So what if they changed the Party leader as they had in Poland? So what if the new leader vilified the old leader? What if they had a Gero instead of a Rákosi? Or a Nagy instead of a Gero? They were all turds off the same production line. It was like making a fuss about changing a light bulb. What if the new leader blamed everything on the old leader? It was political leapfrog, musical chairs in the Central Committee. Why get excited by it?
Gyuri’s view of the morning was soured by his attendance being required at a disciplinary hearing, but he was cheered up by the AVO incident.
At the Astoria, an AVO officer got on (uniformed AVO were harder to spot on the streets now – they seemed ill at ease). He was carrying a smart briefcase smartly. He exuded a vigorous belief in his importance, it was as if his importance was flamboyantly doing chin-ups in the tram. A group of labourers was next to him. Dirty, hardy, work-darkened figures who would no doubt place head-kicking at the head of their leisure pursuits. You could see it coming. They took their time, though, eyeing up the officer as the tram rattled along. At the next stop, one of them leaned over and asked him stentoriously to the accompaniment of pálinka fumes: ‘Tell me, did you brush your teeth this morning?’
‘What?’ asked the AVO, puzzled by this forewordless inquiry.
‘Did you brush your teeth this morning?’ insisted his interrogator.’Yes,’ was the only thing the AVO could think of as a reply.
‘Excellent. In that case, just this once, you can lick my arse.’
The detonation of laughter practically blew the AVO officer off the tram. Gyuri felt privileged to be in at the making of an anecdote that would enliven many an evening in a kocsma. Carrying his massive discomfiture awkwardly, the AVO noticed his stop had arrived and alighted.
At the Ministry of Sport, Hepp was waiting outside, looking at his watch angrily as if it were colluding with Gyuri’s tardiness. They weren’t late for the hearing but Hepp always liked to be ten minutes ahead of events. Gyuri really went out of his way to be there on the dot for Hepp, because if you weren’t, you’d pay for it. ‘But we said eleven o’ clock,’ Hepp would say, sincerely bewildered as to why such a clear agreement hadn’t been respected. And he would keep on saying it until you feared for your sanity. If you pleaded tram-famine, earthquake, your home suddenly combusting, Hepp would merely say: ‘Why didn’t you start earlier?’.
Being late was incomprehensible to him, dug-up tablets in some ancient tongue. It was more confusion than anger: ‘But we said eleven o’ clock’. He would repeat this, on and on, tonally turning it up and down, with the determination of a code-breaker trying to crack an unbreakable code. Hepp’s solar punctuality never failed him. As far as anyone knew he had only been late for an appointment once in his life and that was when Pataki, forewarned Hepp was due at a coaches’ seminar, had slipped into Hepp’s office just as Hepp was getting ready to leave. Under the cover of some anodyne conversation, Pataki had withdrawn, palming the key to Hepp’s office door. He had then locked the door from the corridor and had joined everyone outside, on the other side of the street, where they had a good view of Hepp’s office. Within minutes Hepp was loudly ordering them to let him out, shouting at times with great pathos from his second floor window. Eventually, he prevailed on a passer-by to provide a ladder but by that point he was an irrecuperable fifteen minutes late.
Matasits was, naturally enough, behind Gyuri’s appearance in front of the disciplinary tribunal. It was boring, in a way. Every time Gyuri played a game with Matasits refereeing, Gyuri would speedily accumulate his five fouls and be sent off before he could cover the length of the court, whether or not he was actually doing any fouling or even getting into the ball’s neighbourhood. Matasits’s compulsion to blow his whistle every time he saw Gyuri had long before made it clear to Gyuri that Matasits had him down as a bad element, a committed recidivist.
While Gyuri would have freely conceded that the referees wouldn’t be voting him the sportingest player on the nation’s basketball courts, the accruing of this fictional blame was irritating. No matter how exemplary Gyuri was on court, no matter how preposterously courteous he was – handing over the ball on a silver plate to the opposition at the slightest suggestion they had an interest in it, shunning contact with the opposing players as if they were radioactive lepers, if Matasits was there, he was off. There was a rumour that Matasits believed Gyuri responsible for a delivery of two hundred pairs of Soviet spectacles to his home and was seeking revenge for this insult by freight.
However, getting to the tribunal was a first for Gyuri. His gift for lurking in the referees’ blind spots usually enabled him to nobble the opposition with impunity; he had also developed a prestidigitator’s talent for sending the referees’ attention the wrong way so he could elbow, grab trousers and tread on feet under the nose of authority. Hepp would even evaluate the quality of his fouling during the post-match analysis, ‘adequate’, ‘stylish’ or on the day he had head-butted Princz (a man who regarded basketball matches as an unlimited opportunity for the grabbing of testicles) and got Princz stretchered off, ‘world-class’.
However, with Matasits on the sidelines, Gyuri would stick resolutely, if futilely, to nobility. But during a match with the Army, which the Army, despite Pataki’s absence, was scarcely winning, Gyuri and an Army player had gone up for a ball. The Army player had got the ball and had Gyuri crash to the ground where he had remained while the Army player winged his way to Locomotive’s basket and dumped the ball through the ring for two easy points. Like everyone else, Róka had looked on Gyuri’s collapse as an overly histrionic attempt to get the ball back ‘It’s okay,’ Róka had said to the slumped Gyuri, ‘you can get up now.’
But Gyuri hadn’t got up because he was firmly unconscious. Matasits booked him for wilfully obstructing the course of play, saying in all his years of refereeing he had never seen such blatant fakery and that this was going to the basketball council, particularly as, when Gyuri had regained contact with the world and learned what was going on, he had made a groggy attempt to strangle Matasits.
The tribunal was composed of three inert, overflowingly bored gentlemen behind a sweeping desk: they looked as if they were left in the room when the tribunal wasn’t sitting.
Matasits kicked off. ‘Esteemed tribunal, we are dealing here with a debaser of what is most sacred to man.’ He read badly from notes. Gyuri settled down, judging from the depth of Matasits’s sheets that it would be a long haul. Matasits had been leaning on his dictionary. In a number of rehashes, he denounced Gyuri as the fountain of all evil, a homicidal neanderthal, who wandered around the court on his knuckles, only employing his limited power of speech to heap abuse on duly empowered officials. To Matasits’s gaugeable and progressive disappointment, the tribunal didn’t gasp with horror but took notes emotionlessly albeit diligently. Having counted on something on the lines of a burning at the stake, with a little quartering thrown in for good measure, Matasits left the room, dejected at the coolness of his reception. The bored faces buoyed Gyuri a little, although he had a strong awareness of how even bored people could really disembowel a career.
Then it was Hepp’s turn: ‘Gentlemen, while I can in no way whatsoever condone Fischer’s behaviour, I should like to point out that he has been under enormous, enormous, pressures. His mother died recently, and this bereavement combined with his voluntary coaching at the Ferencvaros orphanage, in addition to his outstanding work-record at his place of employment…’ It was good stuff, though Gyuri wasn’t sure there was an orphanage in Ferencvaros.