However, whenever Gyuri proposed some social union, Agnes always produced some excuse. There was no untreated refusal. She never gave the same excuse twice and they ranged from hair-washing to one twenty-minute apology featuring an escaped lion from Budapest Zoo where her brother was the deputy Party Secretary. Gyuri remembered that the plot began with an attempt to shift elephant shit in a more socialist and scientific manner, applying only the strictest of Marxist-Leninist principles. It was without doubt the longest alibi Gyuri had endured, and, since he doubted that Agnes’s imagination was up to it, probably true, but at the end of it she said that, sadly, she couldn’t go to the cinema. Gyuri would have taken off his chasing shoes long before if it hadn’t been for Pataki’s protestations that he had approval from flight control. ‘Just ask her out,’ he censured impatiently.
Finally, after listening to dozens of instalments about Agnes’s crammed time, since she wasn’t the sort to engender rabid desire, Gyuri had let it drop. After all, Gyuri had reasoned, if it was going to be unrequited love and regular humiliation, it might as well be unrequited love and regular humiliation at the hands of a prodigiously attractive female, which would be a shade less humiliating. ‘You don’t know how to ask. You just don’t know how to ask,’ Pataki had commented.
Agnes seemed sorry about past misunderstandings, as she was crying, as indeed many people were. The acceleration from initial jocularity to maudlin impotence had been phenomenal. An hour after the kick-off at eight o’clock, there was already a three o’clock in the morning atmosphere.
‘I’m so sorry, Gyuri,’ she sobbed. Her contrition seemed genuine because she kept repeating this with her head slumped on Gyuri’s chest. He assumed her grief was to do with her rejections of him, though it was hard to tell. At the behest of hormonal petition, Gyuri thought about a bareback waltz against a sequestered wall somewhere but discarded the idea. He didn’t want to gain admission to the club because there was no one on duty at the door, and besides, although part of him was already working on self chastisement for not taking what was offered to him on the tray of his sternum, he realised that he’d rather be with Jadwiga. He’d rather be sitting with Jadwiga chatting about some Hungarian writer, than taking a tongue tour of Agnes, or indeed any other highly acquiescent lady. You always get what you want when you don’t want it, he concluded, dumping Agnes into a more comfortable bit of aisle where she could continue her soliloquy.
He left and was braced by the cool night air which swept out some of the alcoholic debris left by Sólyom-Nagy’s concoction. He learned later from Sólyom-Nagy that two actresses who had been dancing on a prop coffin, had, shortly after Gyuri’s departure, taken off all their clothes. There had been no risk of them being voted the most beautiful women in Szeged, or indeed the most beautiful women at the party, but still, whoever got tired of naked actresses? Sólyom-Nagy had also reported the arrival of the police who were summoned because of a group jumping out of the theatre bar, a drop of twenty feet to the pavement below, as the result of some inebriated logic. The neighbours complained to the police because of the loud noise made by the jumpers as they laughed raucously about their broken ankles.
The police story was better. ‘I left the party five minutes before the police arrived’ made better narration than ‘I left the party five minutes before two actresses stripped naked.’
As Gyuri approached the student hostel, he could see a light in what he surmised was Jadwiga’s room. That was all you needed: a lit window in the distance, the knowledge that there was something there, something to work for. The company of a dwarfy hope.
He knocked civilisedly on Jadwiga’s door. ‘I have an important consignment of vernacular Hungarian for you,’ he said as she opened up. She studied him thoughtfully with much-read eyes, then backed away in a silent invitation to enter. She closed the door. Gyuri sat down on the bed of her still absent room-mate, while Jadwiga sat opposite him. Tired from her studying, she appraised him as if she hadn’t seen him before, slightly narrowing her eyes as if trying to focus better. Then she said with a half-smile: ‘We must talk.’ A pause. ‘We can be friends… but no more.’
‘You have a boyfriend?’ asked Gyuri, feeling exceptionally confident that any competition could be trampled underfoot, obliterated effortlessly. He was intoxicated with the certainty that he was on to a winner. He liked everything about her, the way she spoke, the way she sat, the way she handled him. Perfection. She paused again.
‘No.’ With the full smile. ‘I have a husband.’
September 1956
Striding down Petõfi Sándor utca, Gyuri saw the sign in the window of the photolab: ‘Lab Technician Required’. This, more than the phone call, brought home the fact that Pataki was gone.
The phone had rung and Gyuri had counted out the crackly silence. He had made it only forty-two seconds before the distant receiver was replaced but it could only have been the forty-five second signal agreed with Pataki. Pataki was out. He had gone to heaven and called from a pearly phone. As if it had been stitched there, Gyuri carried a smile so wide it hurt for the next day, a smile that completely cancelled the mild melancholy he felt at Pataki’s escape: a mild melancholy because he hadn’t wanted to dwell on the probability that he would never see him again.
Pataki was out. It was not only a stinking horseprick in the posterior of the authorities, it was a colossal stinking horseprick. It gave him so much pleasure that he tried not to think about it too much, to ration himself to a few hours’ gloating a day. But this notice cut the floor out from under his satisfaction. Only a fortnight gone and he was missing Pataki acutely. There was no one else in the country who could call him an arsehead with quite the same authority, the authority of a lifetime’s acquaintance.
When he got home, he was glad Elek wasn’t manning the armchair and that his nosiness wouldn’t be snooping around. He was also glad Jadwiga had consented to come to Budapest and that he didn’t have to trudge down to Szeged. Did other people really have to work this hard for happiness? You find world-class love but your beloved lives at the other end of the country. He peered out of the window and inspected the street although it was too early for her to appear. She had insisted that he shouldn’t wait at the station – with her Polish disregard for the passage of clocks, she couldn’t guarantee which train she would catch. But at least there was no more nonsense about her husband. When she returned from Poland after her summer visit, she had been full of news about the riots in her hometown of Poznan. Gyuri had got all the details about that but Jadwiga had been pleasingly reticent on the subject of her husband who seemed to have been airbrushed out of the picture, like Trotsky standing behind Lenin.
The news that Jadwiga was married had caused all his carefully handmade aspirations to shatter like the china in a porcelain shop crashed into by a well-fuelled bomber with a full payload. Gyuri had hoped that his facade indicated the manly resolve he was searching for but couldn’t feel and not the widespread collapse that was dominoeing its way through the regions of his body. He should have expected something like this; it had gone far too smoothly. Jadwiga had talked proudly of her husband. ‘My husband is a writer,’ she said in a way that left no doubt this was the only thing for a quality husband to be. He was writing a book on Polish painting.
They had gone out for a walk anyway. It had been pitch black, cold and windy and there wasn’t much to be seen in Szeged even in the best of daylight but Gyuri enjoyed the walk because despite having the someone-just-trod-on-my-throat sensation, the black environment had given them a duopoly. They were the movers of the universe, the animation in a depeopled darkness. Gyuri had generally considered walking to be one of the most inferior of amusements but that walk with Jadwiga had been infinitely preferable to doing anything else with say, Agnes. Kissing her respectfully on the cheek, he bade her farewell.