‘We can talk about that jazz record of yours,’ replied Pataki, patiently shuffling the cards.
Róka, as the son of a prominent Lutheran bishop, was the carriage authority on all matters ecclesiastical, plus Horace’s odes. Every time Róka’s father had seen one of his three children, he had greeted them with a line from Horace; the offspring had been enjoined to respond with the subsequent line, on pain of an imminent clip around the ear. The bishop was not completely severe. A slice of chocolate cake was on offer for anyone who could catch him out on Horace’s texts; Róka claimed he had never eaten chocolate cake until he was sixteen.
Like Gyuri, Róka was class-x. But Róka seemed unperturbed by this, and certainly didn’t allow his political handicap to interfere with his mission in life. Methodically, he scanned the platforms at Szeged station for any woman who had the sort of look on her face which suggested that she might be thinking about a vertical liaison against a secluded wall with a basketball player en route to Makó. Aside from his interminable hormones, Róka had also acquired a haul of excellent (i.e. Western) jazz records that was now almost entirely in Pataki’s clutches, and he was looking out in the hope of a deliverance that might prevent another disc from taking up residence in Pataki’s collection. Róka’s countenance grimly, faultlessly, registered the absence of a woman under sixty at Szeged ’s railway station.
‘We haven’t blessed Szeged, have we?’ remarked Bánhegyi. It was childish, but cheap, and sometimes amusing. Katona leaned out of a window further along, so he could capture the scene while, as the train pulled out of the station, Róka, Gyurkovics, Demeter and Pataki promoted their posteriors up against the carriage window next to the platform. A gallery of photographs starring bewildered or outraged rail passengers from all over Hungary adorned the carriage walls.
Szeged was a little disappointing. One elderly ticket-inspector got the full blast of the four-bum salute but she remained unmoved. Myopia perhaps, or an overdose of war; it looked very much as if some misfortune had spooned the zest out of her. Or possibly they were inured to basketball teams in Szeged.
Gyuri looked out on the river as they crossed over, still ruminating on the attractions of being a streetsweeper. ‘The border’s too far to walk from here,’ said Pataki, continuing to preside over the impoverishment of his team-mates. ‘Make your break from Makó.’
Gyuri’s aspirations, though he had never opened them up, dripped out over time and had been fully divined by the others. Keeping secrets from those you travelled around with naked wasn’t easy. ‘It’s really not that wonderful out there, Gyuri.’ Gyurkovics kept on repeating this. Gyurkovics was a liar – not in the same league as Pataki but competent. But while Pataki turned on the falsehood principally for entertainment and only used it as a shield at the last resort, with Gyurkovics you knew as soon as his enamels parted, his lying was to exile the truth.
Gyurkovics had got out. In ’47, before the borders had been sealed up tighter than a louse’s arse, Gyurkovics went off to Vienna. It had been about the same time that Gyuri had gone to see Pataki about skipping the country. Wearing newspaper for underwear, Gyuri was spending most of his time worrying about when his next foodstuff would be making its appearance. He had been going upstairs in the hope of catching lunchtime in the Pataki household when he bumped into Pataki coming down the stairway. Pataki was wearing his US Army sunglasses (clandestinely obtained and one of only a dozen pairs in the whole of Hungary). Pataki was better off in that his loins weren’t girded with newsprint and he had a mother and an employed father to assist him in the obtaining of meals. But Gyuri doubted that was the crucial factor. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get out of this country,’ Gyuri had urged. Pataki paused, mentally fingering the proposal. ‘No,’ he said, ‘let’s go rowing.’ That had been that. Gyuri had no doubt that if it had been yes, they would have strolled down to the station without any ado, but it had been no and a saunter to the boathouse.
Gyurkovics however had snapped the homeland umbilical cord, but incredibly had returned six months later, when there were even fewer reasons to return. He had an uncle in Vienna, who from Budapest looked immeasurably rich, having coined it in the shoe business. Many an evening had been spent in the throes of unrestrained envy, but Gyurkovics had reappeared looking gloomy and sporting an unimpressive suit. The rumour had been that only insanity or murder could have brought him back; his brother had passed out the truth. Gyurkovics had demolished the shoe empire. In his suicide note, Gyurkovics’s uncle had written: ‘You have incredible gifts – anyone who can destroy an enterprise built up over forty years with love, diligence, early rising and an unequalled regard for the customer, in the space of a few weeks, has extraordinary talents. I trust that one day these powers will be harnessed for the benefit of mankind.’
Still biding his time with a bit of basketball before redeeming humanity, Gyurkovics played down the West. Probably there were further embarrassments littered around Vienna that he didn’t want any acquaintances to chance on. Besides, this stretch of border around Makó wasn’t worth the effort of crossing it. Who wanted to go to Yugoslavia or Rumania? Both red star affairs. Yugoslavia – a bunch of knife wielding Serbs and Rumania…
Gyuri had been miffed at not going on the Rumanian tour. Okay, Rumania wasn’t really a country, but it wasn’t Hungary and it was infuriating that bourgeois lineage should have deprived him of the trip when crypto-fascists and rotten decadents like Róka and Pataki had gone. They had wanted the team to win, so they couldn’t leave Pataki behind, but they didn’t want anyone too class-x passing the ball to him. By some incomprehensible ministerial process the level of class-x in Róka had been deemed more acceptable than his.
Rumania hadn’t had a good press though. Years before, Józsi from the ground floor had returned from a summer holiday visiting relatives in Transylvania and recounted in horrified tones: ‘They actually fuck ducks. I’m not joking, I saw it’. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pataki had riposted, ‘it must have been a goose.’ Józsi had seemed genuinely aghast and when you thought about how all the great Hungarian generals, all the true hard men of Hungarian history had come from Transylvania, it seemed plausible that rising in the morning to discover your neighbour with his breeches around his ankles making some fowl howl could toughen you up.
Gyuri had also quizzed István, who had been the last soldier out of Kolozsvar, ‘the last but the fastest’, about Rumania. István just laughed and carried on laughing. Elek, who had taken the Orient Express to do business in Bucharest before the war, when he heard that Gyuri was angling to get on the Rumanian tour, commented: ‘My son is an imbecile. This is the cruellest blow.’
Still, Gyuri was subjected to an air of distinct smugness as the others made their preparations to depart for Rumania. Róka managed to acquire a Rumanian phrase, which he went round chanting all day, which, he believed, translated roughly as ‘put your hole on my pole’. Pataki packed extra toilet paper and took a small, aged guide book on Rumanian gastronomic delights.
They went, they saw, they lost, but at least they came back. Gyuri had met the returning train at the Keleti railway station.
Róka was the first off. Always reedy, he had noticeably lost weight, a skeleton painted a white skin colour, totally out of place for August. ‘Let me put it this way,’ Róka summed up, ‘if you gave me the choice of spending two weeks in the waiting room here at the Keleti, with nothing to eat, or a night in Bucharest’s best hotel, I wouldn’t have to think very hard about it.’