dare
you hide it from me!?” He grinned with satisfaction. “Be glad that you got away with the little you have! I could have just taken it from you!” Esti nodded understandingly, and started slowly backing away because she feared her brother was about to hit her. “Anyway,” he added with a conspiratorial smile, “I’ve got some really cool wine here. Do you want a sip? I’ll let you have a bit. Do you want a drag of this? There.” And he extended the by-now dead cigarette towards her. Esti made a tentative effort to reach for it, but almost immediately snatched her hand back. “No? OK. Now listen, I’ll tell you something. You’ll never amount to anything. You were born a retard, and that’s what you’ll remain.” The little girl screwed up her courage. “So you . . . knew?” “Knew what, bug? What the fuck did I know?” “You knew . . . that . . . that.. the money plant . . . never . . . never? . . .” Sanyi lost his temper again. “What? Don’t try to put one over on me. You should have tumbled to that much earlier, you retard! You think I’m going to believe you never had a clue? You’re not that soft in the head . . .” He took out a match and lit the cigarette, shielding it with his hand. “Brilliant! So you’re the one upset! Rather than being happy that I’m paying you some attention!” He blew out the smoke and blinked. “Right! Session over! I haven’t got the time to stand here debating with idiots. Scram, little baby. Scram!” and he prodded Esti with his forefinger, but the moment she set off at a run, her shouted after her. “Come back here! Closer! Closer, I said. Good. What’s that in your pocket?” He reached into her cardigan pocket and pulled out the paper bag. “Fucking hell! What’s this?!” He raised the bag and examined the writing. “For fuck’s sake! This is rat poison! Where did you get this?!” Esti couldn’t get a word out. Sanyi bit his lip. “Fine. I know anyway. . . . It’s from the barn and you
stole
it! Right?” He pressed the bag. “So what did you want it for, my little retard? Be nice and tell big bro!” Esti didn’t move a muscle. “I see it now. A pile of dead bodies back home, right?” the boy continued, laughing. “And I’m next in line, eh? OK. Now let’s see if you have a spark of courage in you! There you are!” He pushed the bag back in the cardigan pocket. “But be careful. I’ve got my eyes on you!” Esti started running towards the bar, waddling a little, like a duck. “Easy now! Be careful!” Sanyi shouted after her: “Don’t use it all at once!” He stood for a while in the rain, his shoulders hunched, his head up, holding his breath, listening to the noises of the night, then fixed his eye on the distant window, squeezed a zit on his face, then he too started to run, turned off by the road mender’s house and vanished into the darkness. Esti, who kept looking back, saw him for a split second, his cigarette alight in his hand, like a comet fading, never to reappear, its trace remaining for a few minutes in the dark sky, its outlines growing blurred, eventually absorbed in the heavy night haze that snapped its jaw around her now, the road beneath her immediately snuffed out so she felt as though she were swimming through the dark without any support, weightless, quite isolated. She was running towards the flickering light of the bar window as if that could compensate for the lost glow of her brother” cigarette, and more than once she shuddered in the cold once she reached it and hung on to the bar’s projecting windowsill, because her clothes were completely soaked through and the lace curtain was clinging to her hot body, and it felt like ice. She stood on tiptoe but couldn’t quite reach the window so had to jump to look inside and because her breath misted the glass she was only able to hear a confused babble inside, the clinking of a glass, some more glass breaking, and snatches of laughter that quickly melted into the louder sound of human conversation. Her head was pounding: she felt a flock of invisible birds were screaming and circling her. She pulled back from the light of the window, leaned her back against the wall and dreamily stared at the ground with its patch of light from the window. That was why it was only at the last possible moment that she became aware of heavy steps and the sound of gasping as they emerged from the road and mounted the steps to the door. There was no time to escape now so she just stood by the wall, her feet rooted to the ground, hoping she wouldn’t be noticed. She only moved when she saw it was the doctor, and ran to him in a panic. She clutched at his soaked coat and would have most happily hidden herself inside it, the only reason she didn’t burst into tears was because the doctor did not embrace her and so she simply stood before him, her head hung low, her heart racing, the blood throbbing in her ears, and she didn’t really take in the fact that the doctor was saying something, she understood only that he was impatiently wanting to be rid of her and, not being able to make out