Snapshot of a lawyers' working offvice in the eighties in Hungary

In May 1978, I was admitted from the Kiskunhalmi Municipal Lawyers' Working Committee to the
Budapest number XY Lawyers' Working Committee number XY. Mihály Dobos was the head of the
working comittee. He was a short, stout man with a larva face. He was the member of the communist
party. Of course, at that time I only knew that he was a party member and that he was the
Communist Worker Guards member, but only after the regime change was it whispered that he was
supposed to have been a blood judge in the 1950 -s years. He led the workers' association on the
principle of „live and let live”. He did not interfere in anything, only that everyone had to contribute
to the common overheads.

His confidante was Anita Varró, a former gymnast. The two of them could have held a communist
party members' meeting in the working group, as there were no other party members. They handled
the double zero and military criminal cases on secondment. In practice, they only had such cases.

The XY Committee was a large office with nearly twenty lawyers. It gave a complete cross-section of
the legal society of the fifties, sixties and seventies.

There was also Count Zobor Turay, who was the military attaché in Bucharest during the nazi Szálasi
government. He raised his three sons alone, widowed. In a car accident he lost the sight in his left
eye. He spoke perfect Romanian and had many contacts in Transylvania, so he lived practically
exclusively on Transylvanian inheritance cases.

At that time, there was a State Notaries' Office in Benczúr Street, mostly with female notaries, who
knew that Uncle Zobor was raising his sons alone, so they took care of everything for him. And Uncle
Zobor was a good collector of the best antique carpets, furniture, ornamental furniture, paintings
and other antiques from the estates, for a small amount of money or for a tipping. He had a summer
house on Lake Balaton with a real wine cellar. Every year he invited us down there and we had a
great time. The cellar was full of beautiful old furniture, ornaments, it was like a museum. The wine
wasn't first class, but you could drink it. However, it made a pretty decent champagne. All year round
he had to collect champagne corks, and even the wire had to be unwound intact.

Uncle Zobor was in his seventies and sometimes had problems with technique. In those days, two
lawyers would see clients at the same time in the same office room, probably to 'protect' the
attorney-client privilege. There was one city telephone trunk line for every 20 lawyers. So, if
someone wanted to make a phone call into the city, he had to press a button on the handset first,
and only then could he dial. Uncle Zobor always forgot that. If he dialled without pressing the button,
the first two numbers dialled would ring the phone of one of the lawyers in the office. It happened
once that Uncle Zobor called the train company operator because he had a meeting in the country
the next day. Of course, he did not press the button, and so he unintentionally called his lawyer
colleague Dr. Nándor Derék, who was sitting a metre away. Nándi, not knowing at first what the call
was, picked up the receiver and called in a bass voice: Hello! "I kiss your hand, miss, would you be so
kind as to tell me what time the train leaves for Bátaszék tomorrow morning? In the meantime,
Nándor's jaw dropped, so for a few minutes he stunned the old man by telling him that he had to get
off at Cikádor, because there was a track closure and he had to walk 5 kilometres, etc., which the old
man ate with a spoon and in a cold sweat, and for minutes he refused to believe that he was talking
to Nándor sitting opposite him, while their customers sitting in the small room choked with laughter.

On another occasion, Uncle Zobor went into the office of Tamás Olasz, who was known to: 1. not
discuss the fee structure with his colleagues in front of clients, and 2. charge very high fees. Well,
Uncle Zobor, not caring that Tamás had a client in his office, went in and asked him, "My little boy,
tell me, if I were to charge 500 forints for a divorce case, wouldn't that be too much?" (Tamás would
charge normally at least five thousand for such a case)

Whereupon Tamás nervously, and so as not to be understood by his own client, asked Uncle Zobor in
German to come back later! Then the old man said, "My little boy, when you have finished talking to
your German client, could you tell me if 500 Ft. fee would not be too much in a divorce case?"

Our photocopying machine, weighing about a ton, was in the trainee lawyer's room. And it happened
that Uncle Zobor's clients from Transylvania had arrived, on a probate case, and handed over the
treasure trove of a single copy of the birth certificate, painstakingly acquired over several years, to
their highly knowledgeable lawyer in Budapest, who smiled meaningfully and told them that he had
just received a miracle machine to copy the precious document, so that it would never be lost again.
He came into our room, and instead of asking one of us to copy it, he made the attempt himself. I will
not go into details, the point is that he did not put the document to be copied in its place, but in the
place, where the papers were, on witch the machine copies the documents.

The primitive but sturdy machine jerked the even more primitive thick Romanian paper, splashed a
pint or so of paint on it, and then pushed the mop, dripping with dark blue liquid, out the other side.

