Gyuri suspected that Hepp may have had other reasons, apart from Pataki’s cajolery, for acquiescing but Pataki had unwound Hepp, and given the rest of the team a summary level of activity (except for Gyuri who couldn’t afford to let any hour pass without exploiting it).
Gyuri was ushered out of sleep’s antechamber by a procession of loud bumps, which his ejected senses slowly situated as emanating from the bunk above him. Craning out of his bed, he realised that unless Pataki had suddenly developed a brilliant ventriloquist act and grown a large pale bottom, he had enticed some female company back to their hut. It was outrageous – here they were in a Communist dictatorship, on the verge of World War Three, in the middle of the night and Pataki had the gall to enjoy himself and invade his sleep.
‘God’s dick,’ was about all Gyuri could think of in his irate daze, not fully reconnected to his imaginative facilities.
‘There’s really no need to be polite,’ insisted Pataki, not missing a beat. ‘Don’t pay the slightest attention to us. Pretend we aren’t here. Feel free to carry on with your sleep.’
Not confident in the resilience of the bunkbeds in the face of love’s vibrations Gyuri threw his mattress onto the floor, where he would be a safe distance from any collapsing reposery. ‘If you tie a torch to it, you’ll be able to see what you’re doing,’ he counselled.
At dawn’s entry, Gyuri awoke, feeling more sleepy than when he had started. It was a morning he immediately recognised as one he wanted nothing to do with, a day that revealed itself, that flagrantly exposed itself as a day which wouldn’t allow him to get anywhere. Gyuri found himself thinking, without any side-dish of shame, about why he hadn’t joined the Communist Party. That was where his life had taken the wrong turn, he decided. Deciding where his life had gone wrong was something that took up a lot of his leisure time and he was convinced that he had pinpointed the chairman of the error board. If only he could send back a message to his younger self to sign up, if only he had accidentally walked into a Party office and inadvertently dropped his signature on an application form.
Now, of course, apart from the bad taste it would leave in his soul, his participation in the Communist movement would be as welcome as a bonfire in an ammunition dump. He had as much chance of joining as a blue whale had, assuming it could make its way to Budapest. But back in ’45 or ’
46, things were different. Hitler could have got a membership card then- the more the merrier. He could have got in, denounced his family background, vituperating Elek as a decadent bourgeois (which would have been fun), and with a bit of Lenin-spouting, the odd weekend being chummy with coal miners down a pit somewhere, he could have ended up with a comfortable, well-paid workfree job as a funksh somewhere, and with the accelerating rate of arrests and hangings, promotion couldn’t be avoided.
The Chinaman had stunned them all.
Gyuri had tried to get to know him, still curious about Red China. This was shortly after the thwarted visit to the Chinese Embassy. The visit to the Chinese Embassy had come a few weeks after the thwarted visit to the Ministry of the Interior, where he and Pataki had tried to get into the police. Getting into the police had originally been Pataki’s idea, but Gyuri warmed to it, thinking about all the people he could be rude to while in uniform. The police had a second-division basketball team and Pataki had the belief they could work themselves a niche there. All those policeman jokes were a deterrent but after deliberation, Gyuri felt the list of people he had prepared for harassment was worth it, and the prime factor was dodging military service, since they had got wind of a rumour that suggested Ganz’s workforce would no longer qualify for strategic exemption. No one had spelled out why they were turned down; they could only guess the police had found another source of first-division players or maybe the crippled and deformed status of their moral credentials had done in their prospects.
While he and Pataki were negotiating their transfer to Locomotive and wangling their places in the evening classes at the College of Accountancy, Gyuri, reviewing the options in case of severe emergency, had managed to find something preferable to self-mutilation to stay out of the Army: going Chinese. He had been thinking about Ladányi. He never had the chance to see Ladányi again after the feeding frenzy in Hálás, but he heard that he had been posted to China as predicted, just before the Communists had come into their own there. The only bulletin after that was that Ladányi was in Shanghai. He couldn’t have been there for long. The Chinese had got a bad case of socialism, but at least they didn’t have too many Russians. Not enough rice to go around.
Reviewing the state of China and speculating on Ladányi’s whereabouts (celebrating one-man mass in gaol, running a restaurant, correcting some mandarin’s ideograms?) Gyuri lighted on the idea of going to China. Red China was the first stop for the journalistic imagination; it was always getting slapped on the back every time you opened a paper or switched on the radio.
‘Let’s go con the Chinese,’ Gyuri proposed to Pataki. ‘If we get out there, it might lead to other things. And if it’s awful, well, it’s awful here and at least it’ll be Chinese misery.’ Anything seemed superior to homegrown misery. Gyuri argued they should go along in the guise of ardent admirers of the Chinese Revolution, avid to learn more about the achievements of people’s power in China and eager to start Chinese lessons. ‘With a border that big, it’ll be no problem walking out,’ Gyuri reasoned. Pataki had a look that alluded to the excellent rowing weather, but why not roll the dice?
The Chinese Embassy was in a quiet, elegant street just off Andrássy út, in what was the diplomatic quarter. Huge, ornate, opulent buildings that spoke of an unhurried lifestyle. How do you enlist for the diplomatic game? Gyuri wondered as he inspected the serenity and evident absence of work in the embassies. They had ruled out writing a letter or phoning: that left space for prevarication or refusal. The best would be to go along and put their feet in the door. The time of their approach had also been intensely debated, and they came to the conclusion that early afternoon would be most suitable.
The Embassy’s door was black and enormous and didn’t look like the sort of door that cared to be disturbed. It was a door that was meant to be seen but not knocked on, a door you walked past at a path’s distance. Unlike the Western embassies there wasn’t a policeman on guard outside, but the whole tenor of the facade was discouragement.
A sizeable bell was on duty at the side of the door. Gyuri pushed it once, manfully, for a very polite duration but didn’t hear any corresponding ringing inside. He waited for a very polite duration, hoping for signs of life. This process was repeated twice as passers-by passed by wondering what two young, smartly-dressed Hungarians were doing outside the Chinese Embassy. The bell obviously hadn’t been designed to be rung, so Gyuri gave a curt rap on the door, stinging his finger joints (there was no knocker provided). He continued lengthy intervals of polite waiting with painful knocking bouts. They were beginning to infer that the building was abandoned, when they noticed, from a first-floor window, an oriental visage peering out at them, having shunted aside a substantial lace curtain. Pataki and Gyuri acknowledged the watcher by switching on exemplarily polite and radiant smiles.
Nothing happened after this first contact for several minutes. ‘They’re busy learning Hungarian,’ offered Pataki, free to amuse himself since it hadn’t been his idea. ‘They’re scanning the phrase book for “Drop dead”.’ After an unreasonable length of time, the door was opened by a young Chinese man in a wearied suit, who greeted them in mechanical but correct Hungarian. ‘We’re fans of the Chinese Revolution,’ said Gyuri, ‘my friend and I have been stunned by the feats of the Communist Party of China. Could we come in to express our admiration?’