Gyuri watched that newsreel several times, because there was one wide shot of the crowds around the Stalin statue which had microscopically featured his bedroom window, enabling him, with some imagination, to relive the joy of his only-just-off-camera mourning.
But Stalin’s death, although derangingly enjoyable, hadn’t changed things much. Rákosi was a little less cocky and Nagy became Prime Minister. Gyuri heard rumours that people were being cleared out of the prisons, but Stalin stood monumentally on. The eight metre bronze statue, planted on the site of a church that had been demolished at the end of the war, was the main feature visible from Gyuri’s bedroom window and he had taken the positioning of the statue as a personal horseprick from Fate. Nagy, of course, was different to Rákosi. He had a moustache. Rákosi didn’t. Also, Nagy wasn’t completely bald. But the Stalin statue statued on, sodomising the Budapest skyline, sundering any remaining dignity from a city still recovering from its postwar hangover.
This evening, Makkai appeared at the doorway of his flat without any doorbell prompting. ‘Three-two to the Germans,’ he said, ‘it must be a fix.’ Completely enraged by auditing, frustrated and bored with his accountancy course, in a stupor of fed-upness, Gyuri hadn’t been paying attention to the World Cup Final that was engrossing everyone else, Hungary vs. West Germany. He certainly hadn’t been in the mood for his English lesson but as Makkai had no phone he hadn’t had any means of cancelling it, so he turned up so as not to offend Makkai, who was a connoisseur of courtesy and did enjoy giving language lessons. Makkai didn’t charge very much for two hours although it was still a strain on Gyuri’s resources. But Gyuri felt that for Makkai teaching had less to do with the money (although he certainly needed it) than with importing an audience into his flat and that for a while he was taken seriously. Out on the street he was another pensioner, an old fart with no position, no clout, no job, no money, but in the instructing chair he was a skilled keeper of deep intellectual treasures.
These infusions of esteem were vital to Makkai who would shed a few years during the course of his revelations about English syntax, pronunciation and life in England where he had once worked at the Hungarian embassy. ‘A marvellous building. We couldn’t have afforded it, but it was an inheritance from the Habsburgs. We got the old Habsburg building in London, the Austrians got Paris and the Czechs were very pleased about getting the building in Berlin. That’ll teach them.’
Gyuri sat down and waited for Pataki who had suddenly decided that he should start learning English as well. Pataki had also decided that the ideal method for him to learn would be to sit in on Gyuri’s lessons. Gyuri had reminded Pataki that he was fairly advanced in his acquaintance with the English language but this hadn’t deterred Pataki who had assured him he would pick up the gist easily.
‘Three-two,’ Makkai repeated, stunned by the result of the football match, dumbfounded as everyone else in Hungary was, apart from Gyuri who was too preoccupied with the misery of accountancy. Along with the rest of the football team, Puskás, the man with the unstoppable feet and the golden toes, was the sole repository of national pride. Hungary, in accounting terms, had only one thing to its credit – Puskás the footballing genius. He was tubby, he looked a joke (even more than Pataki he would have nothing to do with training) but once he was on a football pitch he saw things that no one else did and would end up unfailingly whacking the ball into the net. The rest of the team was talented but Puskás was the diminutive giant of the side. They had even destroyed the English five-one, so everyone had been confident that the Germans would be vanquished in the final.
‘They must have been bought off. The Germans must have offered some bribe. They must have offered the government a loan or something. The team must have been ordered to lose,’ said Makkai.
The lesson should have started five minutes previously but there was still no sign of Pataki. Makkai decided to indulge in a cup of coffee, Brazilian coffee routed into Budapest by a cousin living in Koln. ‘I was lucky. The customs people only stole half of it, normally the whole package disappears,’ commented Makkai. ‘Of course, I may be unfair to the customs, perhaps it was the postman who stole it.’ Gyuri’s polite refusal only lasted as far as the second offer.
The English lessons had been going well. Gyuri had reached the point where he could boldly open a book and the page would hold no secrets for him. There might be murkiness and fleeting confusion but there would be no huge catch of meaning that could escape him. This rather pleased him: after all, his studies had been carried out on an intermittent basis, in the evenings when he was often half-dead from basketball. The main appeal of English was, he supposed, that it was only spoken by rotten imperialists, filthy bastards such as the bloated Wall Street Capitalists or the conniving British empire-builders. The appeal was that English was not only not compulsory like Russian, but that it was rather hard to study anywhere since it was viewed as lax, sullying, unsalubrious – unlike the bracing, cleansing cyrillic script.
Gyuri had taken a number of exams in Russian which consisted of having a firm grip on phrases such as ‘Have the Steelworkers’ Trade Union delegates arrived yet, Comrade?’ or ‘How is the hegemony of the proletariat today?’ You could almost pass the exam by supplying a plethora of ‘comrades’ into the text or the conversation. Gyuri was proud of the fact that he had the lowest passes possible and that he had forgotten everything by the time he walked out from the exam, his self-collapsing knowledge gone.
His English had only really been put to the test once, when a basketball coach from Manchester University came to visit and Gyuri was nominated to transmit understanding between the guest and his hosts. He had been horrified to discover that he didn’t understand a single word, not a single word the man was saying, so much so that he took aside the man from the Ministry and checked with him that the visitor really spoke English. ‘He should do,’ came the reply, ‘he’s a Scot.’ Gyuri resorted to inventing questions and statements approximately the length of the Scotsman’s speaking. Both sides ended up satisfied.
‘Here,’ said Makkai, handing over the coffee; it was strong enough to encaffeinate at five paces, dark, aromatic with abroad. Brazil, thought Gyuri taking a sip, lots of coffee, beach, Hungarian fascists. Despite the Hungarians, Brazil wouldn’t be such a bad destination.
There was still no sign of Pataki who had never taken much interest in time and its regulated passage. Even if he had been sovietised to the point of having a dozen wrist-watches on his arm he couldn’t have kept an appointment. His lack of synchronisation with the rest of the country had become more pronounced since Bea had forsaken him. Pataki had never admitted it. He never conceded that Bea had dumped him, had dropped him from a great height, but Bea’s opening a liaison with one of Hungary’s most senior, most influential, most monied actors had coincided with Pataki staying in bed for three days, unable to muster enough courage to brush his teeth or even to join Elek for a tête-à-tête. ‘Come on,’ Gyuri urged after Pataki had remained connected to his bed for forty-eight hours, ‘pull yourself together and let’s go rowing.’ Pataki turned over onto his other side so that his melancholy would be unblemished by Gyuri.
‘Frankly, I can’t see the point of being conscious. It’s more trouble than it’s worth,’ Pataki had replied. ‘Be a man,’ Gyuri reiterated, ‘look how often I get the elbow.’