He left and was braced by the cool night air which swept out some of the alcoholic debris left by Sólyom-Nagy’s concoction. He learned later from Sólyom-Nagy that two actresses who had been dancing on a prop coffin, had, shortly after Gyuri’s departure, taken off all their clothes. There had been no risk of them being voted the most beautiful women in Szeged, or indeed the most beautiful women at the party, but still, whoever got tired of naked actresses? Sólyom-Nagy had also reported the arrival of the police who were summoned because of a group jumping out of the theatre bar, a drop of twenty feet to the pavement below, as the result of some inebriated logic. The neighbours complained to the police because of the loud noise made by the jumpers as they laughed raucously about their broken ankles.
The police story was better. ‘I left the party five minutes before the police arrived’ made better narration than ‘I left the party five minutes before two actresses stripped naked.’
As Gyuri approached the student hostel, he could see a light in what he surmised was Jadwiga’s room. That was all you needed: a lit window in the distance, the knowledge that there was something there, something to work for. The company of a dwarfy hope.
He knocked civilisedly on Jadwiga’s door. ‘I have an important consignment of vernacular Hungarian for you,’ he said as she opened up. She studied him thoughtfully with much-read eyes, then backed away in a silent invitation to enter. She closed the door. Gyuri sat down on the bed of her still absent room-mate, while Jadwiga sat opposite him. Tired from her studying, she appraised him as if she hadn’t seen him before, slightly narrowing her eyes as if trying to focus better. Then she said with a half-smile: ‘We must talk.’ A pause. ‘We can be friends… but no more.’
‘You have a boyfriend?’ asked Gyuri, feeling exceptionally confident that any competition could be trampled underfoot, obliterated effortlessly. He was intoxicated with the certainty that he was on to a winner. He liked everything about her, the way she spoke, the way she sat, the way she handled him. Perfection. She paused again.
‘No.’ With the full smile. ‘I have a husband.’
September 1956
Striding down Petõfi Sándor utca, Gyuri saw the sign in the window of the photolab: ‘Lab Technician Required’. This, more than the phone call, brought home the fact that Pataki was gone.
The phone had rung and Gyuri had counted out the crackly silence. He had made it only forty-two seconds before the distant receiver was replaced but it could only have been the forty-five second signal agreed with Pataki. Pataki was out. He had gone to heaven and called from a pearly phone. As if it had been stitched there, Gyuri carried a smile so wide it hurt for the next day, a smile that completely cancelled the mild melancholy he felt at Pataki’s escape: a mild melancholy because he hadn’t wanted to dwell on the probability that he would never see him again.
Pataki was out. It was not only a stinking horseprick in the posterior of the authorities, it was a colossal stinking horseprick. It gave him so much pleasure that he tried not to think about it too much, to ration himself to a few hours’ gloating a day. But this notice cut the floor out from under his satisfaction. Only a fortnight gone and he was missing Pataki acutely. There was no one else in the country who could call him an arsehead with quite the same authority, the authority of a lifetime’s acquaintance.
When he got home, he was glad Elek wasn’t manning the armchair and that his nosiness wouldn’t be snooping around. He was also glad Jadwiga had consented to come to Budapest and that he didn’t have to trudge down to Szeged. Did other people really have to work this hard for happiness? You find world-class love but your beloved lives at the other end of the country. He peered out of the window and inspected the street although it was too early for her to appear. She had insisted that he shouldn’t wait at the station – with her Polish disregard for the passage of clocks, she couldn’t guarantee which train she would catch. But at least there was no more nonsense about her husband. When she returned from Poland after her summer visit, she had been full of news about the riots in her hometown of Poznan. Gyuri had got all the details about that but Jadwiga had been pleasingly reticent on the subject of her husband who seemed to have been airbrushed out of the picture, like Trotsky standing behind Lenin.
The news that Jadwiga was married had caused all his carefully handmade aspirations to shatter like the china in a porcelain shop crashed into by a well-fuelled bomber with a full payload. Gyuri had hoped that his facade indicated the manly resolve he was searching for but couldn’t feel and not the widespread collapse that was dominoeing its way through the regions of his body. He should have expected something like this; it had gone far too smoothly. Jadwiga had talked proudly of her husband. ‘My husband is a writer,’ she said in a way that left no doubt this was the only thing for a quality husband to be. He was writing a book on Polish painting.
They had gone out for a walk anyway. It had been pitch black, cold and windy and there wasn’t much to be seen in Szeged even in the best of daylight but Gyuri enjoyed the walk because despite having the someone-just-trod-on-my-throat sensation, the black environment had given them a duopoly. They were the movers of the universe, the animation in a depeopled darkness. Gyuri had generally considered walking to be one of the most inferior of amusements but that walk with Jadwiga had been infinitely preferable to doing anything else with say, Agnes. Kissing her respectfully on the cheek, he bade her farewell.
On the train back to Budapest, he had juggled two main thoughts. Firstly, that he didn’t care whether she was married or not and secondly (as a consolation prize for his floored morality) the conclusion that it was rather an odd sort of marriage, where you lived hundreds of kilometres, days of travel apart. It didn’t look like a thriving marriage at all, it was a marriage stretched so thin that you couldn’t really notice it.
He had determined to avoid Szeged for a fallow fortnight but the next weekend found himself dashing to the Nyugati station. He invented some nearby athletic activity to justify his presence and sought out Jadwiga. He found her dutiful in the library, asleep. He went out, bought a flower, and returned to leave it on her notebook and to wait for the study-fatigued student to rouse herself, which she did after ten minutes. She was surprised to see the flower and then, looking round, was surprised to see Gyuri. Despite the arguable propriety of the flower, she was pleased. ‘You are a very keen friend,’ she remarked.
This time supper was accepted and Gyuri didn’t regret having to sleep on Solyom Nagy’s floor although its embrace lingered on his back for the next twenty-four hours. The conversation had been agreeable and unremarkable but as with the walk it had been intensely pleasurable. If Pataki had known that his friend had spent the better part of two days travelling in order to have a so-so meal with a side-serving of jejune dialogue, he would have been shocked and incredulous, but Gyuri felt it was time well used. Jadwiga’s husband worked very hard, it turned out, though the admiration with which she wheeled out this information had been a trifle faltering, a little adulterated.
The next weekend saw Gyuri becoming a real expert on the Budapest-Szeged rail link. Individual haystacks and trees were recognised on the way down. Gyuri hadn’t let Elek in on the reason for his travelling down to Szeged but it was obvious that it wasn’t Gyuri’s passion for the local architecture. ‘Have fun,’ Elek had said in the way that parents do, convinced that their offspring were engrossed in incessant debauchery the moment they set foot outside the front door.
Jadwiga was again surprised to see him. ‘You take friendship very seriously indeed,’ she observed. They went to supper and the cinema which vacuumed Gyuri’s pockets clean. Posting a birthday card to her grandfather, Jadwiga asked Gyuri if his grandparents were still alive; this annoyed him slightly because she asked the same question during their first walk and thus it was obvious she didn’t store away everything he said in the way that he noted down her words for future examination, building up a dossier on her. ‘My grandfather was in what the Germans called Auschwitz. The Jews don’t like to mention how many Poles died there. My grandfather survived, I think, because he’s a persistent man: a very persistent man. He taught me the value of persistence too.’