Also, one had to respect suicide as the national pastime, as the vice Hungarian. Gyuri wasn’t up to date on how suicide was progressing under socialism, it could well have been abolished but the popularity of doing-it-yourself couldn’t entirely be laid at the door of Rákosi & Co. For centuries, Hungarians of quality and quantity, who hadn’t managed to be part of Hungarian armies that got wiped out, had been blowing their brains out or uncaging their souls in other ways. Yes, a few idle minutes, some melancholy music and a Hungarian would be trying to unplug himself. And not just the nobility- Hungarian maids in Vienna had been notorious for their fondness for bleaching their entrails.
The tram deposited Gyuri in front of the monstrous Ganz Electrical Works but he was the only one the tram off-loaded who made his way through the entrance of Ganz; all the other workers had arrived much earlier, before the shift had started.
Of course, Gyuri thought, the Hungarian propensity for suicide might stem from their other great proclivity: their love of complaining. Who better to complain to than the chief architect? Go to the top, go meet your maker and give him an earful about the shortcomings of the universe. There was probably a dirty great queue of Hungarians outside God’s office ready to remonstrate.
As Gyuri entered the main yard, he passed a board which was bedecked with amateurish red decorations and which had a heading ‘Socialist Brigades’. Underneath were lesser signs such as ‘ Guernica ’, ‘Dimitrov’ and ‘Béla Kun’, presiding over wonderful production figures and grainy black and white photographs of sheepishly pleased and self-conscious lathe-operators lathe-operating. These photographs didn’t change. Alongside these displays was an elegantly penned scroll, ‘Hungarian-Soviet Friendship Society’, heading a series of ailing black and white photographs of Soviet lathe-operators watching Hungarian lathe-operators lathe-operate with avuncular, elder-brotherly encouragement, and photographs of Hungarian lathe-operators watching Soviet lathe-operators lathe-operate, with younger-brother wide-eyed admiration. There was no seasonal variation in these pictures either.
Not far from these displays, but diametrically opposed to them, on the other side of the yard, was an enormous caricature of US President Harry Truman made out of card. At the foot of this caricature was a board with the inscription ‘FRIENDS OF TRUMAN’ in wobbly calligraphy, and in less bold lettering ‘I’m out to destroy the gains of the people of democratic Hungary, please help me by taking it easy. My thanks.’ On the board, which looked like an old situations vacant notice that used to be hung outside the factory, various names had been inserted. There wasn’t much seasonal variation in this either. Top of the list was Pataki, Tibor, followed by Fischer, Gyorgy (Gyuri could never fathom how Pataki had managed to get top billing once again) with one or two other more mutable names, Nemeth, Sándor or Kovrig, Laszlo. Unknown but agreeable figures to Gyuri.
This pillorying was attributable chiefly to the reluctance of Pataki and himself to come to work any earlier than was truly necessary to avoid dismissal. Gyuri didn’t care too much about President Truman’s friendship (though he did wonder if he ever got to the United States whether the amity would stand him in good stead there), largely because there were few additional penalties to having your name publicly associated with the President of the United States (and Gombás could deal with them). The juxtaposition of names was clearly deemed by the agit-prop department to be sufficiently shameful to obviate the need for further reprimand.
Being class-x, being a class alien, Gyuri really couldn’t be much worse off; he was starting from the back of the queue for the goodies (had there been any in the first place). Apart from the obvious problems of having class-x stamped on the moral credentials you had to produce every time you wanted a job, a place at university or more or less anything, what was so grossly unfair and infuriating about being labelled as the son of a bourgeois family, was that Elek was so profoundly, all-round unbourgeois. Aside from the profession of bookmaking not being the most highly regarded of careers in canapé circles, there was the whole weight of the old morphinist’s behaviour: molesting widows and chambermaids, carrying a cosh, shooting up. He had always instructed his employees to call him Elek (which in itself had been tantamount to membership of the Communist Party in the eyes of his fellow capitalists) and gave them afternoons off if the weather had been outstandingly good or if he felt like treating his torticollis with some morphine (although it had been evident for years that the dope didn’t do his neck any good – just as the hypnotist had failed but Elek had only given him one go. The hypnotist had brandished his pendulum and chanted ‘You are in a deep, deep sleep’ for ten minutes after which Elek had said ‘No, I’m not. Are you planning to charge for this?’). And then, when he lost all his money, instead of trying to recoup his losses, going out to toil dutifully in the respectable bourgeois way, Elek just sat around contentedly in his armchair, wearing his lacunar pullover, his neck cricked, grappling with the theoretical questions of how to get a cigarette. Bourgeois and Elek didn’t mix. Agreed: he had some money at one point, but that had been a long time ago, before Gyuri was old enough to use it.
‘What I’m giving you is priceless,’ Elek had said, holding court in his armchair that morning. ‘I’m giving you your independence. You’re making your own way. You owe me nothing. Whatever you achieve you can say “I made it on my own”. You’re not weighed down by an over-solicitous father. You have no towering figure of paternal success to intimidate you. How many people can say that? You’re a talented acorn that can grow without fear of the shade of a great oak.’
The curious thing about Elek was that the less active he became, the less he slept, thus ensuring his availability to give Gyuri the benefit of his thoughts as Gyuri got ready to go to work. ‘You see, István, for example, will always have the disadvantages of everything that money could buy.’ István, in practice, was bearing up beneath that burden rather well. He had returned at the end of ’45, with a dozen chums who disembarked from the prisoner of war camp in Denmark where they had been guarding themselves, carrying two thousand cigarettes and fluent in fifteen languages. Before things grimmed up, István had managed to get a job in the Ministry of Agriculture where he had got to know everything there was to know about sugar. Because he was unobtrusively junior and because they had to retain some people at the Ministry who knew something about agriculture, he had been magnanimously tolerated.
István had laughed about it all, as he did about everything. Always of a jovial disposition, he had returned from his years on the Russian front, with one important souvenir: the inability to get worked up about things that weren’t three years on the Russian front. You could tell István things like, you had gone to a restaurant and contracted hepatitis, you were going to be conscripted into the army, you had just been jilted by the girl who was more important to you at that moment than life and that you wanted to fold up and die, and István would just chuckle or if you looked really miserable, guffaw loudly.
István had reappeared in Budapest the day after they had been burgled.There hadn’t been much left to steal after the Red Army had manoeuvred back and forth across the flat a couple of times and furniture had been traded for food. István had walked in as if he had just returned from the corner-shop to find Gyuri dazed by the inexhaustibility of their misfortune. István immediately went out again, and the next morning all the missing items were piled up outside the front door with a note apologising that the dust pan left wasn’t the original but hoping the replacement would live up to expectations and wishing the family good health. The only other survivor from István’s artillery unit it turned out, was one of the master burglars of Budapest who had been greatly peeved to hear that his commanding officer’s family should have suffered such an indignity. There was only one question that István asked when you started to reconstruct some tribulation: ‘What did you do about it?’