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.
The fascination of the ants had run unabated as long as there was no other distraction from the maths. Mathematics had this to recommend it, if nothing else: it made everything else, ants, English, push-ups, ironing, washing-up, beguiling and wonderful. Whole new galaxies of interests had popped open now that the maths exam was drawing close; anything unconnected with maths was irresistible.
He rowed back to the boat-house to discover that Pataki had been sculling up and down the Danube looking for him in a fruitless attempt to gloat over his revision.
Gyuri lugged the maths books home. He was used to carrying the heavy weight about as a sort of tandem intellectual and physical toning, helping his stamina and also, he hoped, the proximity of the knowledge would help it to spill out on him. There were many dogs in Budapest that weren’t as well-walked as his maths textbooks. Entering the flat, Gyuri noted that Pataki wasn’t around, because Elek was on his own. Pataki had taken to frequenting the Fischer flat, because he found Elek most congenial, as unlike Pataki’s father, Elek had no objection to Pataki smoking; indeed, he would hoard up cigarettes, ear-marking sole survivors of a delivery to be reserved for an appearance by Pataki.
More and more often Gyuri would return from training or a run to find Elek and Pataki in a nicotine partnership, making the most of scanty tobacco; Elek usually testifying to the callipygian glories of a set of buttocks he had encountered as long as four decades ago. Gyuri didn’t smoke. The odds against him playing first-division basketball were already so great that he couldn’t afford any handicap however small, so he didn’t begrudge the extrafamilial sharing of the cigarettes.
What was irritating was Elek’s equanimity.
Elek would now be regularly on duty in the large armchair which was almost the last remnant of their prewar furniture, indeed virtually the last of their prewar property. Stationing himself in this armchair, abetted by a cigarette if available, Elek looked unbelievably good for a man completely ruined. His hair and moustache were so disciplined it was as if they had been sculpted into place; however the grey pullover which was now the core of his wardrobe did have two impossible-to-miss holes. Other men having seen all their assets evaporate overnight, especially having an entire fortune fly by night, would have protested bitterly at the unseen forces reducing their wealth to the small change in their trouser pockets. Destitute at the age of sixty, even allowing for the common denominator of a world war and vast industries of suffering and misery, you would have expected some cursing and shrieking. A gnawing of fists. A denouncing of higher powers.
But Elek didn’t issue any unseemly lamentations. He simply sat in the armchair, at ease, as if enjoying a day off. He tried to resurrect his fortunes after the war, and more crucially, after the hyper-inflation, which Hungarians proudly pointed out had been the fastest and greatest in economic history. Once the inflation was over, Elek went to the bank where he had deposited millions, emptied his unfrozen account and bought a loaf of bread, hardly getting any change back. The gutters of Budapest had been clogged with discarded banknotes, the fallen leaves of an old order.
What tortured Gyuri even more than Elek’s tranquillity, what racked him night and day, was the sheer inanity of the loss. It could have been so different, a tiny stash in Switzerland, a loose gold ingot buried in a field, some well-cached jewellery and things would have been different enough for them to eat and even eat well. But everything had gone in what would amount to no more than, at best, an eyebrow raising footnote in abstruse economic journals.
Funnily enough for a bookie who had made a very good living out of people losing their money on horses, Elek’s first ventures to recoup some money saw him going to the track for a string of flutters. Gyuri could distinctly remember Elek before the war coming home with the takings from the races (in a small brown suitcase, the money all jumbled up for Elek’s staff to sort out) and exclaiming: ‘Human folly- it’s the business to be in. You can’t go wrong.’ His turf accountancy riches had been less the result of his astuteness than the fact of bookmaking being a virtual monopoly and one of his old army chums being responsible for handing out the licences. Nevertheless, incited perhaps by his inside knowledge, Elek remained adamant that the gee-gees would provide, if not a regular income, a start-up capital for some future, nameless, hardship-solving enterprise.
Elek’s excursions to the track were, in the main, shirt-losing exercises but now and then he must have won since there were evenings when there was something to eat. More direct action took place too. One day Gyuri came home to find that his books, all his books, were gone; all that was remained was a patch of lighter wallpaper ‘I had to sell them,’ Elek replied to Gyuri’s inquiry: ‘we have to eat you know.’ Which was fine, but Elek could have asked first, and the galling thing was not that the books were gone but that whatever the going market value of his library was Elek would have been bamboozled and only got a tenth of it. Elek’s business sense, if he ever had any, seemed to have been mislaid somewhere during the war. The grocery shop that he had run for a month was the best example; it nearly destroyed the family because they had to rise before dawn to buy stock and not only did they not make any money, they lost it. They lost a staggering amount, more than if they had just jettisoned the greens in the street. Grocers weren’t keen on other people becoming grocers.