the words, her original relief was quickly succeeded by an incomprehensible bitterness because rather than hugging her he was sending her away. She couldn’t understand what had happened to the doctor, to the one man who once “had spent the whole night at her bedside, wiping the perspiration from her brow,” why she had to wrestle with him to hold on to him and to prevent him from pushing her away but, in any case, she simply couldn’t let go of the edge of his coat and only gave up when she saw that everything around them — suddenly — was caving in and rising up, and it was hopeless trying to detain the doctor because, at last, it was all over, and she watched terrified as the earth opened under them and the doctor disappeared in the bottomless pit. She started to run, with a chorus of baying voices, like wild dogs, pursuing her and she felt it was the end, that she could do no more, that the howling voices were bound to seize her and grind her into the mud, when it suddenly fell silent, with only the humming of the wind and the soft explosions of a million tiny raindrops covering the ground around her. She only dared slow down a little when she reached the edge of the Hochmeiss estate but she couldn’t stop. The wind drove the rain into her face, the cardigan had come unbuttoned and she couldn’t stop coughing. Sanyi’s frightening words and the nasty incident with the doctor bore down on her with such force that she was incapable of thinking; it was little things that drew her attention: her bootlaces had come undone . . . the cardigan was unbuttoned . . . did she still have the paper bag? . . . By the time she reached the canal and stopped at the hole in the ground a curious calm had settled on her. “Yes,” she thought. “Yes, the angels see this and understand it.” She looked at the disturbed earth around the hole, the water dripping from her brow into her eyes, and the ground before her started, ever so gently, to undulate. She tied up her laces, buttoned the cardigan and tried to fill the hole by pushing the earth with her foot. She stopped and left it. She turned to one side and saw Micur’s dead body extended on the ground. The cat’s fur had soaked up the water, her eyes were staring glassily into nothing, her stomach was strangely sagging. “You’re coming with me,” she said quietly to the corpse and lifted it out of the mud. She hugged it close, and thoughtfully, decisively, set off. She followed the course of the canal for a while then turned off before the Kerekes farm, reaching the long, winding path round the Pósteleki estate, which, having cut across the metalled road into town, leads straight past the ruins of Weinkheim Castle, towards the fogbound Pósteleki woods. She tried to walk so that her the lining of her boots rubbed less painfully against her heels because she knew she had a long way to go: she had to be at Weinkheim Manor by daybreak. She was glad she wasn’t alone and Micur was warming her stomach a little. “Yes,” she quietly repeated to herself, “the angels see this and understand it.” She felt a more naked kind of peace now: the trees, the road, the rain, even the night, all radiated calm. “Whatever happens is good,” she thought. Everything was simple at last, forever. She saw the rows of naked acacia on either side of the road, the landscape that vanished into the dark within a few yards of her, was aware of the rain and the stifling smell of mud, and knew for certain that what she was doing was absolutely right. She thought over the events of the day and smiled as she understood how they all connected up: she felt it was neither chance, nor accident, but an unutterably beautiful logic that was holding them together. She also knew she was not alone, since everything and everyone — her father up above, her mother, her siblings, the doctor, the cat, these acacias, this muddy track, this sky and the night below it, all depended on her, just as she depended on everything else. “What a great champion I might become! I just have to keep going.” She squeezed Micur still closer, looked up at the unchanging sky and quickly stopped. “I’ll make myself useful once I’m there.” The sky was slowly beginning to lighten in the east, and by the time the first beams of the sun touched the ruined walls of Weinkheim Castle and streamed through the gaps and the enormous window spaces into the burnt-out, overgrown rooms, Esti had made all the preparations. She laid Micur down on her right, and once she had divided the remaining contents, brotherly fashion, half and half, and had succeeded in swallowing her half with a little rainwater to wash it down, she placed the paper bag on her left side on a rotten board, because she wanted to be sure her brother wouldn’t miss it. She lay down in the middle, stretched out her legs and relaxed. She brushed the hair from her forehead, put her thumb in her mouth, and closed her eyes. No need to worry. She knew perfectly well her guardian angels were already on the way.
