The life of the Army’s basketball players, as indeed of all its sporting practitioners, was cushy. On the first day they might go as far as to show you what a rifle looked like but that was as far as military science went for the sporters. Anyone who played in the first division had a nominal job handed out by their club, the duties being mainly collecting your wages (there were also the little brown envelopes at the clubhouse containing ‘calorie money’). For example, Gyuri had visited his place of employment on numerous occasions and had learned the Morse code in the course of his railway career. In the Army, shamateurism reached full speed; the only duty that impinged on the Army’s athletes was putting on a uniform once in a while. Plus, if you were of an international standard, a high rank and a fat salary were thrust on you. Puskás, the football genius, not only had a car, but a chauffeur.
In their changing room, Locomotive were joined by their vanquished opponents. The atmosphere was not one of sporting benevolence and fraternity; the hope of obtaining some home-brewed pálinka, as often happened on trips to the provinces, was dashed. The demeanour and conduct of the small-bone boys was indisputably bunko; you would have thought they could contain their surly clod-hopping to their own changing room but they couldn’t stay away from the excitement from Budapest: ergo, there was nothing else to do that weekend in Makó except bait the Locomotive team.
The Meats had chosen Demeter as the principal subject of their attentions. Demeter was tall and aristocratic, as befitted someone who came from a long line of tall aristocrats. Whether because seven hundred years of appearances behoved him to do so, or whether it emanated from his nature, Demeter emitted a constant poise: you could imagine him being bombed and pulled out from a pile of rubble without a hair out of place. If you were wearing a dinner jacket and Demeter was stark naked, you’d still feel underdressed.
Demeter was also excessively equitable, which was why he hadn’t responded to the Meats’ unimaginative abuse. If it had been Pataki or Katona, or indeed any other member of the team on the receiving end, fugitive teeth would already have been scuttling across the floor. Why was it always the friendly matches that ended up unfriendly? thought Gyuri looking around the changing room for some handy blunt instrument such as a length of iron piping.
The universal punch-up Gyuri expected didn’t in fact come to pass. The Meats’ spokesman was working his way through a loop of observations such as ‘You think you’re pretty good, don’t you?’ and ‘You think your shit doesn’t stink, eh?’ As he was engaged in this, Demeter adjusted his tie, and then, with such purpose the movement seemed slow, administered a slap resoundingly on the spokesman’s face. Not a punch but an open-handed rebuke, without any follow up. Demeter then carried on packing up his kit-bag. The Meats flocked out in silence – rather as a martial artist was reputed to be able to summon fatal strength to one finger, so Demeter had conduited a crushing amount of contempt into that slap that had incontrovertibly spelt out their fourth-divisionness in all aspects of life. The irony was that it was Demeter who insisted on politely bidding farewell to their hosts.
They had to hunt around for Hepp before they could leave, but they located him eventually, somewhat out of breath- he had run a mile down the road pursuing the referee who had taken to his bicycle at point forty-eight. Hepp was in excellent condition for his age, indeed he was in good shape for someone twenty years younger, and he could have carried on much further had it not been for the awareness that his strictures were not being accepted constructively.
Returning to Szeged to spend the night, the bulk of Locomotive opted for an inspection of the town’s main square to see if there was a restaurant willing to serve them. They remembered that they had run out of a restaurant in the centre of town without paying the bill, doing a Zrinyi, as it was known in the Locomotive ranks, in memory of the great Hungarian general Miklós Zrinyi, who had rushed out of his castle, admittedly to do battle with a Turkish force that outnumbered him ten times (to be completely wiped out). They remembered they had zrinyied out of a restaurant, but having been so legless and brainless they couldn’t remember which one (they had been so inebriated only half the team could walk, and had only made good their escape by locking the staff in the kitchen). But what was the point of being away from home if you didn’t behave disgracefully? They chose the restaurant on the left hand side of the square, where having reassured the management they weren’t anything to do with water-polo they were shown to a table. ‘When I hear the word water-polo,’ said the head waiter, ‘I know it means… refurbishment, hospital, the police, a loss of teeth… years of painfui, slow recovery.’
Hepp was busy back at the hotel, writing letters about the one hundred and eight points to everyone even remotely connected with the governing of basketball and some to people who weren’t. ‘I definitely think you should write to the Ministry,’ Pataki had said, knowing that Hepp’s epistolary exertions would save the team from a few hours of post-match analysis which on previous occasions had driven people to climbing out of windows to evade Hepp.
Gyuri had gone off to the main post office to see about a phone call to Budapest. Three days before, he had been stopped in the street by a striking Swedish girl who asked for directions to the Museum of Fine Arts. The miracle of such an encounter, of a girl who was from the outside and who was good-looking, just walking up to him without any advance notice from fate, had stupefied him and he almost let her go without assaying further acquaintance. She was visiting Budapest for some youth festival organised by one of the countless peace committees but that was immaterial. She was a two-legged ticket out of Hungary and worth a four hour wait for a phone-call. Stay calm, reasoned Gyuri, stay calm for a few more days and then if she hasn’t fallen insanely in love with me, there’s always the expedient of falling at her feet, pleading for marriage, offering half of his salary for life, offering anything, to kill people she didn’t like, to beg desperately and shamelessly.
Bugger the informer, he concluded entering the post office, I’m breaking out. Joining the queue for phone calls, a familiar figure in front of him was mnemonically focused into recognition. It was Sólyom-Nagy, the champion shoplifter of the Minta school. Sólyom-Nagy’s prowess at pilfering, mostly chocolate bars, had been such that the entire third year, as a result of the gargantuan amounts of cut-price Sólyom-Nagy-supplied chocolate they had consumed, had been unable to view a bar without feeling ill. Although they had lost touch, Gyuri had got on well with Sólyom-Nagy and had been very grateful to him for specially stealing a multi-faceted penknife, subsequently lost when Keresztes, who had said he just wanted to borrow it for a minute, had left it in a gypsy at the fairground.
Sólyom-Nagy, it transpired, was studying Hungarian literature at the university in Szeged. ‘This is Jadwiga, by the way,’ he said indicating a slim girl next to him who was letting her boredom with waiting show. The surname was something Polish that Gyuri didn’t bother trying to retain but he was disappointed that Jadwiga didn’t seem more delighted to meet him. One didn’t get anywhere by overlooking introductions to women. However, according to the instant classification of the back-room boys in Gyuri’s cranium, Jadwiga only scored a keep-on-file anyway and he had more pressing Swedish women to phone.
It took a portly three hours to get through to Budapest and she wasn’t at the student hostel. It was going to be hard work becoming a streetsweeper in Stockholm.