men?! . . .
Where were the men around here, except him? Schmidt with his stinking feet? Futaki with his gammy leg and soaked trousers? The landlord — this thing here, with his potbelly, rotten teeth and foul breath? She was familiar with “all the filthy beds in the district” but she had never met one man to compare with Irimiás, before or since. “The miserable faces of these miserable people! What are they doing here? The same piercing, unbearable stench everywhere, even in the walls. How come I’m here? In this fetid swamp. What a dump it is! What a bunch of filthy polecats!” “Ah well,” sighed Halics, “what can you do, that Schmidt is one lucky son of a bitch.” He gazed lustfully at the woman’s broad shoulders, her substantial thighs, her black hair wound into a knot, and that beautiful vast bosom delicious even under a thick coat, not to mention in the imagination . . . (He gets up to offer her a glass of
pálinka
. And then? Then, they get to talking, and he asks her to marry him. But you’re already married, she says. No matter, he answers.) The landlord put another glass of
pálinka
down in front of Mrs. Schmidt, and while she drank it off in little sips her mouth filled with saliva. Mrs. Halics’s back was covered in gooseflesh. There could be no more doubt that the landlord had given her another glass of
pálinka
, though she hadn’t asked for it, and that she had drunk it. “Now they’re lovers!” She closed her eyes so no one else should see what she felt. Fury and frustration ran through her veins from head to toe. This time she all but lost control. She felt trapped because there was nothing she could do against them; after all it was not just that they were “constantly mouthing off” but that she had to sit here helplessly while they went about their wicked affairs. But suddenly a great light brightened her terrible darkness — she could have sworn it was a beam directly from heaven — and she inwardly cried out: “I am a sinner!” She grabbed her Bible in panic and, lips moving silently, but screaming inside, she instinctively started mouthing the Our Father. “By morning?” the driver cried. “It can’t have been later than seven, half-past seven at most, when I met them at the fork in the road, and, OK . . . I did the journey in, let’s say, three or four hours, though the horses often had to slow down to walking pace in that mud, so for them, four or five hours might be enough shall we say?!” The landlord raised a finger. “It will be the morning at least, you wait and see. The road is full of ridges and potholes! The old road leads directly here, of course, it’s straight as an arrow, but they’d have to come by the metalled road. And the metalled road goes a long way around, it’s like having to skirt an ocean. Don’t even bother to argue: I am from these parts myself.” Kelemen could hardly keep his eyes open by now, and was reduced to waving and leaning his head on the counter, where he pretty soon fell asleep. At the back of the room Kerekes slowly raised his terrifying shaven head, covered in the scars of old injuries, his dreams practically nailing him to the “billiards table.” He listened to the driving rain for a few minutes, rubbed his numb thighs, gave a shudder on account of the cold then turned on the landlord. “Dumb ass! Why is that fucking stove not working?!” The obscenity had a certain effect. “Fair enough,” added Mrs. Halics: “It’d be nice to have a bit of warmth.” The landlord lost his temper. “Tell me, honestly, what are
you
gabbing on about? What!? This isn’t a waiting room. It’s a bar!” Kerekes rounded on him: “If it’s not warm in here in ten minutes, I’ll wring your neck!” “OK, OK. What’s the point of shouting?” the landlord caved in, then looked over to Mrs. Schmidt and gave her a cheesy grin. “What time is it?” The landlord glanced at his watch. “Eleven. Twelve at most. We’ll know when the others arrive.” “What others?” asked Kerekes. “I’m just saying.” The farmer leaned on the “billiards table,” gave a yawn, and reached for his glass. “Who’s taken my wine?” he asked in a flat voice. “You spilled it.” “You’re lying, you dumb ass.” The landlord spread his palms, “No, really, you did spill it.” “Then bring me another.” The smoke slowly billowed across the tables and in the distance they heard the sound — now there, now gone — of furious barking. Mrs. Schmidt sniffed the air. “What’s that smell? It wasn’t there before,” she asked, startled. “It’s just the spiders. Or the oil,” the landlord replied in unctuous tones, and knelt down by the stove to light it. Mrs. Schmidt shook her head. She put her nose to her trench coat and sniffed it both in and out, then the chair, then got down on her knees and proceeded to inquire further. Her face was practically up against the floor when she suddenly stood up straight and declared, “It’s an earth smell.”
