puddles that were thinking about becoming ice (the little finger on his left hand had been peeled off by frostbite) and killing Russians until the cows came home. He was an enthusiast of the knife. ‘You know,’ he confided to Gyuri, ‘people don’t like being stabbed.’ After one mission, when he had spent two months dodging around behind Russian lines without resupply, he had been captured (no ammunition) and offered a job on the spot. ‘Killing Russians or killing Germans, you think I give a toss?’

Tamás was, Gyuri guessed, heading for forty, but he still had the sort of hard, well-defined muscles that would have socialist realist painters fighting for space. He was in charge of insulating the parts of the electrical engines that needed insulating. Gyuri didn’t understand it really, but since he really didn’t do anything, it didn’t matter. Tamás hauled the heavy parts up by chain and then immersed them in a vat full of chemicals which insulated the copper. Despite having been in attendance for months, Gyuri had no idea what the chemicals were or how the process worked. This was because Tamás did everything, while Gyuri watched him intently. It was supposed to be dangerous work and was by the standards of Ganz, well paid; i.e: you had change in your pocket after you had eaten.

What Gyuri was paid for boiled down to listening to Tamás’s adventures, recent and ancient, which Tamás would recount without a break as he hauled electrical engines up and down. Tamás had a lot of adventures, chiefly because he didn’t seem to sleep very much. He had no fixed abode and looked on renting a room as a waste of money. He slept the three or four hours he needed in some only very noisy part of the factory (as opposed to an unbearably noisy part) curled up on the floor, springing out of his slumber fresh and zestful. Most evenings, however, he didn’t need to sleep at the factory because of an amorous entanglement or transnocturnal carousing.

Tamás had a unique view of Budapest in terms of the women he had slept with and of the kocsmas he drank in; this topography he would share with Gyuri during their work. A routine Tamás monologue: ‘Yeah, I was over by “The Blind Drunk Blindman”, they do a great Czech beer there. Anyway, I hadn’t been there since I was giving cock to the French Ambassador’s wife’s maid, and it’s just opposite to where I was delivering my dick to the wife of the gypsy violinist who used to play in “The Overflowing Ashtray”, that was the violinist I had to stab, not the one who tried to pay me to keep his wife; she was the one I met behind the “You Can Even Make Wine From Grapes”. That was a great place, you know, I had a marvellous evening there with a Bulgarian girl. I didn’t speak any Bulgarian, she didn’t speak any Hungarian. But then you don’t need to, do you? She had a place that was almost above the “Why Is The Floor Pressing On My Nose?”. I didn’t get out for days.

‘So, I was in “The Blind Drunk Blindman”, they were giving me some of the under the counter pálinka, they say the Germans wanted it for their rocket program, when I noticed some really small bloke in there with a good-looking woman. They were sitting next to this group of dockers. Anyway, this bloke leans over to the dockers who are mothering this and mothering that, and says very professor-like “Would you mind not swearing in front of my wife?” You have to admire his bottle but getting upset about swearing in “The Blind Drunk Blindman” is a bit like going into a grocer’s and being shocked by the vegetables. I can see the guy is going to get more kicked around than a football at Ferencvaros on a Saturday afternoon, so I tell the barman to hide away a bottle of the special pig-trough pálinka for me because there isn’t going to be any unshattered glass in a moment and I get over at the right moment to wish one of the dockers the best of health with the boot as he’s giving the guy’s wife’s tits a courtesy squeeze.’

This episode was representative of Tamás’s evenings, leaving behind five unconscious dockers and two others earnestly searching for their earlobes. ‘They weren’t going to find them, because I swallowed them. Good protein – learned that behind the Don. The police turned up. Think they were thinking about charging me, because the guy I was helping out suddenly choruses up: “That’s him, I saw the whole thing. He’s the ruffian who started it.” Still, the police knew they’d look good and stupid in court explaining how I’d attacked ten dockers. ’Course they took me in for questioning, but they only asked one question: “Where’s the pig-trough pálinka?’”

Perhaps for Gyuri’s benefit, Tamás was always fastidiously precise about the location of the women with whom he was consorting.

Thus, Gyuri knew as well as his own address that Tamás’s separated wife lived halfway up Kossuth út in Kobányá, between the ‘Short Dipsomaniac’ and the ‘Tall Dipsomaniac’.

