Attila Bartis
Engelhard, or the Story of Photography
(Short story)

[...]

Oszkár, or the Story of Physics

(Short story)

Originally they had decided that little Oszkár would not go to school at all on Wednesday, they would take him to the doctor instead, but on Tuesday evening the doctor telephoned to say that Wednesday would have to be cancelled as something had come up, Friday would be better if it was convenient for the father, Friday at ten, perfect, and then we’ll check and see why Oszkár is still no bigger than a kindergarden child.

So on Wednesday morning the child went to school after all, and there during the physics lesson he suddenly thought of something, and then he began to count, and he counted and counted, and Friday came, and the doctor said that little Oszkár would in all probability remain kindergarden size to the end of his days, though there was a chance that he will grow another ten centimetres, or twenty at the most, but what does it matter, he’s still worth as much as the next man, and he should pay no attention to those who call him Owlcast instead of Oszkár Dóczy, because those who call people names are uncivilized, and God will punish them.

But little Dóczy was no longer very interested in what the doctor had to say, he just carried on counting, and he counted through secondary school, then through university and the Second World War, then, with the exception of a typical house search, he counted through the fifties, though to be more precise that house search wasn’t so typical after all, as the officer was still standing in the doorway when he asked whether Dóczy had any gold or subversive literature on the premises, to which Dóczy replied that he had, but that he never lent books to anyone, and closed the door, and those three just stood out in the corridor and laughed their heads off, because it was simply unbelievable, too absurd for words, too good to be true, so they decided not to spoil it and rang the bell of the next-door flat instead, from where they soon took away Mr Szilágyi together with his gold-nibbed Parker pen. In short, that is all that happened in the fifties, at least to little Dóczy, and in the sixties even less, those should have been the best years for counting, being the quietest, but they too were fruitless. By then he had been teaching the physics lessons himself for a long time, first in secondary school, then at the medical university, but still the result would not come out.

Then one night he started up from his sleep with six point nine running in his mind, and for a moment he thought that it was his sixty-years of bachelorhood playing a dirty trick on him, for what is six point nine, there is no such number in physics, only elsewhere, in quite different fields, fields he knew nothing about, as they were no concern of a hundred and forty-centimetre physicist, so he took a sip from the glass of mineral water set on the night-table to still his heaving chest, and then he would have gone back to sleep but those two numbers rutting with the shamelessness of animals would not let him rest. So he set his pyjamas straight and sat down at his desk, for at such times counting is worth infinitely more than all the mineral water in the world, and then suddenly there it was, in black and white, p equals six point nine, and then instead of being overjoyed, he burst into tears, because there was not a soul in the flat whom he could have dragged out of bed to show them Dóczy’s invariable.

In the morning the professor addressed a large envelope to the proper department, put in it the invariable together with the deduction, and posted it on the way to the university, by registered post, express delivery, just to be on the safe side. He had been waiting for a reply for three months when, during a coffee-break, one of the fifth-year students asked the comrade professor’s opinion about Voinic’s invariable, which had been written up in that day’s Red Flag directly after the editorial, to which Dóczy replied that unfortunately he did not read the papers, but Comrade Academician Voinic was an excellent authority, both as a physicist and as the nephew of the Comrade Secretary-General, and if he had discovered an invariable, then it would surely hold its own anywhere around the world. Then he glanced through the paper and there it was, in black and white, six point nine, which for a couple of moments did not even surprise him, for what else could p equal but six point nine, and it was only then that a hand seemed to seize his lungs and his heart and his stomach and began to twist and tear them, not so that he’d die, which may perhaps have been better, just so that he’d scream with the pain. And when he was no longer raving like a lunatic, but you could clearly make out that what he was shouting was thieves, communist thieves, give me back my invariable, then the front man of the class went to fetch help from the reception desk, and the professor was secluded.

Physicists came under the jurisdiction of Captain Frunza, so it was to him that Dr Dóczy was taken, and the Captain professed to be very happy to meet the professor in person, then asked him what his grievance was, what this bitter outburst in the university corridor was all about.

"They stole my invariable, they just went ahead and stole my invariable," said Oszkár Dóczy, upon which the Captain asked him who had been responsible for such a dastardly deed. But the moment the professor told him, he found himself gasping, as the Captain slapped him so hard that he bounced back off the wall.

Captain Frunza asked little Oszkár to sit back down in his seat and not cry like a baby, it wasn’t seemly, then said that the professor had said something very foolish just a moment ago, and he’d much rather pretend he hadn’t even heard it.

"Oszkár, Oszkár, what shall we do with you," he asked, not of the physicist, but of the file lying before him on the table. He flicked through the file as though that were the real Dóczy, and the other, the one sitting on the chair, in effect some sort of supplement to it, a sort of flesh-and-blood illustration which, with its cut lips and teary eyes, only makes the proper interpretation of the text more difficult.

