Under the frog (12 page)

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.