By the time Boleros realised that he should have opted for a totalitarianism that went in for long stretches of immaculate tarmac, it was too late. Everyone assumed it would end in tragedy, either his bike being nationalised, or him dying as a result of not seeing eye to eye with a Hungarian bend but what happened was as unforeseen as you could get. As he was overtaking, on a country road, a tractor with a load of fixed, upturned scythe-fittings on the back, one of the blades slid down, decapitating Bokros. ‘You don’t need much in the way of brains to ride a bike,’ Pataki had said at the funeral, mulling over the bike having carried on for half a kilometre without a head.
‘You’ll like Sándor, everyone does,’ was the way Bokros was always described. His brother, Vilmos, was described as one of those people who was disliked by everyone. Indisputably, Mrs Bokros hadn’t been eating enough affability when Vilmos was conceived. One of the most upsetting aspects about Sándor’s death had been that it meant the fastest motorcycle in the country would be passing into the hands of the loathsome Vilmos.
Vilmos fulfilled a useful function on the Locomotive team: everyone could rally round their dislike of him. Instead of suffering from a selection of grudges and vendettas, Locomotive could use Vilmos as the dustbin of enmity. He hardly ever played in a match because he wasn’t much good and because of one of the standard amusements on the way to a fixture – pushing Vilmos out onto a railway platform as the train was pulling away, ideally when he was wearing only his basketball boots. ‘Where’s Bokros?’ Hepp would ask. ‘We saw him going for a walk in Hatvan/Cegled/Veszprem’, someone would say. Vilmos discovered the only way of ensuring he wasn’t exposed in rather dull parts of the country with poor transportational possibilities was to barricade himself in the toilet until they reached their destination.
It was the week after Gyuri had lost his bet with Bokros on the outcome of the Army vs. Ironworkers football match.
Gyuri had confidently bet on the Army, not understanding why Bokros was being ostensibly that stupid, because he didn’t know as Bokros did that an international match had been fixed for the same day so that the Army was going to be stripped of all its best players. Gyuri was skint at the time but he had had his eye on a leather belt that had also formerly belonged to Sándor, so he had wagered in exchange for the belt, in an excess of colourful hyperbole, that Bokros could crap into his hands if the Ironworkers won. The Ironworkers did, but fortunately, out of the blue, Vilmos had grown a sense of humour.
Naturally, everyone gathered around for the show. Vilmos crouched down, and Gyuri obligingly hunkered down behind him ready to catch the fecal ball. ‘No fumbling,’ was the general exhortation. Honourably, Gyuri waited to settle his debt but Bokros, suddenly the centre of approval for devising such a wonderful entertainment, was laughing so much that he was incapable of invoking the muscular bailiffs to evict some tenants from his bowels.
‘Give me a newspaper,’ Bokros had instructed, hoping that reading some of Prime Minister Hegedus’s speech on Hungarian-Soviet relations would induce a state of tranquillity and sphinctal detente but the crowd eventually had to disperse in disappointment.
The following week, Gyuri had missed the preamble of the argument but the bet between Pataki and Bokros had grown out of a furious abuse session. It happened on Margit Island, after a training session and Gyuri entered as Pataki, who had recently been extremely tetchy, was telling Bokros what trash he was. Pataki was angry, and he looked angry, which was unusual in that he didn’t routinely hand out public bulletins on his feelings like that: Bokros, who you would have thought would have been quite used to being called a shit and so on, was greatly incensed.
‘Who do you think you are?’ he spat out. ‘Do you think you’re so great? That you’re so hard?’ Bokros almost ruptured himself getting the word out. ‘You toe the line when it matters.’
‘But I haven’t licked the arse of everyone at the Ministry of Sport, including the doorman.’
‘No, you’re so independent, the changing-room rebel, the revolutionary who’s going to bring everything down with some explosive whispered sarcasm… you haven’t got the guts to speak out. If you think it all stinks why don’t you say so?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Pataki, pointing at the White House across the river. Why doesn’t he just hit Bokros? Gyuri wondered. ‘You’ll have the chance to see what I think if you want. Let’s have a bet. You put up your bike against half of my salary for a year and I’ll run stark naked around the White House and give them a 360 degree view of my fine Hungarian bum.’
‘Done,’ said Bokros, made adamant by his anger and the certitude that Pataki wouldn’t attempt it. But Pataki waved in Gyuri and Bánhegyi. ‘Come on, I want witnesses.’
Gyuri had spent most of his life thinking that Pataki had gone too far, but he hadn’t felt so strongly that his friend was on course to crash head-on with destiny since that time in ’45 when Pataki had said to him: ‘Of course we should try out that revolver. Your mother won’t know. What do you think’s going to happen? The Russians are going to arrest us and have us shot?’
The White House was nominally the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior; it was mostly a haunt for the Hungarian Working People’s Party and the AVO. Some said it was the headquarters of the AVO, but the AVO taking no chances, seemed to have several headquarters: Andrássy út for one, plus a number of villas up in the hills of Budapest where they could beat people up in comfort and tranquillity.
The White House, as the Ministry in its well-appointed riverside location was popularly known, had a marked resemblance to a shoebox. The story went thus: the architect who had been commissioned to design it (not because he was a Party member, but because of his family background – his father had been a dipsomaniac and a worker manque, his mother a moderately successful prostitute, so he was valued as being suitably anti-bourgeois) had, in the recognised tradition of Hungarian architecture, namely boozing and gibbering excitedly, spent both the six months he had been allotted to create a plan and the commission fee, boozing and gibbering, telling everyone he met- building workers, shop assistants, proctologists, swimming pool attendants, paviours, percussion players and a man on the number two tram who was breeding leeches, waiting for their big comeback in medicine – that he had been commissioned to design the Ministry.
The architect was cruelly woken one morning by a phone call from Party headquarters saying they had been looking for him for a week and that he was expected that afternoon to display the model of the new building and that Rákosi wasn’t in a very good mood. Luckily the architect didn’t have a hangover, as he was still drunk, having only just got to bed after three days’ revelling at a gypsy wedding in Mateszalka. He had enough clarity of mind to realise that he would be shot or if he were lucky he could spend the rest of a short life making uranium pies down a mineshaft under an unfashionable part of Hungary.