The man had the look of an engineer, something lowly and civil, the pens in his shirtpocket spoke of a rudimentary learning and erudition; the adept way he blew his nose with the aid of his right hand and with one motion hustled the catarrh out of the open window spoke of too much time on building sites. He had got on the train at Budapest and placed his dowdy belongings on the overhead rack, sat down in one of the seats next to the door, leaned his head against the glass and turned on the sleep, instantly, without any preamble.
Within a few seconds the snoring had commenced, as if approaching them from a great distance, faint at first but growing steadily to a prodigious din erupting from the man’s open mouth. Everyone else had looked at each other, first with a sort of tacit amusement that had progressed to bemusement and carried on to irritation. The odd thing about people behaving badly, Gyuri noticed, letting their boorishness slop out onto others, was that it was usually the victims who were embarrassed rather than the perpetrator.
The volume of the snoring was phenomenal. A mild, intermittent rasping might have been bearable but the engineer’s lungs pummelled everyone’s eardrums mercilessly. Also, truthfully, it was most unwelcome to be privy to the detailed internal workings of a corpulent engineer – to have a ringside perspective on his respiratory adventures. There were sporadic lulls, producing an optimistic sense of relief, of the auditory siege being lifted, but these interludes of silence while the snoring caught its breath only made the restored gurgling more serrated.
Gyuri, at the opposite end of the compartment, had no contiguous opportunity to impede the snoring but those closer attempted to trip up the volume. Discreet coughs followed by indiscreet coughs, yells, proddings and shovings didn’t succeed in making him miss a slumbering beat. The woman in the headscarf started clucking loudly, as if giving the traditional imitation of a chicken. The snoring faltered and disappeared under the onslaught of the clucking. ‘It always works with my husband,’ she said proudly but as she did the snoring pulled out into the fast lane again. The man opposite tried trailing a powerful garlic sausage under the sleeper’s nose. Nothing. The engineer snored on blissfully.
The flawless repose, the effortless snoozing excited Gyuri’s admiration as well as irritating him. He could never sleep on trains, or at best, could only achieve a disorientating stupor that was worse than being tired.
The sausage-waver was becoming edgy and aggressive towards the morpheused slob who was wholly indifferent to the implorings and digitings he was getting. If it hadn’t been for the obvious passage of air in and out of his workings, the sleeper’s lack of response would have been rather worrying, so loath was his body to do its job and pass on the complaints.
‘My dear sir, you’re snoring rather loudly,’ said the bespectacled protester, giving another push to the snorer. To flee the palatal thunder, Gyuri left the compartment.
What a gift to be able to sleep like that, he thought. How agreeable to sleep through the entire thing, to only wake up when everything had changed. That was one of the worst things: the boredom. Dictatorship of the proletariat, apart from the abrasive and brutal nature of its despotism, was terribly dull. It wasn’t the sort of tyranny you’d want to invite to a party. Look at the great tyrannies of antiquity: Caligula, Nero, now there was tyranny for you, excess, colour, abundant fornication, stage management, excitement on the loose, panem et circenses. What have we got? brooded Gyuri. Hardly any panem and as for the circenses, only the sort involving people running around wearing red noses.
Not only do I get a dictatorship, fumed Gyuri, but I get a tatty dictatorship, a third rate, a boring dictatorship. I could have stayed in Budapest and watched Boris Godunov, he thought. He had only seen it four times. Another, somewhat unacknowledged triumph of the new order was that you could always watch Boris Godunov any time you wanted to. After all, there were only so many Russian operas to choose from. Róka, entwined with a singer, had acquired an unquenchable taste for opera and had invited Gyuri to accompany him to see his fiancée in action. It was amusing to see all the policemen and steelworkers packed into the front rows of the auditorium, whether they wanted to be there or not. (At Ganz the lathe-turners had drawn lots to allocate the tickets distributed to them by the Party secretary, many preferring to do an extra shift rather than having to face the music.) Gyuri had put in attendance at Boris Godunov the month before so he had decided to go down to Szeged to investigate the party for which Sólyom-Nagy had been acting as harbinger.
In the next compartment, a beautiful girl was talking animatedly to a female friend with the bounce of the attractive. With the right looks, a good stock of beauty, you were always going to come out on top, it was the life-belt that would keep you floating on the surface. Sadistically, she licked her lips and dangled her left calf, crossed over her right leg, energetically in a manner and in a brisk rhythm that even someone without Gyuri’s unifilar mind would have found reminiscent of riding the unirail.
Why, lamented Gyuri, does the beautiful girl never sit in my compartment? Why am I always lumbered with the noisy oaf? Admitting to himself, as he returned to his compartment, as he was old enough to know, that if she had been sitting in the compartment he wouldn’t have been able to craft any conversational grappling-hooks or have the nerve to use them.
The passenger who had been trying to stop the slob sleeping aloud had finally despaired of polite memos to the snorer’s nervous system. He arranged the sleeper’s hand into overhanging the doorway and then slammed shut the sliding door in a vigorous attempt to guillotine the fingers. The sleeper awoke but only with a mild grunt of surprise as if he had dropped off unexpectedly.,
‘So sorry,’ apologised the door-slammer, ‘I seem to have caught your fingers.’ The slamee wasn’t bothered at all. He proceeded to unwrap a rug-sized piece of paper from which he dug out three greasy fried chicken wings which he ate with such gusto and noise that everyone felt they had a molar eye’s view of the mastication. The general relief that came when he had chomped the last of the chicken was promptly dispelled when, on the count of three, sleep was resumed and the slob carried on snoring from where he had left off. Szeged was still two hours away.
As a putative employee of the railways, Gyuri travelled free, but this didn’t make the trip any less onerous. When you’re eighteen, you’ll travel to the other side of the earth for a party, he thought, sensing how he needed to talk himself into the pursuit of pleasure now.
‘Don’t worry,’ Elek had said, struck by a wave of paternity. ‘There is a season to these things. 1911 in my case. In 1911, I couldn’t so much as say hello to a woman without her running away or calling the police. The whole year there was this great wall of China between them and me. Nations, individuals, they all have their ups and downs. Pussy shortage doesn’t last.’ This paternal wisdom might have been more consoling if Elek hadn’t been coiffuring himself prior to some nocturnal escorting of one of his female acquaintances. Pataki had doubtless passed on gleefully to Elek the news of Gyuri’s latest failure, an unprecedented hat trick of romantic flops.
On Andrássy út, Gyuri, having bumped into István’s wife’s youngest sister, had been introduced to two shapely netball players she had in tow. He had taken advantage of their fortuitous discussion of a new film to propose a joint outing. The film, like all Hungarian films, would be rubbish, but it might help to flush out the girls’ evaluation of him. And the beauty of suggesting the film was that he hadn’t, technically, asked the netball players out, so that a refusal would be a rejection of the film rather than his charms. This appeal to culture was necessary because: his self-confidence was pavement-high, and also, because from such a cursory reading of the netball players’ interest meters he hadn’t been able to ascertain how keen they were to admit him to the two-legged amusement park. Then there was the question of balancing their inclination towards him with his inclination to them; the blonde was more attractive, but on the other hand it would be foolish to pass up the brunette if she were unattached and itchy.