Unraveling
It wasn’t easy. Back then it had taken her two days to work out where she should plant her foot, what to grab for support and how to squeeze herself through what looked to be the impossibly narrow hole left by a few slats that opened under the eaves at the back of the house; now, of course, it took only half a minute and was only mildly risky, entailing one well-chosen movement to leap onto the woodpile covered in black tarpaulin, grabbing the gutter, slipping her left foot into the gap and sliding it to one side, then forcefully entering, head first, while kicking against the support with her free foot, and there she was inside the old pigeon loft in the attic, in that single domain whose secrets were known to her alone, where she had no need to fear her elder brother’s sudden inexplicable assaults, though she did have to be careful not to awaken the suspicions of her mother and elder sister on account of her long absence, because, should they discover her secret, they would immediately ban her from the loft, and then all further effort would be in vain. But what did all that matter now! She pulled off her soaked sweater, adjusted her favorite pink outfit with its white collar and sat herself at “the window” where she closed his eyes and shivered, ready to jump, listening to the roar of rain on the tiles. Her mother was asleep in the house somewhere below, her sisters hadn’t yet returned though it was time for tea, so she was practically certain that no one would look for her that afternoon, with the possible exception of Sanyi, and nobody ever knew where to find him which made all his appearances sudden and unexpected, as if he were seeking the answer to some long-ignored riddle of the estate, a secret that could only be discovered by means of a sudden surprise attack. The fact was she had no real reason to be frightened, because no one ever did look for her; on the contrary, she had been firmly told to stay away, particularly — and this was often the case — when there was a visitor at the house. She had found herself in this no-man’s-land because she was incapable of obeying orders; she wasn’t allowed to be anywhere near the door nor to wander too far because she knew she could be summoned any time (“Go fetch me a bottle of wine. On the double!” or “Get me three packets of cigarettes, my girl, Kossuth brand, you won’t forget, will you?”), and should she fail but once in her mission she’d never be let into the house again. Because there was nothing else left to her: her mother, when she was sent home from the special school “by mutual agreement” put her to kitchen work, but her fear of disapproval — when plates broke on the floor, or enamel chipped off the pan, or when the cobweb remained in the corner, or when the soup turned out tasteless, or the paprika stew too salty — made her incapable of completing the simplest tasks at last, so there was nothing for it but to chase her from the kitchen too. From that time on, her days were filled with cramping anxiety and she hid herself behind the barn or, sometimes at the end of the house under the eaves because from there she could keep an eye on the kitchen door so that, though they couldn’t see her from there, if they called she could appear immediately. Having to be constantly on the alert soon played havoc with her emotions: her attention was almost exclusively restricted to the kitchen door, but she registered that with such keen sharpness it almost amounted to acute pain, every detail of the door impinging on her at once, the two dirty panes of glass above it, through which she glimpsed flashes of lace curtains fixed there with drawing pins, and below it, splashes of dried mud, and the line of the door handle as it bent towards the ground; in other words a terrifying network of shapes, colors, lines; not only that, but the precise condition of the door itself as it changed according to her curiously chopped-up sense of time, in which possible dangers presented themselves every moment. When any period of immobility came to a sudden end everything around her shifted with it: the walls of the house sped by her as did the crooked arc of the eaves, the window altered position, the pigsty and the neglected flowerbed drifted past her from left to right, the earth under her feet shifted, and she seemed to be standing in front of her mother or elder sister who suddenly appeared before her, without her being able to see the open door. The brief moment it took her to blink was enough for her to recognize them, since that was all she needed, because the shadowy forms of her mother and sister were constantly imprinted on the scene before her in the throbbing air: she could sense their presence without seeing them, she knew they were there, that she was facing
them
down there,