The Work of the Spider II
The Devil’s Tit, Satantango
What is behind me still remains ahead of me. Can’t a man rest?” Futaki said to himself in a low mood, when, treading soft as a cat, leaning on his stick, he caught up with the stubbornly silent Schmidt, and the now silent, now howling Mrs. Schmidt at the “personal table” to the right of the counter, and dropped heavily into the chair, letting the woman’s words slip by him (“As far as I can see you must be drunk! I think, it’s gone to my own head a little, I shouldn’t mix my drinks like that, but . . . But you’re such a gentleman . . .”) as he grabbed the new bottle and slid it to the middle of the table with a foolish look on his face, wondering why he should feel so glum all of a sudden, because, really, there was absolutely no reason to be so gloomy, after all, today wasn’t just any old day, because he knew the landlord would be proved to be right and that “they had only a few short hours to wait” for Irimiás and Petrina to arrive and that their arrival would put an end to years of “wretched misery,” break the damp silence, and stop that infernal funereal bell, the one that wouldn’t let people rest in bed in the early morning, so they had to stand there helplessly, dripping with sweat while everything slowly fell to pieces. Schmidt who had refused to say a word ever since they set foot in the bar (and would only mumble, turning his back on “the whole damn thing” in the great din when Kráner and Mrs. Schmidt shared out the money) now raised his head, laid furiously into his wife as she swayed precariously on the edge of her chair (“It’s all gone to your head, not to mention your ass! . . . You’re drunk as a newt”) then turned to Futaki who was just about to fill their glasses. “Don’t give her any more, damn it! Can’t you see the state she’s in?!” Futaki didn’t answer or try to make any excuses, he simply gestured that he totally agreed with him, and quickly put the bottle down again. He had spent hours trying to explain it to Schmidt, but the man just shook his head: according to him, “they’d had their one chance and had blown it” by sitting here in the bar, like “gutless sheep” instead of using the confusion created by Irimiás and Petrina to quietly make off with the money and, better still, “Kráner might have been left here to rot . . .” However Futaki went on about how, from tomorrow on, everything would be different, that Schmidt should just calm down, because they’d really struck it lucky this time, Schmidt simply made a mocking face and kept quiet, and so it all went on until Futaki realized that they could never see eye to eye since while his old chum might be willing to accept that Irimiás was “a real opportunity,” he would not agree that there was no other option: without him (and without Petrina too, of course) they’d just be stumbling about like the blind, without a clue, ranting on, fighting each other, “like condemned horses at the slaughterhouse.” Somewhere deep inside him he did — of course — understand Schmidt’s resistance, since they had spent years cursed with bad luck, though he thought the sheer hope that Irimiás would look after things and that everything would improve as a result might mean that they could finally “make it all work” because Irimiás was the only man capable of “holding together things that just fall apart when we’re in charge.” What would it matter then that an indeterminate sum of money had gone up in smoke? At least they need not feel so bitter about things, watching helplessly, day after day, the plaster falling off the walls, the walls cracking, the roofs sagging; nor would they have to put up with the ever slower beating of their hearts and the growing numbness of their limbs. Because Futaki was certain that neither this week-on-week, month-on-month cycle of failure in which the same but increasingly confused schemes suddenly and inevitably crumbled into ash, nor the ever fainter longing for freedom, constituted a real danger: on the contrary, these were the forces that held them together, because bad luck and utter annihilation were far from the same thing, but right now, in this most recent state of affairs, failure was out of the question. It was as if the real threat came from elsewhere, from somewhere beneath their feet, though its source was bound to be uncertain: a man will suddenly find silence frightening, he fears to move, he squats in a corner that he hopes might protect him: even chewing becomes a torture there and swallowing agony, so eventually he doesn’t even notice that everything around him has slowed, that he is ever more hemmed in, and then discovers that his strategic withdrawal is in fact nothing less than petrification. Futaki