But there were a few other 'grand masters'. Young Uncle Dr. Károly Csáth, when I met him, he was in
his seventies, but he still introduced himself under that name. He was a real dandy between the two
wars. He knew my stepfather, the dancer-bonvivan, the valiant Cirmi Gozmány, from the nightlife of
the 1930’s. He told nme once: "Cirmi and I used to have a lot of fun together with the Prince of Wales
and little Horthy in Arizona! And then in the nightly fast train’s sleeper to the sea, Abbazia!"

But the seventies were a different world. In a 6-square-metre basement room on Baross Street,
converted into an office, he received his clients - with second seeds - with their little chickens law
suits. The old man was a big inker and had a genius for drinking from the bottle in front of his clients
without them noticing. In a moment - a careless moment - he turned his back towards the filing
cabinet as if looking for a document, and took the bottle, which was well flattened there, backwards
towards the client and drank without his head moved up.
He didn't like criminal cases, but once he couldn't give an assignment to any of the candidates and
had to go to the Metropolitan Court in person. He had to defend a member of a skinhead society in a
case of incitement against the community. They drew swastikas and other nazi symbols. Young Dr.
Károly Csáth was desperately walking down the corridor of the Municipal Court, in his inevitable
bow-tie, gloomy and with his head bowed, when he saw the idea of a rescue on the pavement of the
corridor. In the corridor of the late 19th-century neo-Renaissance building, a mosaic pattern would
occasionally pop up - an ancient Persian pattern, a perfect replica of the swastika, or even more its
predecessor.

Of course, the backbone of the plea was that if the Honourable Metropolitan Court condemned
these innocent and deluded young people, it would have to judge itself, because in the corridor of
the Court... etc. etc. etc. etc.

But the biggest daredevil was András Kulinyi (Uncle Bandi). He demanded that I, as a trainee lawyer,
should say him Mr. Kulinyi, but it was natural that he should say to me: you. Otherwise it was quite
common. Then, when I passed the bar exam and continued to practice, he asked for it! "We're
colleagues, or what the heck! Call me „You”, little brother, or I'll beat you up!"

In the late 1940s, he was a Smallholdder Party politician, and was disbarred in 1949. He lived on odd
jobs and played with his nationally famous model railway in the living room of his huge Baross Street
apartment. One day in the early 1950s, a large black chariot pulled up in front of the house, a small
man in a leather jacket with glasses got out, ran up and rang the bell to the Kulinys: 'Are you Kulinyi?
And without waiting for an answer, he rushed into the living room, pushed Uncle Bandi aside, fell to
the floor and spent a few hours modeling with the train model and Uncle Bandi. He called back as he
was leaving: Tomorrow, go to the Bar Association to get your lawyer's card. "Oh, and I'll pop up to do
some modelling. He was the Attorney General at the time.

Kulinyi Bandi also had a holiday home on Lake Balaton, but it was not famous for its antique
furniture, but for the fact that Uncle Bandi had not paid holiday tax contributions for 20 years and
appealed the regular annual decisions on the grounds that he could not holiday as long as Soviet
helicopters were circling over his holiday home.

After the regime change he took the plunge into smallholder politics and died within six months.

The central figure in the community was Uncle Pufi the treasurer. Among us we called him Old Fly,
because if we opened a bottle of booze in any room, he was there within a minute, almost 'by
chance'.
He lived with his sick wife, their son had defected to Corsica, and his trips to Corsica were the colour
of Uncle Pufi's life. And then there was our Lawyers Office, where he was indispensable. We had a
ten-man football team with a foreign goalkeeper. We played in Vác and also on the Czakó street
pitch, we had equipment, in short, it was a serious business. Uncle Pufi was the trainer and the
coach. This meant that he was inevitably at the regular Monday evening gym training matches, as
there was a beer afterwards!

We took the game very seriously, so much so that after one of the matches, Gyuri Brunner had a
minor heart attack of sorts, in the Ludas Pub, where we took care not to dehydrate ourselves after
the matches.

Pufi loved to play chess, and in the summer, when we went down to Derék Nándi's holiday home in
TiHany by the Balaton Lake, to hold the annual regular Derék Cup, the best „Pufi prisoner of war”
stories would come out over a few glasses of wine during a chess match.

Here's one for memory: he was a prisoner in the Baltic after the second war, in some port in the
Baltic. On one occasion, many, many tons of crystal sugar had to be shovelled out of the ship. It was
summer, the prisoners were sweating profusely. There was nothing to talk about, they just looked at
each other, and towards the end of the job, everyone arranged to be suddenly naked and undressed
in the bowels of the ship, they were drowning in sugar and became covered with granulated sugar. In
the evening they were taken by lorry to the camp. After the lamps were put out, tablecloth was laid
out on the large communal table. The shovelers carefully stood up on the table, stripped off their
clothes, and the others thoroughly rubbed every inch of their sweaty bodies, even the tiniest curves.
The sugar thus collected was then sipped with wonderful relish from their hitherto bitter tea.

