Under the frog (6 page)

One day, an hour after school had finished and the class had
filed out, it was claimed Hidassy had been seen still conducting a lesson on
electromagnetism: he loved physics. And he was liked by his pupils, not only
because he left them in peace, but because, when it came to exam time and
mouths were left gasping like landed fish, he would give a good mark for ‘understanding
the principle’. In fact what usually happened during the oral exam was that he
asked the question and then, even before you had time to supply an answer
(should you have happened to have had one), however feeble or conquering, he
would beamingly answer it, requiring at most a little nodding in agreement from
the examinee.

‘Teller was telling me that if you split the atom, you’d
blow up the whole world: the least he could have done was write to apologise,’
Hidassy was rambling as Pataki sold his grenades. Keresztes, as well as Fuchs,
came round to examine the goods, which Pataki wished they wouldn’t do.
Keresztes was an unwelcome customer as he was perilously unpredictable. During
the siege, Soviet machine gunners had found Keresztes at their elbows, asking
for a go. Once Pataki and Gyuri had been at a fairground when Keresztes had
latched on to them. A gypsy, without carelessness or malice, entirely through
the natural Brownian motion of public place, had brushed into Keresztes.
Courteously asking for Gyuri’s celebrated penknife, Keresztes had run through
the different attachments and, having selected the longest blade, sunk it into
the gypsy. ‘Thanks,’ he had said politely.

That was the only occasion, though, that Pataki had seen
Keresztes exhibit good manners. Fuchs wasn’t great as a prospective customer
either as he had an unblemished reputation as penniless. In any gathering of
thirty youths, there is always one who gets sat on. Someone, anyone, would call
‘time for a Fuchs’ and immediately a quorum of eight would sit on Fuchs; more
might be interested, but Fuchs wasn’t very large, and even with ten there would
be a couple only sitting on a brace of fingers, a hand, a nose – something
peripheral like that. It was a rather simple, but an inexhaustible amusement.
Fuchs was also good for locking in cupboards, and because it was public
knowledge that his mother would phone the police if he was two minutes late
home, on one side-splitting occasion he had been handcuffed to a rail in the
number forty-seven tram, where he had stayed despite his impassioned pleas
until the driver took the tram back to the terminal.

Even more amusing than doing things to Fuchs was doing
things to his briefcase. He had acquired a very sober, expensive leather
briefcase through a family belief that such an accoutrement would boost his
scholastic achievement. Because the briefcase was pompous, very expensive and
above all belonged to Fuchs it came in for a lot of attention. Fuchs had a
curious spiritual oneness with this briefcase that transcended merely trying to
protect it. Since it was kicked on sight Fuchs had to walk around with the
briefcase clutched to his chest, but as he couldn’t maintain such tight
security all day, the briefcase would disappear. Invariably, the moment it fell
into hostile hands, no matter how distracted he was, Fuchs was telepathically
alerted and he would have to be sat on while his briefcase was filled with
liquids, trampolined on, nailed to a wall, or on one memorable occasion during
one of Solyom-Nagy’s chocolate gluts in early ’44, topped up with chocolate
melted over a bunsen burner to the accompaniment of Hidassy’s discourse on the
spectrum.

They were sitting on the window ledge at the rear of the
classroom where Keresztes pawed the grenades much to Pataki’s discomfiture. The
lab was on the second floor and there was a drop of twenty feet to the
pavement. A vogue was sweeping the school for jumping off the top of the music
block, which was a twelve foot drop onto grass, started by Gomboc, whose elder
brother had been a paratrooper, resulting in an epidemic of sprained and broken
ankles. Keresztes lobbed a grenade up and down thoughtfully: ‘I tell you what.
I bet you this grenade that you can jump out this window and walk away.’
Keresztes never explained what he was going to put up but in any case Pataki
wasn’t having it, since whether or not Keresztes broke his neck, such an
escapade could only add to Pataki’s detention time, which was already heavily
curtailing his rowing on the Danube.

Pataki had already said no three times when Keresztes, who
needed to be told things six times as a minimum, threw Fuchs out of the window.
Fuchs looked surprised at the physics lesson having run away from him but had
got up swiftly and dusted himself off. ‘See,’ said Keresztes, ‘my grenade.’
Whereupon he pulled out the pin. Row upon row of boys ducked under their
benches as awareness of the unpinned grenade spread.

