Under the frog (3 page)

Róka put on one of the jazz records, to the sound of which
Locomotive trooped out and started their warm-up, bouncing around and sinking
baskets. The records they performed to were all of American origin, which could
have been tricky, but before they had thrown away a load of records presented
to them by one of the visiting Soviet railway teams, they had steamed off the
labels and refixed them on the jazz records. So the Western decadents were then
camouflaged by rubrics such as ‘Lenin is Amongst Us’, ‘Our Steam Engine’, and
the biggest hit ‘In the Front-Line Forest’ performed by the Song and Dance
Ensemble of the Soviet Army (the original credits for the jazz had been long
forgotten). Any snooping eyes would only meet estimable red cyrillic whatever
the reports of their ears.

The small-bone cleaners were visibly taken aback by this.
Somehow, Gyuri felt, they weren’t going to break into the big time of big-bone
cleaning. One of them loped up and announced that they could only provide one
referee. ‘My other uncle couldn’t come.’

A towering player, some six foot six, the Meats’ not-so-secret secret weapon, lined up with Pataki for the jump-off, pouring down a
look of smug contempt on the five inches shorter Pataki. It was funny – the
Meats thought they were going to win.

They were very surprised when Pataki disappeared with the
ball but instead of whizzing downcourt to deposit it in the boardbank as was
his wont, he passed it back to Gyuri. For a bit of fun, Gyuri tried to drop the
bomb, taking a shot from under his basket at the opposition basket. Normally,
this was only attempted as a desperate measure with only seconds to go before
the end of a match. The odds practically blocked the ball going in but as Gyuri
knew the match was Locomotive’s anyway, even if they’d only been playing two
men, he had a go. The ball flew across the court and shot through the net
without touching the ring or the backboard. Any experienced player would have
diagnosed it as magnificent, once in a career cheek, but the Meats were
flummoxed and rocketed from bucolic swagger to abject panic. Instead of piling
on Pataki (not that it would have greatly hindered him) they crowded around
Gyuri. After Pataki had eased his way through to ten straight dunkings as if he
were practising on an empty court, the twenty points hinted to the Meats that
they should keep an eye on Pataki but this was of little help. The Secret
Weapon lumbered about trying to pillage passes to Pataki but he was too big an
opportunity for gravity to pass up and Pataki always got higher or lower faster
to pluck the ball.

Bias, the like of which none of the Locomotive players had
seen, flabbergasting bias from the referee which gave the Meats impunity to
foul, trip and punch, along with several completely unwarranted penalty throws,
resulted in a final score of 68-32 to Locomotive. It seemed obvious that the
total export capacity of Hungary’s salami industry would be needed to thrust
the Meats into the first division.

The pleasure of the good result that Hepp was looking
forward to had been greatly marred by the referee’s behaviour, going for his
whistle whenever someone from Locomotive neared the ball. Hepp went over to the
referee to discuss the one hundred and eight infractions of correct refereeing
he had noted down during the course of the match. Gyuri could tell by the look
on the referee’s face that he didn’t realise that he really was going to have
to go through the one hundred and eight points one by one in exacting and
atomic detail.

Hepp’s persistence was one of the pillars of Locomotive’s
high ranking in the league but despite all his cunning, expertise and drive,
there was no way he could push Locomotive into beating the Army’s team, which
had the championship trophy riveted down in its clubhouse, as there was no need
to move it. The Army’s strengths were self-evident: an infinity of boons for
its sporters, innumerable facilities, the ability to draft anyone they wanted
and above all, the bonus that playing for the Army meant that you didn’t have
to be in the Army (the real one where you didn’t eat, lived out in sub-zero
temperatures and dug ditches). In fact one of the most agreeable ways of
avoiding the Army – a pastime that, after bonking, was the major preoccupation
for healthy young Hungarian males – was to join the Army.

