Under the frog (26 page)

* * *

On the
orders of his ball-gripping lust, Gyuri kept looking out of the window, and
just when he thought he was going to swoon with expectation, Jadwiga appeared.
She was walking at a furious pace, he noted, a woman with a purpose, the weekly
week-long separation eliciting the same concupiscent smouldering from her. One
of her most endearing features was the way she would take her clothes off as if
they were on fire, leaving them where they dropped, without a thought for any
sartorial suffering that might occur, and plunging into bed as if it were a
cool pond of water. The other women had, no matter how high the flame was under
them, been fearful of creases and had taken time out to utilise a hanger or a
chair to drape their attire.

Gyuri
saw her shape through the smoked opaque glass of the front-door and he thought
how lucky he was to have such a visitor. Virtually ignoring him, she made for
the bedroom, casting off her dress and stumbling on her knickers, fell flat on
her face on the bed. ‘Come inside,’ she commanded at the end of the crumpled
clothes-trail.

A
part-time god,
Gyuri ruminated in a bout of lyricism,
1 loosed
off
liquid lightning in my
private thunderstorm.
Jadwiga rose to go to the bathroom, and Gyuri
perceived a fructiferous droplet dash along her thigh towards her ankle. He
wanted to make her pregnant. He wanted to make her pregnant. What was going on?
He couldn’t believe he felt like that but you can’t beat biology, he concluded.

Furthermore,
it was very, very unlikely that he would achieve anything more important or
significant than this, making one person feel full happiness, manufacturing a
roomful of ecstasy, even if it were only a bubble in a gloomy ocean. It seemed
a mundane pinnacle for a life, a trite climax for a biography, a flippant line
for a gravestone – ‘did some worthwhile willying’. But was there anything else
that had given him the same reward of joy and plenitude? The oldest trap had
opened and snapped shut and he didn’t mind at all.

‘There
goes the best moment of my life,’ he said to the absent Jadwiga. Which story
had it been where the devil offers a man the chance to stop time, to slam on
the brakes at a point of his own choosing, but the man can’t decide when to say
when? Gyuri had had intimations of love before, but looking at Jadwiga, he
realised that was a prospect that could last him for eternity, whatever went on
outside the walls. He didn’t care who the general-secretary of the Hungarian
Working People’s Party was or whether or not socialism was being built outside
or whether people were swinging around in the trees. He had his portable
universe, his mobile self-sufficiency. This sort of satisfaction could bog
down a man with great aims, but since he had never got around to preparing any,
Gyuri felt ready to sink back and enjoy it.

As
Jadwiga started recovering her clothing, Elek returned and for some obscure
reason (he only ever visited Gyuri’s bedroom on average twice a year) wandered
in to catch the whole story of her skin. Mumbling apologies from the other side
of the door, Elek retreated to his armchair, like a parrot to its perch, as if
that would render him inconspicuous and inoffensive.

Unhindered
by Elek’s entrance, Jadwiga carried on with her dressing. Her poise made a
contrast with Tünde’s hysterics when Elek had found her torso exhibited in the
shower. She had yelled as if her life was in danger and threw her arms tightly
over the regions acknowledged to be of most interest to men, to staunch the
flow of libidinous material. Tünde’s behaviour had been excessive; despite
living in an age when the public baring of bodies was frowned on, her physique
was as well-viewed as the Statue of Liberty and in particular the parts she was
shielding with her hands, making fleshy fig leaves, had been as relentlessly
fingered as the timetable at the Keleti railway station. But for some reason
Tünde believed that all-lung hysterics was the pertinent reaction of a
well-brought-up girl to an unannounced guest. Jadwiga’s nakedness hadn’t
blinked.

Gyuri
loved her alert breasts. He loved her runner’s legs (she had dabbled in
sprinting) paradisiac containers of aphrodisiac. He loved her sagacious
buttocks that had settled the entire subject of good buttocking. He loved her
lips, the well-marked borders of her mouth; he loved her felicitating soles and
all on them. He couldn’t see anything that let the view down. Perhaps that was
the symptom of fully-defined love: like a great work of art, nothing could be
docked, interjected or tampered with. If the Creator had come to him with a
special offer of restyling, ‘For you, Gyuri, I can change anything you’d like:
a little more leg? another helping of breast? blonder hair? darker hair? more
ear lobe? younger? older? wittier? graver? repainted eyes? American passported?’
Gyuri realised that he would just reply: ‘We’ll stop here.’ He wouldn’t change
a hair, not a pore, not one particle more, not one particle less, because then
she wouldn’t be she. And it was no use trying to make up his mind about which
sector bested the others; he couldn’t judge Jadwiga’s beauties’ contest,
because her components kept leapfrogging over each other, grabbing his favour.
Then he knew that he had jettisoned the world. That he was marooned on the
planet Jadwiga.