Tamás also went to great pains to underline that his son, who was ten, got ‘the best pocket money’ in Budapest. Tamás did the work of three people and was remunerated accordingly. As he calculated his pay packet (an hourly event) he would include the information about the superlative status of his son’s pocket money. Tamás’s herculean exertions were a further reason why Gyuri didn’t need to do much (although Pataki who was employed in the section where the copper wire was spun out had absolutely nothing to do but remark: ‘Hey, look at that wire getting stretched’).

But, from time to time, Tamás would create a task for Gyuri.

‘Get a new blade for this hacksaw,’ Tamás requested, which pleased Gyuri as that would fill up the time until lunch. He set off for the stores as slowly as he could to make the most of the trip. When he got there, he was surprised to see a ‘Do not disturb’ sign which looked as if it had been borrowed thirty years previously from a luxury hotel. Inside, the storemaster, who was the Party Secretary of that section of Ganz, was playing cards with three confederates. Gyuri had barely got his foot across the threshold when, without looking at him or noticeably moving his lips, the storemaster said firmly but without rancour: ‘fuckyourmother’. This was said as such an aside, so mechanically, that Gyuri felt it couldn’t have been related to his entry. So he asked: ‘Sorry to interrupt, but…’

The storemaster wheeled on him: ‘May God and all his holy saints fuck you!’ he exclaimed in what seemed a deplorable lapse for an avowed atheist and a historical materialist. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Fischer.’

‘Okay, you’re fired and on your way out stick a horseprick up your arse,’ said the storemaster dismissing him in an enraged tone before turning back to his comrades in cards. ‘Can you believe this? You can’t get a minute’s peace in this place.’

Returning to his electrical engines, Gyuri pondered the question of whether Gombás, his protector, was in a stronger position than Lakatos, the wing Party Secretary, and if he were fired, did he care that much? He tried to kid himself, but then realised that he did care. Ganz might be bad, but it wasn’t Army bad.

Tamás was surprised to see Gyuri returning empty-handed. ‘He said that he was too busy and that I’m fired,’ Gyuri reported.

‘He does have a cruel sense of humour, that Lakatos,’ said Tamás setting off with the blunted hacksaw. Continuing to meditate on his predicament, Gyuri resolved to alert Gombás immediately to the threat to his employment and went up to Gombás’s office.

Gombás’s secretary wasn’t there. Neither was Gombás. After repeated polite and clear knocking in order to ensure that he didn’t accidentally spoil a ‘training session’, Gyuri found Gombás’s office to be vacated. He stared at Gombás’s black telephone. The idea of picking up the receiver and putting a call through to abroad, somewhere, anywhere West, sneaked into his mind. He toyed with the idea of just doing it, of placing a call, just to hear them say ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning’, just to hear the sound of abroad, the crackle of free air, the ineffable language of out. The prospect xylophoned excitement along his spine.

He enjoyed toying with the idea for a few minutes, knowing for a variety of reasons, first and foremost, a lack of guts, he wouldn’t attempt it but he fully savoured the opportunity. He imagined picking up the receiver and asking in a Gombás-like voice for New York, Paris, London, Berlin even Cleveland, Ohio. It was five of the best minutes he had spent for a very long time.

Then he restarted his worries on getting the sack. Where was Gombás? Had he embarked on a talent-scouting tour? Would he be in the army before Gombás paid another visit to his office? Going back to the shopfloor, Gyuri bumped into Pataki sauntering down a corridor, bouncing a basketball on the floor and off the walls, wearing his sunglasses. Presumably he had run out of wire to watch. Gyuri recounted his problems while Pataki bounced the ball furiously around a portrait of Rákosi. ‘I always envisaged you as a military man,’ said Pataki with the total lack of sympathy only a close friend could muster. ‘No, don’t laugh. I’ve never seen anyone who can rival your genius for digging trenches. In recognition of your trench-digging alone you should make General. And I hear military service is being extended to three years, that should give you plenty of time.’ Pataki then moved off into the offices to dazzle dazzleable young women with his dribbling skills.

