And they did, as soon as the referee’s whistle gave the signal. They were big men, mostly beefier of face and feature than the Magyars. The teammates who’d been here long enough to have played them before said that they were also slower, and that they weren’t shy about throwing elbows.
Well, Istvan wasn’t shy about throwing elbows, either. You couldn’t be, if you were going to play back. And everybody on both sides was a soldier. They’d all seen, and many of them had done, things far worse than any that happened on the pitch.
Here came one of the Czechoslovakian midfielders, dribbling with decent skill. Istvan moved up to cut off his path. The guy in the red shirt tried a dummy, pretending to go right but then really cutting left. His eyes telegraphed the move. Before he could bring it off, Istvan stole the ball with his left foot.
He quickly sent it up to a Hungarian midfielder. “Yeah! There you go!” the other center-back called.
“Thanks, Gyula.” Istvan wanted to do well. Doing well would help him fit in, make him less the man on the outside looking in.
A halfway-promising Hungarian attack developed. A linesman aborted it, raising his flag to show that a Magyar had been offside.
“You’re blind, you Dummkopf!” Istvan yelled. He was fifty meters away from the play, but he assumed the referee’s assistant must have got it wrong. He knew how football worked. What were linesmen good for but botching calls when your side was on the move?
The Czechoslovakian goalkeeper, a mountain of a man, booted the ball down to the Magyars’ end. Istvan sprang into the air to head it away. A foe also leaped, to flick it on toward the goal. They crashed together and knocked each other sprawling. The ball flew over them both.
“You good?” Istvan asked as he scrambled to his feet. The ground was hard and cold.
“I’ll live,” the Czechoslovakian said.
They went back and forth, as evenly matched sides will. The Hungarians scored. Less than two minutes later, the Czechoslovakians equalized. Then they went ahead. Just before halftime, one of the men in red broke through the Magyars’ midfielders and charged toward Istvan. One other man was still behind him, but he took no chances. He leveled the Czechoslovakian.
As he’d known it would, the referee’s whistled screamed. The man he’d fouled swore at him in German, which he understood, and then in Czech, which he didn’t. When the ref ran up to position the ball for the free kick, he said, “You do that again and I’ll throw your sorry ass out of the match. You hear me?”
“I hear you.” Istvan did his best to sound sorry. The Frenchman put him in mind of Sergeant Gergely. He wouldn’t listen to excuses or nonsense.
He grudged a nod. “All right. Once, all right-not twice. That was a professional foul, and this isn’t a professional game.”
But the Czechoslovakian who tried the free kick put the ball a meter over the crossbar. So the professional foul did what it was supposed to do: it took his team out of danger.
At halftime, Captain Czurka smacked Istvan on the back. “That’s how you do it!” he said. “Don’t back away from the bastards. Never back away from the bastards. If they beat us, they beat us. But we’ll still be going forward when that frog fucker blows the whistle to end things.”
Halfway through the second period, a burly Czechoslovakian knocked Istvan head over heels. He was nowhere near the ball, but that had nothing to do with anything. It was payback for the professional foul. He reassembled himself, got up, and went on with the game. A few minutes later, when the referee was looking somewhere else, he flattened the red-shirt who’d got him.
“Don’t fuck with me, turdnose,” he said as he trotted away.
Geza scored twice in the match, once on a header from a corner kick, the other time with a half-volley any professional would have been proud to claim as his own to give the Hungarian side the lead once more. But the Czechoslovakians leveled things again five minutes before full time, and the match ended 3-3.
The draw left everybody imperfectly satisfied. The weary Hungarian footballers shook hands with their opponents. As Istvan came off the pitch, Miklos folded him into a bear hug. Istvan would have laughed if he hadn’t been so tired. Like a surprising number of Fascists, Miklos had found himself his very own pet Jew.
–
Daisy Baxter had her strength back, or most of it. She was getting her hair back. She was out of hospital in East Dereham (Bruce said out of the hospital, as if it were something special, which it surely wasn’t), and living in a furnished room above a chemist’s shop.
She had the rent covered because of what had happened to Fakenham, and got a couple of quid a week to keep her going. She was on the dole, was what she was. It should have been humiliating, but living through an atom bomb took away a lot of smaller stings.
She might have dwelt on it more if she hadn’t been happy. Happiness was something she wasn’t used to. It felt faintly illicit, or more than faintly, like a drug that made you think you were God or at least Superman but that could send you to gaol if the coppers caught you with it.
She’d had happiness wiped off her map the moment she learned Tom was dead. Since then…every day had been gray and cold and drizzly. She’d got used to gray and cold and drizzly; she’d come to think that was the way things were meant to be.
Now she’d changed her mind. It wasn’t what Bruce made her feel, not in the physical sense of the word. Yes, he knew how to please a woman. But he couldn’t make the lights go on behind her eyes any better than her own hand could. Every so often, after Tom died, her body had felt the need for that. Quietly and without any fuss, she’d taken care of it. Then the need went away…till the next time.
Your hand could scratch that particular itch, certainly. What your hand couldn’t do, though, was make you not feel lonely afterwards. More often than not, you felt lonelier then than before, because as the brief pleasure faded you remembered that once upon a time you’d enjoyed it in the company of someone you loved, not all by yourself.
That was what had gone missing. That was the absence that turned her life drizzly and cold and gray. Now she had it back again. It was like going from Kansas to Oz. Suddenly, the world’s film ran in glorious Technicolor.
Of course, with a man you always worried that he was just out for whatever he could get, that he cared more about what you were doing to him than about you as you. Till Bruce came along, Daisy’d ignored every would-be ladykiller who walked into the Owl and Unicorn. That worry was the biggest reason why.
As he’d given her joy, there in the jeep stopped between Yaxham and East Dereham, so she’d returned it. If that was all he’d been after, or if he’d decided she was a slut and he didn’t want anything more to do with her now that he’d had his fun, she never would have heard from him again.
She also wouldn’t have heard from him if the Russians had shot down his B-29. She had no formal ties to him, not yet. If he’d stopped coming to see her, would she ever have known why? Would some other American flyer have hunted her up to let her know Bruce’s luck had run out? Or would she have spent the rest of her life wondering?
There was something she didn’t need to worry about. He came to see her as often as duty let him, sometimes in a jeep (she couldn’t look at one now without feeling warmth between her legs), sometimes in a hired car. “Isn’t that terribly dear?” she asked him the first time he showed up in a Vauxhall.
“You mean expensive, dear?” He grinned at her, and at two countries separated by the same language. “I can spend my money on booze. I can spend it on pretty girls.” He blew her a kiss. “Or I can waste it.”
She made a face at him. “You’re impossible! I’ve told you that before, haven’t I?”