Under the Frog Read online

  He knocked civilisedly on Jadwiga’s door. ‘I have an important consignment of vernacular Hungarian for you,’ he said as she opened up. She studied him thoughtfully with much-read eyes, then backed away in a silent invitation to enter. She closed the door. Gyuri sat down on the bed of her still absent room-mate, while Jadwiga sat opposite him. Tired from her studying, she appraised him as if she hadn’t seen him before, slightly narrowing her eyes as if trying to focus better. Then she said with a half-smile: ‘We must talk.’ A pause. ‘We can be friends… but no more.’

  ‘You have a boyfriend?’ asked Gyuri, feeling exceptionally confident that any competition could be trampled underfoot, obliterated effortlessly. He was intoxicated with the certainty that he was on to a winner. He liked everything about her, the way she spoke, the way she sat, the way she handled him. Perfection. She paused again.

  ‘No.’ With the full smile. ‘I have a husband.’

  September 1956

  Striding down Petõfi Sándor utca, Gyuri saw the sign in the window of the photolab: ‘Lab Technician Required’. This, more than the phone call, brought home the fact that Pataki was gone.

  The phone had rung and Gyuri had counted out the crackly silence. He had made it only forty-two seconds before the distant receiver was replaced but it could only have been the forty-five second signal agreed with Pataki. Pataki was out. He had gone to heaven and called from a pearly phone. As if it had been stitched there, Gyuri carried a smile so wide it hurt for the next day, a smile that completely cancelled the mild melancholy he felt at Pataki’s escape: a mild melancholy because he hadn’t wanted to dwell on the probability that he would never see him again.

  Pataki was out. It was not only a stinking horseprick in the posterior of the authorities, it was a colossal stinking horseprick. It gave him so much pleasure that he tried not to think about it too much, to ration himself to a few hours’ gloating a day. But this notice cut the floor out from under his satisfaction. Only a fortnight gone and he was missing Pataki acutely. There was no one else in the country who could call him an arsehead with quite the same authority, the authority of a lifetime’s acquaintance.

  When he got home, he was glad Elek wasn’t manning the armchair and that his nosiness wouldn’t be snooping around. He was also glad Jadwiga had consented to come to Budapest and that he didn’t have to trudge down to Szeged. Did other people really have to work this hard for happiness? You find world-class love but your beloved lives at the other end of the country. He peered out of the window and inspected the street although it was too early for her to appear. She had insisted that he shouldn’t wait at the station – with her Polish disregard for the passage of clocks, she couldn’t guarantee which train she would catch. But at least there was no more nonsense about her husband. When she returned from Poland after her summer visit, she had been full of news about the riots in her hometown of Poznan. Gyuri had got all the details about that but Jadwiga had been pleasingly reticent on the subject of her husband who seemed to have been airbrushed out of the picture, like Trotsky standing behind Lenin.

  The news that Jadwiga was married had caused all his carefully handmade aspirations to shatter like the china in a porcelain shop crashed into by a well-fuelled bomber with a full payload. Gyuri had hoped that his facade indicated the manly resolve he was searching for but couldn’t feel and not the widespread collapse that was dominoeing its way through the regions of his body. He should have expected something like this; it had gone far too smoothly. Jadwiga had talked proudly of her husband. ‘My husband is a writer,’ she said in a way that left no doubt this was the only thing for a quality husband to be. He was writing a book on Polish painting.

  They had gone out for a walk anyway. It had been pitch black, cold and windy and there wasn’t much to be seen in Szeged even in the best of daylight but Gyuri enjoyed the walk because despite having the someone-just-trod-on-my-throat sensation, the black environment had given them a duopoly. They were the movers of the universe, the animation in a depeopled darkness. Gyuri had generally considered walking to be one of the most inferior of amusements but that walk with Jadwiga had been infinitely preferable to doing anything else with say, Agnes. Kissing her respectfully on the cheek, he bade her farewell.

  On the train back to Budapest, he had juggled two main thoughts. Firstly, that he didn’t care whether she was married or not and secondly (as a consolation prize for his floored morality) the conclusion that it was rather an odd sort of marriage, where you lived hundreds of kilometres, days of travel apart. It didn’t look like a thriving marriage at all, it was a marriage stretched so thin that you couldn’t really notice it.