just as she knew that they were rising above her to the point that if she once looked up and saw them, their image might crack right across, because their intolerable right to tower above her was so unarguable that the vision she had of them might well be enough to explode them. The ringing silence extended only as far as the unmoving door, beyond that she struggled to distinguish her mother or sister’s angry command from the pounding noise (“You’re enough to give anyone a heart attack! Why are you rushing about like that? There’s nothing for you here! Go on, get out and play somewhere!”) that quickly faded as she ran away to hide behind the barn or under the eaves, so that relief might overcome panic, of which she was never quite free because it could start again at any time. Of course, there was no playing for her, not that she had a doll, or story book, or a glass marble to hand with which — if any stranger should appear in the yard or if the people inside glanced out of the window to check on her — she might pretend to be engaged in a game but dared not, because her constant state of alert had prevented her, for a long time now, from being immersed in any kind of game. Not merely because her brother’s rapidly changing moods determined what objects presented themselves to her to play with — ruthlessly deciding what things she might keep and for how long — but because the games she was expected to play, that she might play as a kind of defense to satisfy her mother and sister’s expectations of “the kind of games she should play,” for, this way, they were not forced to endure the daily shame of her (“If we let her!”) “peeping at us, like a sick thing, watching everything we do.” Only up here, in the old unused pigeon loft, did she feel at all safe: here, she didn’t have to play; there was no door “that people might walk through” (her father having nailed up the door as the first stage of some never executed plan in the dim and distant past) and no window “that people might look through,” since she herself had taken two color photographs torn from newspapers across the projecting pigeonholes so that there might be “a nice view,” one of them showing a seashore with setting sun, the other a snow-covered mountain peak with a reindeer in the foreground. Of course, everything was all over now, forever. A draft blew through the space once occupied by the old attic flap: she shuddered. She felt for her sweater but it wasn’t dry yet so she took one of her greatest treasures, a scrap of white lace rescued from among the rags in the back kitchen and spread it over herself rather than go down into the house, wake her mother, and ask her for some dry clothes. She wouldn’t have believed herself so daring, not even one day before could she have imagined it. Had she got soaked yesterday she would immediately have changed her clothes because she knew that, if she fell ill and had to be confined to bed, her mother and sisters couldn’t abide her crying. But how could she have suspected that as late as yesterday morning, there would be this event, like an explosion that did not knock things flat, but, on the contrary, made things stronger and that, having been purged by “a belief built on the tempting sense of dignity” she’d been able to sleep and dream in peace. She had noticed a few days earlier that something had happened to her brother: he held his spoon differently, closed the door after him in a different way, would wake suddenly on the iron bedstead beside her in the kitchen, and spent the whole day puzzling over something. Yesterday, after breakfast he came over to the barn but instead of pulling her up by her hair or — what was worse — simply stand behind her until she burst into tears, he pulled a piece of Balaton Slice candy from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. Little Esti didn’t know what to make of it and she suspected something bad might happen in the afternoon when Sanyi shared with her “the most fantastic secret ever.” She never doubted the truth of what her brother told her, and was far more inclined to disbelieve and find inexplicable the fact that Sanyi had chosen her of all people to ask for help, she “who was completely unreliable.” But the hope that this wouldn’t turn out to be just another trap overcame her anxiety that it would; so, before the question could be resolved, Esti — immediately and quite unconditionally — agreed to everything. Not that she could have done anything else, of course, because Sanyi would have forced a “yes” out of her anyway, but there was no need because once he had revealed to her the secret of the money-tree he immediately won her unqualified confidence. Once Sanyi had “finally” finished, he looked to see what effect he had had on his sister’s “dumb mug,” she was practically in tears with this unexpected burst of happiness, though she knew from bitter experience that crying was not an advisable course with her brother. Confused, she handed over the little treasure she had scraped together since Easter, as her contribution to the can’t lose” experiment, because she had intended this collection of dimes she had picked up from visitors