Free Under the frog by Tibor Fischer Page A

finger across his throat. The girl reddened and threw her
regard down onto her own sheets of paper. Now that he had conceded the
mathematical match, Gyuri adjourned to treat himself to a spot of ocular
plundering from the chest of the girl on his left, but was disgruntled to find
that a fold of blouse was now refusing his glance admission, barring any
further visual trespass.
    Having decided that he wasn’t going to sit like a cabbage
any longer, he was putting the top back on his pen as a prelude to departure,
when the supervising rays from the invigilator were momentarily diverted and a
square of paper made its way from the row on the right to his desk. Opening up
the paper, Gyuri found it contained a neatly written solution which although he
couldn’t entirely follow it, had such aplomb that he couldn’t doubt its
correctness. He copied out the answer and sauntered out of the exam-hall
knowing he had vaulted the pass, although, with hindsight, he conceded the ant-training and other diversions had drained the blood from his luck.
    In the aftermath, several congregations of maths discussions
formed. Numerous people were slumped around, with crumbled faces, as if
auditioning to illustrate the caption ‘despair’. For the first time in his
life, Gyuri felt like going to church to say thank you.
    He certainly thanked his immediate saviour. He was in good
form with her since she was so unattractive that there could be no question of
making an overture and he could relax. Pataki appeared, closing in and frowning
to see Gyuri wasting verbal effort on a young lady lagging so far behind the
pack of beauty. Pataki, of course, hadn’t failed any of his exams. He had
strolled down to the exams, dipping into a textbook or two as he walked,
packing bites of knowledge into his cheeks like a hoarding hamster and then
spitting them out at the examiners. By the time he walked out of the exam, he
already knew less than when he walked in. In basketballing terms it was like a
one-armed blindman throwing the ball, the ball hitting the ring, circling
around, wobbling, teetering but then finally slumping into the net. Lucky, very
lucky, travelling to the border between luck and miracle, but two points
nevertheless.
    Gyuri could see Pataki taking his time, lining up a whole
afternoon’s witticisms about his poor choice of female interlocutors, but it
wasn’t going to bother him. ‘Thanks again for the help,’ said Gyuri as his
valediction, ‘you must be phenomenally good at maths.’
    ‘Oh no,’ said the girl modestly and endearingly, ‘they gave
us all the answers last week. We had plenty of time to learn them.’
    * * *
    They took the watch to the brothel. His mother’s watch which
had incredibly not ended up on a Soviet Army arm, which was probably the only
pre-liberation timepiece left in Hungary and which had once been worth an awful
lot, was on that particular evening enough for two beachings, one for himself
and one for Pataki.
    Gyuri had been fervently determined to celebrate and to have
the much-respected good time but once the negotiations over the gold watch’s
weight in harlots were over, Gyuri felt oddly detached, as if he’d left his
dick at home. He would never have believed he could appraise so academically
femaleness being exposed.
    Whores were so often associated with ugliness, sadness and
debasement but the girl who had introduced herself as Timea was young,
vivacious and if not intelligent had an alertness that could pass for it. ‘You’re
very beautiful,’ Gyuri remarked, repeating the observations of his eyes. ‘Oh,
my breasts are much too small,’ she replied as she continued to undress for
work. It wasn’t true. She had the sort of beauty that removed the possibility
of difficulties; she could have had anything she wanted from hordes of men
genuflecting in submission. Her employment in the brothel was strange, since
you would have thought she could have easily bagged a couple of millionaires to
have a