‘Angyal!’ Pataki called out to Gyuri’s co-worker in Locomotive’s dirty tricks department. Angyal, who had been sitting it out on the bench, trotted over. His talent was to neutralise players in the opposing teams who demonstrated too great a facility at scoring baskets, by using a variety of techniques, never recommended by coaches, but extraordinarily effective – the backhand testicle-grab or the airborne elbow-jab to the face. Angyal was injured, he had sprained his ankle after administering a particularly devastating elbow to Demeny, Hungary ’s leading scorer, turning on the crimson nostril-taps. Leaning close, Pataki poured some words into Angyal’s ear, who then sauntered off.
‘What are we going to do?’ Gyuri asked Pataki. ‘You look a wreck. You’re not going to last the second half.’
Pataki smiled. ‘We just have to soldier on.’
The second half showed that Pataki had expended his fuel and lost his magical ability to corner the ball. Hepp remained impassively on the bench, aware as anyone else that the points were starting to snub Locomotive. The score was 33 to 32 to Locomotive when the shouts of ‘Fire’ were heard and someone ran in to call for help in carrying buckets of water to put out the blaze that was consuming the quarters of the National team. Hearing this, the National team to a man dashed out to save their hard-earned toiletries. They had been due to leave the camp that afternoon, and what with sifting through the ashes to find French shampoo and Italian soap, the match never resumed.
Hepp didn’t look happy about this, but more importantly, to everyone’s relief, he didn’t look very unhappy; he did also look as if he wouldn’t be listening to Pataki much in the future.
Boarding the bus that was to take them to the railway station, Pataki and Gyuri noticed Wu sitting beside the running track, looking as affable and out of touch as ever. ‘I don’t suppose anyone has told him the camp is over, or if they have, I don’t suppose he knows,’ Gyuri said. They collected Wu, since, if nothing else, they knew exactly where to leave him in Budapest…
He had met Zsuzsa a fortnight before the camp. She represented a change of tactic for Gyuri. He had been pursuing a number of attractive women, who far from considering docking had recoiled from his greetings as if his hello were a wielded knife. ‘Communism and celibacy, that’s too much,’ Gyuri had moaned. Rather like an injured player seeking a fixture in the division below to repair his pride, Gyuri had met Zsuzsa at a dance. Gangs of hormones, supported by a sense of desperation, had unearthed beauty from an unpromising surface. Even though they had only met three times, Gyuri had been unpacking the equipment, setting up the furnishings of affection and a good part of his time in Tatabánya was spent contemplating the ransacking of her fleshy treasures.
Gyuri went back home only long enough to spruce up and to verify his summered, youthful looks in the mirror. Staring at himself, he really couldn’t understand why women weren’t climbing in through the windows. He didn’t mind about totalitarianism at all as he sauntered over to Zsuzsa. ‘All you need is something to look forward to,’ he said to himself.
Zsuzsa’s flat had a phone but he felt like reappearing in person.
Zsuzsa was in, but was showing out a guest. In his initial shock, Gyuri couldn’t decide which was worse, that the caller was a strapping gentleman, the holder, probably, of a jaunty dong, or that he was also owner of a blue-flash AVO uniform. A professional, not like the poor green sods conscripted to tramp around the borders and shoot any decamping capitalists, foreign spies or general bad lots seeking to flee the gains of the people. Even without the blue uniform, they would still have looked at each other as if they were being introduced to a dog log.
What further incensed Gyuri was that Zsuzsa was unaware of the monstrosity of inviting a blueboy home, even when he pointed it out to her. ‘Elemér is sweet,’ was about all Zsuzsa would say as Gyuri fulminated about the iniquities of the AVO. Under interrogation, Zsuzsa explained that Elemér had entered the scene by apprehending Bodri, Zsuzsa’s dog, when Bodri had inexplicably succumbed to the call of the wild in the park and spurned Zsuzsa’s implorings to return. ‘He ought to be good at collaring,’ riposted Gyuri.
The other great disappointment he suffered that evening was the realisation that Zsuzsa was heavily involved with stupidity. Her occupation (florist) should have warned him but Zsusza, although she inhabited Hungary, didn’t seem to live there. She didn’t understand what was going on, she hadn’t noticed what was going on and couldn’t grasp what Gyuri was saying. Gyuri also noticed that her nose was looking too large that evening but on the other hand he couldn’t help being envious of her total lack of contact with 1950. She had an airtight insulation of dimness.
‘Have some tea,’ Zsuzsa insisted. She was still pleased to see Gyuri and didn’t pay any heed to his ravings and didn’t comprehend what upset him on either the masculine or ethical plane. Gyuri enumerated the AVO’s privileges, their special supplies.
‘That’s not true, Elemér was just saying he has to work very long hours and he needs to earn extra money by translating articles from Pravda to help look after his mother.’ Gyuri realised it was like trying to demolish a house by throwing a glass of water at it and a strong sense of familiar futility descended on him like a cage. He had a good look at what was on his plate and he didn’t find his appetite stirred. This was going to be, he sensed, another fine addition to his collection of failures. He could see the title of his autobiography: Women I almost slept with. Not kissing and telling. ‘1950 was a good year, I almost slept with four women: a heroic production increase, under strict Marxist-Leninist principles, from 1949, when I almost slept with two women.’
He had an expired affair on his hands, but he was going to have to prop up the cadaver, as troops might do in a trench with fallen comrades to dupe their enemy into thinking they still had greater numbers to fight. The complication was that the following Friday, Locomotive was having its annual party, the summit of its social gatherings, and Gyuri knew that he would sooner face a firing squad than attend without a companion, and unfortunately Zsuzsa was the only representative of her sex willing to even talk with Gyuri. If Zsuzsa didn’t go with him, no one would.
Elemér was removed from the conversation but this eviscerated their badinage severely and with a reminder about the Locomotive festivity, Gyuri took his leave and reflected deeply on the absurdity of living in a country more than half full of women (demography being on his side since the erasure of the Hungarian Second Army in 1944) and being unable to transact some romantic commerce. Standing in the tram, with the passengers packed as tightly as cigarettes in a carton, centuplets in the oblong womb of the tram, even with the backs of three other citizens coupling with him, Gyuri felt sappingly lonely. Crushed, but lonely. How do you find people you can talk to? There should be a shop. And once you’ve found people you can talk to, how do you hang on to them?
He devoted a lot of his spare time over the next few days to internal lamentation and some deft self-pity, cassandraing about the flat, looking at himself in the mirror and asking: ‘Ever had one of those lives where nothing goes right?’ But on the Tuesday night he found himself awake. Mental eructations growled up clearly from the cerebral digestion. It was three o’ clock in the morning, the hour favoured by the back-seat drivers in his cranium for interrupting his sleep. Whatever was bothering him would be thrust up, and although he couldn’t name the issue, a strong discontent was emanating from his cerebral colon.