That was the sort of organic stagnation, displayed stasis, obedience under clear glass that they would like from people, stacked in their homes, products that didn’t require attention, that wouldn’t be troubled by the languors of the system of distribution, that would just exist docilely on the shelf until needed.
July 1954
Fuming at the injustice of a regime that was turning him into an accountant, Gyuri went along to his English lesson.
Makkai’s flat was off the Űllői út and – unusually for someone Gyuri visited regularly – only on the second floor. It wasn’t a very spacious flat but as a pre-war diplomat and current incurable bourgeois, Makkai had a son of the soil, a toiler for international peace, a student at the Party’s College, billeted legally, forcibly, permanently in his home.
Makkai usually let his pet complaint off the leash the moment he opened the door, berating his lodger as he ushered Gyuri inside.
‘I don’t mind that he’s a Communist. I don’t mind that he leaves Rákosi’s speeches all over the place. I don’t mind that he’s an oafish imbecile- after all one should hesitate to pass judgement on others – but what I can’t stand is that he stinks. It’s unforgivable. Unforgivable. We had an SS officer dumped on us during the war, a mass murderer, torturer of infants and so on, one assumes. I could stomach that, but not this. And don’t think I’m being harsh. It’s not the didn’t-have-time-this-morning-I-was-in-such-a-rush unwashedness, no, no. This is the unmistakable reek of a body that doesn’t even have childhood memories of soap. You can shake hands with the smell.
‘I’ve tried subtlety: daily eulogies on the joys of running water, leaving fresh towels prominently in his room, detailing at length the trouble I had purchasing and installing a new shower-head. Relating a fictitious newspaper account of how washing regularly could extend your life expectancy by twenty years. Relating another fictitious newspaper article reporting Comrade Rákosi stressing the urgency of all good Communists scrubbing their armpits with the slogan Cleanliness is Next to Sovietness. Nothing. I even tried presenting him with two superb bars of soap on May Day.’
Makkai seemed a trifle indiscreet for someone who had to cohabit with a cadre, or perhaps he saved up his indiscretion for Gyuri. Last year, when Stalin had died, Gyuri left the College of Accountancy to find Comrade Kompan kneeling in front of the bust of Stalin in the hallway, weeping quite uncontrollably, in the way one does when a close family member has died. She had been quite decent to Gyuri when he had enrolled at the College, pointing out that since he was class-x, ‘We have our eye on you, Fischer. You’ll have to work twice as hard as everyone else to make amends for your background.’ She hadn’t meant this in a malevolent, hectoring fashion, but rather in a forgiving, encouraging way and she had been only voicing what any Party functionary would have thought after reading the file that always followed Gyuri around – his moral credentials.
Comrade Kompan had been so distraught that Gyuri thought perhaps he ought to offer some solace out of courtesy, but he sensed it wouldn’t work. He had continued on to his English lesson.
On reaching Makkai’s flat, he had found Makkai dancing on the table – something, he divulged to Gyuri, he hadn’t done for over forty years, which was why he looked so out of practice. He went to the larder and produced a bottle of champagne. ‘It’s Soviet, sadly – I’ve been keeping it cool for years so I’d be ready to celebrate.’ The lesson that day had consisted of toasts to the late, unlamented Joseph Vissarionovich and selecting pejorative epithets. ‘You’re lucky, you’re young. This can’t go on much longer now,’ said Makkai. ‘And you’ll be able to make the pilgrimage to pass water on Stalin’s grave. But by the time you get to the front of the queue you’ll be an old man.’ It was the first time Gyuri had seen Makkai smile, in the four years of his tuition he had never glimpsed the woebegotten Makkai enjoying anything. He thought he knew the whole Makkai, childless widower, glum scholar, whose erudition – far from earning him esteem and fortune or securing him a comfortable position – was a handicap, as if he were chained to the decomposing carcass of an elephant. The smile made Gyuri realise there were whole departments of Makkai he had never glimpsed; it was like turning a dusty vase stationed on top of a wardrobe for years to discover the reverse has an unseen design.
When he heard the news of Stalin’s death, from the radio, Gyuri was shampooing his hair. Apart from experiencing an intense well-being, his first thought was whether the whole system would collapse in time for him not to have to take the exam in Marxism-Leninism he was due to sit the following week. Could he count on the downfall of Communism or was he actually going to have to read some Marx?
His second thought was how to achieve maximum disrespect during the ten minutes’ silence that had been decreed for the next day. When he later saw in the cinema the film tribute of Stalin’s Budapest obsequies, the whole city coming to a halt, grim faced workers frozen on the edge of pavements, grimy railway workers easing off the steam on their engines, entire crowds steeped in black making their way to the enormous statue of Stalin by Hosok Square – when he saw all this, Gyuri regretted that he hadn’t been able to invite a film crew up to his flat to record for posterity the only part of him that was standing to attention, as it was readily interred and disinterred in an old girlfriend, married now but still eager to reminisce.
Gyuri watched that newsreel several times, because there was one wide shot of the crowds around the Stalin statue which had microscopically featured his bedroom window, enabling him, with some imagination, to relive the joy of his only-just-off-camera mourning.
But Stalin’s death, although derangingly enjoyable, hadn’t changed things much. Rákosi was a little less cocky and Nagy became Prime Minister. Gyuri heard rumours that people were being cleared out of the prisons, but Stalin stood monumentally on. The eight metre bronze statue, planted on the site of a church that had been demolished at the end of the war, was the main feature visible from Gyuri’s bedroom window and he had taken the positioning of the statue as a personal horseprick from Fate. Nagy, of course, was different to Rákosi. He had a moustache. Rákosi didn’t. Also, Nagy wasn’t completely bald. But the Stalin statue statued on, sodomising the Budapest skyline, sundering any remaining dignity from a city still recovering from its postwar hangover.
This evening, Makkai appeared at the doorway of his flat without any doorbell prompting. ‘Three-two to the Germans,’ he said, ‘it must be a fix.’ Completely enraged by auditing, frustrated and bored with his accountancy course, in a stupor of fed-upness, Gyuri hadn’t been paying attention to the World Cup Final that was engrossing everyone else, Hungary vs. West Germany. He certainly hadn’t been in the mood for his English lesson but as Makkai had no phone he hadn’t had any means of cancelling it, so he turned up so as not to offend Makkai, who was a connoisseur of courtesy and did enjoy giving language lessons. Makkai didn’t charge very much for two hours although it was still a strain on Gyuri’s resources. But Gyuri felt that for Makkai teaching had less to do with the money (although he certainly needed it) than with importing an audience into his flat and that for a while he was taken seriously. Out on the street he was another pensioner, an old fart with no position, no clout, no job, no money, but in the instructing chair he was a skilled keeper of deep intellectual treasures.