Captain Frunza perplexedly counted the invitations, honorary diplomas and foreign honoris causae which made the situation so delicate, for what was he going to say if those foreigners happened to ask him where he had mislaid the professor, then he picked up the phone, dialled, and asked what was to be done about this dwarf.

"He must be given treatment," said someone very far away, perhaps in Bucharest. So Professor Dóczy was treated at the neurological clinic by a former student of his called Árpád Bréda, and after the treatment he had not only forgotten Voinic’s invariable, but even Newton’s laws.

Then one night Dr Valeriu Ghinda walked up and down Bolyai Street a couple of times with his medical bag under his arm, and when he had assured himself that the street sweeper was really a street sweeper, and the roast chestnut-man was really a roast chestnut-man, he slipped in through the door of Professor Dóczy’s house. In the course of that week he went back twice, and he can’t have been carrying ordinary pharmaceutical products in that bag, for upon his third visit the professor remembered not only his own name but that of Doctor Ghinda as well, and he did not struggle and kick and shout let me go, leave me alone, I don’t know anything, I’m just a physicist, but said thank you, Valeriu. He even cracked a joke, saying, you’ve been concocting on the sly again, haven’t you, to which Dr Ghinda replied that it didn’t need much concocting, because that Árpád Bréda bungled things again, you can tell he was your student.

So Dr Ghinda succeeded in bringing Dr Dóczy up from the depths to the level of a perfectly run-of-the-mill nervous wreck, but they thought it would be better if the professor did not yet flaunt his improved state of health, but told the social and health committee to hurry as he had a rendezvous with UFOs at three o’clock under the bronze owl guarding the entrance of the Teleki Library.

"That’s just fine," said the chairman of the committee with satisfaction, and approved Professor Dóczy’s disability pension.

Just to be safe, the old man went to the library and walked up and down before the entrance anxiously until closing time, exactly as someone waiting for UFOs would do, for what if they were keeping an eye on him, and found out that he was bluffing, and hadn’t really had a meeting lined up, he would lose the disability pension, and the Bréda treatment would begin all over again. So when the library closed, and the man who had been reading a newspaper for hours with his back against the statue of Bolyai had disappeared as well, the professor rang our bell; the trouble was that we did not want to open the door, for though he was a hundred and forty centimetres tall, and wearing his grey raincoat, we still did not recognize him. He stood there in front of the glass door like a kindergarden child struck by lightning, his finger clumsily stuck to the bell.

"Good evening, it’s only me," he said, pressing his face up against the glass.

"Good grief, whatever happened to you, Oszkár?" asked my mother, taking the old man by the arm and pulling him inside, then she sat him down in the kitchen on a stool and quickly gave him a slice of bread and butter sprinkled with sugar, just like in the old days when Professor Dóczy was still recognizable at first sight.

My father switched on the radio and the television, so the voices of the broadcaster and Captain Onedin would mingle with ours, because at that time he still believed that there was no bugging device in the world that could filter the essence out of so much noise. Then The Onedin Line was over and the running commentaries on harvesting began, in Ilfov county the harvest was much better than last year’s, the reporter said, especially the wheat crop, upon which Professor Dóczy asked whether we thought he would be killed, and my father said that they probably would not dare go that far.

Mother spread another two slices of bread and butter, sprinkled them with sugar, made a sandwich of them and wrapped them in a napkin, the professor was long past the point of finding something like this humiliating.

"Should I go to the library tomorrow as well, do you think?" he asked as he put the sandwich in the pocket of his raincoat, beside the papers attesting his entitlement to a disabilty pension.

"I don’t know," said my father.

"Or should I leave town?"

"Absolutely not. I think you’d better go to the library after all."

"Alright," said Oszkár.

"But just keep looking up at the sky, like today. If you overplay your part, you know, that can look suspicious too."

My mother made the beds, and for a while my father tried to tune in to the short-wave band. I packed my school-bag so I wouldn’t have to hurry in the morning, Hungarian, Romanian, PE, physics cancelled, there’ll be history and music instead.

We do not speak about it, because one ought not speak of such things, but we are in actual fact grateful to Captain Frunza, Voinic and the others. Because before, when Oszkár came to see us, he always spoke of black holes, and antibodies, and condensation of time and the like, things that are much closer to God than to us, so all we could do was nod or look incredulous. Now Father could at least express his opinion on the subject, which of course made a difference, at least one didn’t feel a total fool.

Translated by Eszter Molnár

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Attila Bartis, a native of Transylvania, has lived in Budapest since 1984. His publications include the novel A séta (The Stroll) and a volume of short stories A kéklő pára (Blue Mist), reviewed in THQ 152. He is also a noted photographer.