After a good three or four minutes, Pataki crawled out from
underneath the neighbouring bench to see Keresztes holding the grenade up to
the light. ‘All right, how did you know it was a dud?’

‘I didn’t,’ replied Keresztes. Just then Fuchs walked back
into the classroom. Hidassy, who hadn’t missed a word of his eulogy on the
electron during the grenade scare, rounded on Fuchs. ‘How dare you leave the
classroom without my permission? Double detention.’ That lesson was the last
time they saw Keresztes. Two rumours made the rounds. One that the headmaster
had Keresztes on a retainer to stay away from school; the other that Keresztes’s
vanishing was due to having bet someone at Kobányá railway station that he
could headbutt the 4.15 from the Keleti, which didn’t stop at Kobányá, into
submission. Pataki definitely preferred the latter version and found the detail
verisimilar.

Fuchs had been doubly depressed by the double detention: he
had never had a detention and Hidassy, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, had
never given a detention.

As they left their punishment, Fuchs bent double with woe,
his briefcase pressed to his chest, Pataki, since there was no one else around
to witness it, felt compassion and tried to cheer Fuchs up. ‘It’s no use,’
moaned Fuchs, ‘I’ll never do the great stuff like you, selling grenades. No one
sits on you.’ Pataki strived to play down the kudos of arms-dealing but as they
waited for the tram, his sense of humour pushed in front of his compassion when
Fuchs suggested: ‘Look, couldn’t I help you sell some?’ Pataki looked
contemplative for a theatrical moment, then agreed. ‘Okay,’ he said.

Pataki outlined the hidden underground German arsenal he had
discovered which was brimming over with top SS gear, ammunition, weapons,
grenades etc., which would make the two of them a fortune.

‘What you need to bring is rope … a lot of rope, fifty feet.
A miner’s helmet or if you can’t get one, a very powerful torch. And lots of
sorrel.’

‘Sorrel?’

‘Yes. You know, the green stuff. Sorrel is the best thing to
pack explosives in; it relaxes them,’ elucidated Pataki with an infallibly
serious face. The rest of the way home, after he had farewelled Fuchs, Pataki
kept lapsing into laughter at the thought of Fuchs working his way through the
shopping list. And on the appointed Thursday, when Fuchs showed up at school
hidden under enormous coils of rope, a miner’s helmet at a rakish angle on his
head, carrying two huge baskets full of fresh green sorrel, Pataki was truly
afraid that he was going to injure himself or pass out. He had also primed the
rest of the class about the proposed weapons-quest, so there was universal
merriment, but it was the touch of the miner’s helmet, which must have potently
taxed Fuchs’s ingenuity, that finished Pataki off. He couldn’t control himself
and earned three detentions for inexplicable spasms of mirth. By the next
afternoon he had managed to compose himself as he read his Tompa.

* * *

The schoolish atmosphere at number 60 Andrássy út was
further heightened by an instruction, after he had been standing in the corner
for hours, to cover two sides of paper with his curriculum vitae. Pataki was
calm now, if not utterly confident of talking his way home that night. The
grenades he had actually sold would be long gone, deniable. A blanket refusal
to acknowledge them was the tactic there, and as for the subterranean German
arms cache, since there wasn’t one, he could reveal it as a schoolboy prank,
apologise profusely and go home. It was a pity he hadn’t had a chance to liaise
with Fuchs to harmonise their narratives, but he polished various emotional
stages, fear, incredulity, repentance, with a few stand-by lies in reserve.
Mentally, he adjusted the tones of denial and set the level of horrified
innocence he wanted to draw on at key junctures.

They were interrogated separately. Pataki was allowed to
sit, and this he did as respectfully and helpfully as humanely possible. His
interrogator was wearing the new blue-insignia uniform of the AVO and he
started off the session with: ‘Of course, we know all about you, Pataki.’
Pataki paid no heed to the contemptuous tone and smiled steadily, working on
the theory that smiling might reduce the chances of getting hit. The
interrogator looked at his life story with conspicuous disgust. He put it down
with what Pataki as a consummate dissimulator instantly spotted as an
artificial hiatus; he had the feeling that his interrogator wanted to go home.
It was nine o’ clock after all. ‘Fuchs has confessed everything about the
weapons. He told us you wanted to be his assistant in organising an armed
struggle… ‘No,’ said Pataki as uncontradictorily as possible, ‘there aren’t any
weapons, it’s…’ ‘What’s this then?’ asked the interrogator, slapping a German
sub-machine gun on the table. He counted the beats and said: ‘An oversized and
extremely impractical toothpick? Part of a lawnmower perhaps?’