glanced around in fright, lit a cigarette, his hands trembling, and greedily drank up what was in his glass. “I shouldn’t be drinking,” he berated himself. “Every time I do I can’t help thinking of coffins.” He stretched out his legs, leaned comfortably back in his chair, and decided to indulge in no more fearful thoughts; he closed his eyes and let the warmth, the wine and noise radiate his bones. And the ridiculous panic that had seized hold of him one moment was gone the next: now he was listening only to the cheerful banter round him and was so moved he could barely hold back a tear because his earlier anxiety had been succeeded by gratitude for the privilege of being able, after all his sufferings, to sit in this hubbub, excited and optimistic, safe from everything he had just had to confront. If, having consumed eight and a half glasses, he had had enough strength left, he would have hugged each of his sweating, gesticulating companions if only because he couldn’t resist the desire to give formal shape to this profound emotion. The trouble was he had unexpectedly developed a violent headache, felt suddenly hot, his stomach was heaving and his brow was covered in sweat. He sank back into himself, quite weak, and tried to alleviate his condition by breathing deeply, so he never even heard the words of Mrs. Schmidt (“What’s with you? Gone deaf or something? Hey, Futaki, you feeling sick?”) who, seeing Futaki massaging his stomach, his face pale and clearly suffering, just waved (“Ah well. Someone else you shouldn’t count on! . . .”) and turned to face the landlord who had long been staring at her with the most lustful expression. “This heat is unbearable! János, do something for heaven’s sake!” But it was as if he hadn’t heard her “in this hellish din’: he simply spread his hands, and without responding to Mrs. Schmidt and her nonsense about the heater, gave her a deeply meaningful nod. Having realized that her efforts had been in vain, the woman sat angrily down and unbuttoned the top button of her lemon-yellow blouse, to the gratification of the landlord who regarded her with pleasure, delighted his patient work had borne the desired fruit. For hours now, secretly, and with commendable diligence, he had been turning up the fire, and finally, with one quick movement, he had raised and slid aside the oil-heater’s control — who, after all, would have noticed that in all the hubbub? — so that Mrs. Schmidt might be “liberated” from, first, her coat and then her cardigan, her charms acting on him with even greater power than before. For some unaccountable reason she had always rejected his advances, his every effort — though he never ever gave up — meeting with failure, and the agonies he suffered through her rejections increased each time. But he was patient and waited, and continued waiting, because he knew from the first time he surprised Mrs. Schmidt at the mill, in the arms of a young tractor-driver — when instead of leaping to her feet and running away in shame, she just carried on, letting him stand there, his throat dry, until the young man finally brought her to a climax — that it would take a long-term campaign to win her. However, ever since it had come to his attention a few days ago, that the bonds between Futaki and Mrs. Schmidt had, so to speak, “loosened,” he was hardly able to conceal his delight because he felt it was his turn now, that this was his opportunity once and for all. Now, weakening at the sight of Mrs. Schmidt delicately pinching the blouse about her breasts and using the garment to fan herself, his hands began to shake uncontrollably and his eyes all but misted over. “Those shoulders! Those two sweet little thighs rubbing against each other! Those hips. And those tits, dear lord!. . . .” His eyes wanted to seize the Entirety at once, but in his excitement he could only concentrate on the “maddening sequence” of the Details. The blood drained from his face, he felt dizzy: he was practically begging to catch Mrs. Schmidt’s indifferent (“It’s like he’s some kind of simpleton . . .”) eyes and, since he was incapable of freeing himself from the illusion that he could sum up every situation in life, from the simplest to the most complex, in one pithy phrase, he asked himself, “Wouldn’t any man spare the oil for a woman like this?” It was all one happy dream. Ah, but if he had known how hopeless it was, how unsuited he was to her desires, he would anxiously have retreated to the store room once again to nurse his fresh wounds, protected there from the hostile looks of others, and escape the gleeful mocking he would have had to face. Because he couldn’t even begin to guess that what he took for the come-on looks