  He had determined to avoid Szeged for a fallow fortnight but the next weekend found himself dashing to the Nyugati station. He invented some nearby athletic activity to justify his presence and sought out Jadwiga. He found her dutiful in the library, asleep. He went out, bought a flower, and returned to leave it on her notebook and to wait for the study-fatigued student to rouse herself, which she did after ten minutes. She was surprised to see the flower and then, looking round, was surprised to see Gyuri. Despite the arguable propriety of the flower, she was pleased. ‘You are a very keen friend,’ she remarked.

  This time supper was accepted and Gyuri didn’t regret having to sleep on Solyom Nagy’s floor although its embrace lingered on his back for the next twenty-four hours. The conversation had been agreeable and unremarkable but as with the walk it had been intensely pleasurable. If Pataki had known that his friend had spent the better part of two days travelling in order to have a so-so meal with a side-serving of jejune dialogue, he would have been shocked and incredulous, but Gyuri felt it was time well used. Jadwiga’s husband worked very hard, it turned out, though the admiration with which she wheeled out this information had been a trifle faltering, a little adulterated.

  The next weekend saw Gyuri becoming a real expert on the Budapest-Szeged rail link. Individual haystacks and trees were recognised on the way down. Gyuri hadn’t let Elek in on the reason for his travelling down to Szeged but it was obvious that it wasn’t Gyuri’s passion for the local architecture. ‘Have fun,’ Elek had said in the way that parents do, convinced that their offspring were engrossed in incessant debauchery the moment they set foot outside the front door.

  Jadwiga was again surprised to see him. ‘You take friendship very seriously indeed,’ she observed. They went to supper and the cinema which vacuumed Gyuri’s pockets clean. Posting a birthday card to her grandfather, Jadwiga asked Gyuri if his grandparents were still alive; this annoyed him slightly because she asked the same question during their first walk and thus it was obvious she didn’t store away everything he said in the way that he noted down her words for future examination, building up a dossier on her. ‘My grandfather was in what the Germans called Auschwitz. The Jews don’t like to mention how many Poles died there. My grandfather survived, I think, because he’s a persistent man: a very persistent man. He taught me the value of persistence too.’

  Reviewing the proceedings, Gyuri was astonished how much pleasure could be had without taking off any clothes and with a moat of oxygen dividing him from the castle he wanted to storm. He had listened politely when she had made reference several times to her husband not writing dutifully enough to her, though this had been presented more as a general critique of men. The travel was a nuisance though. Gyuri wished they could provide a gymnasium in the train so he could do some athletic training. He opened an accountancy textbook and he and the print stared sullenly at each other for a while. The travel was eating up a lot of his time.

  The next weekend he was spared the purgatory of hours of travel because Jadwiga came up to Budapest to visit some fellow Polish students, to whom in the end she barely said hello. It was an unusual situation for Gyuri. He had never shown anyone around Budapest before, indeed he had never had the inclination to do so. Jadwiga had only spent half-days in Budapest in transit to Szeged, so he had to shake his brains for an itinerary.r />
  He took Jadwiga up to the Gellert Hill where there was the Statue of Liberty, a woman reaching out above herself with her arms at full stretch as if reaching for something on a top shelf. Into her grip had been lowered some amorphous burden, perhaps palm fronds, perhaps oversized laurels, certainly something of heavy significance weighing down on the sprightly dame, who nevertheless effected a transcendental expression.

  You could see the statue from most parts of the city and from the statue’s foot you had a panoramic view of Budapest. The Statue of Liberty had been originally intended as a memorial to Admiral Horthy’s son, a fighter pilot who like most Hungarians of his age had died around the Don but before it had been erected there had been a change of government and of uniforms in the street. Purged of its dynastic and political past, charged up with the ideology of a new age, it had been stuck on top of the Gellert Hill to act as a spiritual beacon.

  As a supplement to the Statue of Liberty, perhaps as an additional ideological boost to compensate for the statue’s ignominious beginnings, was a smaller, clumsier statue of a Soviet soldier, known locally, Gyuri explained, as the Unknown Watch-Thief.