to the house for Sanyi anyway, and she didn’t know how to tell him that she had hidden it away for months and lied about it, just so that it — her savings — should remain a secret . . . But her brother showed no great curiosity and, in any case, the joy she felt at being able, at last, to take part in her brother’s secret adventures immediately overcame any sense of confusion. What she couldn’t explain was why he should be landing her with this dangerous confidence and why he should risk failure in this way since he couldn’t possibly believe that his sister was capable of executing a mission that demanded “courage, endurance and the will to victory.” On the other hand she couldn’t forget that beneath all the harsh suffering he inflicted on her, under all the ruthless cruelty, there’d been one time, when she was ill, that Sanyi allowed her to creep into the kitchen bed with him and even let her cuddle him a little and so fall asleep. That would explain it. And there was that other time, some years ago, at her father’s funeral, when, having understood that death, which was “the most direct way to heaven and the angels,” was not only the result of God’s will, but was something that could be chosen, and she herself was determined to find out how that worked, it was her brother who had enlightened her. She couldn’t possibly have worked it out by herself: she needed him to tell her, what exactly to do, a solution she might perhaps have stumbled on by herself, which was that “rat poison would do the trick too.” And then yesterday, when she woke at dawn, when she had finally overcome her fear and decided to wait no longer, and was feeling a real desire to be raised to heaven, and a mighty wind seemed to be lifting her, so that she saw the earth beneath her receding further and further, the houses, trees, the fields, the canal, the whole world shrinking below and she was already standing at heaven’s gate, among the angels who lived in a blaze of scarlet — it was again Sanyi with his talk of the secret money tree who had yanked her back from that magical yet terrifying height, and so, at dusk they set out together — together! — for the canal, her brother happily whistling and carrying the spade on his back, she a couple of strides behind, excitedly clutching her little hoard of money, tied up in a handkerchief. Sany dug a hole in the canal bank in his customary silence and, rather than chasing her away, even let her place the money at the bottom of it. He instructed her more strictly that the money-seeds they had sown should be generously watered twice daily, once in the morning, once in the evening (“or it all dries up!”) then sent her home telling her she should return “precisely” an hour later with the watering can, because he had to utter “some magic spells” while she was gone, and he had to be absolutely alone while he uttered them. Little Esti conscientiously went about her task and slept badly that night, dreaming of being pursued by escaped dogs, but when she woke in the morning and saw it was raining heavily outside, everything took on a more cheerful air, a warm miasma of happiness settling over her. She immediately went back to the canal so she could be certain of giving the magic seeds a truly thorough soaking in case they weren’t getting as much water as they needed. At lunch she whispered to Sanyi — she didn’t want to disturb her mother who was asleep because she’d been making hay all night — that she hadn’t seen anything so far,” . . . nothing, simply nothing,” but he argued that it would take at least three, possibly four, days for the shoots to appear, and there would certainly be nothing till then, and even that depended on whether “the spot had been properly watered.” “After that,” he added impatiently, in a voice that brooked no contradiction, “there’s no need for you to spend the whole damn day crouching there to watch it . . . that won’t do any good. It’s enough for you to be there twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening. That’s all. Do you understand, retard?” Giving her a grin, he left the house and Esti decided to stay up in the loft until the evening if need be. “Until the shoots come through!” How often, after that, did she close her eyes so she might imagine the shoot rising and growing ever more lush, its boughs soon bending under the tremendous weight when she, with her little basket with the torn handles, might — abracadabra! — gather up the fruits, go home and tumble the coins out on the table! . . . How they would all stare! From that day on she would be given a clean room to sleep in, one with a big bed with a really big eiderdown, and there would be nothing for any of them to do other than to make a daily visit to the canal, fill the basket, and dance and drink cup after cup of cocoa, and the angels would be there too, fleets of them, all sitting around the kitchen table . . . She wrinkled her brow (“Hang on a minute!”) and, bending to and fro, began to sing: