Under the frog by Tibor Fischer Read Free Book Online

forest slap into a Russian camp. Pataki immediately feigned
intense pain, on the lines of acute appendicitis, and got the others to plead
for a doctor and medicine. This appeal had the desired effect, the soldiers had
told them to go to hell and shooed them away.
    They had been reliving that escape the following day,
chuckling over Russian gullibility as they fired a revolver at some bottles
they had carried out to a local beauty spot for target practice. This was when
there had been notices everywhere, in newspapers, on walls, in railway
carriages warning that anyone caught with a firearm would be considered a
bandit, a fascist, someone to be shot forthwith. It was probably the shooting
and their chuckling that obscured the sound of Russian patrol until it was
right behind them.
    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