of Mrs. Schmidt, apparently aimed at Kráner, Halics, the headmaster, and he himself, and the way she led them into this dangerous whirlplool of desire with her languorously extended limbs, was only her way of filling the time while every inch of her imagination was given over to Irimiás, her memories of him beating at “the grassy cliffs of her consciousness like a roaring sea in a storm” that, combined with exciting visions of their future life together, served to intensify her hatred and loathing of the world around her, a world to which “she must soon bid adieu.” And if, now and then, it happened that she swayed her hips or allowed greedy eyes to feast on the sight of her notable bosom, it was not just to make the remaining, highly tedious hours fly faster, but because it was preparation for the much longed for meeting with Irimiás, at which point their two hearts “might be conjoined in recollected pleasures.” Kráner and Halics (and even the headmaster) — unlike the landlord — were perfectly clear there was no hope for them: their arrows of desire dropped at Mrs. Schmidt’s feet with a hollow sound, but this way, at least, they could remain resigned to the pointlessness of their desire: the desire, at least, would survive without its object. The bald, thin, tall (“but sinewy . . .”) figure of the headmaster, with his disproportionately small head, sat, resentfully, by his glass of wine, behind Kerekes, in the corner. It was pure chance he had heard of the prospective arrival of Irimiás, he, the only educated man in the district! except, that is, for the perpetually drunk doctor. Who do these people think they are? What do they think they’re up to? If he hadn’t eventually had enough of Schmidt and Kráner’s ridiculous unpunctuality and closed up the Culture Center, having placed the projector, as he was bound to in writing, in a secure place, and decided to “catch up with the news” at the bar, he might never have heard about the return of Irimiás and Petrina . . . And what would these people do without him? Who would protect their interests? Did they think he’d accept whatever Irimiás was likely to propose, just as it was, no questions asked? Who else was likely to put himself forward as the leader of such a rabble? Someone had to grasp the nettle, to prepare a plan and organize “all the necessaries” into a proper list! As his first fit of rage passed (“These people are hopeless! What to do? Surely we must be methodical about this, we can’t leave everything from one day to the next . . .”) his attention was divided between Mrs. Schmidt and the detailed working out of such a plan, but he quickly dropped the latter because he was firmly of the opinion, based on long years of experience, that “at any given time one should concentrate only on one given thing.” He was convinced that this woman was different from the others. It could be no accident that she had rejected the crude, animal advances of the other locals, one after the other. Mrs. Schmidt, he felt, needed “a serious man, a man of some substance” not someone of Schmidt’s kind, Schmidt, whose coarse character was not in the least fitted to her thoughtful, simple, yet refined soul. And, “in the last analysis,” it was no wonder that the woman was attracted to him — there could be no question that she was — it was enough to know that she was the only one on the estate who had never tried to make fun of him, not even that time the school was closed down, and that she had continued to address him as “headmaster.” And that must be because the way this woman behaved towards him — quite apart from the issue of attraction, that is to say with clear and obvious respect — showed that she knew he was just waiting for the right moment (which would be when the right people, proper first-rate figures in both human and professional terms, reassumed the official positions they had relinquished to make room for that vulgar horde of clowns in what could only be a strategic, temporary retreat) to renovate the building and “energetically to set about” teaching again. Mrs. Schmidt, of course — why deny it? — was a very good looking woman; the photographs he had of her (he’d taken them years ago on a cheap, but all the more reliable, camera) were far superior, in his opinion, to the “highly provocative” kind he saw in
Füles
