The villagers were very surprised to see him again. ‘You gave me a revolver with only six shots, is it my fault?’ a reproachful voice was heard in the csárda. This hadn’t been the first attempt on Faragó’s life. A month earlier, as Faragó was enjoying the hospitality of a ditch which was a lot closer to where he had got leg-bucklingly drunk than home, sleeping soundly in the cold, someone had chucked in a grenade to keep him company. The grenade had failed to get rid of Faragó, though it did get rid of his left leg but even this didn’t slow him down in his duties for his German mentors, hence the subsequent target practice.
It was the village priest who then suggested an auto-da-fé.
Again, when it was known that Faragó had his nose pressed to his pillow by an enormous volume of alcohol, anonymous hands set fire to his house in the middle of the night. Faragó must have been in the grip of a true carus because he didn’t lose a snore as the fire charred his front door and then burned to the ground the two neighbouring houses. ‘The priest suggested that?’ observed Gyuri. ‘Who knows?’ Ladányi said. ‘If we had the original text of the commandments, there might well be a footnote concerning exemption in regard to Faragó.’
When Hálás learned that Faragó had signed up to become the local Communist Party Secretary following the changing political wind, it was decided to stop messing about. Faragó was dragged out of his house in the dead of night, dead drunk, a dead weight. His hands were tied behind his back, a rope was thrown over a branch, a noose attached to Faragó’s neck. He was hoisted up, the branch snapped and Faragó’s yells drew a passing Russian patrol that came to investigate.
The outcome of this nocturnal suspension was that Faragó ended up with a blister necklace and a revolver as he sensed there were people who didn’t entirely approve of him.
‘I shoot,’ Faragó had announced in the csárda, ‘and I’m not even going to bother asking any questions afterwards.’ This statement came after the death of the villager credited previously with the six-fold ventilation of Faragó.
The cause of Ladányi’s return was a small vineyard of two hectares well away from Hálás that produced a wine so acrid that Faragó was almost the only person who would drink it. This vineyard had been left to the Church (probably maliciously) although it barely earned enough income to have the altar dusted.
Faragó as first secretary and mayor of the Hálás-Mezo megyer-Murony community had decreed that the vineyard should be removed from the charge of the pushers of the people’s opiate and handed over to the hegemony of the proletariat. The village turned to Ladányi because he was someone who had been to Budapest, who had seen the innards of books, because he had breathed his first lungfuls in Hálás, because he was a fully paid-up member of the Society of Jesus and because he had broken the fifty-egg barrier.
Although he had left the village fifteen years ago and had only been back for one weekend in the interval, Ladányi was still big news and a source of immense pride. How many other places could boast that the village Jew had become a Jesuit? And then there were the reports that meandered back, as Ladányi made his way through his law studies at university, of the omelette jousts and of Ladányi’s participation in the goulash wars that had broken out at the end of the thirties in Budapest ’s restaurants. Ladányi was six foot two and this copious frame in conjunction with a,student’s appetite created an enormous parking space for edibles. He started to pay for his studies and his mother’s upkeep by taking part in eat-outs with a side-bet going to the greatest devourer. His first contests were on the student circuit where the wagers merely covered the cost of the food consumed (usually dittoed three-course meals) but his unflinching digestion soon took him to the big time of the New York Cafe where leading journalists would be hard at work stretching the human capacity for eating omelettes. When Ladányi polished off a forty-five egg omelette with a couple of kilos of onions and ham thrown in for flavour, devastating the drama critic of the Pester Lloyd, who had thrown in his napkin at thirty-eight, Hálás knew all about it. When Ladányi with his custom-built cutlery was invited to Gundel’s to test the new hyperstrength goulash, which was eventually billed as ‘even Ladányi only had three bowls’ and had been certified by the Technical University as containing 30,000 calories, Hálás had all the details (if a month later). When circus strongman Sándor the Savage thought he could take Ladányi with drum cakes, everyone had a good chuckle about that and the Stradivarius violin Ladányi had won.
But Ladányi had hung up his knife and fork, having broken the fifty-egg barrier for the second time, after the editor of the Pesti Hirlap dropped dead on the opposite side of the table, his cardiac arrest not unconnected with the forty-six eggs’ worth of omelette he had just consumed. This abrupt prandial demise and Ladányi’s realisation that he wanted to join the Order brought his gastronomic career to an end, without diminishing his fame in Hálás. So when Faragó heard that Ladányi was coming to plead for the vineyard, he simply issued the challenge ‘Let’s eat it out.’
The population of Hálás was hardly past four hundred, according to Ladányi, and despite the cold and pluvial weather, most of them were gathered outside in the rain waiting for the Jesuit-laden cart to arrive.
It was, Gyuri comprehended, the highest accolade you could get. ‘Now I know what the nineteenth century was like,’ he thought. The best thing about visiting a place like Hálás was that it made you very grateful for living in Budapest. Gyuri hadn’t been out of Budapest seven hours and already the charms of electricity, pavement and a greater choice of genetic material were becoming overpowering. For a day, when he got back to Budapest, he would be very happy. Feeling he had grown to the dimensions of a tycoon or a film star, Gyuri stepped off the cart and watched his best shoes (not much to brag about, but the most powerful in his sartorial arsenal) disappear in mud.
They were shown into the csárda, a wooden affair, with a stove in the centre dispensing a little heat into the interior, which was really going to be warmed by the crowd outside funnelling its way in. Ladányi held a whispered confabulation with the village priest in a confessional, sombre manner. As Ladányi’s retinue, Gyuri and Neumann took the brunt of the local hospitality. This, of course, had been in Gyuri’s mind when he agreed to come to Hálás: the countryside meant unrestrained food. They might go short of excitement, but not of eats. Gyuri had firm intentions of swallowing along with Ladányi as long as he could and if people insisted on pressing presents of foodstuffs on them when they departed, Gyuri could put up with that.
The scale and ferocity of peasant cuisine could be overpowering if you were out of training. Gyuri knew how the breakfasts alone could put feeble urban dwellers in hospital. At Erdóváros, the summer he was thirteen, when Gyuri had been entrusted to one of the local families, they poured him a generous pálinka for breakfast along with a brick of fat garnished with a dash of paprika. Thinking well of their liberality, he drank the pálinka before walking out the door into the ground. It had taken his legs hours to remember how to walk but his stomach only a few minutes to evict the solid elements of his meal. That sort of morning fuelling was tolerable only if you had grown up on it and if you had a day in a field ahead of you. Even as an athletic thirteen year-old, harvesting for an hour had given him so much pain in so many places that all he could do was lie in the field and pray for an ambulance, while the heavily pregnant woman who had been working alongside him kindly offered to go and get him a drink.