  Situated underneath the Statue of Liberty, less visible and not tampering with the skyline, the rather morose Soviet soldier, scowling from being left on duty for so many years, had an inscription: ‘From the grateful Hungarian people’.

  ‘I assure you the Poles are far more grateful,’ said Jadwiga.

  Bánhegyi had, as always when he ran out of cash, dislocated his shoulder (he could dis-and relocate his joints at will), gone to the doctor, collected a cheque from the insurance company (despite the fact that he would be out on court bullying the ball the day after) and invited everyone to the restaurant at the Keleti railway station. Jadwiga impressed everyone with her Hungarian (Róka refused to believe she was Polish) and also with the way she dealt with an enormous plate of wienerschnitzel and a liberal portion of calf’s brains. Gyuri caught glances of admiration from the team and Róka in a state of extreme perturbation had to leave twice for ‘fresh air’.

  Pataki had been quiet. His mutism amply expressed his high regard for Jadwiga. Gyuri would have been worried about the possibility of competition from Pataki were it not for his conviction that he was backed by destiny this time. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve drilled for the white oil yet?’ Pataki inquired. Gyuri snorted as an all-purpose reaction which contained amusement, denial, confirmation and contempt, hoping that Pataki would select whichever element would shut him up. Everyone else was evidently assuming that he had full access and this had been quite satisfying, since reputation is only one step away from the real thing. ‘I think you’re going to make it this time,’ Pataki appended.

  As he railwayed down to Szeged the subsequent weekend, he tried to think of some good pretext to cover his trip, at the same time thanking providence that he worked for the railways which made such a long-distance liaison financially possible. Jadwiga didn’t seem surprised to see him nor did she bother to ask for any explanation of his presence in Szeged.

  Gyuri had still not met Jadwiga’s room-mate Magda, but had developed a great affection for her solely on the strength of her absences. As they sat in the room, Gyuri wondered how to elegantly polevault from friendship into a more clasping form of love. He checked his watch. By six o’ clock, he resolved, he would be entangled in her garments or out. He had put in the miles. This deadline kept shifting steadily like the horizon as time progressed and he remained frozen in a posture of warm cordiality opposite her.

  A clock’s far-off chiming entered quietly during a caesura in their conversation. ‘It’s eight o’clock and you haven’t pounced,’ she commented. ‘You men are such frail creatures.’

  They closed in to fit their urges together. The main thing, he pondered, hugging her thankfully was that she felt it too; if he had made no inroads on her heart, that would have been unbearable.They clung to each other as if they were tumbling through outer space. Two supplementary conclusions made themselves comfortable in his thoughts: that by holding her he had captured everything he wanted in life and that he had got to the end of pleasure. ‘Switch off the light,’ she breathed. Just before he alighted on her in the darkness, she halted him, and from the bed she reached up to draw back the curtain; her naked body was instantly coated with moonlight. How did she learn that?

  They sweated out the loneliness and after the gasps of surprise and exertion, prostrated themselves on each other. That’s something that can’t be wrenched from your possession, Gyuri reflected. Money in the unrobbable bank. Whatever happens now, I’ve won.

  Jadwiga’s husband, it turned out, was a bastard.

  * * *

  On the orders of his ball-gripping lust, Gyuri kept looking out of the window, and just when he thought he was going to swoon with expectation, Jadwiga appeared. She was walking at a furious pace, he noted, a woman with a purpose, the weekly week-long separation eliciting the same concupiscent smouldering from her. One of her most endearing features was the way she would take her clothes off as if they were on fire, leaving them where they dropped, without a thought for any sartorial suffering that might occur, and plunging into bed as if it were a cool pond of water. The other women had, no matter how high the flame was under them, been fearful of creases and had taken time out to utilise a hanger or a chair to drape their attire.

  Gyuri saw her shape through the smoked opaque glass of the front-door and he thought how lucky he was to have such a visitor. Virtually ignoring him, she made for the bedroom, casting off her dress and stumbling on her knickers, fell flat on her face on the bed. ‘Come inside,’ she commanded at the end of the crumpled clothes-trail.

