Furthermore, it was very, very unlikely that he would achieve anything more important or significant than this, making one person feel full happiness, manufacturing a roomful of ecstasy, even if it were only a bubble in a gloomy ocean. It seemed a mundane pinnacle for a life, a trite climax for a biography, a flippant line for a gravestone – ‘did some worthwhile willying’. But was there anything else that had given him the same reward of joy and plenitude? The oldest trap had opened and snapped shut and he didn’t mind at all.
‘There goes the best moment of my life,’ he said to the absent Jadwiga. Which story had it been where the devil offers a man the chance to stop time, to slam on the brakes at a point of his own choosing, but the man can’t decide when to say when? Gyuri had had intimations of love before, but looking at Jadwiga, he realised that was a prospect that could last him for eternity, whatever went on outside the walls. He didn’t care who the general-secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party was or whether or not socialism was being built outside or whether people were swinging around in the trees. He had his portable universe, his mobile self-sufficiency. This sort of satisfaction could bog down a man with great aims, but since he had never got around to preparing any, Gyuri felt ready to sink back and enjoy it.
As Jadwiga started recovering her clothing, Elek returned and for some obscure reason (he only ever visited Gyuri’s bedroom on average twice a year) wandered in to catch the whole story of her skin. Mumbling apologies from the other side of the door, Elek retreated to his armchair, like a parrot to its perch, as if that would render him inconspicuous and inoffensive.
Unhindered by Elek’s entrance, Jadwiga carried on with her dressing. Her poise made a contrast with Tünde’s hysterics when Elek had found her torso exhibited in the shower. She had yelled as if her life was in danger and threw her arms tightly over the regions acknowledged to be of most interest to men, to staunch the flow of libidinous material. Tünde’s behaviour had been excessive; despite living in an age when the public baring of bodies was frowned on, her physique was as well-viewed as the Statue of Liberty and in particular the parts she was shielding with her hands, making fleshy fig leaves, had been as relentlessly fingered as the timetable at the Keleti railway station. But for some reason Tünde believed that all-lung hysterics was the pertinent reaction of a well-brought-up girl to an unannounced guest. Jadwiga’s nakedness hadn’t blinked.
Gyuri loved her alert breasts. He loved her runner’s legs (she had dabbled in sprinting) paradisiac containers of aphrodisiac. He loved her sagacious buttocks that had settled the entire subject of good buttocking. He loved her lips, the well-marked borders of her mouth; he loved her felicitating soles and all on them. He couldn’t see anything that let the view down. Perhaps that was the symptom of fully-defined love: like a great work of art, nothing could be docked, interjected or tampered with. If the Creator had come to him with a special offer of restyling, ‘For you, Gyuri, I can change anything you’d like: a little more leg? another helping of breast? blonder hair? darker hair? more ear lobe? younger? older? wittier? graver? repainted eyes? American passported?’ Gyuri realised that he would just reply: ‘We’ll stop here.’ He wouldn’t change a hair, not a pore, not one particle more, not one particle less, because then she wouldn’t be she. And it was no use trying to make up his mind about which sector bested the others; he couldn’t judge Jadwiga’s beauties’ contest, because her components kept leapfrogging over each other, grabbing his favour. Then he knew that he had jettisoned the world. That he was marooned on the planet Jadwiga.
Although not Jadwiga’s first foray into the flat, it was the first time she had met Elek who had taken up employment as a night-watchman at the Laszlo hospital (an occupation that suited him since it involved a lot of sitting and doing nothing and gave him complete freedom to speculate on what he would do with the money he was counting on winning in the lottery). So, after the full-frontal introduction, time was set aside for a formal hand-kissing which Elek did with a snap of the heels.
In the kitchen, as Gyuri lined up the ingredients for an omelette, Elek sidled up to whisper his warm admiration: ‘My congratulations.’ Gyuri didn’t want to register pleasure at Elek’s approval but it was pleasing nevertheless. Elek watched Gyuri’s egg-cracking with the admiration of the culinary illiterate. ‘You haven’t heard any more from young Pataki, have you?’ he asked.
Gyuri shook his head.
The fastest motorcycle in Hungary had been the root of Pataki’s departure. Or maybe one of the roots of it. Or maybe, Gyuri continued to reflect, really in the mood to push a metaphor around, just part of the foliage. Who knew?
The motorcycle had been a Motoguzzi, a mountain of a bike. Sándor Bokros had owned it originally. Bokros had, by a series of dazzling commercial speculations, starting in 1945, when there had been a widespread vogue for a really good wash, juggled a dozen bars of soap through ever-augmenting metamorphoses until he had half a dozen fur coats. Then Bokros left the country and went to Italy, where, according to reliable accounts, he had almost willied off his willy and bought the motorcycle. Suddenly, through some incomprehensible mental aberration, Bokros had returned to Hungary on his bike, just as the country’s borders were being sealed so tightly they lost fifty kilometres. Even in Italy there had only been a handful of bikes like that one and for the citizens of Budapest it was like something from Mars. Bokros had two problems: having to cope with an epidemic of adulation and street-enquiry and finding a stretch of road on which he could get out of first gear.
By the time Boleros realised that he should have opted for a totalitarianism that went in for long stretches of immaculate tarmac, it was too late. Everyone assumed it would end in tragedy, either his bike being nationalised, or him dying as a result of not seeing eye to eye with a Hungarian bend but what happened was as unforeseen as you could get. As he was overtaking, on a country road, a tractor with a load of fixed, upturned scythe-fittings on the back, one of the blades slid down, decapitating Bokros. ‘You don’t need much in the way of brains to ride a bike,’ Pataki had said at the funeral, mulling over the bike having carried on for half a kilometre without a head.
‘You’ll like Sándor, everyone does,’ was the way Bokros was always described. His brother, Vilmos, was described as one of those people who was disliked by everyone. Indisputably, Mrs Bokros hadn’t been eating enough affability when Vilmos was conceived. One of the most upsetting aspects about Sándor’s death had been that it meant the fastest motorcycle in the country would be passing into the hands of the loathsome Vilmos.
Vilmos fulfilled a useful function on the Locomotive team: everyone could rally round their dislike of him. Instead of suffering from a selection of grudges and vendettas, Locomotive could use Vilmos as the dustbin of enmity. He hardly ever played in a match because he wasn’t much good and because of one of the standard amusements on the way to a fixture – pushing Vilmos out onto a railway platform as the train was pulling away, ideally when he was wearing only his basketball boots. ‘Where’s Bokros?’ Hepp would ask. ‘We saw him going for a walk in Hatvan/Cegled/Veszprem’, someone would say. Vilmos discovered the only way of ensuring he wasn’t exposed in rather dull parts of the country with poor transportational possibilities was to barricade himself in the toilet until they reached their destination.
It was the week after Gyuri had lost his bet with Bokros on the outcome of the Army vs. Ironworkers football match.
Gyuri had confidently bet on the Army, not understanding why Bokros was being ostensibly that stupid, because he didn’t know as Bokros did that an international match had been fixed for the same day so that the Army was going to be stripped of all its best players. Gyuri was skint at the time but he had had his eye on a leather belt that had also formerly belonged to Sándor, so he had wagered in exchange for the belt, in an excess of colourful hyperbole, that Bokros could crap into his hands if the Ironworkers won. The Ironworkers did, but fortunately, out of the blue, Vilmos had grown a sense of humour.