Read Online Under the frog by Tibor Fischer - Free Book Online Page B

had
long unruly hair, so remorselessly unruly that pupils and staff suspected he
engineered his coiffure to look like a starfish every morning.
    ‘Well, fischer,’ Botond had said jovially staring up at the
ceiling, tapping a cuspid with the earpiece of his spectacles, probably running
through some juicy texts at the back of the cerebral shop while he was going
through the tedious business of testing the pupils. ‘It’s always a pleasure to
see you, but I regret that you’ll have to give us some of Toldi before we can let you go.’
    ‘To be honest, I can’t,’ Gyuri owned up. ‘I’m sorry; but I
don’t know any.’
    ‘Ha, ha. Always modest. Always modest. Any section, just
fire away.’
    ‘No honestly. I don’t want to waste your time,’ Gyuri had
insisted.
    ‘Exam nerves, eh? All right, just recite any one of your
favourite poems.’
    It was a reasonable request, but it caught Gyuri by
surprise. He rifled his literary knowledge but the drawer was empty. ‘No, sir,
I’m afraid I can’t recite anything.’
    ‘Ha, ha, Fischer, your sense of humour will get you into
trouble one day. I’ll put you down for a pass. Send in the next candidate,
please.’ Botond was extremely avuncular to everyone (except those who evinced a
sincere enmity to poetry). He was one of the few masters who was liked, a
fondness fuelled by the biographical information, passed on year after year,
that Botond had got drunk with all the major figures working the Hungarian
language since the turn of the century. He had starved with Ady in Paris (‘Bandi
and I were arguing who should peel the potato for supper’) and with eight other
unwashed and less posteritied Hungarians shared one bed on a shift basis in an
unheated garret, got drunk with all the major literary figures again, punched
Picasso in an argument over prosody and was, despite his senior teaching post,
available at short notice for drinks with any major (or minor for that matter)
literary figures left after two world wars and a plethora of emigration.
Literary criticism was more compelling when you knew that your teacher had
dragged the author out of a bar by his legs.
    No, Botond was not the type to hand out a fail lightly,
especially since he still owed Elek a five figure sum.
    Once out of the exam, in the corridor, with post-incident
clarity, it did occur to Gyuri that there was one poem he could have rounded
up, by Botond’s old pal, Ady, on the pleasure of seeing the Gare de l’Est in
Paris; one of Ady’s most appealing themes being that the noblest prospect a
Hungarian could see was the way out of Hungary. Good but sozzled poet. István
had been in Érmindszent, Ady’s birthplace, during the war and had been
surprised to find not so much as a plaque to Ady’s memory, whereas, by
comparison, Hungary was littered with commemorative notices such as ‘Petófi
walked past here’ and ‘Petófi almost walked past here’. When István pointed out
this omission to a local the rejoinder was ‘Why should we put up a monument to
a second-generation alcoholic?’
    The maths exam was first thing the next morning but it was
too craven to stay in, despite the frittering away of time caused by the
afternoon’s ant-circus. Elek was in the armchair, in some difficulty without a
cigarette. As Gyuri was heading out, Elek caught him in the back with ‘You’re
going to love the Army’.
    * * *
    The first time he sat the mathematics exam, he had prudently
taken the precaution of smuggling in the textbook. The main reason he failed at
the first attempt was because he hadn’t known enough to know he hadn’t known
enough. Gyuri dipped into the textbook in the hope of succour, but had found
its pages totally unintelligible. He angrily registered that if he had worked a
bit harder he would have been able to cheat properly.
    The second time around, his preparations at least gave him
enough expertise to understand the questions, even if the answers weren’t
jumping into view. It was