, the games and puzzles magazine, with which he tried to chase away those sleepless, endless nights filled with anxiety. . . . But, possibly as a result of the generally recognized effect of yet another emptied bottle of wine, his normally clear, methodical, organized thoughts suddenly failed him: his stomach began to heave, the “veins” in his head started pounding, and he was almost ready to leap to his feet, ignoring the babblings of these primitive “peasants,” and invite the woman to his table, when his excited gaze, roving here and there over the hidden promise of Mrs. Schmidt’s body, suddenly met her own apparently indifferent eyes across the snoring figure of Kerekes slumped over the billiards table, and the shock of her utter indifference seemed to cut right through him, brought a blush to his face and led him to retreat behind the farmer’s vast bulk so that he might be “alone with his shame” or at least to give up the idea, for an hour or so, much like Halics who — having seen that Mrs. Schmidt, though sitting opposite him, had not heard him, or, if she had heard him, simply didn’t want to hear his gripping account of long familiar events — abruptly stopped in mid-sentence and let Kráner carry on shouting and quarrelling with the ever more furious driver, but — “excuse me!” — without him, for he wasn’t going to get himself into a stew about it, and, having resolved this, he swept the cobwebs off his clothes and glared in frustration at the greasy, self-satisfied mug of the landlord as he made eyes at Mrs. Schmidt, because — after considerable thought — he had concluded that, since “shits like him had no place in the world” the profusion of cobwebs must be a new kind of ruse, part of the landlord’s guile. What an utter scoundrel the man was! It wasn’t enough for him to be constantly annoying people with his childish nonsense, now he had to make eyes at Mrs. Schmidt too. Because this woman was his alone . . . or would be soon because even a blind man could see that she’d smiled at him at least twice, and he had, after all, smiled back! . . . Given all this — for it was plain to see, especially with eyes as sharp as his were generally acknowledged to be — that there was no limit to the depths to which this brigand, this shameless exploiter, this disgraceful conman, was prepared to stoop! . . . The man was loaded with money, his storeroom was packed to the rafters with wine, brandy and food, never mind what was in the bar itself, not to mention the car outside, and yet he wanted more! And more, and more. The man was insatiable! And now he had to be drooling over Mrs. Schmidt too! This time he’s gone too far! Halics was made of sterner stuff: he was not going put up with such impertinence! Everyone thinks he’s just some timid little mouse, but that’s just appearances, the outer man. Well, let them bring on Irimiás and Petrina! The inner man was capable of things they could never dream of! He threw back his wine, squinted over at his stony, all-observing wife and reached for a quick refill but, to his greatest surprise — he distinctly remembered there being at least two glassfuls remaining — the bottle was empty. “Someone’s stolen my wine!” he cried and leapt to his feet, glaring, but, not meeting with a single pair of startled, guilty eyes, he grumbled and sat back in his chair. The tobacco smoke was so dense now you could barely see through it: the oil heater pumped out heat, its top glowing bright red, so everyone was pouring with sweat. The noise grew louder and louder because the loudest people, Kráner, Kelemen, Mrs. Kráner, and when she had recovered her strength, Mrs. Schmidt, all tried to shout over the racket and now, on top of it all, Kerekes had woken up and was demanding another bottle from the landlord. “That’s what you think, pal!” Kráner stumbled forward. Glass in hand he was waving his arms about right under Kelemen’s nose, the veins on his forehead standing out, his cataract-grey eyes glittering with menace. “I’m not your “pal,’ ” the driver leapt to his feet, having completely lost his temper. “I’ve never been anyone’s “pal,” understand?!” The landlord tried to calm them from behind his counter (“Just leave it, will you? Your noise is enough to give a man a splitting headache!”) but Kelemen skirted round Futaki’s table and ran over to the counter. “Well, you tell him then! Someone’s got to tell him!” The landlord picked his nose. “Tell him what? Can’t you just forget it, can’t you see he’s upsetting everyone!” But instead of calming down Kelemen grew angrier still. “So you don’t get it either! Are you all stupid?!” he bellowed, and started beating his fists on the counter. “When I . . . yes, I . . . got friendly with Irimiás . . . near Novosibirsk . . . in the prisoner-of-war camp, there was no Petrina then! Understand?! Petrina was nowhere!” “What do you mean nowhere? He must have been somewhere, mustn’t he?” Kelemen was practically frothing at the mouth and gave the counter a great kick. “Look if I say he was nowhere, he was nowhere. Simply . . . nowhere!” “OK, OK,” the landlord tried to pacify him: “Whatever you say; now just be nice, go back to your table and stop kicking my counter to pieces!” Kráner made a face and shouted over Futaki’s head: “Where were you?! And how did you get to be at Novosibirsk or what the fuck? Look pal, if you can’t hold your liquor, stop drinking!” Kelemen stared at the landlord, with an agonized expression, then turned to Kráner, and having shaken his head to convey the right mixture of fury and bitterness, flapped his hand in a rather grand way at the extraordinary ignorance of the man . . . He swayed back to his table and tried to calm himself by sitting in a comfortable position but miscalculated, upset the chair and, dragging it with him, ended up sprawling on the floor. This was too much for Kráner who burst out laughing. “What’s the matter with you. . . . You lunk. . . .You big drunk lunk?! . . . My sides are splitting! And that this . . . this. . . . he . . . he claims. . . . To have been a prisoner-of-war at. . . . No, it’s too much! . . .” His eyes bulging, his hand clutching his belly, he managed to make his way over to the Schmidts’ table, stopped behind Mrs. Schmidt and abruptly gave her a big sudden hug. “Did you hear that . . . ,” he started, his voice still choked by laughter: “This man — this man here — he has been trying to tell me . . . did you hear him?! . . .” “No I didn’t, but in any case I’m not interested!” Mrs. Schmidt snapped back, trying to free herself from Kráner’s spade-like hands. “And you can take your filthy paws off me!” Kráner let that pass and leaned against her with the full weight of his body, then — as if by mere accident — he slid his hand down Mrs. Schmidt’s open blouse. “Ooh! It’s lovely and warm in here,” he grinned but the woman, with one furious movement, freed herself, turned round and, summoning her full power, struck him a heavy blow. “You!” she bellowed at Schmidt when she saw that Kráner hadn’t stopped grinning. “You just sit there! How can you tolerate it?! His hands were all over me!?” With an enormous effort, Schmidt raised his head from the table, but this being the limits of his strength, slumped right back again. “What are you beefing about?” he muttered and started a bout of hiccupping. “Just . . . let. . . . hands . . . go wherever! At least someone is enjoying them . . . selves . . .” But by this time the landlord had sprung into action and went at Kráner like a fighting cockerel. “You think this is some kind of bordello! You think that’s what this place is! A whorehouse!?” But Kráner just stood there, more bull than rooster, not flinching, but looking at him sidelong, before suddenly brightening. “Whorehouse! That’s it precisely, pal! That’s what it is!” He put his arm round the landlord and started dragging him toward the door. “This way, pal! Let’s get out of this shitty hole! Let’s go down to the mill! Now that’s what I call life down there . . . Come on, don’t hang back! . . .” But the landlord succeeded in escaping him, and quickly skipped back behind the bar, waiting, by way of satisfaction, for the “drunken idiot” to notice at last that his statuesque wife had long been waiting by the door, hands on hips, her eyes flashing. “I can’t hear you! Go on, tell me too!” she hissed into her husband’s ear when he bumped into her. “Where do you think you’re going?! Up your mother’s ass?!” Kráner immediately sobered up. “Me?” he looked at her uncomprehendingly: “Me? Why should I be going anywhere? I’m not going anywhere because I want my one and only little darling, and no one else!” Mrs. Kráner disengaged herself from her husband’s arms and carried on, stabbing her finger at him. “I’ll give you “little darling” and no mistake, and you sober up by morning or little darling will give you a black eye you won’t forget!” Though two heads shorter than he was, she grabbed the meek-as-a-lamb Kráner’s shirtsleeve and pushed him down into the chair: “You dare stand up again without my say so, I tell you, you’ll regret it . . .” She filled her own glass, drained it in anger, looked round, gave a great sigh and turned to Mrs. Halics (“A den of vice, that’s what this is! But there’ll be tears and wailing and gnashing of teeth yet, just like the prophet says!”) who was watching events with a grim satisfaction. “Where was I?” Mrs. Kráner picked up her broken conversation, waving an admonitory finger at her husband as he carefully reached for a glass. “Oh yes! In other words my husband is a decent man, I can’t complain, and there’s the truth! It’s just the booze, you know, the booze! If it weren’t for that, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, believe you me, butter wouldn’t melt. He can be such a thoroughly good man when he wants to be! And he