Under the frog by Tibor Fischer Read Free Book Online Page A

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