Gyuri could see Pataki taking his time, lining up a whole afternoon’s witticisms about his poor choice of female interlocutors, but it wasn’t going to bother him. ‘Thanks again for the help,’ said Gyuri as his valediction, ‘you must be phenomenally good at maths.’

‘Oh no,’ said the girl modestly and endearingly, ‘they gave us all the answers last week. We had plenty of time to learn them.’

They took the watch to the brothel. His mother’s watch which had incredibly not ended up on a Soviet Army arm, which was probably the only pre-liberation timepiece left in Hungary and which had once been worth an awful lot, was on that particular evening enough for two beachings, one for himself and one for Pataki.

Gyuri had been fervently determined to celebrate and to have the much-respected good time but once the negotiations over the gold watch’s weight in harlots were over, Gyuri felt oddly detached, as if he’d left his dick at home. He would never have believed he could appraise so academically femaleness being exposed.

Whores were so often associated with ugliness, sadness and debasement but the girl who had introduced herself as Timea was young, vivacious and if not intelligent had an alertness that could pass for it. ‘You’re very beautiful,’ Gyuri remarked, repeating the observations of his eyes. ‘Oh, my breasts are much too small,’ she replied as she continued to undress for work. It wasn’t true. She had the sort of beauty that removed the possibility of difficulties; she could have had anything she wanted from hordes of men genuflecting in submission. Her employment in the brothel was strange, since you would have thought she could have easily bagged a couple of millionaires to have a less demanding lifestyle.

Considering the inordinate amounts of time he spent in contemplation of four-legging, Gyuri found it hard to account for the sudden amputation of his desire. Watching Timea was delightful, worth the money in itself but a curiously abstract experience like admiring some art in a museum. Gyuri suggested that Pataki go first.

It was terrible. His callousness had simply packed up on him: out of order. He was annoyed with himself for wanting to do it, and at the same time, he knew that once he was out of range of the brothel, he would be annoyed with himself for not doing it. When Pataki re-emerged, all he could suggest was that they should leave. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Pataki expostulated. ‘You can’t throw away a perfectly good fuck!’ He returned to claim the unused coitus.

Gyuri learned there are people who can take their deceased mother’s watch to a brothel and there are people who can’t. And if you’re one of those who can’t, you can’t. It was an expensive lesson and one that was not likely to have any future applications because he wasn’t going to have any more deceased mothers or deceased mothers’ watches.

He wished Pataki would hurry up. He wanted to go home since he had the feeling he was going to cry.

January 1949

They spent the last hour telling camel jokes.

‘The new Foreign Legion officer arrives at the fort in the middle of the Sahara desert,’ explained Ladányi. ‘And he’s being given the introductory tour by the sergeant and he listens attentively but eventually he says: “This is all very interesting, Sergeant but there’s a rather delicate matter I’d like to inquire about. We’re going to be out here for years. I mean what does one do when the juices start to build up?” “Well, sir,” says the sergeant pointing to a camel tethered in the yard, “when an officer is missing the ladies’ company, that’s what we have Daisy, the regimental camel for.” The new officer is rather shocked to hear this but says nothing. Months elapse and finally after a year in the Sahara, he snaps, runs screaming across the yard and flings himself on the camel. As he’s pumping away, the sergeant comes up and coughs discreetly. “It’s none of my business, sir, but the other officers prefer to ride Daisy to the brothel in the next village.’”

For a Jesuit, Ladányi had an astonishingly good fund of camel jokes. Gyuri and Neumann could hardly get any in. Ladányi was rather hogging the camel section but it was a very long journey, and Gyuri certainly didn’t have enough camel jokes at his disposal to cover a fraction of the trip to Hálás.

Ladányi had been a little vague at first about what he had to attend to in Hálás, the hamlet where he had been born and raised. ‘I might need a bodyguard,’ he had said to Gyuri. Gyuri would have been glad to do a favour for Ladányi anyway but it was flattering to be thought of as large and dangerous (though Gyuri had brought Neumann along in the event of any bona fide bodyguarding being required. As a water-polo player and a very large person, Neumann was going to have the last punch on any subject. Gyuri had seen Neumann, when two drunk and quite large firemen had merrily announced that they were going to thrash the living daylights out of him, pick them up and throw them across Rákoczi út where they had hit a wall with unpleasant bone-breaking sounds. It had to be some sort of record, but sadly throwing firemen wasn’t a recognised sport.)

‘The new Foreign Legion recruit arrives at the fort in the middle of the Sahara desert,’ Ladányi resumed. ‘And he’s being shown the ropes by an old sweat, and he finally summons up the courage to ask the question that’s on his mind. “Look,” he asks, “we have to spend years out here, what do you do about the urges?” “‘What we do,” the old sweat elucidates, “is we go out, find a bunch of bedouin, ambush them and find relief with their camels.” So time passes, the troops go out into the desert, they hide behind a sand dune and bushwhack some bedouins. The old sweat immediately runs down towards the camels and the new recruit asks: “What’s the rush? There are plenty of camels for everyone.” “Yes, but you want to get a good-looking one.”‘

At the railway station at Békéscsaba, a wiry, behatted peasant who kissed Ladányi’s hand, was waiting for them. A cart, luxurious by local standards, but bottom-grating for an hour’s journey – the time the deferential peasant assured them it would take to reach Hálás, conveyed them.

Going back to his origins didn’t seem to excite Ladányi greatly, but as Gyuri surveyed the territory, where the shoe was still seen as a daring new fashion idea, where only the sound of crops growing disturbed the peace, he could comprehend the lack of enthusiasm. There was nothing to be said about the landscape apart from that it started where the sky finished.

Ladányi was coming home because of Comrade Faragó. Faragó had been, apparently, an egregious feature of life in Hálás for a long time. Ladányi had vivid memories of him although he left Hálás at fourteen to study in Budapest. ‘Faragó was both the village idiot and the village thief. In a small place like Hálás you have to double up,’ Ladányi recounted. But the small village had great tolerance for homegrown trouble.

The war and the Arrow Cross changed that. October 1944 was the last time the villagers of Hálás had expected to see Faragó. He had evolved from subsistence misdemeanours such as sunflower-stealing, apricot-rustling and abducting pigs, to running the district Nazi franchise. Ladányi didn’t expand on what Faragó had been up to. ‘You don’t want to know.’

Hálás’s citizens had not expected to see Faragó again after October 1944 as that was when he had been shot in the chest six times and taken by cart to the mortuary in Békéscsaba where the police deposited inexplicable and unclaimed cadavers. It was still a time when stray bodies attracted bureaucracy; a little later no one would have bothered.

It was when they put Faragó on the slab at Békéscsaba that he began to complain, quite loudly for a corpse, that he wanted a drink.