Although
not Jadwiga’s first foray into the flat, it was the first time she had met Elek
who had taken up employment as a night-watchman at the Laszlo hospital (an
occupation that suited him since it involved a lot of sitting and doing nothing
and gave him complete freedom to speculate on what he would do with the money
he was counting on winning in the lottery). So, after the full-frontal
introduction, time was set aside for a formal hand-kissing which Elek did with
a snap of the heels.

In the
kitchen, as Gyuri lined up the ingredients for an omelette, Elek sidled up to
whisper his warm admiration: ‘My congratulations.’ Gyuri didn’t want to
register pleasure at Elek’s approval but it was pleasing nevertheless. Elek
watched Gyuri’s egg-cracking with the admiration of the culinary illiterate. ‘You
haven’t heard any more from young Pataki, have you?’ he asked.

Gyuri
shook his head.

The
fastest motorcycle in Hungary had been the root of Pataki’s departure. Or maybe
one of the roots of it. Or maybe, Gyuri continued to reflect, really in the
mood to push a metaphor around, just part of the foliage. Who knew?

The
motorcycle had been a Motoguzzi, a mountain of a bike. Sándor Bokros had owned
it originally. Bokros had, by a series of dazzling commercial speculations,
starting in 1945, when there had been a widespread vogue for a really good
wash, juggled a dozen bars of soap through ever-augmenting metamorphoses until
he had half a dozen fur coats. Then Bokros left the country and went to Italy,
where, according to reliable accounts, he had almost willied off his willy and
bought the motorcycle. Suddenly, through some incomprehensible mental
aberration, Bokros had returned to Hungary on his bike, just as the country’s
borders were being sealed so tightly they lost fifty kilometres. Even in Italy
there had only been a handful of bikes like that one and for the citizens of
Budapest it was like something from Mars. Bokros had two problems: having to cope
with an epidemic of adulation and street-enquiry and finding a stretch of road
on which he could get out of first gear.

By the
time Boleros realised that he should have opted for a totalitarianism that went
in for long stretches of immaculate tarmac, it was too late. Everyone assumed
it would end in tragedy, either his bike being nationalised, or him dying as a
result of not seeing eye to eye with a Hungarian bend but what happened was as
unforeseen as you could get. As he was overtaking, on a country road, a tractor
with a load of fixed, upturned scythe-fittings on the back, one of the blades
slid down, decapitating Bokros. ‘You don’t need much in the way of brains to
ride a bike,’ Pataki had said at the funeral, mulling over the bike having
carried on for half a kilometre without a head.

‘You’ll
like Sándor, everyone does,’ was the way Bokros was always described. His
brother, Vilmos, was described as one of those people who was disliked by
everyone. Indisputably, Mrs Bokros hadn’t been eating enough affability when
Vilmos was conceived. One of the most upsetting aspects about Sándor’s death
had been that it meant the fastest motorcycle in the country would be passing
into the hands of the loathsome Vilmos.

Vilmos
fulfilled a useful function on the Locomotive team: everyone could rally round
their dislike of him. Instead of suffering from a selection of grudges and
vendettas, Locomotive could use Vilmos as the dustbin of enmity. He hardly ever
played in a match because he wasn’t much good and because of one of the
standard amusements on the way to a fixture – pushing Vilmos out onto a railway
platform as the train was pulling away, ideally when he was wearing only his
basketball boots. ‘Where’s Bokros?’ Hepp would ask. ‘We saw him going for a
walk in Hatvan/Cegled/Veszprem’, someone would say. Vilmos discovered the only
way of ensuring he wasn’t exposed in rather dull parts of the country with poor
transportational possibilities was to barricade himself in the toilet until
they reached their destination.