Gyuri Brunner was also connected with Balatonkörtédi, as his family owned the hotel opposite the
railway station. He once told me that one afternoon they were so nationalised that they even had to
hand over the tips in the waiters' pockets to the comrades.

Nándi, an excellent fencer, became a lawyer. He became a good lawyer, but he never loved the
profession. He saw it as a compulsory way of making money. He would go in the office early in the
morning to settle his affairs and then rush off to the Tattersaal to ride. He inherited a special clientele
of foreign insurance companies from a former lawyer and principal who handled the insurance claims
of foreigners who had had accidents in Hungary. Nándi speaks good German, so he was able to
handle the cases excellently. This had two advantages: 1. he didn't have to meet the clients and 2. he
didn't have to go to negotiations. It was possible to ride. He retired at the first opportunity and since
then he has lived for horses and painting. He has a strange atmosphere, paints good pictures, and has
had a few exhibitions.

Huba from Pilisszentiváni greeted me on the first day by telling me to take a petition to the XVII
District Court the next day. It was then about a three - hour trip there by tram and bus. I looked at
him, puzzled, then reached into my pocket and gave him four forints. Send it by post, I'll pay! He
asked for no more, neither as a favour nor as a replacement. He never took a holiday in his life, he
was always afraid that the best clients would come when he was on holiday, and he would rush
straight from meetings to the office, he didn't even eat lunch, he sat there all day on the safe, on the
inside of a blown-up motorbike, because he had a gold vein, and even on Saturdays he would check
on clients who never came.

Béla Csikós worked in the same room with his father, Uncle Kálmán. Béla was born a lawyer. Even in
high school, he used to say "please be so kind" when he spoke and meanwhile wore a hat. He was my
contemporary, but the rock and hippie era simply missed out on his life. He couldn't stand the
immediate and all-encompassing use the words „you guys”. One day, a new lawyer arrived, Gyuri
Ligethy, and we young lawyers naturally immediately started to get along with him. He went around
the office introducing himself to everyone, and it was Béla Csikós's turn. He asked us, "What kind?
We said cool kid, feel free to call him that! From the door we saw the scene: Gyuri went to Béla and
said, "Hi, I'm so-and-so. Béla looked at him in amazement and asked him: who are you and what do
you want here?

The Csikós family was on good terms with Judge Dr. Ládán, who for 40 years had only heard custody
cases, at least ten a day. "Teacher" Ládán always appointed the Csikós lawers as trustees for the
unfortunate half-wits, and of course the Csikós clan always sent the youngest lawyer candidate of the
moment to the hearings. (But the bigger part of the fee was of course theirs) I too have tried a few
thousand guardianship cases. Over the decades, Judge Ladan has identified completely with the
trustees in spirit and in mind, and I have sometimes had the feeling that he should be placed under
trusteeship. He would always ask the unfortunate, frustrated human wrecks who showed up at the
co-convocation: do you know who you are and why we are here? That was the Ark of the Covenant
test. He knew everything from the answer to that question, and he didn't need a mental health
expert.

Béla Csikós was the exact opposite of Tamás Olasz. He had many, but very low-paying, mainly elderly
and difficult to treat clients. So, every afternoon after Wednesday, there were long queues of clients,
smelling of must and naphthalene, queuing outside Csikós's 'office' until late in the evening. Every
evening Béla closed the Lawyers office around 10 o'clock. Sometimes, on my way home from the
neighboring Vörösmarty cinema after the evening show, I saw that the light in his room was still on.
Then we noted: shh ! Lenin is working! Béla was an openly anti-establishment and bourgeois person,
and he never hid his opinions. He was a good lawyer, but his greatest strength was not his knowledge
of the subject, but his innate sense of justice and his fighting spirit. He was the fiercest lawyer I have
ever known. Anybody had to pull himself together as the opposing lawyer after Béla's piquant,
sarcastic, humorous diatribes. He later became the legal adviser to the Calvinist Bishoprics.

Orsi Teri was one of the young people. Her father was the president of a provincial bar association.
She later married guitarist Attila Kanyi, a founding member of the band Scampolo.
Laci Író was a trainee lawyer after me, I was friend with him and with Robi Eszes and Nandi Derék.
Gabi was a sailor for a year beforehe became a lawyer and travelled the world as a boatman.

