The sergeant-major’s first threat: ‘When we get to our base, you will become acquainted with the parade ground. You will become so well-acquainted that if by some unheard-of miracle you survive, you’ll remember every crack when you’re ninety.’ Here, the sergeant who had been delegated as assistant, whispered into the SM’s ear, what they were to learn later, that Böhönye didn’t have a parade ground. ‘There’ll be plenty of drill,’ the SM continued, ‘so that, from a great distance the Imperialists might accidentally mistake you for soldiers.’
The military had not lost its fondness for cow pats. What Böhönye did have was meadows, so they practised their ceremonial march, with bayonets fixed and resting on the shoulder of the person in front. On a level parade ground, this could have been an impressive sight of co-ordination and martial display. In a meadow full of cow dung and hollows it was a massive exercise in ear-removal. The first to lose his aural equilibrium was Gyongyosi, a lawyer, who being a lawyer deserved it. He wasn’t going to be produced in any show trials after that.
The month was bad, very bad. But a month only being a month as such, it couldn’t be unbearably bad. Most of the time was spent on the usual military tricks of making you try and do half an hour’s worth of doing in five minutes. And Dohányi, the SM, who never told them his name (‘I don’t want you to think of me as a person, just as a fucking bastard’) was very keen on making people run around in full gear, with twenty pounds of kit, wearing a gas mask. The odd thing about gas masks, Gyuri reflected, when you thought about how they were designed for you to breathe through, was that they were virtually impossible for you to breathe through, particularly when doing anything more arduous than standing still.
The bulk of the agony revolved around unending physical exertion. Even for Gyuri, as a professional amateur athlete, it was demanding. For the students who had been more sedentary, it produced the effect Dohányi was after: intense pain, shock, disbelief at how much physical punishment the body could take in twenty-four hours. ‘Sleep is bourgeois,’ pronounced Dohányi, before sending them out on all-night manoeuvres with the sergeant. Most of the group developed an air of aghastness after the second day, as if they were permanently being punched in the stomach. At moments of excruciating physical effort, running with a stretcherful of hypothetically wounded soldiers for example, Gyuri recalled a painting he had recently seen of a soldier lying down in a comfortable field, reading pensively, surrounded by comatosely relaxed brothers-in-arms. The painting was entitled: ‘Soldier reading, surrounded by his brothers-in-arms.’ Dohányi would have shot anyone he found lying around pensively or reading.
Despite Dohányi doing his best to make things as horrific as possible, he was cruelly let down by the weather which was regulation summer issue, warm and invigorating. The heat was sometimes cumbersome but the summer didn’t permit suicidal misery. Dohányi’s torments which would have been unsupportable and shattering in a cold muddy winter were kept digestible. He became visibly frustrated by the lack of breakdown. Standing by Bencze, the architect, who had collapsed in a meadow under a rucksack full of ammunition and who was floundering on the grass, rather as if he were feebly trying to swim across the meadow, incapable of getting to his feet, Dohányi shouted sympathetically: ‘Had enough? Want a rest? Desert! Then I can have you shot.’ Dohányi kept on counselling desertion, to no avail, but he always repeated the punchline: ‘I’ll have you shot. Why should you waste the Imperialists’ time?’
The Imperialists were another classic Dohányi theme, from a man whose knowledge of world affairs was based on the few months when he had travelled out of Hungary to kill people. ‘The Imperialists are coming. Any day now, we’re going to have number three. Third time lucky. Of course, you barely uniformed turds won’t make any difference but we don’t want you wetting yourselves in civilian shelters, distressing the populace. The best thing you can do when the war starts is dig a hole, jump in, and fill it up.’
So where were the American Imperialists? The British Imperialists? Or even the German ones? They had been promised Imperialists for years on end, Gyuri thought angrily. What were the Imperialists playing at? He had carefully rehearsed the phrase with which he would greet the American invaders: ‘What kept you? Let me take you to many interesting Communists I am sure you will be eager to shoot.’
The whole camp and the idea of the camp was a complete waste of time courtesy of the people who had given Hungary such impressive ideas as the centrally-controlled economy where you had to work your way through dozens of barriers to find the man at the ministry who was responsible for getting you some extra bolts only to find he was on holiday. Apart from confirming their suspicions about which end of a rifle the bullet emerged from, the heroic sons of democratic Hungary had learned only one other thing: a formative hatred of the Army. The futility of the training was doubled in Gyuri’s case: although the camp was devised to render them sturdy leaders of men, Gyuri, being class-x, wouldn’t be allowed to be an officer, so the most he could ever be was the best-trained corporal in the People’s Army.
The political classes were for once extremely welcome although they were raw tedium. Everyone looked forward to them because you could sit down, not be shouted at and not have to worry about donning a gas mask. Dohányi would stand to one side, fuming conspicuously at this respite from his meticulously conceived diet of ordeal.
The political officer was called Lieutenant-Colonel Tibor Pataki, a fact that Gyuri fully intended to tease Pataki about when he returned to Budapest, away from the military and the countryside where all you had was a choice of grass and excrement served up in a variety of styles. Lt.-Col. Pataki obviously did a lot of this sort of instruction – he had been chauffeured into the camp hot from another engagement, and his monotonous, unfaltering flow suggested regular practice.
‘It is, of course, Generalissimo Stalin, who has given us life, that we salute, and the triumph of Stalinian strategy in the Great Patriotic War that we take as our guiding precept but it is above all the Hungarian edition of the works of Stalin, a new invincible weapon in our hands, that will enable us to model ourselves on the glorious Stalinian Soviet Army.’ This was all without a breath, and in front of a mounted, hazy photograph of a Soviet officer looking knowingly and professionally down the gun barrel proffered by a Soviet infantryman, smirkingly proud and confident of the unbesmirched state of his rifling. That photograph was to the left of Lieutenant-Colonel Pataki. To his right was a grey, hard-to-distinguish photograph of small figures in a line, carrying banners with indecipherable slogans. This picture was bottomed: ‘Peace Demonstration, London.’
Lt.-Col. Pataki took up Dohányi’s theme of Communism getting ready to put its boot on the throat of decadent bourgeois countries, to stick the bayonet in and twist it about, but in much more refined and dull language for fifteen minutes or so, before expounding further about Stalin, leader of the Peace Front.
If the Lieutenant-Colonel took this seriously, if he believed what he was saying, Gyuri pondered, it was sad. If he didn’t believe the nonsense he was spouting, like a parrot or a khaki gramophone player, that was sad too. Which was sadder? Or maybe you could take the whole scene, all of them assembled in the hut pretending to imbibe the wisdom that the Lt.-Col. was pretending to impart, as an enormously elaborate practical joke. Perhaps one day everyone in Hungary, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Rumania, the Soviet Union and even Albania would wake up one day to hear Stalin shrieking with laughter in the Kremlin: ‘You didn’t think I was serious, did you?’
Living according to bolshevik principles: the idea was as absurd as walking around all day with two fingers stuck up your nose. At least the Church only expected you to turn up once a week, but otherwise was prepared to keep out of your hair. If people’s power only meant a weekly hour-long lecture, Gyuri thought, I could live with it.