can work, you know, work as hard as two men! Well, so what if he has a fault or two, dear God! Who doesn’t have faults, Mr. Halics, my dear, tell me that? There’s no such man anywhere. None that walk the earth, anyway. What? He can’t stand people being rude to him? Yes, that’s the one thing he gets really sore about, my husband. That time with the doctor, that happened because, well, you know what the doctor is like, treating people like they’re his dogs! An intelligent man would let it pass, and pull himself together, because it’s only the doctor, after all, and the whole thing doesn’t amount to much, best ignore it, end of story. In any case he’s nowhere near so bad a man as he seems. I should know Mrs. Halics darling, because don’t I know him through and through, his every little foible, after all these years!?” Futaki put out a careful hand as he leaned on his stick and teetered towards the door, his hair tousled, his shirt hanging out at the back, his face white as lime. With great difficulty he removed the wedge and stepped outside, but the shock of fresh air immediately laid him on his back. The rain was beating down as hard as ever, each drop “a sure messenger of doom,” exploding against the moss-covered tiles of the bar roof, against the trunk and branches of the acacia, on the uneven glimmering surface of the metalled road above and, down below the road, on the space by the door where Futaki’s bent, shivering body sprawled in the mud. He lay there for long minutes, as if unconscious in the dark, and when he eventually managed to relax, he immediately fell asleep, so if it hadn’t occurred to the landlord, some half an hour later, to wonder where he’d got to, to find him and shake him into consciousness (“Hey! Have you gone crazy or something?! Get up! Do you want pneumonia?!”) he might have remained there till the morning. Dizzy, he leant against the wall of the bar, rejecting the landlord’s offer (“Come along, lean on me, you’ll get soaked to the bone out here, so stop it . . .”) and just stood, stupid and drained under the pitiless power of the rain, seeing but not understanding the unstable world around him until — another half hour later — he was utterly soaked and he suddenly noticed he was sober again. He nipped round the corner of the building to piss by an old bare acacia and, while doing so, looked up at the sky, feeling tiny and quite helpless — and while an endless stream of water gushed from him in powerful masculine fashion he experienced a fresh wave of melancholy. He continued gazing at the sky, examining it, thinking that somewhere — however far away — there must be an end to the great tent extended above them, since “it is ordained that all things must end.” “We are born into this sty of a world,” he thought, his mind still pounding, “like pigs rolling in our own muck, with no idea what all that jostling at the teats amounts to, why we’re engaged in this perpetual hoof-to-hoof combat on the path that leads to the trough, or to our beds at dusk.” He buttoned himself up and moved to one side to be directly under the rain. “Go wash my old bones,” he grumbled. “Give them a good wash, since this ancient piece of shit won’t be around much longer.” He stood there, his eyes closed, his head thrown back because he longed to be free of the obstinate, ever recurring desire to know at last, now that he was near the end the answer to the question: “What is the point of Futaki?” Because it would be best to resign himself now, to resign himself to that last moment when his body dropped into the last ditch, to drop into it with the same enthusiastic thud you expect from a baby saying hello to the world for the first time; and then he thought again of the sty and of the pigs because he felt — though it would have been hard to put the feeling into words, his mouth being so dry — that no one ever suspected that the reassuring self-evident providence that took care of us all on a daily basis would (“At one unavoidable dawn hour”) be simply the light flashing off the butcher’s knife, and that that would be at the time when we least expected it, a time when we wouldn’t even know why we should be facing that incomprehensible and terrifying last goodbye. “And there’s no escape and nothing to be done about it,” he thought as he shook his tangled locks, in ever deeper melancholy, “for who could possibly comprehend the idea that someone who, for whatever reason, would happily carry on living for ever, should be kicked off the face of the planet and spend eternity with worms in some dark, stinking marsh.” Futaki had, in his youth, been “a lover of machines” and retained that love even now when he resembled nothing so much as a small drenched