Pataki found himself, for the first time in his life, out of
stock of any suitable fabrications. Were they going to frame him? Whatever was
going on he realised he wasn’t going to get any of the good lines. ‘But as I
said,’ continued the interrogator, ‘Fuchs has turned on his mouth. He explained
that you didn’t know anything, that he was just bringing you in to help
distribute. We’ve nipped this one in the bud, which is as well for you.’ Here
it is, thought Pataki seeing it coming, he wants to go home. ‘We know all about
you. That’s our job. But you’re young. We’re going to overlook this mistake
though it’s a weighty offence. We’re going to give you another chance.’
Whatever you say, thought Pataki. ‘You’re in the scouts, aren’t you?’ It wasn’t
a question.

They didn’t give him a lift back home. Andrássy út, bleak
and black as it was, looked tremendously beautiful to Pataki. He inhaled a
generous amount of night air. A poem about freedom was coming on, given his new
qualifications in valuing it. The prop with the gun had been a little crude, he
judged, but he had been really afraid they were going to stitch him up. But if
they deemed waving a gun necessary to get his co-operation, that was their
business.

Ladányi was then in charge of the scout troop. The other
Jesuits took part, but it was Ladányi’s principal duty, fitting enough, as he
had worked his way up through the ranks. He looked the part of the Jesuit, tall
with sober eyes that could gatecrash your thoughts. Pataki had to remind
himself that although Ladányi was dressed in black, he was still on probation;
there was some ridiculously long apprenticeship for the Society of Jesus,
advanced altar-kissing and so on.

‘I know you may find this hard to believe …’ Pataki began.

‘Let me guess: the AVO want you to spy on the troop,’
Ladányi volunteered.

‘Er … yes, frankly. How did you know?’

‘Someone would have to do it. Your fondness for getting into
trouble makes you the obvious choice. May I suggest copying out the troop’s
newsletter? It’ll save you a lot of time. Just give a little more space to any
particularly noteworthy knots, any really intriguing bonfires. Those people are
very keen on paperwork. Anything else?’

Pataki met Fuchs on the way to school a week later, the
first time he had seen him since their joint incarceration. Fuchs seemed
terribly frightened and upset to see him. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were joking
about those guns: that’s why I took them to the caverns; but I think I managed
to convince them it was me who found them. I’m sorry.’

Pataki and Fuchs never talked about it again. They never really talked again. And Pataki certainly never talked about
it with anyone else. But he noticed that people didn’t sit on Fuchs any more.

September 1948

The ant-training had been typical. Gyuri knew he should be
studying much harder. Unlike all previous exams, whose certificates of
importance he had never found convincing, this was frighteningly,
windpipe-constrictingly important, and he really should have been studying much
harder. He had wanted to study much harder. The intention had been beautifully
formed, it had been everything an intention should be, but it remained an
understudy, never getting on stage.

He had rowed out on his own to a quiet stretch of Margit
Island with a whole boatful of textbooks, leaving no clue as to his
whereabouts. It was just him and the mathematics. One on one. Lying in the heat
of the elderly summer, Gyuri opened the books to lay himself bare to calculus,
to bask in the equations, but while his tan deepened, somehow his erudition
didn’t. He felt cheated. Like jumping off a cliff, he had hurled himself at the
distant algebra, but instead of plummeting down to impact with those formulae,
he just hovered above, aloft, some covert anti-gravity repelling him from the
maths.

Relishing the unrationed sunshine, he succumbed to a bout of
ant-shepherding. Prior to this, his only dealings with ants had been stepping
on them, either by accident or squashing them when they invaded his possessions
or edibles. He had partitioned himself at the intersection of a number of
formic caravan routes and spent the better part of three hours devising
olympianly a series of obstacles and tests for the ants with the aid of twigs,
leaves and extracts from his lunch sandwiches. He toyed with the idea of
becoming a great entomologist, a world-leading zoologist. As far as he knew,
biology was an area unpolluted by Marx though some of his disciples, like
Lysenko, had tried to make up for Marx’s silence on the phyla.