The life of the Army’s basketball players, as indeed of all
its sporting practitioners, was cushy. On the first day they might go as far as
to show you what a rifle looked like but that was as far as military science
went for the sporters. Anyone who played in the first division had a nominal
job handed out by their club, the duties being mainly collecting your wages
(there were also the little brown envelopes at the clubhouse containing ‘calorie
money’). For example, Gyuri had visited his place of employment on numerous
occasions and had learned the Morse code in the course of his railway career.
In the Army, shamateurism reached full speed; the only duty that impinged on
the Army’s athletes was putting on a uniform once in a while. Plus, if you were
of an international standard, a high rank and a fat salary were thrust on you.
Puskás, the football genius, not only had a car, but a chauffeur.

In their changing room, Locomotive were joined by their
vanquished opponents. The atmosphere was not one of sporting benevolence and
fraternity; the hope of obtaining some home-brewed pálinka, as often happened
on trips to the provinces, was dashed. The demeanour and conduct of the
small-bone boys was indisputably bunko; you would have thought they could
contain their surly clod-hopping to their own changing room but they couldn’t
stay away from the excitement from Budapest: ergo, there was nothing else to do
that weekend in Makó except bait the Locomotive team.

The Meats had chosen Demeter as the principal subject of
their attentions. Demeter was tall and aristocratic, as befitted someone who
came from a long line of tall aristocrats. Whether because seven hundred years
of appearances behoved him to do so, or whether it emanated from his nature,
Demeter emitted a constant poise: you could imagine him being bombed and pulled
out from a pile of rubble without a hair out of place. If you were wearing a
dinner jacket and Demeter was stark naked, you’d still feel underdressed.

Demeter was also excessively equitable, which was why he
hadn’t responded to the Meats’ unimaginative abuse. If it had been Pataki or
Katona, or indeed any other member of the team on the receiving end, fugitive
teeth would already have been scuttling across the floor. Why was it always the
friendly matches that ended up unfriendly? thought Gyuri looking around the
changing room for some handy blunt instrument such as a length of iron piping.

The universal punch-up Gyuri expected didn’t in fact come to
pass. The Meats’ spokesman was working his way through a loop of observations
such as ‘You think you’re pretty good, don’t you?’ and ‘You think your shit
doesn’t stink, eh?’ As he was engaged in this, Demeter adjusted his tie, and
then, with such purpose the movement seemed slow, administered a slap
resoundingly on the spokesman’s face. Not a punch but an open-handed rebuke,
without any follow up. Demeter then carried on packing up his kit-bag. The
Meats flocked out in silence – rather as a martial artist was reputed to be
able to summon fatal strength to one finger, so Demeter had conduited a
crushing amount of contempt into that slap that had incontrovertibly spelt out
their fourth-divisionness in all aspects of life. The irony was that it was
Demeter who insisted on politely bidding farewell to their hosts.

They had to hunt around for Hepp before they could leave,
but they located him eventually, somewhat out of breath– he had run a mile down
the road pursuing the referee who had taken to his bicycle at point
forty-eight. Hepp was in excellent condition for his age, indeed he was in good
shape for someone twenty years younger, and he could have carried on much
further had it not been for the awareness that his strictures were not being
accepted constructively.

Returning to Szeged to spend the night, the bulk of
Locomotive opted for an inspection of the town’s main square to see if there
was a restaurant willing to serve them. They remembered that they had run out
of a restaurant in the centre of town without paying the bill, doing a Zrinyi,
as it was known in the Locomotive ranks, in memory of the great Hungarian
general Miklós Zrinyi, who had rushed out of his castle, admittedly to do
battle with a Turkish force that outnumbered him ten times (to be completely
wiped out). They remembered they had zrinyied out of a restaurant, but having
been so legless and brainless they couldn’t remember which one (they had been
so inebriated only half the team could walk, and had only made good their
escape by locking the staff in the kitchen). But what was the point of being
away from home if you didn’t behave disgracefully? They chose the restaurant on
the left hand side of the square, where having reassured the management they
weren’t anything to do with water-polo they were shown to a table. ‘When I hear
the word water-polo,’ said the head waiter, ‘I know it means … refurbishment,
hospital, the police, a loss of teeth … years of painfui, slow recovery.’

