However, in other ways Father Jenik was the traditional avuncular priest, always rolling up your sleeve to check your spiritual pulse, working his way through the club regulations: attendance at mass, confessions, observance of holy days. Ladányi would never mention religion, unless you brought it up or it cropped up naturally in the course of conversation. There was no badgering, no impresario-like push to get bums on seats, no ticking off a list with Ladányi. He seemed unconcerned whether you turned up or not and this was what was so pernicious. Gyuri had dropped church much in the same way as he had stopped believing in Santa Claus; there came a point where it was impossible to take it seriously. And that was what was so worrying about Ladányi. He was so clever, he had a bird’s eye view of everyone’s actions – even Pataki wouldn’t try modifying reality with Ladányi, because Ladányi would have read your diary before you’d written it. Gyuri couldn’t help feeling when he was doing something totally trivial like cleaning the bathtub or buying some groceries that it was all part of some master-plan, that cleaning the bathtub and buying groceries were all part of Ladányi’s machinations (it was just that he was unaware of it) and that one day he would wake up wearing black with a white collar.
Perhaps because of his order, perhaps because of his Ladányiness, Ladányi operated quietly. The summer before, in an excess of compliance, Gyuri had offered Katalin Takács to pick up her new dress from the dressmaker. It was bruited by her changing room companions that she had no pubic hair. So he journeyed out to the dressmaker, helping to dress the girl he wanted to undress to verify the canard about her cat.
The favour was a double goodwill since the dressmaker lived in the Angyalföld, off the Váci út. It was said that when the American Liberators had carpet-bombed Angyalföld at the end of ’44 by mistake as they searched for the factories on Csepel Island, no one had minded because no one could tell the difference. It was also maintained that both the Waffen SS and the Red Army had stayed out of the Angyalföld because they hadn’t wanted any trouble.
Although Gyuri knew Budapest well, he had never ventured into the Angyalföld and was flabbergasted to discover that the stories were true. Having quit the tram, he passed people lying in gutters, like piles of autumnal leaves in smarter quarters, booze having severed their relations with the known universe. As he walked along, he was regarded with an unconcealed hatred by groups of natives milling around; reflexive dislike and aggression he had experienced before but never with such cannibalistic fervour. Gyuri had considered, before setting out that morning, pocketing a knife on account of Angyalföld’s notoriety but as he turned the corner into Jasz utca, he couldn’t help noticing two men fighting with what could only be described as cutlasses, long heavy swords of the type favoured by Hollywood pirates. A semi-circle of barefoot spectators were monitoring, not greatly impressed by the quality of the hacking. Carrying a knife wouldn’t have helped, the result would have been that he would have had his knife stolen as a supplement to getting stabbed, and a good knife like everything else was hard to get in those days.
Gyuri had lots of time to ruminate on how his untimely, unremarked demise on the streets of the Angyalföld would be due to his yearning to let his gaze ski down Katalin’s smooth slopes, killed by curiosity about a bald cat. He had also ruminated on his way up to the fifth floor, how people he visited always lived on the fifth floor of liftless buildings. The dressmaker, a sprightly lady of eighty plus, clearly of the work-twelve-hours-a-day-till-you-drop variety, and who was cosily unaware of what went on in the rest of Angyalföld, congratulated Gyuri on the cut of his trousers. The trousers were the last pair of Elek’s Savile Row trousers, indeed the only fully-qualified trousers that Elek had left, lent to Gyuri since Elek had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t getting out of bed that day, or that should he rise, he wouldn’t be progressing beyond the armchair. The dressmaker bustled away to prepare the dress for its journey while Gyuri reflected how sad it was that she couldn’t bequeath her industry to him.
It was as he rushed back to the tram that he chanced on Ladányi talking with some of the Angyalföld’s denizens patiently listening to him. They patently considered Ladányi as someone who had stepped down from the moon. Ladányi seemed slightly peeved at being caught in the act of doing good, but he accompanied Gyuri to the tram and reluctantly disclosed that he haunted Angyalföld before the first mass of the day. It was the sheer lunacy of his faith, Gyuri thought, that enabled Ladányi to leave with all his physical workings intact. Greatly relieved at having emerged from Angyalföld with his functions uninhibited, Gyuri was waiting outside the Nyugati station to change trams to deliver the dress, when a group of five youths his age came up and one, without any preamble, with a pair of scissors, swiftly cut the tie Gyuri was wearing, the last of Elek’s silk ties, the last of Elek’s ties and the only tie then residing in the Fischer household. The trimmer then handed over the snipped sections to Gyuri with the invocation: ‘Cerulean’.
At that point Gyuri recalled there was a vogue in Budapest, particularly amongst those who went round in fists of five, for prowling the boulevards with a pair of scissors to amputate ties and then to say ‘cerulean’. The tie hadn’t been a great tie, the design hadn’t really been to Gyuri’s taste and there had been of late a painfully visible soup stain on it, but the desire to punch the scissor-operator in the mouth had been quite breathtaking in its intensity, especially since he was clearly expecting Gyuri to have a laugh over the dividing of his tie. Gyuri thought how much he would enjoy punching him in the mouth, then he thought how much he wouldn’t enjoy getting it back as a fivefold minimum. He resorted to what he hoped was a look of contempt. The five got on the next tram remarking how some people had no sense of humour.
When, at Faragó’s suggestion, they switched to chocolate ice cream, Gyuri knew it was all over.
Ladányi and Faragó had warmed up with a couple of litres of bean soup before moving on to the main course – fried chicken – its consumption meticulously measured on the scales. ‘We in Hálás have always been famous for our fried chicken,’ Faragó rambled on, ‘and now under socialism, the fried chicken is even more fried.’ He reached for a plate of slender green tubes. ‘The paprika is optional,’ he announced loading a couple into his mouth.
Three kilos into the chicken, Faragó began to sweat, though whether this was due to gastronomic exertion or the calorific effects of the paprika it was hard to judge. He was also beginning to look uneasy, perhaps because it was dawning on him that the reports of the Jesuit’s unearthly wolfing had some foundation. Faragó was oozing effort while Ladányi was methodically and calmly stripping drumsticks with such ease that he hadn’t taken the trouble of dialling his willpower yet.