Naturally, everyone gathered around for the show. Vilmos crouched down, and Gyuri obligingly hunkered down behind him ready to catch the fecal ball. ‘No fumbling,’ was the general exhortation. Honourably, Gyuri waited to settle his debt but Bokros, suddenly the centre of approval for devising such a wonderful entertainment, was laughing so much that he was incapable of invoking the muscular bailiffs to evict some tenants from his bowels.
‘Give me a newspaper,’ Bokros had instructed, hoping that reading some of Prime Minister Hegedus’s speech on Hungarian-Soviet relations would induce a state of tranquillity and sphinctal detente but the crowd eventually had to disperse in disappointment.
The following week, Gyuri had missed the preamble of the argument but the bet between Pataki and Bokros had grown out of a furious abuse session. It happened on Margit Island, after a training session and Gyuri entered as Pataki, who had recently been extremely tetchy, was telling Bokros what trash he was. Pataki was angry, and he looked angry, which was unusual in that he didn’t routinely hand out public bulletins on his feelings like that: Bokros, who you would have thought would have been quite used to being called a shit and so on, was greatly incensed.
‘Who do you think you are?’ he spat out. ‘Do you think you’re so great? That you’re so hard?’ Bokros almost ruptured himself getting the word out. ‘You toe the line when it matters.’
‘But I haven’t licked the arse of everyone at the Ministry of Sport, including the doorman.’
‘No, you’re so independent, the changing-room rebel, the revolutionary who’s going to bring everything down with some explosive whispered sarcasm… you haven’t got the guts to speak out. If you think it all stinks why don’t you say so?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Pataki, pointing at the White House across the river. Why doesn’t he just hit Bokros? Gyuri wondered. ‘You’ll have the chance to see what I think if you want. Let’s have a bet. You put up your bike against half of my salary for a year and I’ll run stark naked around the White House and give them a 360 degree view of my fine Hungarian bum.’
‘Done,’ said Bokros, made adamant by his anger and the certitude that Pataki wouldn’t attempt it. But Pataki waved in Gyuri and Bánhegyi. ‘Come on, I want witnesses.’
Gyuri had spent most of his life thinking that Pataki had gone too far, but he hadn’t felt so strongly that his friend was on course to crash head-on with destiny since that time in ’45 when Pataki had said to him: ‘Of course we should try out that revolver. Your mother won’t know. What do you think’s going to happen? The Russians are going to arrest us and have us shot?’
The White House was nominally the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior; it was mostly a haunt for the Hungarian Working People’s Party and the AVO. Some said it was the headquarters of the AVO, but the AVO taking no chances, seemed to have several headquarters: Andrássy út for one, plus a number of villas up in the hills of Budapest where they could beat people up in comfort and tranquillity.
The White House, as the Ministry in its well-appointed riverside location was popularly known, had a marked resemblance to a shoebox. The story went thus: the architect who had been commissioned to design it (not because he was a Party member, but because of his family background – his father had been a dipsomaniac and a worker manque, his mother a moderately successful prostitute, so he was valued as being suitably anti-bourgeois) had, in the recognised tradition of Hungarian architecture, namely boozing and gibbering excitedly, spent both the six months he had been allotted to create a plan and the commission fee, boozing and gibbering, telling everyone he met- building workers, shop assistants, proctologists, swimming pool attendants, paviours, percussion players and a man on the number two tram who was breeding leeches, waiting for their big comeback in medicine – that he had been commissioned to design the Ministry.
The architect was cruelly woken one morning by a phone call from Party headquarters saying they had been looking for him for a week and that he was expected that afternoon to display the model of the new building and that Rákosi wasn’t in a very good mood. Luckily the architect didn’t have a hangover, as he was still drunk, having only just got to bed after three days’ revelling at a gypsy wedding in Mateszalka. He had enough clarity of mind to realise that he would be shot or if he were lucky he could spend the rest of a short life making uranium pies down a mineshaft under an unfashionable part of Hungary.
Desperately rummaging through his closet, he unearthed a model he had constructed years ago in his student days before the war, for a competition to build a luxury hotel in Lillafiired. The model was quite detailed, though the gothic towers weren’t in keeping with the latest thinking from Moscow but while this model would finish his career as an architect, it might save his life and allow a possibility of further boozing and gibbering. Who knows, Rákosi might even have a thing about gothic towers?
As he was dreaming up some brazen lies to accompany the model, he didn’t pay the necessary attention to pulling on his trousers and he keeled over, crushing the model beyond redemption and the most epic of his falsehoods.
Spotting a shoebox skulking in the closet, he remembered the words of his professor: ‘All the best ideas are accidents.’ (The professor had got the commission to build the Ethnography Museum because he had copied down the wrong address for a prospective client who wanted a layout for a cakeshop and had ended up on the doorstep of the head of the museum committee who had been won over by his gibbering.) Seizing the shoebox and drawing some windows on it, he started to improvise a speech making copious reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat. ‘I could have brought an elaborate model but surely in an era when the working people dictate…’
Then there was the Szell story. Every time Gyuri looked at the White House he recalled it. Szell and his father specialised in food-processing equipment and he had insisted that they had received a decree to install two king-sized meat-grinders in the basement of the White House, obviously to mince up those particularly difficult corpses for the fishes. Of course, both Szell and his father were inveterate liars. If they were facing a firing squad and you were to ask them, ‘Do you want your lives to be spared?’ they’d be forced to answer ‘No’. On the other hand, you could see how an ample meat grinder could come in handy and it was a good way of turning the blue Danube red.
Gyuri, Bánhegyi, Róka and even, in the end, Bokros, all tried to dissuade Pataki from executing the wager, but Pataki was, even in the bright sunshine, almost incandescent with anger. Bokros attempted to jolly down the situation, perhaps realising that the consequences of such an action might well injure even himself. ‘No,’ said Pataki walking off, ‘tomorrow, at twelve.’
Worried, Gyuri pondered how to divert Pataki from taunting the White House with his buttocks. Talking him out of it directly wouldn’t work and Gyuri was unsure which style of machination would have the desired effect. It was like lacking the right-sized spanner to undo a bolt; simple if you had the right tool, otherwise impossible.There was a formula of words that would make Pataki laugh and go rowing but Gyuri couldn’t think of the combination.
So alarmed was Gyuri that he even took the step of talking to Elek about Pataki’s planned run. Elek wasn’t taken aback; he showed no consternation at the prospect of losing his partner in nicotine, indeed he maintained his armchair aloofness. ‘I suppose you’ll be getting arrested with him, will you? They say prison is character-forming. Mind you, my character was already formed when they put me inside in Bucharest.’