‘Yes, but you’re used to it,’ had been the response.
Even Hepp had been unable to persuade Pataki to get vertical but he rose on the third day and Gyuri spotted him bouncing down the street dribbling a basketball with an air of haste. ‘What happened?’ he had asked.
‘I got an erection.’
Twenty minutes late, Pataki entered, saying ‘Three-two to the Germans. It must have been fixed.’ Pataki and Makkai traded indignation on the infamy and turpitude of the age, much to Gyuri’s annoyance. However, once the lesson began, he regained his equilibrium and began to enjoy Pataki’s absolute bafflement at a language of which he didn’t understand a word, as Makkai yet again cruised the olfactory vocabulary of English, drawing on thirty adjectives to portray the miasmatic nature of his lodger’s crannies. Gyuri could tell that Pataki wouldn’t be back in a hurry.
Showing them out of the flat, Makkai returned to the theme of his flatmate. ‘He’s doing a three-year course at the Party College. Three years! I mean how long does it take to learn to say “Yes, comrade”?’ He insisted on showing Pataki the interloper’s room to give a more forceful illustration of the magnitude of the stench. ‘What can I do? You don’t know a place where I can buy some powdered glass?’
‘Why not drop a letter to Andrássy út,’ suggested Pataki, ‘something on the lines of seeing him hanging around the American Embassy with a false moustache. If you could get a few dollars to slip under his pillowcase that would be a nice touch.’
Makkai had been preparing to laugh but then realised Pataki wasn’t being facetious, and settled for a nod or two that could be interpreted any way you wanted.
The tram was empty apart from Gyuri and Pataki but still indisputably public when Pataki pulled a thin manila folder from the large hold-all he used for hauling around his photographic paraphernalia. He handed it over to Gyuri. ‘It’s this year’s belated birthday present,’ he said.
The file was marked with the AVH acronym, the latest rearrangement of the AVO’s name, and lower down with a lower-case ‘severely secret’. Inside was Gyuri’s form, his Ministry of the Interior file, his civic, ideological profile and worth. His date of birth and name were typed. His date of birth was incorrect and his middle name was misspelt. The only entry on the file, in a rather flourishing hand, in blue ink was ‘No particular remarks’. It was the most insulting assessment he had ever had, leaving the caustic remarks of his schoolteachers at the starting-line. The police state didn’t think him worth policing, not interesting enough to merit further consideration.
‘How did you get this?’ asked Gyuri, feeling distinctly uneasy holding such an Interior document in his hands.
‘Agnes, the singing secret policewoman. If you know whom to ask and how to ask you can get anything you want.’ Pataki, Gyuri knew, in the cursory way he was acquainted with the female figures that conveyor-belted their way through Pataki’s bedroom, had had an affair with a typist in the AVO who was also a singer in the AVO’s all-female choir brought out to croon on special occasions for the Soviet Ambassador. The reddest of Pataki’s girlfriends, she was also taking a night-course in scriptwriting at the College of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts, ‘to help crispen those confessions’ as Pataki had observed.
‘They didn’t have much to say on the subject of me,’ said Gyuri.
‘Let’s face it, you don’t join the AVO because you want to work. Mind you, you should see my file,’ said Pataki, pulling out a folder like a volume of an encyclopaedia. ‘I never would have guessed they had so many women working for them, including one very sexy chimney sweep that I briefly met in ’49. I haven’t read it all,’ Pataki paused to scan a few pages. ‘But there’s definitely someone grassing on us in Locomotive.’ He fished into his pocket, and produced a card. ‘But anyway, thanks to Agnes, I’m well prepared.’ He held an AVO identity card, with his picture and name.
Gyuri’s lengthy astonishment had only started its journey into expression when, as the tram rumbled down the Muzeum Körút, they saw and heard the commotion of a large crowd around Bródy Sándor utca. ‘It’s not Lenin’s mother’s birthday or something, is it?’ asked Pataki, although the gathering had an unfamiliarly unofficial air about it. They got off the tram to have a closer look.
Hundreds of people were crowded around the headquarters of Hungarian Radio. It quickly became clear that the crowd was there on account of its displeasure with the result of the World Cup final. There were periodic bursts of rhythmic chants: ‘We want justice, we want justice’, and ‘It’s a swindle, swindle, swindle’.
More than anything else, Gyuri was shocked by the flagrant public expression of sentiment. It was something he hadn’t seen for years, not since the ’45 elections. ‘Let’s take a closer look,’ said Pataki pushing through the people. The crowd was surging towards the entrance of the Radio where the AVO were out in a chain, armed and looking unhappy. Pataki was eager to get to the clashing point, and despite Gyuri’s reservations, the motion of the crowd kept pushing him closer to the irascible, gun-toting defenders of state authority.
To add to Gyuri’s discomfiture, they had arrived just at the moment when the commanding officer was about to lose his temper. What the crowd was after, Gyuri couldn’t work out. Whether they considered the Radio a more tangible representative of power than the parliament and thus a target to vent their anger on, or whether they wanted to broadcast something, he couldn’t discern. Perhaps it was the commentary on the match they objected to. The commanding officer of the AVO detachment was repeating very loudly, again and again: ‘This is the last time. I’m telling you, move back and go home.’
‘This is the last time I’m telling you, you’re a wanker,’ shouted a man squashed next to Gyuri. The crowd was very angry and surprisingly sure of itself, bearing in mind the AVO were carrying guns and the crowd had nothing but its fury, and the AVO men patently fell into the category of crowd-shooters.
The commanding officer kept telling everyone to disperse and those not immediately in front of him but well within earshot kept telling him he was a wanker. Gyuri, riding high on the crowd’s sum, shouted profanities since it seemed the done thing. The AVO pressed forward. The crowd pressed back, three AVO men went down and there was a joyous shout of ‘I’ve got him in the bollocks’. A stone shattered a window in the Radio building.
Then there was a burst of fire into the air. The entertainment was over. Gyuri and apparently lots of others thought that dying would be an over-reaction to the Hungarian goalie having fumbled one ball. He ran as fast as he could in the millimetre of space that he had between him and the person in front. The AVO was coming in with the rifle butts. It took a while to unclog the street, but people were soon running away full pelt from the Radio.
Gyuri, who had been monopolising all his concentration on leaving the vicinity as rapidly as possible, found that Pataki had disappeared. He wasn’t worried that Pataki was one of those lying in the street trying to hold their heads together. He had probably picked up some comely rioter.
He got home to find Elek listening to the radio denouncing the hooligans who had been running wild in the streets of Budapest. It was nice to be famous.
‘I learned something interesting tonight,’ Gyuri recounted to Elek. ‘Hungarians don’t mind dictatorship, but they really hate losing a football match.’
November 1955
The man was snoring, snoring so loudly, so rattlingly, that even if one had been over-dosed with tolerance, it would have been too much. Gyuri and the other passengers, only equipped with everyday indulgence, found their forbearance crushed like an aphid under a sledgehammer.