Even though he was highly exercised about his own perils, Gyuri couldn’t suppress a pang of anxiety about Pataki who wasn’t slowing down his disregard. He had always been the one to get them into trouble, the self-evident, self-incriminating trouble such as the scout camp where they had drunk all the communion wine, all the communion wine at Pataki’s suggestion. There had been no hope of getting away with it. Father Jenik had been justifiably furious, but since there had only been three days of the camp left, there had only been three days of real wrath and punishment. This camp could be longer…

Bearing two new blades, Tamás reappeared. ‘I told you he was pulling your leg. He’s a good lad, old Lakatos. He wouldn’t let me leave without giving me this carton of cigarettes. I didn’t want to take them, but he really pressed me.’ Tamás gave Gyuri two packets.

Then it was lunch. The weather was a muscular sunshine so most employees went out into the yard to eat whatever they had managed to lay their hands on. Zsigmond and Partos, the two priests, were sitting next to each other, dealing with their bread and cheese, conversing in Latin, polishing their only remaining Catholic weapon. No one paid any attention to them any more. The workers were quite accustomed to the strange workfellows that had descended on them. Priests, accountants, diplomats, cartographers, nobility, all undextrous to a man. There was a great campaign going on for ‘sharing working methods’. Posters, films, exhortations in print and in person were undodgeable. One of the newsreel versions of this appeal that Gyuri had seen featured a seasoned old worker, complete with the beret that was the hallmark of proletarianness, who having ignored the frustrated bunglings of the fresh-faced youth on the lathe next to him, reads the ‘Free People’ editorial on the imperativeness of sharing working methods. The old worker is forthwith struck down with shame at his laxness. Instantly, he rushes over to introduce the boy to the delights of advanced lathe-turning.

This was essentially the Party saying: you’d better train each other because we’re not going to spare the time or cash to do so. While everyone in the works would rather have been dead than carrying out what the Party had urged, if for no other reason than not wanting to waste valuable earning-time, they had provided guiding help and encouragement to the newcomers who had been dropped into the midst of the factory without knowing how to do the job, and often not even knowing what the job was. They were silently acknowledged as domestic exiles.

Gyuri was warmly greeted by Csokonai, who was sitting scribbling away furiously on a mess of sheets on his lap. Csokonai had been a lecturer at the University, an expert on international law, a decent man, if tiresome in anything but the smallest doses, who looked on Gyuri as an ally. Having noted that Csokonai had a bulging bag of crisp apples, Gyuri sat down next to him, amazed at what he would do for a good bite. Csokonai was in a incessant state of fury with only slight adjustments in the volume. He had explained to Gyuri several times, firmly gripping him by the wrist (with prodigious force for a skinny lawyer): ‘They replaced me with an idiot. An idiot. An idiot. A man who knew nothing, nothing. You must believe me.’ Csokonai would repeat this just to leave no doubt that he wasn’t using idiot as a figure of speech, but as a purely technical term. Gyuri always agreed adamantly, because he wanted his wrist released and because he found it plausible that some cadre who had flicked through the paperback edition of Lenin on International Law had got Csokonai’s job. Over sixty, Csokonai was too old to take it; he couldn’t even attempt to roll with the punches. Most of his lunchbreak was spent compiling further violations of national and international law and principles. ‘I’ve really got them now,’ he snarled. ‘They’ll pay, they’ll pay. This nonsense can’t last forever and then they’ll pay.’

What Csokonai was doing was extremely dangerous and Gyuri had no intention of frequenting him any longer than was necessary to obtain an apple or two. The other week, a worker who had either too much pálinka or hardship had suddenly burst out with: ‘They say that under Horthy, Hungary was the land of two million beggars. Well at least under Horthy it was just the beggars who were beggars and not the whole sodding country. I can’t feed my family on this.’ A black car had been waiting for him outside the gates. ‘We have a few questions. It’ll only take five minutes.’ No one had seen him since, but then no one had ever seen again those people whom the Russians had invited for ‘malenky robot,’ a little work five years ago.

Being an old-world courtesy fiend, Csokonai handed over three apples which Gyuri could only bring himself to refuse once. Mulling over how egg-shell thin dignity was when your belly was yelling, Gyuri returned to work to find Sulyok talking to Tamás: ‘Listen, Tamás, we need a little favour, we’re having some comradely difficulties.’ It took Sulyok some time to spit it out, but the problem was this: there was only one place manufacturing the machine tools Ganz needed and for some reason – enmity, superior bribery, incompetence, kinship, the machine tools were being shipped to other factories, not to where they were needed at Ganz, where despite Stakhanovite book-cooking, the Three Year Plan was not being fulfilled. ‘Tamás, could you go over there and explain in a constructive, fraternal and socialist manner the absolute dire necessity for some urgent supplies to aid the intensification of the Three Year Plan fulfilment situation?’