Robi Eszes came from a countryside city, Szombatsag, and I admired the way he built up his clientele
in the unfamiliar metropolis.

Gyuszi White was the son of the once famous minister. He was one of the young, along with the ever
pipe-smoking, silent Gyuri Ligethy.

Lívia Surányi was a candidate with me. She was a nice, soft-spoken girl. Her husband was an
interesting character, who spoke several Asian languages perfectly, so after the change of regime he
became attaché at an Asian embassy and the whole family went on a year-long trip to the Far East.

Summer Peti was a legal adviser at the Agricultural Helicopter Station, before he came to us, he used
to fly around the country in a helicopter. He was a great football player and a pillar of our little team.

Poor Mari Farmos died of cancer a few years ago. She was probably the most extreme among us.
When she needed a piece of legislation, he simply tore the page she was looking for out of the
Corpus Juris Hungaris of the Office. Her 'office' was the smallest and most secluded, at the end of the
corridor at the back. For some mysterious reason, in winter and summer, a fur coat hung on the wall
of her office of about 3 square metres.

Dr. Ewald Hallauner was the embodiment of the bourgeois past, with all its allure and reticence. He
was the epitome of the old-style gentrified lawyer, together with the young Dr. Károly Ságh, but
somehow they did not like each other, Ewald lacked bohemianism.

Ildi Drapp was a modest, soft-spoken colleague, difficult to make friends with, difficult to open up to,
and belonged to the "back" section.

Auntie Ili Szőcs also huddled in the back in a small hole called an office, we rarely saw her, but she
always appeared at community dinners with her husband, who was a member of the Count Pálffy
family.

Poor Tamás Olasz also died of lung cancer a few years ago. I was very close to him for a long time, in
fact he was my principal. I learnt a lot from him, I appreciated his intellect and his knowledge of the
subject. In fact, he was the first star Hungarian lawyer in the socialist era. His "office" was just
opposite the entrance. His door was always open. He had no secretary, he typed everything himself.
He did part of his university studies in Munich. The police appointed him as a defence lawyer in all
the big cases. He was, among others, the public defender of the Czechoslovak bank robber in
Hungary and the police murderer in Vecsés. Later, in a case he succeeded in acquitting a defendant -
convicted of manslaughter in the first and second degree - in a "third instance" before the Supreme
Court of Justice, a case which gave him a national reputation. He had incredible stamina. He was
either in court or in the office. He helped me a lot in setting up my office. We became family friends,
we went skiing together in Slovakia, on holiday in Tihany. After the change of regime, when the
Lawyers working assosiation was transformed into a Law Office, I did not vote for him, in the election
of the Office Manager, but for Nandi Derek. Then he fell out with me for life. I was very sorry it
turned out that way.

Next to Tamás' office was Uncle Béla Fürtös' office. I only had a few words with him when I spoke to
him. He retired in the eighties.

Laci Török was once taken away from the Law Office by the police during afternoon office hours, bi-
linked, - before the clients - because, as it turned out, he and his friend (a prosecutor) were
smuggling so-called "Cocom list" technical equipment into the country for sale. He also spent some
time in jail and was barred from practicing law for a few years. Thank God, he is all right now and is a
lawyer again.

Many times the whole company would get together in the candidates' room, on which occasion
Mihály Dobos would bring fine Szekszárd red wine from the grapes of the National Fire Brigade
Command, because his Workers' Guard basic organisation had good relations with them. After a few
glasses of wine, the political kaleidoscope cavalcade was unleashed. Everyone had their say, no one
cared about the other's political creed. It was like a small, private Hyde Park barrel. But there was no
bickering, no shouting, no loud words, no fierce tempers.

Occasionally, the whole party, family and all, would go to the 'Quiet' restaurant for an intimate
dinner.

Then came the change of regime and, like so many things, the lawyers' working groups disappeared
into the mire of history. But something else disappeared with the world of the Lawyers Working
Associations, something human, something charming, something that cannot be described. Today,
nearly 10,000 lawyers and trainee lawyers in Budapest rush past each other, unknown to each other,
with their mobil phones and lap tops, from hearing to hearing.

There's no Uncle Pufi, no inflatable bubble tops, no city lines, no Derek Cupa, no Almadi champagne,
and no pledges' room to drink, chat and be together. There are, however, big international lawyers'
offices, anti-breadfighting, anti-money laundering and who knows what else, and a growing number
of names - often the names of astonishingly young lawyers and women lawyers - in the Lawyer's
Gazette's obituary column.

Dr Golyo

The names and events in this story are all figments of the imagination, and if anyone should discover
any similarities with real persons or events, it could only be coincidence.