Divided and Conquered

In 1991 the Soviets retreated from Eastern Europe, taking with them the rigid state-enforced atheism, leaving the door wide open for Bible-believing missionaries like my parents. My brother, sister, and I packed our suitcases alongside them, and the five of us moved to Budapest in August of that year, ready for the sort of thing that no one can prepare for at all.

In what was later explained to us as an effort to gain credibility, and thereby a means of sharing the good news about Jesus with the locals, I was enrolled in a public elementary school. I faithfully attended classes in spite of not being able to even say “I don’t speak Hungarian” in a language that anyone would understand. Teachers would put their hands in the small of my back and push me around the school.

I was broken machinery.

I was awkward furniture.

By November, the newness of it — whatever it was that sometimes made this feel like more of a vacation than a real life — had worn off. I didn’t get along with my classmates. Judit was still slapping my ears whenever I forgot she was behind me. Ignác was still stuttering when he tried to read and still punching kids who called him a gypsy. I had reached more or less of a truce with most of the others, though. They taught me swear words, which I pretended I didn’t learn when dad asked me about my school day. They drew crude pictures of our teachers and showed them to me during the breaks, making sure to point out that such and such a teacher was pooping. They would repeat the word for this over and over until I finally said it after them. They loved that.

During class, they asked me to pass their notes, and of course I did. I passed them, and I never got caught. I showed them how to wrap the notes around the ink tube of a disassembled pen and to just stand up and carry the pen across the room right in front of the teacher. This idea was the sort of thing that would have made any one of them legendary. It made me normal.

Before English class, the entire group would crowd around me, and I would read off the answers to the worksheets one by one. No one in that class did English homework for almost five years.

It was the combination of these things, I think, that led to an awkward truce between the Hungarians and me. We didn’t like each other, but we didn’t clench fists in our pockets as we walked by each other, either. If it had not been for this sort of amicable cease-fire, I never would have fallen in love. I never would have known that I was even supposed to in the first place.

It was Ignác who first suggested that all of the boys should decide who we were in love with — that we should divide and conquer our female sixth grade counterparts with unprecedented efficiency. He was the only one who had kissed a girl, and one of two who had at some point brought pornography into the boys locker room before school. The other, Ferenc, had managed a steady supply by stealing from his father, or so he told us. Because of his experience with women, we trusted Ignác’s opinion on the matter exclusively.

There are reasons this system of divide and conquer is not more commonly used among communities of would-be male suitors. These reasons might seem obvious now, but we could not think of anything more reasonable at the time. And so we stood in the locker room before gym class, undressing with our backs to the center of the room and each other. I hurried through the process as fast as I could, only slowing myself enough to make it seem as though I wasn’t actually hurrying. The rest of them knew that if they took too long to change they could shorten the length of gym class by at least ten minutes. They stole each other’s shorts. They threw shoes into the toilet. They looked at pornography, which I pretended to ignore, but didn’t really.

This time, though, there was sense of purpose to the stalling. The boys standing in their white underwear and white tank top shirts went down the list of girls, each one doing the rankings in his head. Ferenc, who was second or third in the hierarchy of boys chose Andrea, who was much too smart for him, but similarly ranked among the girls in our general agreement on desirability. Hajnalka, whom we all suspected to be at least part Russian, was high on the list because her parents owned something. I forget what. Peti claimed her the way a man plants a flag on an island. There was a sense of determination in his voice. I didn’t like the way he said “mine,” but I understood it.

Judit, who had terrible acne, ranked lower than she should have. She was, to her credit, a very stylishly dressed young lady — moreso than most of the girls in our class. For obvious reasons, I was concerned that she would end up where I was — at the bottom of the list — and obligate me to pursue her. At one point, Peti and Ference counted through the girls on their fingers, trying to establish a specific order of desirability. Anita was on the bottom. They thankfully did not repeat the process with the boys, but come on. There was only one kid in the room who you could call a homo and he’d respond in broken Hungarian, “No! Not homo, I am.”
We devolved. The boys were arguing, and I could make out most of it. They were saying things like “No way is she prettier” and “I can’t believe you would chose her.” Ignác, who was the tallest and stongest of us, chose Betti Kralik, with whom he did not stand a chance in hell. He used the word love when he picked her. “I will be in love with Betti,” he had said, and that was how I knew that I was supposed to be in love, too.

Betti Kralik had brown hair that was straight as nails. There was not even the slightest hint of a curl to it, not even where it met her forehead and ran straight backwards toward her ponytail. She was the best student in class, and would write and write and write in her notebooks while the teachers went on. She wrote three times as much as anyone else, but also knew at least that much more. When she bent over her desk to write, she would twist her head slightly to the left and quickly reach up with her right hand to pull her ponytail over her right shoulder. It was a quick instinctive movement, but there was a certain poetry in it — the hair flipping up through over fingers as her head tilted. She was beautiful without trying. I liked that about her and couldn’t at all fault Ignác for choosing her.

The gym teacher came and yelled at us twice before we left the locker room, having wasted only a minute or two of class. We never made it to who I was going to fall in love with.
The gym teacher, Ildi Néni, was short, and always stood with her legs wide, which made her even shorter. She was the only gym teacher I ever had that never actually did any gym stuff. She would always pick someone out to show us how it was done, and there was always someone who knew how to do it. She had short spiky black hair, which I think is pretty normal for gym teachers no matter what continent you’re on. She made us run in circles around the basketball court for ten minutes at the beginning of gym class. She stood in the middle of the court, spinning slowly to watch, yelling at us as we went. I never got yelled at, because I ran toward the front of the group.

