Once out of the exam, in the corridor, with post-incident clarity, it did occur to Gyuri that there was one poem he could have rounded up, by Botond’s old pal, Ady, on the pleasure of seeing the Gare de l’Est in Paris; one of Ady’s most appealing themes being that the noblest prospect a Hungarian could see was the way out of Hungary. Good but sozzled poet. István had been in Érmindszent, Ady’s birthplace, during the war and had been surprised to find not so much as a plaque to Ady’s memory, whereas, by comparison, Hungary was littered with commemorative notices such as ‘Petófi walked past here’ and ‘Petófi almost walked past here’. When István pointed out this omission to a local the rejoinder was ‘Why should we put up a monument to a second-generation alcoholic?’
The maths exam was first thing the next morning but it was too craven to stay in, despite the frittering away of time caused by the afternoon’s ant-circus. Elek was in the armchair, in some difficulty without a cigarette. As Gyuri was heading out, Elek caught him in the back with ‘You’re going to love the Army’.
The first time he sat the mathematics exam, he had prudently taken the precaution of smuggling in the textbook. The main reason he failed at the first attempt was because he hadn’t known enough to know he hadn’t known enough. Gyuri dipped into the textbook in the hope of succour, but had found its pages totally unintelligible. He angrily registered that if he had worked a bit harder he would have been able to cheat properly.
The second time around, his preparations at least gave him enough expertise to understand the questions, even if the answers weren’t jumping into view. It was possible for him to do something about these questions, even if it was like fighting a forest-fire with a thimbleful of water. An all-pervasive desperation not to do military service saturated his being. He had seen a group of conscripts the previous week, ideally cast for the role of a chainless chain-gang, miserable, bones veiled in skin, carrying a loaf of bread that had long ago lost its credibility in the civilian world, that required a pickaxe rather than a knife.
Gyuri liked to think he was tough but knew he didn’t have the resilience for hardship so well-planned, so non-stop; although things were rough, there was always the prospect of something good happening to you if you were outside the Army, no matter how remote that prospect might be. In the Army you weren’t going to be bothered by any comfort, cheer, or anything that could be classified under the heading pleasant; there would be no appointments with pleasure.
The others in the exam hall, from a distance anyway, seemed to be beavering away confidently. Did he look in control to those two rows back? Gyuri wondered. The first question offered a few footholds, so he hastened to put something down on paper, before the wisdom he had fished out slipped away, and in the hope that if some apocalypse should curtail the exam after ten minutes, he might have enough answer to pass.
He had unrolled as much of the answer to question one as he could, when a glance to his left established that his gaze had a direct flight path to the left breast of the young lady there; either she had forgotten to do up her blouse or the buttons didn’t feel like working but light was taking off from untextiled skin and crashlanding into Gyuri’s retinas. His loins underwent a stepping-on, all the mathematical erudition he had convoked was summarily banished. To deliberately have arranged such an alignment, to visually sidestep the clothing barrier in other circumstances could have taken hours, but now, at such a delicate moment, his composure and her mammary impacted. Simultaneously, he looked away, but it was too late – the chemical heralds hit the road, stirring up a global ache.
Crippled by this unwarranted intrusion into his concentration, he returned to the maths and found he was locked out. The second question scarcely acknowledged his greeting.
Surveying the 180 degree view on his right, Gyuri ruminated on a group from one of the People’s Colleges. These were the special institutes where individuals predominantly from the bottom of the bucolic barrel were crammed with learning to provide the Party with man and womanpower. Peasant lads, in the main, who had ties fastened around their necks, copies of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) stuck in their hands, along with a ticket to the centre of the universe, Budapest, where accommodation in some appropriated bourgeois building would be waiting. They were loud in their endorsements of Marxism, as anyone in their new shoes would be.
Gyuri needed, as a minimum, three attempted answers to pass and while he had one attempt and a feint, the remaining questions looked hermetically sealed, inscrutable. A girl on his right, one of the People’s College contingent, kept staring over at his paper which Gyuri found droll. How could she think there was anything worth examining on his laughably blank paper?
He was coming to the conclusion that glaring at the questions in the hope they might crack was a waste of time and he might as well enjoy a display of swagger by walking out and perhaps fooling a few despairing souls into believing he had done brilliantly, instead of squirming around like a maggot on a hook.
The People’s girl was still looking at his paper and what was worse, looking as if she was looking. Being disqualified for cheating wasn’t going to make much difference to Gyuri but it might to her.
‘I can’t help,’ Gyuri mouthed to her. ‘Don’t look or we’ll both…’ he drew a finger across his throat. The girl reddened and threw her regard down onto her own sheets of paper. Now that he had conceded the mathematical match, Gyuri adjourned to treat himself to a spot of ocular plundering from the chest of the girl on his left, but was disgruntled to find that a fold of blouse was now refusing his glance admission, barring any further visual trespass.
Having decided that he wasn’t going to sit like a cabbage any longer, he was putting the top back on his pen as a prelude to departure, when the supervising rays from the invigilator were momentarily diverted and a square of paper made its way from the row on the right to his desk. Opening up the paper, Gyuri found it contained a neatly written solution which although he couldn’t entirely follow it, had such aplomb that he couldn’t doubt its correctness. He copied out the answer and sauntered out of the exam-hall knowing he had vaulted the pass, although, with hindsight, he conceded the ant-training and other diversions had drained the blood from his luck.
In the aftermath, several congregations of maths discussions formed. Numerous people were slumped around, with crumbled faces, as if auditioning to illustrate the caption ‘despair’. For the first time in his life, Gyuri felt like going to church to say thank you.
He certainly thanked his immediate saviour. He was in good form with her since she was so unattractive that there could be no question of making an overture and he could relax. Pataki appeared, closing in and frowning to see Gyuri wasting verbal effort on a young lady lagging so far behind the pack of beauty. Pataki, of course, hadn’t failed any of his exams. He had strolled down to the exams, dipping into a textbook or two as he walked, packing bites of knowledge into his cheeks like a hoarding hamster and then spitting them out at the examiners. By the time he walked out of the exam, he already knew less than when he walked in. In basketballing terms it was like a one-armed blindman throwing the ball, the ball hitting the ring, circling around, wobbling, teetering but then finally slumping into the net. Lucky, very lucky, travelling to the border between luck and miracle, but two points nevertheless.
Gyuri could see Pataki taking his time, lining up a whole afternoon’s witticisms about his poor choice of female interlocutors, but it wasn’t going to bother him. ‘Thanks again for the help,’ said Gyuri as his valediction, ‘you must be phenomenally good at maths.’