Elek’s excursions to the track were, in the main, shirt-losing exercises but now and then he must have won since there were evenings when there was something to eat. More direct action took place too. One day Gyuri came home to find that his books, all his books, were gone; all that was remained was a patch of lighter wallpaper ‘I had to sell them,’ Elek replied to Gyuri’s inquiry: ‘we have to eat you know.’ Which was fine, but Elek could have asked first, and the galling thing was not that the books were gone but that whatever the going market value of his library was Elek would have been bamboozled and only got a tenth of it. Elek’s business sense, if he ever had any, seemed to have been mislaid somewhere during the war. The grocery shop that he had run for a month was the best example; it nearly destroyed the family because they had to rise before dawn to buy stock and not only did they not make any money, they lost it. They lost a staggering amount, more than if they had just jettisoned the greens in the street. Grocers weren’t keen on other people becoming grocers.
Ambitious projects like grocering were behind Elek now, the armchair was enough. Since Mother died, Elek had demonstrated less of a need to be seen doing something. There were mysterious absences from time to time, which spawned packages of food, but Elek treated life largely as a spectator sport.
This lack of remorse and of pleading to rewrite the script could be accounted in some quarters as admirable, but Gyuri found himself unable to applaud: ‘How does it feel to have one of the most sat-on arses in the universe?’ he inquired after a very forlorn day. Elek shrugged: ‘My father lost everything,’ he said, as if this were a lucid explanation, appending by way of conclusion, ‘You’ll dig me up when I’m gone.’
Gyuri hadn’t seen much of his grandfather. Memories of his grandfather’s visits in his furthest childhood had two components: nice cakes he wasn’t allowed to touch and a bullet-headed, dangerous-looking old man who kept asking who Gyuri was. His grandfather had, according to Elek, stood surety for a friend’s gambling debts. The friend had been unable to pay and instead of doing the done and honourable thing, passing a bullet through his brains, went off to Berlin to open a Hungarian restaurant, leaving grandfather to fork out. But if nothing else Elek and grandfather had handled fortunes. Somehow Gyuri feared that he wouldn’t be given a fortune to lose.
Nevertheless, Elek’s snap pauperdom had certain benefits for Gyuri. Having a father who had stepped down from life meant there was no friction over the exam business. Elek had never been excessively concerned about Gyuri’s schoolwork; sometimes Gyuri wondered if Elek knew which school he was attending. In a rare and ephemeral flare of studiousness, Gyuri once asked Elek to test him on some Latin verbs. ‘Do you know them or not?’ Elek had queried, and when Gyuri had responded that he thought that he did, Elek had retorted: ‘Then why do I need to test you?’
Still, Gyuri reflected, as he shaved in the first of his preparations for his evening out, at least he only had to sit one subject again to get his matriculation certificate. Next door, while he decapitated his bristles, he could hear Mr Galantai repeatedly complaining about the nationalisation of the factories which really must have been exercising him since it had happened some months ago. ‘This is too much – it can’t go on much longer.’
Gyuri had no doubt that things would go on for some time yet. Enough to get him in the Army. This was the sole encouragement to study – and it was a truly major carrot. No pass, no university. No university, yes Army. Yes to years of not eating, standing out in the rain, digging ditches, not seeing anyone you knew, anyone you liked, prison with salutes and worse beds. People preferred to commit suicide before being conscripted as it was more agreeable to die at home in comfort, rather than truncating your arteries in some dingy barracks.
It was a good thing that mathematics was the only remaining weight threatening to drag him down into all that; after all there had been many fails nuzzling up against him in the exams. Hungarian literature had been a real case of digging himself out of the grave. Luckily, Botond had been conducting the oral examination, albeit with a couple of other teachers who didn’t like him as much, or probably at all. The set text was Arany’s Toldi. Either he had never had a copy or he couldn’t find it but the evening before, when Gyuri had resolved to read a bit, his sudden desire to read Arany was foiled so he turned up dutifully at the exam to collect a fail.
Botond was sitting with his feet up on the table. The other teachers’ faces were strongly broadcasting that this detracted from the decorum of the occasion but Botond was the head of the Hungarian Department and what was more was unchallengeable in Hungarian literature. He had read everything twice, and when it came to poetry could recite nearly every published verse. If you were lucky, if something sparked him off, he would enter a Hidassy-like trance and declaim flawlessly for twenty minutes, giving the class a much-needed break. As befitted someone deeply implicated with art, Botond had long unruly hair, so remorselessly unruly that pupils and staff suspected he engineered his coiffure to look like a starfish every morning.
‘Well, fischer,’ Botond had said jovially staring up at the ceiling, tapping a cuspid with the earpiece of his spectacles, probably running through some juicy texts at the back of the cerebral shop while he was going through the tedious business of testing the pupils. ‘It’s always a pleasure to see you, but I regret that you’ll have to give us some of Toldi before we can let you go.’
‘To be honest, I can’t,’ Gyuri owned up. ‘I’m sorry; but I don’t know any.’
‘Ha, ha. Always modest. Always modest. Any section, just fire away.’
‘No honestly. I don’t want to waste your time,’ Gyuri had insisted.
‘Exam nerves, eh? All right, just recite any one of your favourite poems.’
It was a reasonable request, but it caught Gyuri by surprise. He rifled his literary knowledge but the drawer was empty. ‘No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t recite anything.’
‘Ha, ha, Fischer, your sense of humour will get you into trouble one day. I’ll put you down for a pass. Send in the next candidate, please.’ Botond was extremely avuncular to everyone (except those who evinced a sincere enmity to poetry). He was one of the few masters who was liked, a fondness fuelled by the biographical information, passed on year after year, that Botond had got drunk with all the major figures working the Hungarian language since the turn of the century. He had starved with Ady in Paris (‘Bandi and I were arguing who should peel the potato for supper’) and with eight other unwashed and less posteritied Hungarians shared one bed on a shift basis in an unheated garret, got drunk with all the major literary figures again, punched Picasso in an argument over prosody and was, despite his senior teaching post, available at short notice for drinks with any major (or minor for that matter) literary figures left after two world wars and a plethora of emigration. Literary criticism was more compelling when you knew that your teacher had dragged the author out of a bar by his legs.
No, Botond was not the type to hand out a fail lightly, especially since he still owed Elek a five figure sum.