Ignác was running five steps behind Betti, whose ponytail was bouncing up and down with perfect rhythm against her back. Every time her right foot hit the ground, the ponytail would fall against her right shoulder. Left foot, left shoulder. And in between there was the hypnotic swirl of her hair.

Ignác wasn’t watching her hair. He kept one eye on Ildi Néni, and every time her back was turned he managed some sort of running cadence with hip thrusting. He stuck his tongue out and his eyes got wild. He made fists with his hands and acted like he was pulling something on top of himself, presumably Betti. I knew what it meant, because the boys made those same gestures and the same face when they passed the pornography back and forth. I started to get angry at Ignác, but not angry enough to do anything.

The three of us made a train that was half of a lap ahead of the rest of the group now. Betti, Ignác, and I ran harder and harder, Betti because she could, Ignác because the rest of the boys were snickering and laughing, and me because I could feel my ears getting hotter and my heart pounding faster. Ildi Néni was yelling at the rest of the boys, who were laughing too hard to be able to run any more, and then several things happened all at once.

Two of the boys were laughing so hard that they had stopped running completely. Ildi Néni didn’t think to look and see what they were laughing at, but took a step toward them to give them a piece of her mind, which was something she was very good at. As soon as she took the step, Ignác, who had the eyes of the whole class on him now, raised an open right palm straight up in the air. He swung it around in two giant circles like the lonely blade of a windmill before leaning forward and sprinting past the unsuspecting Betti. As he did, his hand swooped down with amazing speed and he swatted her butt as hard as he could. It was so loud, I winced. Betti’s run stuttered to a stop. Ildi Néni turned to see Ignác trotting forward like nothing had happened.

There was a moment there in the gym where the whole thing was completely clear to me. My days were so full of confusion and misunderstanding, but not now.

I leaned forward and let out a heavy gust of air, picking up my feet as fast as I could, leaning in and turning the tight corner with Ignác in my sights. I made my fists into two straight lines like I had seen some sprinters do. I was breathing through clenched teeth. He was five feet away. Now two. I could have reached forward and punched him in the square of his back, but I didn’t. I ran behind him for awhile and felt myself getting more and more angry. I leaned forward again, and passed him on the outside.

I heard Ignác say the word Yankee.

I called him a gypsy in my head.

He lengthened his stride and started to get closer to pass me again. He was so much taller than me, but I couldn’t let him win. I matched his pace, checking him over my shoulder. He made his hands into straight lines like mine and brought his knees higher. It didn’t matter. I was slowly gaining on him now. We had raced for almost a full lap when I began to pull away. I was lapping the slower students running in the back of the pack. I could feel them giving me strange looks. I didn’t care. I passed Anita, who wasn’t even trying to run at all. I passed Peti, who was pretending to be out of breath. He cursed under his breath.

Ignác was behind me now. I heard him say only loud enough for me to hear, “Stop running, faggot.”

I kept running.

I could feel my heart beating in my fingertips. In the backs of my eyeballs. In my lungs and my throat. In my legs pushing me forward faster and faster. I was angry. I didn’t like what love meant to them. They treated me like that, too. Like I didn’t have any choice in what would happen to me. Betti shouldn’t have been the punch line to the joke. I shouldn’t have been one either. They treated me like they were big and I wasn’t. I was big now, though. There was a pain above my hip. My right side was on fire.

I don’t know if I was angry about Betti or myself, but I thought about one of the things I daydream about sometimes. I thought that if there was a future version of myself that had time-travelled back to see me, that this would be the moment I would want to see. The moment I did something better than anyone else. I pretended I was standing up for Betti, even though I wasn’t sure that’s what was happening. My legs felt like bags of sand. I was heavy and tired, but I kept up the sprint.

I came around the corner to where Betti should have been, but she wasn’t there. She had left the gym in tears, and hadn’t seen any of what happened. I imagined that she had heard Ignác call me a faggot and had figured out that I was out here running my legs off for her. I imagined it even though I knew it wasn’t true.

Ildi Néni was standing near the two boys who had quit running. Her legs wider than they should have been, but like I said, that’s how she always stood. She was giving me a look — a strange mixture between proud and surprised. I could feel it in the side of my head, but I refused to look back toward her. She blew her whistle, and we slowed ourselves. The rhythm of running was broken and our feet stuttered to a stop. Our rubber shoe soles slapping down on the gym floor echoed off the tall walls and sounded like a drum set being knocked over. We were breathing heavily, putting our hands up over our heads because that’s what we knew we were supposed to do after a long run. My lungs were dry, but it felt like I was drowning.

I didn’t know for sure if I was in love with Betti or Andrea or Hajnalka or even Anita just then. I wasn’t what the other boys were, and if they were calling that love, then I was pretty sure that I didn’t need to be in love. I only knew for certain that I felt big. Bigger than an airplane. Bigger than my school. If I had wanted to, I could have smashed a village under my feet. It wouldn’t have mattered what language they used to beg for mercy, I could have demolished everything. I didn’t want to destroy anything, though. I think this is the best way to describe it: I felt exactly the way a mountain feels while the clouds crash around his head and the rivers flow from his kneecaps and a climber stands on his shoulders and wildfires burn at his feet. The only way I will ever be in love, I thought, is if it feels like this.