Hepp was busy back at the hotel, writing letters about the
one hundred and eight points to everyone even remotely connected with the
governing of basketball and some to people who weren’t. ‘I definitely think you
should write to the Ministry,’ Pataki had said, knowing that Hepp’s epistolary
exertions would save the team from a few hours of post-match analysis which on
previous occasions had driven people to climbing out of windows to evade Hepp.

Gyuri had gone off to the main post office to see about a
phone call to Budapest. Three days before, he had been stopped in the street by
a striking Swedish girl who asked for directions to the Museum of Fine Arts.
The miracle of such an encounter, of a girl who was from the outside and who
was good-looking, just walking up to him without any advance notice from fate,
had stupefied him and he almost let her go without assaying further
acquaintance. She was visiting Budapest for some youth festival organised by
one of the countless peace committees but that was immaterial. She was a
two-legged ticket out of Hungary and worth a four hour wait for a phone-call.
Stay calm, reasoned Gyuri, stay calm for a few more days and then if she hasn’t
fallen insanely in love with me, there’s always the expedient of falling at her
feet, pleading for marriage, offering half of his salary for life, offering
anything, to kill people she didn’t like, to beg desperately and shamelessly.

Bugger the informer, he concluded entering the post office,
I’m breaking out. Joining the queue for phone calls, a familiar figure in front
of him was mnemonically focused into recognition. It was Sólyom-Nagy, the
champion shoplifter of the Minta school. Sólyom-Nagy’s prowess at pilfering,
mostly chocolate bars, had been such that the entire third year, as a result of
the gargantuan amounts of cut-price Sólyom-Nagy-supplied chocolate they had
consumed, had been unable to view a bar without feeling ill. Although they had
lost touch, Gyuri had got on well with Sólyom-Nagy and had been very grateful
to him for specially stealing a multi-faceted penknife, subsequently lost when
Keresztes, who had said he just wanted to borrow it for a minute, had left it
in a gypsy at the fairground.

Sólyom-Nagy, it transpired, was studying Hungarian
literature at the university in Szeged. ‘This is Jadwiga, by the way,’ he said
indicating a slim girl next to him who was letting her boredom with waiting
show. The surname was something Polish that Gyuri didn’t bother trying to
retain but he was disappointed that Jadwiga didn’t seem more delighted to meet
him. One didn’t get anywhere by overlooking introductions to women. However,
according to the instant classification of the back-room boys in Gyuri’s
cranium, Jadwiga only scored a keep-on-file anyway and he had more pressing
Swedish women to phone.

It took a portly three hours to get through to Budapest and
she wasn’t at the student hostel. It was going to be hard work becoming a
streetsweeper in Stockholm.

December 1944

The German soldier was trailing behind the others, clutching
in his left hand a good portion of the intestines spilling out from an
otherwise quite smart uniform. To Gyuri, he didn’t seem greatly distressed – it
was rather as if the unTeutonic untidiness of runaway guts was far more
troubling than any physical pain.

Of course, fussing or expecting any sort of sympathy or
attention would have been a waste of time – like everything else sympathy and
attention were running out. The Germans, pedestrian or motorised, still
pretending that the war wasn’t over, were heading to the river and crossing
over to the castle where it was rumoured they were going to hole up and fight
it out with the rapidly approaching Russians. Gyuri had watched the Germans
arrive in force, months earlier, when they had helped themselves to Hungary’s
government. The Germans had poured in with their heroic motorcycles and other
items of snappy transport, swaggering around in beautiful leather coats.

The Germans weren’t looking so confident now, the prospect
of getting mashed by the Russians not agreeing with them. It would have been
fun to watch if it hadn’t been for the fact that the mashing was going to take
place in Budapest. From the direction of the City Park Gyuri could hear the
distant rumbling of artillery, the mighty footfalls of the Red Army.

Military training, even for fourteen year-olds like Gyuri,
had been stepped up since the Hungarian High Command, having lost one army, was
trying to get another to play with. Gyuri’s instructors had placed exclusive
emphasis on running around a lot in gas masks and then crawling back and forth
over some prime cow pats. ‘The Russians will be in big trouble if they try to
defend themselves with cow shit,’ one of Gyuri’s fellow soldiers had remarked.