Péter Esterházy: Journey to the Depths of the Penalty Area

Péter Esterházy

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Unwinnable life

Acountry and its sport, they say, is an ocean in the drop. If that's what they say, then they've got it wrong: it's so untrue that at times that is how it really is. At those times a country's vital force is reflected in the features of its sport. Puskás and Rákosi hand in hand (or should that be left foot in left foot?). Though in that case it was a matter of the Golden Team being aside from the country, the everyday, or to use an unfair simile just as isolated as the secret police, the ÁVÓ, a state within the state. There was something comparable in their self-assurance as well. Democracy did football no favours: the lads became one of us, but then what are we like? First one thing, then another. And then there's the national quirk as well; people really do play football on the beaches like a stereotype of the country (cf. Copacabana, Siófok, Grado, Warnemünde-a drop in the ocean).
Let us try from another angle: life in sport. The struggle for existence. May the best win. That's a tricky matter. Because in all truth we would prefer to say may the good win. The trouble being that the good does not want to win: that's the last thing it has in mind, though it does not want to lose either; but the good is somehow after something else: it presumably doesn't want anything, just to be.
That is no use on a football pitch, that just being. There one has to win, or to be more precise, want to win; it can't be any other way. The differences presumably stem from God and ontological differences between referees. (Imagine for a second God refereeing a footie match. Offside! You've got to be joking, Lord. Ye Gods!)
I would not be happy to live the way I used to play, though I was an uncommonly mild-mannered, sportsmanlike player-famous for it. I never deliberately committed a foul, although. Although, for one thing, I did count heavily on a division of labour, or to be more specific, on our defence, the backs, whose bounden duty it was to grind opponents into the ground; and for another, there were occasions on which one intervened, a euphemism that is readily described, professionally speaking, as being a skill that is part of the craft. Not that I ever cheated, not as far as cheating goes. But I may have sometimes added a little extra to a fall in order to make the foul perpetrated on me more obvious, or to put it bluntly: no one touched me, I just dived, and I considered that to be entirely proper. Story: I did once feel a (slight) twinge of guilt. Somehow a scrimmage had formed on the goal line, I was lying on the ground, at the bottom, and next to me was the opposing goalie, the ball on the line, with the former just about to reach out for the latter, when I, using a limb by his hand, nudged the ball across said fateful line. Our faces could have been no more than about ten centimetres apart: his dismayed countenance from my happy one. Shaking the scrimmage off me, I raced to celebrate; the goalie, growling after me, grabbed me quite literally by the scruff of the neck and hauled me over to the ref in order that I, scum that I was (and the rest!), should tell him that I had flipped it over with my hand. Referees, quite properly, know that they are not omnipotent and so are generally unresponsive to belated appeals, being well aware that it is given to them to be acquainted with only one version of a game, and if they are lucky, that is the majority version, justice or truth having nothing to do with it. But the goalie emanated such raw passion, a blatant craving for justice, that the ref stopped short and raised a quizzical eye at me. (Given the fervour, it should be noted that we played in a low enough league for such things, gripes of this magnitude, to be simply out of order.) The matter suddenly became a point of honour, with me being asked if I had handled the ball, and I had handled the ball. If there hadn't been a referee, the answer would have been a simple "Yes", but with a referee being there, the question is inadmissible, you can't ask a player that, since his word will not be taken if the boot is on the other foot; my manifest rightness will never correct a referee's manifest error. But this time I was being asked nonetheless, and an answer was expected. For a fleeting second it crossed my mind to adopt a tone of injured pride and fling the truth in their face, but this was not the place for that. On the other hand, I couldn't say that I hadn't touched it. The goalie's face was again very close to mine. In the end I resorted to a categorical ruse and with a broad grin all over my face announced that, gentlemen, the management has forbidden me to say anything. That was too much for the ref, who gave a disgusted wave and allowed the goal. As to what the goalie said I won't record here (my mother was no longer alive by then). The predicament was insoluble.
Sport is measurable: two points are two points (or three now), whereas life is immeasurable, three red points is one black mark. Those who are first shall be last. But doesn't that trip off the tongue a little too glibly? Because if we are the last, then we are last. If we are unprepared, then we shall be at a real disadvantage in that game. I would remind you of the classical dilemma of Green Parties; on getting into parliament, they have to decide whether they are going to accept the rules of the game, because if they don't, they will be ejected, or in other words not exist, and then they would be unable to pass any judgement on the rules of the game.
You have to compromise in order that you can be. In order to be yourself. But compromising is tantamount to self-denial. One has to survive, but it's me who has to survive. There are limits, in other words. And who says where those lie? Tricky.
More than one game is going on at once: short-term and long-term games, personal and communal, material and intellectual, with the good and with the better. There is no recipe for making a good choice. It is a common misperception that the loser is on the side of the good. Sometimes he is, sometimes not. Vanity has a thousand faces, and sport is a synonym for vanity.
I don't consider football as being a competition but a game. Which is a bit different, though as we have seen, it's not beyond reproach. Through football, then, I would not have wished to recognise something like an ocean in the drop, but like an ocean in the ocean-not to recognise but to be lost in it. That being lost, that forgetting oneself, is the game.

Péter Esterházy
the internationally acclaimed novelist, himself played in the Hungarian lower divisions for many years. He published this volume on the occasion of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The book is reviewed on pp. 115-118 of this issue.