Tibor Fischer: Under the Frog

© 1992

It was true that at the age of twenty-five he had never left the country, that he had never got more than three days’ march from his birthplace, no more than a day and a half of horse and carting or one long afternoon’s locomoting. On the other hand, Gyuri mused, how many people could say they had travelled the length and breadth of Hungary naked?

They always travelled naked. He couldn’t remember how or why this started, but it had become the irrefrangible rule for the Locomotive team as they traversed the nation for their matches. They always travelled in their luxury wagon (custom-built by Hungarian railways for the Waffen SS to facilitate them in their Europe-wide art-looting, and well known to the authorities on rolling-stock as a peerless carriage for riding the rails) and they always travelled naked.

Róka, Gyurkovics, Demeter, Bánhegyi and Pataki were playing cards on the mahogany dining-table, an ex-antique (according to Bánhegyi, who had served in his father’s removal business) it had been mutilated out of value by years of liquid rings, inadvertent and advertent lacerations, the burrowing of burning tobacco. Left as an object unsuited for pocketing in time of rout, the table had been proudly kept by the Locomotive team despite its great (if progressively diminishing) value as a symbol of corporate excellence.

Who was grassing? Who was the informer?

Róka was shifting about, as if uncomfortable: because he was being tapped of his money like a rubber tree and because of the commotion in his blood stream.

Basketball, for Róka, was essentially an aid in disseminating his chromosomes across the country. Basketball, and in fact any activity that got Róka out the front door, served as a bridge between him and members of the opposite sex. Abstention from sexual relations for anything longer than twenty-four hours would result in Róka getting extremely agitated, and doing things like running around in small figures of eight, ululating. Even in a habitat like the Locomotive carriage where women were over-represented in the conversation, Róka’s devotion to gamic convolutions was remarkable.

But Róka was too decent to be a brick in their wall.

That is, Róka was good-hearted, and Gyuri, like everyone else, liked him. So it was hard to imagine him as a delator, grassing up the team. Indeed, it was hard to imagine anyone in the team snitching. Except Peter. But as the only card-carrier Peter was surely too obvious. Pataki, he had known from the age when you start knowing. Gyuri couldn’t see any of the team informing. Demeter – too much of a gentleman. Bánhegyi – too jolly. Gyurkovics – too unorganised. And all the others were… singularly uninformer-like. However, Gyuri contemplated, turning the proposition on its head, perhaps it was Róka’s decency that had snared him. If you don’t do this, we do that to your motherfathersisterbrother.

As always, when Róka wasn’t humping, he consoled himself by talking about it: ‘So I explained to her it was okay by me.’ That was Róka. He wasn’t elitist. He was generous, egalitarian. He scorned petty bourgeois concepts such as beauty, desirability, and youth. He was relating his tryst with a recent conquest, a lady whose attractiveness, he emphasised, was in no way impaired by her artificial arm. The denouement of Róka’s anecdote was that the lady had become dismembered and Róka had found himself with an extensive annex to his tool. This, apparently, had occasioned great distress to the lady, despite Rolca’s chivalrous assurances that it could happen to anyone with an artificial arm.

Nevertheless, the chief punchline, Gyuri sensed, hadn’t been reached when the narration was guillotined by Róka’s fury at losing a heavily-wagered hand to Pataki. Gyuri wasn’t playing cards, because he found it boring, and additionally, Pataki always won. They only played for small amounts of money but as he only possessed very small amounts of money, he didn’t see why he should hand it over to Pataki. It was a mysterious process, but an inevitable and obvious one, like droplets of rain guided down a window-pane, how all the currency gravitated towards Pataki. Pataki would lose a hand every now and then but it was at best courtesy and looked more like blatant entrapment.

Tired of trying to crack the problem of the informer, Gyuri settled down to think about being a streetsweeper while he gazed out of the window at the countryside that went past quite lazily despite the train’s billing as an express. The streetsweeper was a sort of cerebral chewing gum that Gyuri popped in on long journeys. A streetsweeper. Where? A streetsweeper in London. Or New York. Or Cleveland; he wasn’t that fussy. Some modest streetsweeping anywhere. Anywhere in the West. Anywhere outside. Any job. No matter how menial, a windowcleaner, a dustman, a labourer: you could just do it, just carry out your job and you wouldn’t need an examination in Marxism- Leninism, you wouldn’t have to look at pictures of Rákosi or whoever had superbriganded their way to the top lately. You wouldn’t have to hear about gambolling production figures, going up by leaps and bounds, higher even than the Plan had predicted because the power of Socialist production had been underestimated. Being a streetsweeper would be quite agreeable, Gyuri reflected. You’d be out in the open, doing healthy work, seeing things. It was the very humility of this fantasy, its frugality that gave the greatest pleasure, since Gyuri hoped this could facilitate its coming to pass. It wasn’t as if he were pestering Providence for a millionaireship or to be handed the presidency of the United States. How could anyone refuse a request to be a streetsweeper? Just pull me out. Just pull me out. Apart from the prevailing political inclemency and the ubiquitous shittiness of life, the simple absurdity of never having voyaged more than two hundred kilometres from the spot where he had bailed out of the womb rankled.

The train went into a slower kind of slow, signalling that they were arriving in Szeged. This was, he knew from his research, 171 kilometres from Budapest.

Just next to the railway station in Szeged was a high, redbrick building which now advertised itself as a hotel. It had been, as everyone knew, one of the most renowned brothels in Hungary before such dens of capitalist iniquity were closed down. Town, gown, yokels in their Sunday best (only worn at church, in a coffin, or at the knocking shop), commercial salesmen and royalty (admittedly only the Balkan variety) had all made their way through its portals.

There was no doubt that it was pure hotel now. The girls would have been dispersed to some more dignified toil. Gyuri recalled the Party Secretary at the Ganz works making quite a ceremony out of it when the factory had taken on four night butterflies. Welcoming the new arrivals, Lakatos had launched into a heated denunciation of how the loathsome capitalist system had dragged these unfortunates into the lustful sweatshops of hypocritical bourgeois depravity. How capitalism had perpetuated the droit de seigneur, how capitalism had taken young male proletarians to be slaughtered in wars for markets and how their sisters were thrust into strumpetry. It had been, especially for Lakatos, a sterling performance. He had obviously read it somewhere; he was probably parroting a section in the Party secretary’s manual, ‘upon receiving former whores on the shopfloor’. The girls had listened to Lakatos’s fulminations demurely, wearing factory overalls. The diatribe had ended with Lakatos wiping the rhetorically-induced sweat from his brow and disappearing into his office while the girls had been led off to learn the ropes.