October 1946
Pataki was having a lucubratory crap when they came to arrest him.
He was comfortably perched, working his way through a first edition of Tompa’s poetry, a splendid gold-embossed publication printed in 1849 that had come from a bombed-out Jewish flat. Tompa was the sort of poet Pataki liked, plodding and second-rate, and this was precisely why Pataki was investigating his rhyme schemes. Tompa’s mediocrity was rather reassuring. Tompa had been there, Petófi’s sidekick, in the middle of the 1848 revolution, the highlight of the century, bobbing up and down in the cauldron of era-making, handed all the great moments of existence, and he had fluffed it. All Tompa had managed to do was to knock out greeting-card verse, a chain of tum-tee-tum.
Tompa was what you wanted in the way of a literary predecessor, solid, reliable, uninspired, doing some useful groundwork, warming up a few promising stanzas, passing on the baton to his successors so they could make the dash to glory. A spear-carrier. A stagehand. Not like that bastard Petófi who had fenced off most of the language, who had confiscated most of the things worth poetising about, creating Hungarian literature in the lunchbreaks between his revolutionary activities; the man who (according to some authorities) had declared the 1848 revolution open, monogrammed all the best poetic forms, tossed out entire school and university syllabuses as a sideline, and fought with the Hungarian revolutionary army which thrashed the Habsburgs, the army which looked as if it had ironed out the jinx, when whoops, it got wiped out.
Then Petófi had the nerve to die, looking sharp in a white shirt, alone, on foot against Cossack cavalry at twenty-six. A man whose verse was embossed on every Hungarian at the factory.
That was what you didn’t need – some rotten genius queering the pitch, eating up all the literary glory on the table. Pataki had two recurring dreams. One was rather nightmarish: he would be drummed by a heart-rending fear that he couldn’t remember either the names or the addresses or the telephone numbers of two or three staggeringly attractive women he had met: their details were always just out of recall, the fingertips of his memory couldn’t reach the shelf they were kept on, so he had no way of tracking down the beauties. They were out there, waiting for him, but he couldn’t get his memory to cough up. He would wake in a sweat.
The other dream featured a bookcase. It was the type of dream where you knew from the kick-off it was a dream. The pre-eminent book was a thick volume of poetry. The whole form of this book spoke of great literature, it was stuffed with world-class stuff, the sort of thing that would be in everyone’s collection, even those people who don’t read. So Pataki would read the book, thinking, this is brilliant poetry, it could muscle its way into any anthology of verse, it leaves Petófi at the starting-line and it doesn’t exist. All I have to do, thinks Pataki, is memorise it, write it down when I wake up, and hey presto, instant immortality.
Nevertheless, although he trotted through the dream again and again, he could never capture a chunk. Once, exceptionally, he returned with a line ‘The dog is in the dogcase’, which despite long consideration, wasn’t any good on its own, and Pataki was unable to do the sequels. There was a variant on this dream where he came across a heap of gold coins, and despite furiously concentrating on bringing them back, he would wake up with a fist full of nothing.
Pataki did try writing without the shortcuts but although he would get enthused during the writing, as the ink dried, so did his satisfaction. The ideas, the visions that turned his ignition were exciting but it was like taking a pebble out of a river where it gleamed and watching it become matt and boring. Pataki tried to splash with ink the invisible men that only he could see, so that others could detect their outlines, but he always missed and was merely left with a mess.
He hadn’t succeeded in penning anything he wanted to show other people. It was so frustrating to see something like a beautiful girl and then to end up with something like a matchstick figure scrawled on a wall.
Thus, drawing comfort from Tompa’s mechanical poetry, Pataki was surprised to hear a jarring knock on the toilet door (not really designed to take the force of a heavy fist) and an unfamiliar male voice calling his name. He was surprised, but not as surprised as he would be when he discovered it was the AVO outside waiting for him.
As secret police went, the AVO weren’t terribly secret about what they did – half the business of being secret policemen is people knowing about you, word-of-mouth-publicity. Pataki’s mother was, fortunately, even more astonished than he was; she was flabbergasted into silence and so there was no scene as they left the flat. Even more fortunately Pataki’s father was still at work. If he was going to talk his way out of this problem he didn’t want any interference. The problem was, what was the problem? The two AVO made a point of not telling him why he was wanted for questioning; they were milking the superiority of their knowledge, that Pataki could tell. Until he discovered the cause of the trouble, it was going to be difficult to decide which fraud to unpack; he readied two or three all-purpose disclaimers so as to have a good story at hand.
They passed Mrs Vajda on the staircase lamenting with Mrs Csörgó the demolition of the church that had stood at the end of Damjanich utca for over a hundred years. ‘This can’t go on much longer,’ she was saying.
The AVO car was long and black, and Pataki tried to enjoy the short ride. There was something flattering about being arrested, the entourage did testify to one’s importance, but being in custody was becoming a habit; he really had to cut down. There had been the corpse-collecting incident – the window had got them out of that. Then he and Józsi had accompanied Gyuri to his mother’s cottage in Erdóváros. The first day in the countryside they had walked out of a forest slap into a Russian camp. Pataki immediately feigned intense pain, on the lines of acute appendicitis, and got the others to plead for a doctor and medicine. This appeal had the desired effect, the soldiers had told them to go to hell and shooed them away.
They had been reliving that escape the following day, chuckling over Russian gullibility as they fired a revolver at some bottles they had carried out to a local beauty spot for target practice. This was when there had been notices everywhere, in newspapers, on walls, in railway carriages warning that anyone caught with a firearm would be considered a bandit, a fascist, someone to be shot forthwith. It was probably the shooting and their chuckling that obscured the sound of Russian patrol until it was right behind them.
One of the four soldiers, a true short-arse, who looked about twelve, was extremely jolly. The Red Army manual for troops stationed in Hungary obviously contained the phrase ‘We are going to shoot you’ (just to prevent any misunderstanding) since the midget kept on repeating it with an appalling accent, adding various onomatopoeic execution effects, like ‘bbubbbbuabbaa’. This he did, interspersing delighted laughter, all the way to their headquarters in the village of Jew. The people who lived in Jew didn’t look at all Jewish, nor were they, otherwise they’d have been long dead.
Not for the first time Pataki reflected on the imbecility of Hungarian village names and how idiotic it would look to be shot in Jew.
They were left in a small room, with a window so minute none of them could have managed to get more than an arm out, and besides which their titchy escort was on guard outside, still rehearsing for the firing-squad. It was going to be a tough one to mendacity out, Pataki had reflected, bearing in mind that none of them had a greater command of Russian than ‘fuck your mother’. Józsi was beginning to smell badly and Gyuri’s eyes were on stalks of terror. ‘Don’t worry,’ Pataki said in an endeavour to bolster morale, ‘they’re not going to shoot us.’ ‘It’s not that,’ replied Gyuri, ‘everyone saw us being brought here. My mother’s going to kill me.’ Pataki then recalled that Gyuri’s last word to his mother before going out the door had been ‘no’ in response to the irate question ‘You haven’t still got that revolver, have you?’