Under the frog Read Free

train at the Keleti railway station.
    Róka was the first off. Always reedy, he had noticeably lost
weight, a skeleton painted a white skin colour, totally out of place for
August. ‘Let me put it this way,’ Róka summed up, ‘if you gave me the choice of
spending two weeks in the waiting room here at the Keleti, with nothing to eat,
or a night in Bucharest’s best hotel, I wouldn’t have to think very hard about
it.’
    They had lost the two matches they played. Largely because
Pataki had been out of action. Pataki, who had never had a day’s illness in his
life (the closest he had got to being ill was when he had invented ailments to
dodge various duties), who had only ever come into contact with doctors for the
obligatory check-ups on all players, had spent the duration of his stay in
Bucharest, on his knees, spewing incessantly, vilely betrayed by his sphincter
muscles, bowing to the lords of disgorgement, hugging different immobiles in
his bathroom suite, pleading for divine intercession. The others had had
ruthless alimentary disruptions but had just succeeded in getting out on court;
the Locomotive players had all felt as if their legs were encased in lead casks – they bitterly regretted getting possession of the ball since that forced them
to run or try to do something. They would have happily forfeited the match at
half-time, if it hadn’t been for a fervent appeal to national honour and
auroral threats of unprecedented strength by Hepp. Despite losing irremediably
from the first second (or perhaps because of it) Locomotive were soundly booed
by the crowd and one of the darts thrown by the spectators had skewered
Szabolcs’s ear.
    When Demeter, as acting captain (on account of Pataki’s
indisposition), had offered to trade tops with the opposing captain as was the
custom with international fixtures, the Rumanian had insisted on haggling, with
the result that Demeter ended up with three unwanted Rumanian tops and the
Rumanians left congratulating themselves on having gulled the Hungarians.
    ‘I never thought we were going to get back alive,’ Róka had
said, kissing the platform. On the home leg of the fixture, they had had their
revenge, beating the Rumanian Railway Workers’ Union but only by two points, a
puny margin, acutely disappointing when one took into account that Róka’s
brother, who was in charge of the kitchens at the hotel where the Rumanian team
was staying, had applied injudicious amounts of rat poison to their goulash.
    * * *
    The train rolled into Makó, the last stop for both the train
and the Locomotive team. They were due to play the Makó Meat-Processors that
afternoon. There was a minor abattoir in Makó which helped to supply flesh to
the salami factory in Szeged. Their opposition was entirely drawn from the
small-bone cleaning unit of this abattoir.
    No one was there to greet them at the station, but Makó wasn’t
really big enough to make finding anything too much of a problem. They arrived
at a school sports hall for the match to find the meat-processors out on court,
clumping about in what had the appearance of a desperate attempt to learn how
to play basketball half an hour before play was due to commence.
    As they were changing, Hepp gave the team a pocket edition
of his pre-match exhortation. It definitely wasn’t needed, since they knew
without setting eyes on the meat-processors that they couldn’t be any good.
Unknown, provincial teams couldn’t be any good, since any hot player would be
immediately siphoned up, lured into the grasp of one of the big teams that
could offer huge betterments. This was a friendly match to appraise the
meat-processors, a newly formed team, who had probably lined up the
first-division Locomotive via political channels. A Makó Party secretary had
phoned another Party secretary to whom he had slipped a crate of salamis, who
would in turn phone another Party secretary, a soon-to-be proud owner of a
crate of salamis, and so on, till at the