Desperately rummaging through his closet, he unearthed a model he had constructed years ago in his student days before the war, for a competition to build a luxury hotel in Lillafiired. The model was quite detailed, though the gothic towers weren’t in keeping with the latest thinking from Moscow but while this model would finish his career as an architect, it might save his life and allow a possibility of further boozing and gibbering. Who knows, Rákosi might even have a thing about gothic towers?
As he was dreaming up some brazen lies to accompany the model, he didn’t pay the necessary attention to pulling on his trousers and he keeled over, crushing the model beyond redemption and the most epic of his falsehoods.
Spotting a shoebox skulking in the closet, he remembered the words of his professor: ‘All the best ideas are accidents.’ (The professor had got the commission to build the Ethnography Museum because he had copied down the wrong address for a prospective client who wanted a layout for a cakeshop and had ended up on the doorstep of the head of the museum committee who had been won over by his gibbering.) Seizing the shoebox and drawing some windows on it, he started to improvise a speech making copious reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat. ‘I could have brought an elaborate model but surely in an era when the working people dictate…’
Then there was the Szell story. Every time Gyuri looked at the White House he recalled it. Szell and his father specialised in food-processing equipment and he had insisted that they had received a decree to install two king-sized meat-grinders in the basement of the White House, obviously to mince up those particularly difficult corpses for the fishes. Of course, both Szell and his father were inveterate liars. If they were facing a firing squad and you were to ask them, ‘Do you want your lives to be spared?’ they’d be forced to answer ‘No’. On the other hand, you could see how an ample meat grinder could come in handy and it was a good way of turning the blue Danube red.
Gyuri, Bánhegyi, Róka and even, in the end, Bokros, all tried to dissuade Pataki from executing the wager, but Pataki was, even in the bright sunshine, almost incandescent with anger. Bokros attempted to jolly down the situation, perhaps realising that the consequences of such an action might well injure even himself. ‘No,’ said Pataki walking off, ‘tomorrow, at twelve.’
Worried, Gyuri pondered how to divert Pataki from taunting the White House with his buttocks. Talking him out of it directly wouldn’t work and Gyuri was unsure which style of machination would have the desired effect. It was like lacking the right-sized spanner to undo a bolt; simple if you had the right tool, otherwise impossible.There was a formula of words that would make Pataki laugh and go rowing but Gyuri couldn’t think of the combination.
So alarmed was Gyuri that he even took the step of talking to Elek about Pataki’s planned run. Elek wasn’t taken aback; he showed no consternation at the prospect of losing his partner in nicotine, indeed he maintained his armchair aloofness. ‘I suppose you’ll be getting arrested with him, will you? They say prison is character-forming. Mind you, my character was already formed when they put me inside in Bucharest.’
‘You were in jail?’
‘Only for a few days. Bribery’
‘Bribery? Who did you bribe?’
‘No, the problem was I hadn’t bribed anyone. They were very upset.’
‘Look, Pataki’ll be in for more than few days.’
‘It’s very hard to work out why people do things. Back in Vienna, when I was in the Army, one of my friends ended up in a furious row over something trifling. The positioning of napkins in the officers’ mess – something like that. But he challenged this other fellow to a duel. We all took turns trying to get them to call it off. Apart from the chance of someone getting killed, duelling was furiously prohibited and droves of careers could have dropped dead like flies. The thing everyone was terrified of was losing face, so I put my arm round him and said “Józsi, this is a stupid misunderstanding. Grown men don’t behave like this. Honour’s honour, but you can’t shoot a fellow officer over a napkin.” I thought I was doing a good job when he looked at me and I can still remember this vividly, he was so passionate. “No,” he said to me. “You don’t understand. I want to blow his brains out.” Nothing to do with the napkin, of course, just the usual traffic jam on the thigh of a Viennese fraulein.
‘I’ll talk to Pataki if you want but I don’t think it’ll make any difference. These lunacies-in-waiting are usually readied well in advance, like all the best off-the-cuff remarks. It was the same with me resigning my commission; it had all the appearance of an extempore fed-upness but it had been in training for a considerable while. That was my problem with the Army, I just couldn’t take it seriously and that’s what they couldn’t forgive me for. I suppose people in any profession who don’t carry the due reverence are in trouble. But the whole military was a joke. Every time they get something good going they throw it open to the amateurs anyway and then a natural soldier sticks out like an oak in a meadow.
‘I’ll talk to Pataki if you want. But I’ll be surprised if he’ll listen. You never did.’
But that evening Pataki was nowhere to be found for dissuasion, so, at the appointed time they gathered on the Margit Bridge. Bokros had a pale, posthumous look since he wasn’t going to gain however the day went. He implored Pataki to refrain from his task. If he’d offered the bike, that might have tilted it, but he didn’t. ‘Better stay here’ Pataki suggested, entrusting Gyuri to look after the shortly-to-be-forfeited motorcycle.
‘This could take some time,’ Pataki said, trotting off towards the White House with the ease of a ruthless athlete. He was wearing his black tracksuit, until he reached the embankment adjacent to the Ministry.
From their vantage point on the bridge, Gyuri and Bokros watched as Pataki reduced his attire to Locomotive-style basketball boots. He looked tanned, relaxed and even from hundreds of metres away his muscles had precise definition. A superb musculature, Gyuri thought, recalling how Pataki had been in line to be the model for the naked proletarian Adonis-figure on the back of the new twenty-forint note. They had been looking for a striking example of the new Hungarian might and the artist had gone for Neumann who made a much more towering symbol of resurgence, justice and truth, of socialist invincibility and grit, and perhaps because Pataki had asked for money. ‘They’re not getting my pecs for free.’
All around the building there were guards. People weren’t exactly encouraged to walk past the Ministry. While on the one hand, the AVO felt it only right to have ostentatiously lavish headquarters by the Danube, the drawback to having a headquarters was that people knew where to find you, which obviously made the AVO slightly uneasy.
The guards were drowsy and clearly not accustomed to doing their job. Pataki had drawn up to the main entrance before they became noticeably stirred and perplexed by this challenge to workers’ power. Then one of the guards had the idea of chasing Pataki and the others thought this might be worth trying and followed his example. The guards were well armed, but not well legged. By judiciously using his acceleration, Pataki zipped ahead of them, dodging any newcomers, maintaining a few tantalising metres between himself and his collection of pursuers. He spurted round the corner of the Ministry taking a wake of guards with him, leaving the frontage of the White House deguarded, motionless and summery.
After a longer time than seemed possible, Pataki reemerged from the rear of the building and made his finishing line his starting point where he had left his tracksuit, looking satisfied that he had encircled the White House with his buttocks as his uniformed retinue caught up with him. The guards having apprehended Pataki’s unhidden hide were uncertain what to do. Finally a blanket and then a police van swallowed Pataki.