‘No,’ said Sulyok, shocked. ‘It was 1942.’
‘Oh. I see. It was the fascists who killed him. Listen, could you read that passage about him being tortured to death again? It’s worth hearing one more time.’ Gyuri wished Pataki didn’t have to be so Pataki all the time. Pataki had said all this with the seemingly straight face of someone curious to learn more about the setbacks of the workers’ movement, but Gyuri couldn’t believe that Pataki’s luck would be everlasting. The first day at work, Pataki had helped himself to a long length of copper wiring. ‘The State owes me,’ he asserted. Anyone else would have waited a few days to familiarise himself with the layout before sticking something to their fingers. And it wasn’t as if Pataki was in abject need- he always had supper waiting for him at home.
‘No, regrettably, comrades, we don’t have the time,’ Sulyok apologised, ‘The imperialists don’t rest; remember we have to harden our work discipline.’
‘Why not harden a horseprick up your arse?’ commented Tamás, not too softly, as he and Gyuri strolled back to the electrical engines. Loud enough to be heard, but quiet enough for Sulyok to be able to ignore it. Tamás could get away with this – who wanted to die? Tamás was incredibly good at killing people; he had a couple of Iron Crosses and an Order of Lenin to prove it.
He had been a great hit during the war, in a number of armies, starting with the Hungarians. He didn’t mind being dropped alone behind enemy lines, not eating anything but the odd rat whose head he had to bite off, sitting in puddles that were thinking about becoming ice (the little finger on his left hand had been peeled off by frostbite) and killing Russians until the cows came home. He was an enthusiast of the knife. ‘You know,’ he confided to Gyuri, ‘people don’t like being stabbed.’ After one mission, when he had spent two months dodging around behind Russian lines without resupply, he had been captured (no ammunition) and offered a job on the spot. ‘Killing Russians or killing Germans, you think I give a toss?’
Tamás was, Gyuri guessed, heading for forty, but he still had the sort of hard, well-defined muscles that would have socialist realist painters fighting for space. He was in charge of insulating the parts of the electrical engines that needed insulating. Gyuri didn’t understand it really, but since he really didn’t do anything, it didn’t matter. Tamás hauled the heavy parts up by chain and then immersed them in a vat full of chemicals which insulated the copper. Despite having been in attendance for months, Gyuri had no idea what the chemicals were or how the process worked. This was because Tamás did everything, while Gyuri watched him intently. It was supposed to be dangerous work and was by the standards of Ganz, well paid; i.e: you had change in your pocket after you had eaten.
What Gyuri was paid for boiled down to listening to Tamás’s adventures, recent and ancient, which Tamás would recount without a break as he hauled electrical engines up and down. Tamás had a lot of adventures, chiefly because he didn’t seem to sleep very much. He had no fixed abode and looked on renting a room as a waste of money. He slept the three or four hours he needed in some only very noisy part of the factory (as opposed to an unbearably noisy part) curled up on the floor, springing out of his slumber fresh and zestful. Most evenings, however, he didn’t need to sleep at the factory because of an amorous entanglement or transnocturnal carousing.
Tamás had a unique view of Budapest in terms of the women he had slept with and of the kocsmas he drank in; this topography he would share with Gyuri during their work. A routine Tamás monologue: ‘Yeah, I was over by “The Blind Drunk Blindman”, they do a great Czech beer there. Anyway, I hadn’t been there since I was giving cock to the French Ambassador’s wife’s maid, and it’s just opposite to where I was delivering my dick to the wife of the gypsy violinist who used to play in “The Overflowing Ashtray”, that was the violinist I had to stab, not the one who tried to pay me to keep his wife; she was the one I met behind the “You Can Even Make Wine From Grapes”. That was a great place, you know, I had a marvellous evening there with a Bulgarian girl. I didn’t speak any Bulgarian, she didn’t speak any Hungarian. But then you don’t need to, do you? She had a place that was almost above the “Why Is The Floor Pressing On My Nose?”. I didn’t get out for days.
‘So, I was in “The Blind Drunk Blindman”, they were giving me some of the under the counter pálinka, they say the Germans wanted it for their rocket program, when I noticed some really small bloke in there with a good-looking woman. They were sitting next to this group of dockers. Anyway, this bloke leans over to the dockers who are mothering this and mothering that, and says very professor-like “Would you mind not swearing in front of my wife?” You have to admire his bottle but getting upset about swearing in “The Blind Drunk Blindman” is a bit like going into a grocer’s and being shocked by the vegetables. I can see the guy is going to get more kicked around than a football at Ferencvaros on a Saturday afternoon, so I tell the barman to hide away a bottle of the special pig-trough pálinka for me because there isn’t going to be any unshattered glass in a moment and I get over at the right moment to wish one of the dockers the best of health with the boot as he’s giving the guy’s wife’s tits a courtesy squeeze.’
This episode was representative of Tamás’s evenings, leaving behind five unconscious dockers and two others earnestly searching for their earlobes. ‘They weren’t going to find them, because I swallowed them. Good protein – learned that behind the Don. The police turned up. Think they were thinking about charging me, because the guy I was helping out suddenly choruses up: “That’s him, I saw the whole thing. He’s the ruffian who started it.” Still, the police knew they’d look good and stupid in court explaining how I’d attacked ten dockers. ’Course they took me in for questioning, but they only asked one question: “Where’s the pig-trough pálinka?’”
Perhaps for Gyuri’s benefit, Tamás was always fastidiously precise about the location of the women with whom he was consorting.
Thus, Gyuri knew as well as his own address that Tamás’s separated wife lived halfway up Kossuth út in Kobányá, between the ‘Short Dipsomaniac’ and the ‘Tall Dipsomaniac’.
Tamás also went to great pains to underline that his son, who was ten, got ‘the best pocket money’ in Budapest. Tamás did the work of three people and was remunerated accordingly. As he calculated his pay packet (an hourly event) he would include the information about the superlative status of his son’s pocket money. Tamás’s herculean exertions were a further reason why Gyuri didn’t need to do much (although Pataki who was employed in the section where the copper wire was spun out had absolutely nothing to do but remark: ‘Hey, look at that wire getting stretched’).
But, from time to time, Tamás would create a task for Gyuri.
‘Get a new blade for this hacksaw,’ Tamás requested, which pleased Gyuri as that would fill up the time until lunch. He set off for the stores as slowly as he could to make the most of the trip. When he got there, he was surprised to see a ‘Do not disturb’ sign which looked as if it had been borrowed thirty years previously from a luxury hotel. Inside, the storemaster, who was the Party Secretary of that section of Ganz, was playing cards with three confederates. Gyuri had barely got his foot across the threshold when, without looking at him or noticeably moving his lips, the storemaster said firmly but without rancour: ‘fuckyourmother’. This was said as such an aside, so mechanically, that Gyuri felt it couldn’t have been related to his entry. So he asked: ‘Sorry to interrupt, but…’
The storemaster wheeled on him: ‘May God and all his holy saints fuck you!’ he exclaimed in what seemed a deplorable lapse for an avowed atheist and a historical materialist. ‘What’s your name?’