‘Oh, I’m sure you will. This can’t go on much longer. You realise you and István are my last hopes.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The only sort of success I can anticipate now is sitting in a café regaling my cronies with tales of my sons’ successes. I’m counting on you for some reflected glory and a modest income. You don’t want your old father to be stuck in a café with nothing to boast about?’
‘So you’re going into sitting around full-time?’
‘I’m working up to it. But don’t forget you have no excuses: you’re at the perfect age for disaster. Physical peak. Flexible. Durable. A good reservoir of optimism. Nineteen is the ideal age for misfortune. You can fight back. And things change. Nothing lasts forever. Hungary has had some bizarre moments in its history. Mongols, Turks wandering in and out. Our friend Horthy, a regent without a king, an admiral without a sea. But Rákosi. The one thing I can confidently predict as a non-starter in Hungary is a Jewish King. I’m willing to bet that you won’t last long at Ganz, and that you will have a good laugh about all this.’
‘How much are you willing to bet?’ Gyuri asked, sensing easy money.
‘We can negotiate a figure.’ At this point Elek was racked by a caravan of coughs of lung-ripping ferocity. ‘The trouble is,’ he continued weakly, ‘I’m not going to be around to collect at this rate. But you still have no excuse for not achieving stupendous prosperity. Think of all that bringing-up your mother lavished on you.’
Gyuri decided to tackle some of the housework. Nothing substantial, but tossing a coin to domesticity, Gyuri entered the waiting-room for washing-up and exposed some plates to running water. Considering how little they had to eat, there was an alarming quantity of dirty crockery.
‘I told her for months to go to the doctor. For months. You know what she said, “I can’t go. I haven’t got a slip.” I don’t suppose it would have made a lot of difference,’ Elek volunteered.
Suddenly, Gyuri wished they hadn’t started to converse.
August 1950
They estivated outside Tatabánya.
The peasants out in the fields, on account of what they had endured or because of some innate earthiness, evinced no great surprise to see half a dozen naked and tanned figures strolling through their sunflowers. ‘Basketball players,’ they muttered.
Pataki was in the lead, wearing his sunglasses, striding out in his basketball boots, a map neatly folded under his arm. Although they got plenty of exercise at the training camp where Locomotive had been invited to act as resident sparring partner for the National team, they were full of kicks, and at Pataki’s instigation had gone out for an afternoon constitutional in order to ascertain that the surrounding countryside was as boring as it looked. So far it was.
Most of the vicinity was flat and obvious, but Pataki steered them to a distant clump of greenery, a copse on a series of mounds, with a huge patch of baldness on top. The view from this hillock corroborated their worst fears: the total absence of anything that could be loosely accounted exciting or notable in the neighbourhood. ‘So, gentlemen, there it is: the countryside. The place for those fond of vegetable antics. The abode of bucolic delights as celebrated by millennia of illustrious poets, who, in my opinion, were either heavily bribed by wealthy farmers eager to boost their standing, or gibberingly demented,’ concluded Pataki.
There was a rectangular stone some four feet high on the summit, which Pataki, having consulted the map, announced was an object of significant trigonometrical value. If it hadn’t been on the map, they probably wouldn’t have bothered; but how often do you get a chance to destroy a landmark? The stone was recalcitrant and astonishingly heavy, but with the help of a few sturdy branches as levers, they eventually upended it and had the pleasure of watching it robustly tumble down a good way. Feeling satisfied with their afternoon’s work sabotaging the Hungarian state, they headed back to the camp.
‘Has the new Hungary overcome the old three-layered class system of workers, bourgeoisie and nobility?’ Róka asked, swiftly providing the answer (before anyone thought he was posing a serious question). ‘Not quite. There are still three classes in the new Hungary: those who have been to prison, those who are in prison and those who are going to prison.’
On their way back, Pataki saluted with the map a young peasant girl whose face would have been ugly on a young peasant boy. Joke civility, Gyuri noted, but another week of the camp and the gauche, sack-wrapped girls would start looking like beauty queens.
Usually, tired after the day’s training, Gyuri would plunge into blackness as soon as he made contact with his mattress despite its high ranking in intractability. The training was demanding, and as always, Gyuri had to do twice as much as anyone else. Some people have athleticism handed to them on a tray, others have to sweat to get up to scratch. Hitting sixty push-ups had caused him dreadful suffering while Pataki could do it on demand while conducting a conversation on any theme you’d care to name. He had been born with explosives in his muscles, even his tongue.
When Gyuri returned from the first instalment of the morning’s training, a run around the lake, gasping from the blow of such a brutal introduction to the day, Pataki would be lazily bestirring himself, often having a contemplative cigarette on the porch of their hut. Pataki could get away with this, because he could always deliver on court. ‘I know life is unfair, I don’t dispute that,’ Gyuri would gasp, ‘but does it really have to be this sort of industrial strength unfair?’
Pataki’s rightful place was in the National team, not playing opposite them to give them a good workout. He had been invited to play with the junior squad years earlier when still at school, but was turfed out after a few months. Not for slackness in training or for any other basketballing deficiency but thanks to the light in Hármati’s eye. ‘She’s the light of my eye,’ Hármati would say in an exaggerated, overparental manner of his daughter, Piroska. Pataki’s falling out with Hármati, the coach of the National team, had its root in Hármati walking in when Pataki was deflowering Piroska on a horrifically valuable Louis Quinze chaise-longue that Hármati had personally plundered from the debris of a neighbouring and deceased family’s bombed flat. ‘It was the mess on the sofa that did it,’ Pataki maintained. However, Pataki’s charm and undeniable talents would have boomeranged him back after a nominal banishment had it not been for Hármati walking in again to discover Pataki having a foam bath with some highly-prized bath crystals brought back, by hand, from a trip to Italy, and with Hármati’s other daughter, Noemi. Fortunately for Pataki it was a flat designed with two doors to every room, and his speed enabled him to stay ahead of Hármati for six circuits of the premises, before he could gather up his garb and exit. ‘It’s bad enough being caught with your trousers down but when you have to dry yourself first…’ Pataki reflected later, adding, ‘I think it was the bath crystals that really upset him.’
Pataki had just found out about his speed one day and found it there whenever he needed it. If Gyuri didn’t run every day, he’d slow up and balloon; if he didn’t play ball every day, his edge would blunt but Pataki could wander onto court after a month in a Parisian restaurant and still be able to whizz down infallibly to dunk the ball in the basket. There had to be a good reason for Pataki to stir and training wasn’t one of them. ‘We’re not paid to train, we’re paid to win,’ was his reaction to Hepp’s supplications to hone his abilities. Hepp had no real choice but to put up with Pataki; he usually didn’t keep a close eye on him during training, so that his non-cooperation wouldn’t grate. On the other hand, Hepp had managed on one unforgettable occasion to persuade Pataki to run the 1500. Pataki must have had his mind on something else when Hepp had explained that the Locomotive athletics team was runnerless for the 1500 metres at an upcoming meet and had pleaded with Pataki to run it to avoid the ignominy of a no-show.