Under the frog Read Free Page A

end of the chain Locomotive chugged
into town.
    Thus there was no need for Hepp to flex his admonitions, but
the thing about Hepp, which could be quite irritating at times, was that he was
a professional: he took his job seriously despite the fact that ten million
other people in Hungary didn’t. He was good in every way as a coach, manager
and mentor of the team, but he did have one grave fault. He always got up at
4.30 in the morning, and after fifty years on the earth, still couldn’t grasp
that other people didn’t. His direst threat was circuit training at 5 a.m.
    One morning, not long after he had joined Locomotive, and
not long after he had burned his bed, Gyuri woke up on the floor with the awful
knowledge that Hepp was expecting him at 5.30 for some track work in what was a
bottomless black October freeze. Wondering why so much of existence consisted
of getting up in the cold dark to do something you didn’t like, he resolved he
wasn’t having it. Normally Gyuri was exemplary about training, indeed, that was
why he had burned his bed, in an attempt to incinerate his laziness. It hadn’t
been a great bed, but it had been serviceable, it had worked, and lying there
in the mornings Gyuri had found its temptations preferable to running about in
the winter. He lay there in its fortifying warmth and comfort, thinking about
the training he should have been doing, repeatedly previewing it instead of
doing it. Gyuri knew he had to train, and train much harder than anyone else
because he was a self-made athlete, unlike someone like Pataki who was a
natural. To get the rewards that accrued from basketball, Gyuri had to work.
    That was why he had lugged the bed down to the courtyard and
burned it with a sprinkling of petrol, to make sure that his will wouldn’t
buckle in the future. The neighbours hadn’t batted an eye, because, by that
point, if they hadn’t had their throats slit as they slept by Gyuri or Pataki,
categorised as the crazies of the block, that was good enough for them.
    Gyuri placed his hopes on a groundsheet and the floor
encouraging him to get up briskly and to log a few hours’ exercise before the
other preoccupations of the day. But even the floor could grow on you. And that
morning, he had thought ‘you can’t rush reality’ and dived back into sleep,
having written off Hepp’s proposed cross-arctic running. The doorbell rang at
around six (as it would turn out). Elek, who was up, even though he had no
convincing reason to be, opened the door to Hepp. Hepp handed Elek his card,
which he always carried – ‘Dr Ferenc Hepp, Doctor of Sport’– and asked to be
shown to Gyuri’s room. Lying, Gyuri lied reflexively that he was ill, whereupon
Elek expressed surprise as Gyuri hadn’t mentioned feeling poorly the previous
evening. This somehow removed the sparse vestiges of veracity from Gyuri’s
statement.
    ‘Well,’ Hepp had said good-naturedly, ‘if you can manage to
triumph over this unwellness, if you can bring your body to heel, because a
hard mind makes a hard body, and get to the track in twenty minutes and do ten
more laps than the others, to show this illness you’re not going to take it
lying down, I think I can do you a commensurate favour: I can sign your
military deferment papers.’ That had been quintessential Hepp. Other coaches
would have sent someone else round to threaten him but Hepp was unwavering in
doing things himself.
    ‘It goes without saying you’re going to win this match,’
said Hepp, ‘so I’m not going to say it. These meat-processors have undoubtedly
got webbed toes and if they’re in basketball gear, it’s because they brought
their mothers to help them change. I don’t want to be accused of being
unreasonable, I don’t want to be the target of petulant rumblings but
gentlemen, I have to insist on a twenty-point victory.
    ‘They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but as far
as I’m concerned that’s exactly what it’s there for –