One of the four soldiers, a true short-arse, who looked about twelve, was extremely jolly. The Red Army manual for troops stationed in Hungary obviously contained the phrase ‘We are going to shoot you’ (just to prevent any misunderstanding) since the midget kept on repeating it with an appalling accent, adding various onomatopoeic execution effects, like ‘bbubbbbuabbaa’. This he did, interspersing delighted laughter, all the way to their headquarters in the village of Jew. The people who lived in Jew didn’t look at all Jewish, nor were they, otherwise they’d have been long dead.
Not for the first time Pataki reflected on the imbecility of Hungarian village names and how idiotic it would look to be shot in Jew.
They were left in a small room, with a window so minute none of them could have managed to get more than an arm out, and besides which their titchy escort was on guard outside, still rehearsing for the firing-squad. It was going to be a tough one to mendacity out, Pataki had reflected, bearing in mind that none of them had a greater command of Russian than ‘fuck your mother’. Józsi was beginning to smell badly and Gyuri’s eyes were on stalks of terror. ‘Don’t worry,’ Pataki said in an endeavour to bolster morale, ‘they’re not going to shoot us.’ ‘It’s not that,’ replied Gyuri, ‘everyone saw us being brought here. My mother’s going to kill me.’ Pataki then recalled that Gyuri’s last word to his mother before going out the door had been ‘no’ in response to the irate question ‘You haven’t still got that revolver, have you?’
Pataki was exploring two lines of thought: first, that they had found the revolver and were on their way to hand it in, precisely because they realised how illegal and dangerous such an object was and how it could easily fall into the wrong hands. Or there was the hunting down of a Nazi soldier reputed by the locals to be scavenging in the forest, harbouring wicked anti-Soviet ideals, with the jackpot line ‘we wanted to bring him in ourselves as thanks to the Red Army for having so selflessly liberated our country of evil scum like this’; it was a better yarn but sadly less believable.
Then the commanding officer came in. Pataki divined from the crestfallen look on the midget’s face that perhaps they weren’t going to be fattened up with lead. None of the fabrications were given a chance to come into play but an abrasive, sandpaper severity lecture skinned them alive (through an interpreter) and to Gyuri’s disappointment they were released and had to go home. That captivity had been just over an hour; how long would the AVO hold him?
At a stately pace, the driver took the AVO car down the boulevardous Andrássy út and turned right at number 60, their headquarters. Pataki cut off his reminiscences with the thought that the entrance to number 60 looked familiar and recalled that he had seen it in a newsreel, showing captive Arrow Cross leaders and other assorted Nazi assistants being led in, handcuffed, having a good idea of how their trials were going to go: hangings all round. The car pulled into the side entrance, the tradesmen’s entrance as it were and Pataki suddenly ran out of nonchalance; fear made itself comfortable in his mind.
He was ushered up a long, ornate staircase, with incapacitatingly thick carpet. The opulence of the interior was all the more striking since Pataki couldn’t remember seeing a freshly-decorated wall or indeed one without bulletholes or some sort of martial damage for years.
He was shoved into a large room, with a ceiling almost out of sight from which was suspended a chandelier the size of a crystal yacht. ‘Go and stand in the corner,’ said one of his escorts. Pataki then noticed someone else in another corner with his nose pressed into the right-angle of the walls. Even though he only got the rear view, from his red hair, bolt upright like a thistle, he recognised Fuchs. This revelation and the schoolmasterly injunction to stand in the corner brought on a fit of laughter which had a high hysteria content. This, in turn, produced a fist in Pataki’s ear, which was still smarting when it got dark outside but Pataki was quite happy to stand like a dunce because he now knew what it was all about and he could get the juices of expiation, protestation and misrepresentation ready to flow; moreover, for once, he hadn’t done anything.
It had all started with the rowing trip down the Danube with Gyuri. They stopped for a bite of lunch on Csepel Island and as they relaxed on the verdant riverbank Gyuri spotted a small container of the type that usually housed grenades. To their joy, it was full of grenades. They did some fishing – grenades producing unbeatable results – no wasting time with maggots, bits of line, hooks, weights, waiting. But after you’ve harvested a good haul of zapped fish, the fun diminishes.
They were good grenades, German grenades, so Pataki, having acquired Gyuri’s holding through a boat-counting wager, decided to sell or trade them at school, as he had done a roaring trade at the close of the war, arms-dealing for a little pocket-money.
During one of Hidassy’s physics lessons Pataki started his retail exploits. Hidassy was, no matter how many times he had taught a topic, passionate and excited in his exposition, so much so that as soon as he launched into density or atomic eccentricities he didn’t even notice what the front row was doing, and as far as the back row was concerned, with Pataki and the grenades, it could have been on the other side of the planet. One week they had even managed a small scale football match using a rolled-up paper ball without Hidassy intervening.
Hidassy made a pleasant change from the other masters who loved to supervise every aspect of a pupil’s existence, for example someone like Horvath, whom it was rumoured had been stripped of his Army commission because of the embarrassing number of conscripts who had died in his charge. Horvath was always caning people or grooming them for expulsion on grounds of insufficiently perpendicular spines. Snoozing on the workbench however didn’t bother Hidassy, who just carried on waving sections of rubber tubing or sticking things into a bunsen burner. On the occasion Pataki had ignited one of the laboratory benches, purely experimenting to see if it would burn, Hidassy’s only reaction had been to open a window to let the smoke out.
One day, an hour after school had finished and the class had filed out, it was claimed Hidassy had been seen still conducting a lesson on electromagnetism: he loved physics. And he was liked by his pupils, not only because he left them in peace, but because, when it came to exam time and mouths were left gasping like landed fish, he would give a good mark for ‘understanding the principle’. In fact what usually happened during the oral exam was that he asked the question and then, even before you had time to supply an answer (should you have happened to have had one), however feeble or conquering, he would beamingly answer it, requiring at most a little nodding in agreement from the examinee.
‘Teller was telling me that if you split the atom, you’d blow up the whole world: the least he could have done was write to apologise,’ Hidassy was rambling as Pataki sold his grenades. Keresztes, as well as Fuchs, came round to examine the goods, which Pataki wished they wouldn’t do. Keresztes was an unwelcome customer as he was perilously unpredictable. During the siege, Soviet machine gunners had found Keresztes at their elbows, asking for a go. Once Pataki and Gyuri had been at a fairground when Keresztes had latched on to them. A gypsy, without carelessness or malice, entirely through the natural Brownian motion of public place, had brushed into Keresztes. Courteously asking for Gyuri’s celebrated penknife, Keresztes had run through the different attachments and, having selected the longest blade, sunk it into the gypsy. ‘Thanks,’ he had said politely.