‘You want me to hijack one of their deliveries, right?’ asked Tamás.

Taken aback by this uncomradely language, Sulyok winced, but didn’t blab anymore. ‘Yes,’ he said, handing over a set of lorry keys. ‘Take Gyuri and some of the other lads if you need.’ It’s all about having the right skills for the right task, Gyuri thought. You can read Lenin on International Law, but no amount of reading Lenin on ambushing and highway robbery could help you if you didn’t know the business.

Tamás picked up Palinkas, another well-known pugilist, and an apprentice jaw-breaker, Bod. As they were pulling out by the front gates, Gyuri noticed Pataki, apprehended by two security men who were unwinding a long length of copper wire from underneath his shirt. Smiling, Gyuri waved, looking forward with keen anticipation to hearing how Pataki could talk his way out of that one.

Tamás dropped everyone off, one by one, wherever they wanted to go, before putting his foot down on the accelerator to head off to the Zuglo where the machine tool factory was located. ‘Don’t worry, I can take care of it on my own,’ he said to Gyuri with an expectant grin on his face, slipping his knife in between his teeth.

At home, Gyuri found Elek still parked in his armchair, but entertaining Szocs, his former doorman who came monthly to pay his respects. Szocs was the only one of Elek’s old staff who made the effort to seek him out and he was made welcome because of that and also, more saliently, because he always brought a package of food from his farming cousins. His mother had always complained that Elek showered his staff with holidays and bonuses, though as Gyuri recalled, Szocs, who had been on duty outside Elek’s office, had never copped any of the goodies.

Szocs was inescapably stuck in cheerfulness but went up a jubilation or two when he saw a younger Fischer. ‘How are you, Gyuri? Settling down yet? Thinking about getting married?’ Gyuri knew he was at the age when everyone was immensely inquisitive as to what he was doing with his willy, so he was prepared for this sort of inquiry from his seniors; he was as keen to be castrated as to get married but he laughingly denied major romance with good grace. Someone who had come halfway across Budapest to deliver food was entitled to question away. Gyuri discerned an opened package of goose crackling, and started to make arrangements digestively.

Looking down the finger he was pointing at Gyuri as if down the barrel of a gun, Szocs remarked: ‘You’ll know when you find the right one, you’ll know.’ Gyuri nodded concurringly as one does towards someone who has mustered goose crackling. ‘I knew the moment I saw my wife,’ he said chuckling. This surprised Gyuri because he had only seen Mrs Szocs once, and his first, last and lasting impression was of consummate ugliness; he had always imagined that Szocs married her out of charity, or that their wedlock was a further symptom of Szocs’s chronic misfortune rather than elective affinities. Szocs’s life was one of round-the-clock calamity: an orphan, he had been shipwrecked as a cabin-boy, lost the use of one eye from an infection, lost his toes from frostbite in a Russian prisoner of war camp, lost both his children in the great dysentery epidemic of 1919. You just had to laugh. There was surely more disaster in his past, but unusually for a Hungarian with such promising material to draw on, Szocs was very niggardly in passing out the details of his years.

‘The Party secretary catches Kovacs,’ said Szocs changing tack. ‘“Comrade Kovacs, why weren’t you at the last Party meeting?” “The last Party meeting?” replies Kovacs. “If I’d known it was the last Party meeting, I’d have brought the whole family.’” Szocs was now, in an odd way, a successful figure, now that poverty and misery had been generally distributed; he was a tycoon of jollity. In the land of the blind, Gyuri thought, the man who knows how to use the white stick is king.

The only irritating aspect to Szocs was that his whistling in totalitarianism rather invalidated one’s licence for self-pity.

Gyuri could never enjoy his resentment for quite a while after Szocs had left. Szocs’s presence made him lose that acute sense of accumulated injustice and aggrievedness that he had been so carefully working on. Elek, for example, might be sitting comfortably in the back of adversity’s big black car, but Szocs seemed to thrive on hardship like a slap up meal.

