Tibor Fischer - Under the Frog

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Fekete had said, shaking his hand warmly and giving the rippling-biceped smile of a former showman. ‘I’m in a terrible rush, but a copy of the Plan is in my office. Do help yourself.’ That was the only time Gyuri saw Fekete mainly because Fekete only came into the office when he needed was a convenient site for his extramarital ventures, and also because there wasn’t anything to discuss.

Gyuri went to Fekete’s office and with the aid of one of his secretaries who had come in that day to water the plants, searched it thoroughly. No sign of the Plan. Because he was new to the job, feeling inquisitive, and slightly intoxicated by his responsibility, Gyuri decided to phone the Ministry to get some information.

He talked to three people before he realised that simply finding out what he was supposed to be doing would exhaust him and would be going well beyond the call of duty. Gyuri counted, for his own amusement, that he explained twenty-two times that he was phoning from the Feather Processing Enterprise and he wished to obtain correct and up-to-date figures for the Plan, finally, he was connected to a voice whose hostility and reticence convinced him that he had at last reached the right person in the right department.

‘You expect me to tell you all this on the phone?’ reiterated the irate voice. ‘How do I know you’re not an American spy?’

‘Look at it this way,’ said Gyuri, chewing over this epistemological doubt, ‘would an American spy tell you to fuck your mother?’

Ashamed of having tried to do his job, Gyuri had sauntered out of the plant. Passing through the guard’s lodge at the entrance, his eye had been drawn to the vigilant defender of proletarian power vivisecting some dog-ends on his table to frankenstein together a new cigarette. Gyuri noticed that the guard was tearing off a leaf of paper from a document entitled, The Hungarian Feather Processing Enterprise: Revised Five-Year Plan Figures, 1955.

When in doubt, go home, go to bed, Gyuri thought. He had had a restless night fretting over the prospect of the disciplinary session and elaborating his defence, reckoning the tribunal would be the occasion for a backlog of overdue bad luck to unload on him. He opted to go home and file himself between the sheets.

He found Elek trying to persuade some used ground coffee to do an encore and produce more black soup. ‘You’ve just missed Jadwiga,’ he said. ‘She’s come up to Budapest for the demonstration.’ Gyuri swivelled on his heel and went out.

From the other side of the river, he saw the crowd around the Bern statue as he started to cross the Margit Bridge. Bern had been the Polish General who was confused about which revolution he was in, and zealously led the Hungarian Army of Independence in 1848 against the Habsburgs and led it very successfully, until the Russians were called in and the Army of Independence proved how Hungarian it was by getting wiped out. But at least it went down to vastly superior forces, though, apocryphally, when he heard that the ten-times-greater Russian force was attacking, Bern had remarked: ‘Good, I was worried they’d get away.’

The students had chosen to gather around Bern, since one of the goals of the demonstration was to express their approval of the political changes in Poland (Jadwiga had gone on about them with great enthusiasm) which were the sort of changes they wanted in Hungary: a friendly, ideology-next-door, happy-go-lucky sort of Communism. They didn’t seem alone in this wish.

Not only was the Bern square a lawn of heads but the entire embankment around it was one huge dollop of humanity. Thirty, forty thousand people and more drifting in at the edges. It was a vomiting up of an indigestible system. It had all the makings of uncontrollability.

‘Gyuri!’ He turned around to see Laci with two friends who were carrying a huge Hungarian flag. It was the first occasion Gyuri could recall that he had experienced the sensation of feeling old, gazing enviously on those younger than himself, those who hadn’t expended their optimism and could believe that carrying a flag around could change things.

‘Jadwiga’s here somewhere,’ said Laci, looking back at the crowd. ‘She’s here with some friends from Szeged.’ Gyuri surveyed the throng. It could take him the rest of the day to find her if their destinies weren’t synchronised.

‘I must congratulate you. I never thought I’d ever see anything like this’ commented Gyuri, taken aback by the scale of the protest. ‘Have you seen the sixteen points?’ asked Laci, unfolding a sheet of paper and passing it to Gyuri. ‘We started drawing them up yesterday at the University and we just kept going.’

The first demand that Gyuri read was for a change in the leadership of the Hungarian Working People’s Party. That was the sort of thing that, say in 1950, just thinking about it would have got you a ten-year stretch in an unlit cellar with swollen kidneys and icy water up to your knees. Now, what with Stalin smelling the violets by their roots, and Uncle Nikita rubbishing all his predecessors, that sort of thing was negotiable if you were accompanied by a very, very large crowd. The Communist movement, in the best tradition of bankrupt capitalists, was highly adept at changing name and premises and continuing to trade under a new veneer.

The demands grew more demanding. Imre Nagy in, Soviet troops out. Free elections, free press. Gyuri wondered, Why not throw in a requirement for eternal life and compulsory millionaireships for all Hungarians? There was also a demand for the secret files on everyone to be opened up.

‘Good list,’ he said. ‘Good crowd.’

‘The authorities were against it till we started,’ said Laci, ‘but now we’ve got plenty of gatecrashers from the Party. I suppose they want it to look as if they were behind it.’

The idea of Jadwiga demonstrating against the Party had dismayed Gyuri greatly when he heard about it. Apart from the more physical risks such as beating or death, the threat of deportation had gnawed at his innards. Poland for him, as a member of the passportless masses, was as inaccessible as the South Pole. But he could see the crowd was too big to have problems. It was a crowd so huge you couldn’t shoot at it or try to disperse it. The leaders and speech-makers would doubtless be soon invited in to some subterranean cell for a little chat and damage to their structures. But on the streets, the crowd was too much: like an unwelcome relative coming to call, all you could do was humour it until it decided to go home. Everything would be all right as long as Jadwiga could restrain herself from haranguing the populace or reciting some inflammatory poetry. ‘We’re going off to the parliament now,’ said Laci, ‘we’re going to stay there until they make Imre Nagy Prime Minister again.’ Gyuri watched them walk off along the bridge. Laci was only four, five years younger than him, but his idealism made Gyuri feel like a grandfather. Strange how two brothers could contain so many differences and similarities. Pataki had always harnessed his intelligence to the service of his willy and winding people up as much as possible. Laci was self-effacing, studious; every time Gyuri had been in the Pataki flat Laci had been attached to a book, often extremely dull text-books. Though you didn’t notice him, he was always around. It had been no surprise when he won a scholarship to the University, a considerable achievement for someone whose father wasn’t in the Central Committee. However, his mischief had merely been more undercover, more insidious, biding its time. Laci hadn’t said anything about it but Gyuri was sure he was leading rather than following at the Technical University.

Scanning the crowd, Gyuri tried to catch a fragment of Jadwiga. He was heartened not to see her addressing the demonstrators with a loud-hailer. The people milling around were no longer predominantly students, the demonstration was snowballing: soldiers, old folk, nonentities, water-polo players, housewives, office staff, all those who saw the demonstration and the placards and who realised this wasn’t a stage-managed, Communist-led affair, that it wasn’t an out of season May Day, abandoned their business and joined in with an air of why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-before?