  A part-time god, Gyuri ruminated in a bout of lyricism, 1 loosed off liquid lightning in my private thunderstorm. Jadwiga rose to go to the bathroom, and Gyuri perceived a fructiferous droplet dash along her thigh towards her ankle. He wanted to make her pregnant. He wanted to make her pregnant. What was going on? He couldn’t believe he felt like that but you can’t beat biology, he concluded.

  Furthermore, it was very, very unlikely that he would achieve anything more important or significant than this, making one person feel full happiness, manufacturing a roomful of ecstasy, even if it were only a bubble in a gloomy ocean. It seemed a mundane pinnacle for a life, a trite climax for a biography, a flippant line for a gravestone – ‘did some worthwhile willying’. But was there anything else that had given him the same reward of joy and plenitude? The oldest trap had opened and snapped shut and he didn’t mind at all.

  ‘There goes the best moment of my life,’ he said to the absent Jadwiga. Which story had it been where the devil offers a man the chance to stop time, to slam on the brakes at a point of his own choosing, but the man can’t decide when to say when? Gyuri had had intimations of love before, but looking at Jadwiga, he realised that was a prospect that could last him for eternity, whatever went on outside the walls. He didn’t care who the general-secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party was or whether or not socialism was being built outside or whether people were swinging around in the trees. He had his portable universe, his mobile self-sufficiency. This sort of satisfaction could bog down a man with great aims, but since he had never got around to preparing any, Gyuri felt ready to sink back and enjoy it.

  As Jadwiga started recovering her clothing, Elek returned and for some obscure reason (he only ever visited Gyuri’s bedroom on average twice a year) wandered in to catch the whole story of her skin. Mumbling apologies from the other side of the door, Elek retreated to his armchair, like a parrot to its perch, as if that would render him inconspicuous and inoffensive.

  Unhindered by Elek’s entrance, Jadwiga carried on with her dressing. Her poise made a contrast with Tünde’s hysterics when Elek had found her torso exhibited in the shower. She had yelled as if her life was in danger and threw her arms tightly over the regions acknowledged to be of most interest to men, to staunch the flow of libidinous material. Tünde’s behaviou
r had been excessive; despite living in an age when the public baring of bodies was frowned on, her physique was as well-viewed as the Statue of Liberty and in particular the parts she was shielding with her hands, making fleshy fig leaves, had been as relentlessly fingered as the timetable at the Keleti railway station. But for some reason Tünde believed that all-lung hysterics was the pertinent reaction of a well-brought-up girl to an unannounced guest. Jadwiga’s nakedness hadn’t blinked.

  Gyuri loved her alert breasts. He loved her runner’s legs (she had dabbled in sprinting) paradisiac containers of aphrodisiac. He loved her sagacious buttocks that had settled the entire subject of good buttocking. He loved her lips, the well-marked borders of her mouth; he loved her felicitating soles and all on them. He couldn’t see anything that let the view down. Perhaps that was the symptom of fully-defined love: like a great work of art, nothing could be docked, interjected or tampered with. If the Creator had come to him with a special offer of restyling, ‘For you, Gyuri, I can change anything you’d like: a little more leg? another helping of breast? blonder hair? darker hair? more ear lobe? younger? older? wittier? graver? repainted eyes? American passported?’ Gyuri realised that he would just reply: ‘We’ll stop here.’ He wouldn’t change a hair, not a pore, not one particle more, not one particle less, because then she wouldn’t be she. And it was no use trying to make up his mind about which sector bested the others; he couldn’t judge Jadwiga’s beauties’ contest, because her components kept leapfrogging over each other, grabbing his favour. Then he knew that he had jettisoned the world. That he was marooned on the planet Jadwiga.

  Although not Jadwiga’s first foray into the flat, it was the first time she had met Elek who had taken up employment as a night-watchman at the Laszlo hospital (an occupation that suited him since it involved a lot of sitting and doing nothing and gave him complete freedom to speculate on what he would do with the money he was counting on winning in the lottery). So, after the full-frontal introduction, time was set aside for a formal hand-kissing which Elek did with a snap of the heels.