‘It is, of course, Generalissimo Stalin, who has given us life, that we salute, and the triumph of Stalinian strategy in the Great Patriotic War that we take as our guiding precept but it is above all the Hungarian edition of the works of Stalin, a new invincible weapon in our hands, that will enable us to model ourselves on the glorious Stalinian Soviet Army.’ This was all without a breath, and in front of a mounted, hazy photograph of a Soviet officer looking knowingly and professionally down the gun barrel proffered by a Soviet infantryman, smirkingly proud and confident of the unbesmirched state of his rifling. That photograph was to the left of Lieutenant-Colonel Pataki. To his right was a grey, hard-to-distinguish photograph of small figures in a line, carrying banners with indecipherable slogans. This picture was bottomed: ‘Peace Demonstration, London.’
Lt.-Col. Pataki took up Dohányi’s theme of Communism getting ready to put its boot on the throat of decadent bourgeois countries, to stick the bayonet in and twist it about, but in much more refined and dull language for fifteen minutes or so, before expounding further about Stalin, leader of the Peace Front.
If the Lieutenant-Colonel took this seriously, if he believed what he was saying, Gyuri pondered, it was sad. If he didn’t believe the nonsense he was spouting, like a parrot or a khaki gramophone player, that was sad too. Which was sadder? Or maybe you could take the whole scene, all of them assembled in the hut pretending to imbibe the wisdom that the Lt.-Col. was pretending to impart, as an enormously elaborate practical joke. Perhaps one day everyone in Hungary, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Rumania, the Soviet Union and even Albania would wake up one day to hear Stalin shrieking with laughter in the Kremlin: ‘You didn’t think I was serious, did you?’
Living according to bolshevik principles: the idea was as absurd as walking around all day with two fingers stuck up your nose. At least the Church only expected you to turn up once a week, but otherwise was prepared to keep out of your hair. If people’s power only meant a weekly hour-long lecture, Gyuri thought, I could live with it.
Scrutinising the Lieutenant-Colonel, Gyuri inclined to categorising him as a true believer, a moral cripple, ethically stillborn. This would surely be seen as the most lasting, the most magisterial accomplishment of the Hungarian Workers’ Movement: unearthing, rounding up, nurturing so many prize shits. How many supershits could a small country like Hungary yield? A few hundred? A few thousand? No, the Hungarian Working People’s Party’s talent scouts had offered contracts to hundreds of thousands of manshaped turds. Admittedly not all of them would be truly first division brigands, and who knows, maybe there were even people who joined by mistake, thinking they could do some good.
But for the conscripted audience, the ostensibly dull lecture had, in fact, been garnished with the tang of corporeal detente; numerous limbs and muscle installations had had an opportunity of resting, and as they filed away from the political instruction, they wondered if they would be treated to another session.
At the end of the four weeks, everyone was so glad to leave that they couldn’t find the energy to really hate Dohányi as he gave them some parting abuse: ‘I’m sorry to see you barely biped turds leaving. It would have been a better deal for humanity if you had died here, but I don’t suppose you self-propelled dicks will get very far. There’s no need to thank me.’ Gyuri and some of the others vacillated over giving Dohányi some obscenity, but you never could be sure how far military jurisdiction stretched. They settled for some sloppy salutes and ran to the railway station.
Returning to Budapest, Gyuri felt older, wiser, proud of having taken his four weeks without falling to his knees, begging for mercy. The sight of Budapest brought a torrent of excitement and gratitude. A desire to kiss the ground lasted for several seconds when he stepped off the train and the delight in being capitalised lasted until he got to Thököly út, by which time the crowded tram had pressed the last drops of rejoicing out of him.
It was as he strolled down the last section of Thököly út to turn into Dózsa György út, that a figure in a heavily-peopled delicatessen caught his eye. His subconscious elbowed his conscious, and he noticed Pataki in a queue at the counter. He gazed through the window at this spectacle for a few moments, and then, excited and fearful of missing the continuation, he ran into the shop.
There was Pataki, sandwiched between resolute housewives, carrying a shopping basket, a large wicker construction that Gyuri didn’t recognise as an official Pataki family household object.
Pataki’s awareness latched on to Gyuri as he approached. Just for a shaving of a second, there was a general alarm, a call to action, a glimpse of consternation bolting around the corner. If Gyuri hadn’t known Pataki from the age of four, these fleeting, mostly subcutaneous movements couldn’t have been noticed. As it takes a trained expert to judge a counterfeit banknote, so it took a Pataki expert to detect the counterfeit cool, to detect the thinnest recoil, a proton of shame, as if he had been caught extracting his dick from a herbivore.
The reason for Gyuri’s amazement was that Pataki never went shopping. Never. For certain masculine accessories such as clothes etc., yes, but then that sort of shopping wasn’t done in a shop but by cajoling acquaintances to produce the required item through barter, bribery, blackmail or begging. Even when Pataki was at a more malleable age, at six or seven, he had stubbornly refused to run out to the shops, no matter what the incentives or threats. Though Pataki had never publicly proclaimed it as a policy decision, there was a clear implication that going to the shops was one of the things you didn’t do, that it was an infringement of rowing time, a blight on male dignity. When Gyuri went off to collect the dress from Angyalföld, Pataki had said nothing, but his silence was eloquent: you’re my friend, so I won’t dwell on this deplorable lapse, this sad weakness.
Pataki was the chief exponent of ‘snatch the snatch’, of amatory hitting and running for the rowing-boat. Gyuri didn’t have the black and white evidence yet, but he had the feeling that Pataki’s waiting for some cheese was a sign of doctrinal collapse, that his mulierosity had got him distaffed.
‘How was the Army?’ Pataki greeted him, impeccably casual, as if they were meeting in the sports hall and not at the cheese-counter. ‘I hope they offered you a generalship?’
‘It was everything you’d expect,’ said Gyuri unable to contain himself and going for the jugular question. ‘Doing some errands for your mother, are you?’
‘No. Bea asked me to get a few things for lunch,’ replied Pataki. It was Pataki, in one way, at his greatest. The flawless tones of mundane, routine queuing, as if he were simply standing in a queue talking about standing in a queue and not utter capitulation, the unbridled massacre of a young lifetime’s precepts.
So it was Bea.
When Pataki had been thrown out of the College of Accountancy it hadn’t come as a surprise to anyone concerned. He had only found out about the exams by accident. He was walking past the College when he had been overcome by the need for a leak and he had fortuitously discovered the exam lists on his way to the gents. He had pleaded with Gyuri to remind him of the subjects he was supposed to be studying – was it the light industrial inventory course or the advanced cost analysis? He was so far gone, even cheating couldn’t have helped him.
Pataki had then rapidly obtained a place at the College for Theatrical and Cinematic Arts. Ironically, this hadn’t been for the outstanding performance that freed him from the clutches of the Army, which had snapped him up the minute he had been jettisoned by the College of Accountancy. He had feigned a dud cartilage which required him to walk around with an inflexible leg, all the time, for six weeks, a marathon acting feat that demanded rigorous verisimilitude twenty-four hours a day, thespianism without respite – though it was true that the potential savagery of the non-commissioned critics was a great encouragement in maintaining a correct impaired cartilage posture. A friendly doctor whom István had lined up removed a healthy cartilage from Pataki’s right knee and he got his discharge from the Army. Before his knee had time to heal properly Pataki was in at the College of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts to study photography and thus exempt once again from military service.