‘How did you get this?’ asked Gyuri, feeling distinctly uneasy holding such an Interior document in his hands.
‘Agnes, the singing secret policewoman. If you know whom to ask and how to ask you can get anything you want.’ Pataki, Gyuri knew, in the cursory way he was acquainted with the female figures that conveyor-belted their way through Pataki’s bedroom, had had an affair with a typist in the AVO who was also a singer in the AVO’s all-female choir brought out to croon on special occasions for the Soviet Ambassador. The reddest of Pataki’s girlfriends, she was also taking a night-course in scriptwriting at the College of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts, ‘to help crispen those confessions’ as Pataki had observed.
‘They didn’t have much to say on the subject of me,’ said Gyuri.
‘Let’s face it, you don’t join the AVO because you want to work. Mind you, you should see my file,’ said Pataki, pulling out a folder like a volume of an encyclopaedia. ‘I never would have guessed they had so many women working for them, including one very sexy chimney sweep that I briefly met in ’49. I haven’t read it all,’ Pataki paused to scan a few pages. ‘But there’s definitely someone grassing on us in Locomotive.’ He fished into his pocket, and produced a card. ‘But anyway, thanks to Agnes, I’m well prepared.’ He held an AVO identity card, with his picture and name.
Gyuri’s lengthy astonishment had only started its journey into expression when, as the tram rumbled down the Muzeum Körút, they saw and heard the commotion of a large crowd around Bródy Sándor utca. ‘It’s not Lenin’s mother’s birthday or something, is it?’ asked Pataki, although the gathering had an unfamiliarly unofficial air about it. They got off the tram to have a closer look.
Hundreds of people were crowded around the headquarters of Hungarian Radio. It quickly became clear that the crowd was there on account of its displeasure with the result of the World Cup final. There were periodic bursts of rhythmic chants: ‘We want justice, we want justice’, and ‘It’s a swindle, swindle, swindle’.
More than anything else, Gyuri was shocked by the flagrant public expression of sentiment. It was something he hadn’t seen for years, not since the ’45 elections. ‘Let’s take a closer look,’ said Pataki pushing through the people. The crowd was surging towards the entrance of the Radio where the AVO were out in a chain, armed and looking unhappy. Pataki was eager to get to the clashing point, and despite Gyuri’s reservations, the motion of the crowd kept pushing him closer to the irascible, gun-toting defenders of state authority.
To add to Gyuri’s discomfiture, they had arrived just at the moment when the commanding officer was about to lose his temper. What the crowd was after, Gyuri couldn’t work out. Whether they considered the Radio a more tangible representative of power than the parliament and thus a target to vent their anger on, or whether they wanted to broadcast something, he couldn’t discern. Perhaps it was the commentary on the match they objected to. The commanding officer of the AVO detachment was repeating very loudly, again and again: ‘This is the last time. I’m telling you, move back and go home.’
‘This is the last time I’m telling you, you’re a wanker,’ shouted a man squashed next to Gyuri. The crowd was very angry and surprisingly sure of itself, bearing in mind the AVO were carrying guns and the crowd had nothing but its fury, and the AVO men patently fell into the category of crowd-shooters.
The commanding officer kept telling everyone to disperse and those not immediately in front of him but well within earshot kept telling him he was a wanker. Gyuri, riding high on the crowd’s sum, shouted profanities since it seemed the done thing. The AVO pressed forward. The crowd pressed back, three AVO men went down and there was a joyous shout of ‘I’ve got him in the bollocks’. A stone shattered a window in the Radio building.
Then there was a burst of fire into the air. The entertainment was over. Gyuri and apparently lots of others thought that dying would be an over-reaction to the Hungarian goalie having fumbled one ball. He ran as fast as he could in the millimetre of space that he had between him and the person in front. The AVO was coming in with the rifle butts. It took a while to unclog the street, but people were soon running away full pelt from the Radio.
Gyuri, who had been monopolising all his concentration on leaving the vicinity as rapidly as possible, found that Pataki had disappeared. He wasn’t worried that Pataki was one of those lying in the street trying to hold their heads together. He had probably picked up some comely rioter.
He got home to find Elek listening to the radio denouncing the hooligans who had been running wild in the streets of Budapest. It was nice to be famous.
‘I learned something interesting tonight,’ Gyuri recounted to Elek. ‘Hungarians don’t mind dictatorship, but they really hate losing a football match.’
November 1955
The man was snoring, snoring so loudly, so rattlingly, that even if one had been over-dosed with tolerance, it would have been too much. Gyuri and the other passengers, only equipped with everyday indulgence, found their forbearance crushed like an aphid under a sledgehammer.
The man had the look of an engineer, something lowly and civil, the pens in his shirtpocket spoke of a rudimentary learning and erudition; the adept way he blew his nose with the aid of his right hand and with one motion hustled the catarrh out of the open window spoke of too much time on building sites. He had got on the train at Budapest and placed his dowdy belongings on the overhead rack, sat down in one of the seats next to the door, leaned his head against the glass and turned on the sleep, instantly, without any preamble.
Within a few seconds the snoring had commenced, as if approaching them from a great distance, faint at first but growing steadily to a prodigious din erupting from the man’s open mouth. Everyone else had looked at each other, first with a sort of tacit amusement that had progressed to bemusement and carried on to irritation. The odd thing about people behaving badly, Gyuri noticed, letting their boorishness slop out onto others, was that it was usually the victims who were embarrassed rather than the perpetrator.
The volume of the snoring was phenomenal. A mild, intermittent rasping might have been bearable but the engineer’s lungs pummelled everyone’s eardrums mercilessly. Also, truthfully, it was most unwelcome to be privy to the detailed internal workings of a corpulent engineer – to have a ringside perspective on his respiratory adventures. There were sporadic lulls, producing an optimistic sense of relief, of the auditory siege being lifted, but these interludes of silence while the snoring caught its breath only made the restored gurgling more serrated.
Gyuri, at the opposite end of the compartment, had no contiguous opportunity to impede the snoring but those closer attempted to trip up the volume. Discreet coughs followed by indiscreet coughs, yells, proddings and shovings didn’t succeed in making him miss a slumbering beat. The woman in the headscarf started clucking loudly, as if giving the traditional imitation of a chicken. The snoring faltered and disappeared under the onslaught of the clucking. ‘It always works with my husband,’ she said proudly but as she did the snoring pulled out into the fast lane again. The man opposite tried trailing a powerful garlic sausage under the sleeper’s nose. Nothing. The engineer snored on blissfully.