He had met Zsuzsa a fortnight before the camp. She represented a change of tactic for Gyuri. He had been pursuing a number of attractive women, who far from considering docking had recoiled from his greetings as if his hello were a wielded knife. ‘Communism and celibacy, that’s too much,’ Gyuri had moaned. Rather like an injured player seeking a fixture in the division below to repair his pride, Gyuri had met Zsuzsa at a dance. Gangs of hormones, supported by a sense of desperation, had unearthed beauty from an unpromising surface. Even though they had only met three times, Gyuri had been unpacking the equipment, setting up the furnishings of affection and a good part of his time in Tatabánya was spent contemplating the ransacking of her fleshy treasures.
Gyuri went back home only long enough to spruce up and to verify his summered, youthful looks in the mirror. Staring at himself, he really couldn’t understand why women weren’t climbing in through the windows. He didn’t mind about totalitarianism at all as he sauntered over to Zsuzsa. ‘All you need is something to look forward to,’ he said to himself.
Zsuzsa’s flat had a phone but he felt like reappearing in person.
Zsuzsa was in, but was showing out a guest. In his initial shock, Gyuri couldn’t decide which was worse, that the caller was a strapping gentleman, the holder, probably, of a jaunty dong, or that he was also owner of a blue-flash AVO uniform. A professional, not like the poor green sods conscripted to tramp around the borders and shoot any decamping capitalists, foreign spies or general bad lots seeking to flee the gains of the people. Even without the blue uniform, they would still have looked at each other as if they were being introduced to a dog log.
What further incensed Gyuri was that Zsuzsa was unaware of the monstrosity of inviting a blueboy home, even when he pointed it out to her. ‘Elemér is sweet,’ was about all Zsuzsa would say as Gyuri fulminated about the iniquities of the AVO. Under interrogation, Zsuzsa explained that Elemér had entered the scene by apprehending Bodri, Zsuzsa’s dog, when Bodri had inexplicably succumbed to the call of the wild in the park and spurned Zsuzsa’s implorings to return. ‘He ought to be good at collaring,’ riposted Gyuri.
The other great disappointment he suffered that evening was the realisation that Zsuzsa was heavily involved with stupidity. Her occupation (florist) should have warned him but Zsusza, although she inhabited Hungary, didn’t seem to live there. She didn’t understand what was going on, she hadn’t noticed what was going on and couldn’t grasp what Gyuri was saying. Gyuri also noticed that her nose was looking too large that evening but on the other hand he couldn’t help being envious of her total lack of contact with 1950. She had an airtight insulation of dimness.
‘Have some tea,’ Zsuzsa insisted. She was still pleased to see Gyuri and didn’t pay any heed to his ravings and didn’t comprehend what upset him on either the masculine or ethical plane. Gyuri enumerated the AVO’s privileges, their special supplies.
‘That’s not true, Elemér was just saying he has to work very long hours and he needs to earn extra money by translating articles from Pravda to help look after his mother.’ Gyuri realised it was like trying to demolish a house by throwing a glass of water at it and a strong sense of familiar futility descended on him like a cage. He had a good look at what was on his plate and he didn’t find his appetite stirred. This was going to be, he sensed, another fine addition to his collection of failures. He could see the title of his autobiography: Women I almost slept with. Not kissing and telling. ‘1950 was a good year, I almost slept with four women: a heroic production increase, under strict Marxist-Leninist principles, from 1949, when I almost slept with two women.’
He had an expired affair on his hands, but he was going to have to prop up the cadaver, as troops might do in a trench with fallen comrades to dupe their enemy into thinking they still had greater numbers to fight. The complication was that the following Friday, Locomotive was having its annual party, the summit of its social gatherings, and Gyuri knew that he would sooner face a firing squad than attend without a companion, and unfortunately Zsuzsa was the only representative of her sex willing to even talk with Gyuri. If Zsuzsa didn’t go with him, no one would.
Elemér was removed from the conversation but this eviscerated their badinage severely and with a reminder about the Locomotive festivity, Gyuri took his leave and reflected deeply on the absurdity of living in a country more than half full of women (demography being on his side since the erasure of the Hungarian Second Army in 1944) and being unable to transact some romantic commerce. Standing in the tram, with the passengers packed as tightly as cigarettes in a carton, centuplets in the oblong womb of the tram, even with the backs of three other citizens coupling with him, Gyuri felt sappingly lonely. Crushed, but lonely. How do you find people you can talk to? There should be a shop. And once you’ve found people you can talk to, how do you hang on to them?
He devoted a lot of his spare time over the next few days to internal lamentation and some deft self-pity, cassandraing about the flat, looking at himself in the mirror and asking: ‘Ever had one of those lives where nothing goes right?’ But on the Tuesday night he found himself awake. Mental eructations growled up clearly from the cerebral digestion. It was three o’ clock in the morning, the hour favoured by the back-seat drivers in his cranium for interrupting his sleep. Whatever was bothering him would be thrust up, and although he couldn’t name the issue, a strong discontent was emanating from his cerebral colon.
Switching on the light, Gyuri referred to his watch. Three minutes after three. Why was it when he wanted to wake up with punctuality he couldn’t but the seething rage inside always popped out at its self-appointed seething hour and why was it that when he wanted to feel awakened in the mornings he could never feel as fresh as he did now? He switched off the light and hoped for sleep to creep up on him. His freshness was undiminished when he heard the doorbell ring. His first thought was Hepp, but it was too early and too outrageous even for Hepp and he was in the clear with Hepp so there could be no justification for a dawn raid. Such a ring could only herald a really interesting misfortune amongst the neighbours. Murder? Rape? Cardiac arrest? Or was it the AVO? he thought sarcastically. His curiosity rubbing its hands with glee, Gyuri went to the door to find four plainclothes AVO men there. The plainclothes usually made them stick out as much as the uniforms since no one but the AVO could get proper clothes.
Everyone knew about the bell-shock, sweating away with the fear of arrest, but Gyuri had never felt important enough to be arrested. For an instant he believed they must be looking for someone else or that they had the wrong address; until they explained, not that they were arresting him, but that they had a few questions waiting for him.
Gyuri got dressed and left a note for Elek who was nowhere in evidence (warming up a widow somewhere no doubt).
Kovacs the concierge, an inveterate arsehead, was waiting, deeply disgruntled, to let them out and to lock up. Gyuri did manage to pick up a very faint sensation of satisfaction as he saw Kovacs fuming in his moth-eaten, cigarette-ventilated dressing gown, his hair floating in all directions.
The car wasn’t black, as tradition dictated, but a sort of pukey brown. This was a little disappointing since it was going to spoil the story he could relate when he got out in five, six, seven, ten years time, whenever. It was a short drive through empty streets. Gyuri was surprised in a way that something he had been fearing for so long should have come so inexplicably out of the black. Was he going to be coached for a show trial? Who was being stored in the clink these days? They seemed keener on Communists these days but there was always the need for a supporting cast.