They had lost the two matches they played. Largely because Pataki had been out of action. Pataki, who had never had a day’s illness in his life (the closest he had got to being ill was when he had invented ailments to dodge various duties), who had only ever come into contact with doctors for the obligatory check-ups on all players, had spent the duration of his stay in Bucharest, on his knees, spewing incessantly, vilely betrayed by his sphincter muscles, bowing to the lords of disgorgement, hugging different immobiles in his bathroom suite, pleading for divine intercession. The others had had ruthless alimentary disruptions but had just succeeded in getting out on court; the Locomotive players had all felt as if their legs were encased in lead casks – they bitterly regretted getting possession of the ball since that forced them to run or try to do something. They would have happily forfeited the match at half-time, if it hadn’t been for a fervent appeal to national honour and auroral threats of unprecedented strength by Hepp. Despite losing irremediably from the first second (or perhaps because of it) Locomotive were soundly booed by the crowd and one of the darts thrown by the spectators had skewered Szabolcs’s ear.
When Demeter, as acting captain (on account of Pataki’s indisposition), had offered to trade tops with the opposing captain as was the custom with international fixtures, the Rumanian had insisted on haggling, with the result that Demeter ended up with three unwanted Rumanian tops and the Rumanians left congratulating themselves on having gulled the Hungarians.
‘I never thought we were going to get back alive,’ Róka had said, kissing the platform. On the home leg of the fixture, they had had their revenge, beating the Rumanian Railway Workers’ Union but only by two points, a puny margin, acutely disappointing when one took into account that Róka’s brother, who was in charge of the kitchens at the hotel where the Rumanian team was staying, had applied injudicious amounts of rat poison to their goulash.
The train rolled into Makó, the last stop for both the train and the Locomotive team. They were due to play the Makó Meat-Processors that afternoon. There was a minor abattoir in Makó which helped to supply flesh to the salami factory in Szeged. Their opposition was entirely drawn from the small-bone cleaning unit of this abattoir.
No one was there to greet them at the station, but Makó wasn’t really big enough to make finding anything too much of a problem. They arrived at a school sports hall for the match to find the meat-processors out on court, clumping about in what had the appearance of a desperate attempt to learn how to play basketball half an hour before play was due to commence.
As they were changing, Hepp gave the team a pocket edition of his pre-match exhortation. It definitely wasn’t needed, since they knew without setting eyes on the meat-processors that they couldn’t be any good. Unknown, provincial teams couldn’t be any good, since any hot player would be immediately siphoned up, lured into the grasp of one of the big teams that could offer huge betterments. This was a friendly match to appraise the meat-processors, a newly formed team, who had probably lined up the first-division Locomotive via political channels. A Makó Party secretary had phoned another Party secretary to whom he had slipped a crate of salamis, who would in turn phone another Party secretary, a soon-to-be proud owner of a crate of salamis, and so on, till at the end of the chain Locomotive chugged into town.
Thus there was no need for Hepp to flex his admonitions, but the thing about Hepp, which could be quite irritating at times, was that he was a professionaclass="underline" he took his job seriously despite the fact that ten million other people in Hungary didn’t. He was good in every way as a coach, manager and mentor of the team, but he did have one grave fault. He always got up at 4.30 in the morning, and after fifty years on the earth, still couldn’t grasp that other people didn’t. His direst threat was circuit training at 5 a.m.
One morning, not long after he had joined Locomotive, and not long after he had burned his bed, Gyuri woke up on the floor with the awful knowledge that Hepp was expecting him at 5.30 for some track work in what was a bottomless black October freeze. Wondering why so much of existence consisted of getting up in the cold dark to do something you didn’t like, he resolved he wasn’t having it. Normally Gyuri was exemplary about training, indeed, that was why he had burned his bed, in an attempt to incinerate his laziness. It hadn’t been a great bed, but it had been serviceable, it had worked, and lying there in the mornings Gyuri had found its temptations preferable to running about in the winter. He lay there in its fortifying warmth and comfort, thinking about the training he should have been doing, repeatedly previewing it instead of doing it. Gyuri knew he had to train, and train much harder than anyone else because he was a self-made athlete, unlike someone like Pataki who was a natural. To get the rewards that accrued from basketball, Gyuri had to work.
That was why he had lugged the bed down to the courtyard and burned it with a sprinkling of petrol, to make sure that his will wouldn’t buckle in the future. The neighbours hadn’t batted an eye, because, by that point, if they hadn’t had their throats slit as they slept by Gyuri or Pataki, categorised as the crazies of the block, that was good enough for them.
Gyuri placed his hopes on a groundsheet and the floor encouraging him to get up briskly and to log a few hours’ exercise before the other preoccupations of the day. But even the floor could grow on you. And that morning, he had thought ‘you can’t rush reality’ and dived back into sleep, having written off Hepp’s proposed cross-arctic running. The doorbell rang at around six (as it would turn out). Elek, who was up, even though he had no convincing reason to be, opened the door to Hepp. Hepp handed Elek his card, which he always carried – ‘Dr Ferenc Hepp, Doctor of Sport’- and asked to be shown to Gyuri’s room. Lying, Gyuri lied reflexively that he was ill, whereupon Elek expressed surprise as Gyuri hadn’t mentioned feeling poorly the previous evening. This somehow removed the sparse vestiges of veracity from Gyuri’s statement.
‘Well,’ Hepp had said good-naturedly, ‘if you can manage to triumph over this unwellness, if you can bring your body to heel, because a hard mind makes a hard body, and get to the track in twenty minutes and do ten more laps than the others, to show this illness you’re not going to take it lying down, I think I can do you a commensurate favour: I can sign your military deferment papers.’ That had been quintessential Hepp. Other coaches would have sent someone else round to threaten him but Hepp was unwavering in doing things himself.
‘It goes without saying you’re going to win this match,’ said Hepp, ‘so I’m not going to say it. These meat-processors have undoubtedly got webbed toes and if they’re in basketball gear, it’s because they brought their mothers to help them change. I don’t want to be accused of being unreasonable, I don’t want to be the target of petulant rumblings but gentlemen, I have to insist on a twenty-point victory.
‘They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but as far as I’m concerned that’s exactly what it’s there for – this bunch couldn’t find themselves in the dark. So I have to insist, even allowing for your not inconsiderable indolence, I have to insist on a twenty-point, no, a thirty-point margin of victory. Otherwise it’s sit-ups in the City Park on the rainiest five o’ clock in the morning that I can find.’
Hepp then erected his blackboard, which he always carried around, and chalked up a few plays, selected from his notebook as thick as a hammer-thrower’s thigh (Gyuri once glimpsed a play with a number as high as 602). This was often the hardest part of any match, paying attention to Hepp’s schemes, since, certainly when dealing with a collection of small-bone pickers, the required tactic was simply to get hold of the ball, pass it to Pataki and watch him obligingly run down the court and propel it into the basket. This was a tactic stunningly effective against all but the top three or four teams in the first division who had the brains, talent, speed or foresight to impede this model operation.