He knocked on Jadwiga’s door. He heard the sounds of occupancy. ‘I missed you,’ he said as she opened the door. She scrutinised him for a long second, then admitted him. ‘I hope you like tea,’ she said, ‘because that’s all I can offer you.’ As a veteran of impecuniosity, Gyuri immediately read penury in her room. It was clinically smart, causing Gyuri to admire once again the miraculous ability women had to automatically instil order, having that morning stumbled through various items on his bedroom floor, items which had certainly been there when he had started his accountancy studies.
It was as Jadwiga picked up a kettle to boil the water that Gyuri received two co-nascent bulletins from the back-room boys. One thought, how elegant and graceful she was, how she made picking up a kettle touchingly, triumphantly erotic. Optically revisiting her bosom, arms and legs, he appreciated how lithe and athletic she was. Lucky: she had the sort of slender age-resistant frame that would provide the same conjugal scenery at forty as at sixteen.
The second thing that barged into Gyuri’s attention was the certitude that he wanted to marry her. That was surprising. He had never felt wedlockish before; indeed the idea of an additional bond to Hungary, anything that would make his flight less streamlined, was anathema. So this was what it felt like. But here it was, unannounced, without any warning, no throat-clearing – the notion that he wanted to get married, as precisely defined and as urgent as a craving for chocolate cake. Was he going crazy? He pondered this development while Jadwiga boiled the water on the gas ring down the corridor. Old Szocs had been right.
On the wall was a roughly-hewn wooden crucifix, the sort of thing a pious peasant with time on his hands would do. Maybe Stalin was dead, maybe this was 1955 after all, but this was tantamount to having a two-metre marble horseprick deposited outside the Rector’s office. Clearly, it wasn’t just Jadwiga’s breasts that were firm. Gyuri welcomed the audacity, but wondered whether there would be theological tape interfering with the expedition down south?
In a way, Gyuri regretted having the tea and the rather wretched biscuit that Jadwiga offered him since he had the feeling he was consuming half her worldly goods; the tea she had had to scoop out of the bottom of a tin and the biscuit, he suspected, had been stored up for a special occasion, which he wasn’t. An offer of supper, as long as he could find a ridiculously cheap restaurant, was doubly required.
‘Could you help me with the window?’ she asked. ‘It’s a bit stuffy in here.’ She was standing by the window, pushing against its stuckness. How did she do it? The request couldn’t have been more exciting if she had asked him to take off all her clothes. The window didn’t need that much persuading, but even if it had been nailed down, it would have been shooting open, Gyuri was experiencing such vigour.
Jadwiga still wouldn’t relent on the party, or having supper. ‘I’m behind with my work,’ she said steadfastly. This refusal didn’t bother Gyuri unduly. Intuitively, he sensed that it wasn’t powered by a desire to extricate herself from his company. Her regimented books testified to her earnestness. Unusually for someone at university, she was interested in her studies. The biscuit, lone and sagging as it had been, prevented Gyuri from being discouraged. He felt their lines were converging, not staying parallel. This was love at the first cup of tea.
He withdrew to let her study for a while and to craft some advances. Sólyom-Nagy was now back in his room. He apologised for his absence owing to several trips to collect fluid supplies for the evening.
The party was held at the Theatre. Gyuri who had thought he had seen professionally debauched festivities in Budapest had anticipated a more provincial level of bacchanalia but he had to concede that that night in Szeged was nothing but arrestable and immoral behaviour. It was indisputably the fastest social event he had ever attended. There was a hip-bath on stage in which Sólyom-Nagy mixed what he billed as the largest cocktail ever fashioned in Hungary, a triumph of socialist planning involving Albanian brandy, ice cream, vodka and other things that no one could or would identify.
Within half an hour of the hipbath opening for business, there were people unable to prise themselves off the floor. Gyuri had only one small glass which he sipped pensively and he was very glad he hadn’t emptied it down his neck like the others. It already seemed to him that the stage had grown a vicious slope.
Agnes was there, whom Gyuri hadn’t seen for years. That was the problem with a small country: you were always walking into your past. Gyuri had heard that she had gone to Szeged to study. For a lengthy period of time Gyuri had asked her out. Pataki had been squiring her best friend, Elvira. Gyuri asked, Agnes ducked. ‘She always goes out with the friend of whoever’s going out with Elvira,’ Pataki had encouraged, insisting that Agnes had already indicated her approval of Gyuri’s merits.
However, whenever Gyuri proposed some social union, Agnes always produced some excuse. There was no untreated refusal. She never gave the same excuse twice and they ranged from hair-washing to one twenty-minute apology featuring an escaped lion from Budapest Zoo where her brother was the deputy Party Secretary. Gyuri remembered that the plot began with an attempt to shift elephant shit in a more socialist and scientific manner, applying only the strictest of Marxist-Leninist principles. It was without doubt the longest alibi Gyuri had endured, and, since he doubted that Agnes’s imagination was up to it, probably true, but at the end of it she said that, sadly, she couldn’t go to the cinema. Gyuri would have taken off his chasing shoes long before if it hadn’t been for Pataki’s protestations that he had approval from flight control. ‘Just ask her out,’ he censured impatiently.
Finally, after listening to dozens of instalments about Agnes’s crammed time, since she wasn’t the sort to engender rabid desire, Gyuri had let it drop. After all, Gyuri had reasoned, if it was going to be unrequited love and regular humiliation, it might as well be unrequited love and regular humiliation at the hands of a prodigiously attractive female, which would be a shade less humiliating. ‘You don’t know how to ask. You just don’t know how to ask,’ Pataki had commented.
Agnes seemed sorry about past misunderstandings, as she was crying, as indeed many people were. The acceleration from initial jocularity to maudlin impotence had been phenomenal. An hour after the kick-off at eight o’clock, there was already a three o’clock in the morning atmosphere.
‘I’m so sorry, Gyuri,’ she sobbed. Her contrition seemed genuine because she kept repeating this with her head slumped on Gyuri’s chest. He assumed her grief was to do with her rejections of him, though it was hard to tell. At the behest of hormonal petition, Gyuri thought about a bareback waltz against a sequestered wall somewhere but discarded the idea. He didn’t want to gain admission to the club because there was no one on duty at the door, and besides, although part of him was already working on self chastisement for not taking what was offered to him on the tray of his sternum, he realised that he’d rather be with Jadwiga. He’d rather be sitting with Jadwiga chatting about some Hungarian writer, than taking a tongue tour of Agnes, or indeed any other highly acquiescent lady. You always get what you want when you don’t want it, he concluded, dumping Agnes into a more comfortable bit of aisle where she could continue her soliloquy.