It was
the week after Gyuri had lost his bet with Bokros on the outcome of the Army
vs.
Ironworkers football match.

Gyuri
had confidently bet on the Army, not understanding why Bokros was being
ostensibly that stupid, because he didn’t know as Bokros did that an
international match had been fixed for the same day so that the Army was going
to be stripped of all its best players. Gyuri was skint at the time but he had
had his eye on a leather belt that had also formerly belonged to Sándor, so he
had wagered in exchange for the belt, in an excess of colourful hyperbole, that
Bokros could crap into his hands if the Ironworkers won. The Ironworkers did,
but fortunately, out of the blue, Vilmos had grown a sense of humour.

Naturally,
everyone gathered around for the show. Vilmos crouched down, and Gyuri
obligingly hunkered down behind him ready to catch the fecal ball. ‘No
fumbling,’ was the general exhortation. Honourably, Gyuri waited to settle his
debt but Bokros, suddenly the centre of approval for devising such a wonderful
entertainment, was laughing so much that he was incapable of invoking the
muscular bailiffs to evict some tenants from his bowels.

‘Give
me a newspaper,’ Bokros had instructed, hoping that reading some of Prime
Minister Hegedus’s speech on Hungarian-Soviet relations would induce a state of
tranquillity and sphinctal detente but the crowd eventually had to disperse in
disappointment.

The
following week, Gyuri had missed the preamble of the argument but the bet
between Pataki and Bokros had grown out of a furious abuse session. It happened
on Margit Island, after a training session and Gyuri entered as Pataki, who had
recently been extremely tetchy, was telling Bokros what trash he was. Pataki
was angry, and he looked angry, which was unusual in that he didn’t routinely
hand out public bulletins on his feelings like that: Bokros, who you would have
thought would have been quite used to being called a shit and so on, was
greatly incensed.

‘Who do
you think
you
are?’ he
spat out. ‘Do you think you’re so great? That you’re so
hard
?’ Bokros almost ruptured
himself getting the word out. ‘You toe the line when it matters.’

‘But I
haven’t licked the arse of everyone at the Ministry of Sport, including the
doorman.’

‘No,
you’re so independent, the changing-room rebel, the revolutionary who’s going
to bring everything down with some explosive whispered sarcasm … you haven’t
got the guts to speak out. If you think it all stinks why don’t you say so?’

‘I’ll
show you,’ said Pataki, pointing at the White House across the river. Why doesn’t
he just hit Bokros? Gyuri wondered. ‘You’ll have the chance to see what I think
if you want. Let’s have a bet. You put up your bike against half of my salary
for a year and I’ll run stark naked around the White House and give them a 360
degree view of my fine Hungarian bum.’

‘Done,’
said Bokros, made adamant by his anger and the certitude that Pataki wouldn’t
attempt it. But Pataki waved in Gyuri and Bánhegyi. ‘Come on, I want witnesses.’

Gyuri
had spent most of his life thinking that Pataki had gone too far, but he hadn’t
felt so strongly that his friend was on course to crash head-on with destiny
since that time in ’45 when Pataki had said to him: ‘Of course we should try
out that revolver. Your mother won’t know. What do you think’s going to happen?
The Russians are going to arrest us and have us shot?’

The
White House was nominally the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior; it
was mostly a haunt for the Hungarian Working People’s Party and the AVO. Some
said it was the headquarters of the AVO, but the AVO taking no chances, seemed
to have several headquarters: Andrássy út for one, plus a number of villas up
in the hills of Budapest where they could beat people up in comfort and
tranquillity.

The
White House, as the Ministry in its well-appointed riverside location was
popularly known, had a marked resemblance to a shoebox. The story went thus:
the architect who had been commissioned to design it (not because he was a
Party member, but because of his family background – his father had been a
dipsomaniac and a worker manque, his mother a moderately successful prostitute,
so he was valued as being suitably anti-bourgeois) had, in the recognised
tradition of Hungarian architecture, namely boozing and gibbering excitedly,
spent both the six months he had been allotted to create a plan and the
commission fee, boozing and gibbering, telling everyone he met– building
workers, shop assistants, proctologists, swimming pool attendants, paviours,
percussion players and a man on the number two tram who was breeding leeches,
waiting for their big comeback in medicine – that he had been commissioned to
design the Ministry.