To his shame, Gyuri was glad when Szocs left and he didn’t have to pretend any more that he didn’t want to throw himself on the goose crackling. Elek had ventured out earlier to get some fresh bread and this in combination with the goose crackling yielded a profound sense of well-being, an undispersable glow of plenitude that would linger on for the minimum of an evening or until Gyuri went to do some training.

The two packets of cigarettes (French) had been part of a great plan Gyuri had been hatching to do some profitable bartering- but Elek looked so deformed, so unnatural without a cigarette that Gyuri handed them over and watched Elek’s face become an amalgam of joy and reflection on how to apportion the cigarettes chronologically

One strove to be hard, to be tough, dangerous and independent (Gyuri weighed up the effects of the pile of goose crackling) but self-discipline is such a delicate thing, a plant that wilts on either side of a narrow temperature band. In mitigation, it had been exceptionally adipose, unquestionably hastened to the capital that morning, wrapped before darkness had been dispelled, possessed of an evanescent crispness and a tang that had to be captured by taste buds within twelve hours or it would abscond to the limbo of fabulous flavour.

The glut of cigarettes and goose crackling engendered a pliancy and a conversation between the two of them. Of late, Pataki had been the top recipient of Elek’s locutions, a hunched, cigaretted dialogue running through Elek’s lewd ₄ material. Gyuri made a point of ostentatiously going for a run or loudly doing some housework while they were thus engaged, but it didn’t have any dampening effect.

He decided to press Elek on abroad.

‘What was it like in Vienna?’

Elek had spent a couple of years stationed outside Vienna as an Austro-Hungarian officer and gentleman before the Big One that had vaporised the Strudel Empire.

‘I don’t remember much now,’ said Elek. ‘It was a long time ago. I remember the sex but that’s about it. That’s the odd thing about Vienna: all that culture, all those libraries, piano recitals, all that learning, all that Mozart was here, all the elaborate chocolate and patisserie and the women were interested in only one thing. If I hadn’t been twenty it would have killed me.

‘There was one lady, the wife of a distinguished geologist, who was still vigorous enough to carry out his conjugal duties. I timed myself one day. From ten in the morning to three in the afternoon: five hours. I thought she might say stop or ask for an intermission, but no. We only abandoned the mission because her husband was coming back with some very gripping granite. When I got out into the street I had to call for a taxi because my body had gone on strike. Then I found out that someone else from the regiment was leaving his calling cards there as well – the husband challenged him to a duel and I had to act as his second. You would have thought she could have read a book or gone to a museum every now and then.’

‘I don’t think I’ll be getting to Vienna for a while,’ Gyuri remarked.

‘Oh, I’m sure you will. This can’t go on much longer. You realise you and István are my last hopes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The only sort of success I can anticipate now is sitting in a café regaling my cronies with tales of my sons’ successes. I’m counting on you for some reflected glory and a modest income. You don’t want your old father to be stuck in a café with nothing to boast about?’

‘So you’re going into sitting around full-time?’

‘I’m working up to it. But don’t forget you have no excuses: you’re at the perfect age for disaster. Physical peak. Flexible. Durable. A good reservoir of optimism. Nineteen is the ideal age for misfortune. You can fight back. And things change. Nothing lasts forever. Hungary has had some bizarre moments in its history. Mongols, Turks wandering in and out. Our friend Horthy, a regent without a king, an admiral without a sea. But Rákosi. The one thing I can confidently predict as a non-starter in Hungary is a Jewish King. I’m willing to bet that you won’t last long at Ganz, and that you will have a good laugh about all this.’

‘How much are you willing to bet?’ Gyuri asked, sensing easy money.

‘We can negotiate a figure.’ At this point Elek was racked by a caravan of coughs of lung-ripping ferocity. ‘The trouble is,’ he continued weakly, ‘I’m not going to be around to collect at this rate. But you still have no excuse for not achieving stupendous prosperity. Think of all that bringing-up your mother lavished on you.’

Gyuri decided to tackle some of the housework. Nothing substantial, but tossing a coin to domesticity, Gyuri entered the waiting-room for washing-up and exposed some plates to running water. Considering how little they had to eat, there was an alarming quantity of dirty crockery.

‘I told her for months to go to the doctor. For months. You know what she said, “I can’t go. I haven’t got a slip.” I don’t suppose it would have made a lot of difference,’ Elek volunteered.

Suddenly, Gyuri wished they hadn’t started to converse.