its tiny window, the one single point in the darkness to guide him. He was ridiculously close now yet it seemed the filtered light was not getting any closer but, rather, moving away from him. “It’s nothing, it will pass, I’m just not feeling well,” he declared and stopped for a moment. He looked up at the sky and the gale slammed a fistful of rain into his face: what he needed more than anything right now was help. But the weakness that suddenly overcame him left just as suddenly. He turned off the metalled roadway and there he was, right in front of the bar door, when a faint voice below him called out: “Mr. Doctor!” It was the youngest of the Horgos children, little Esti, clinging to his coat. Her straw-blonde hair and her cardigan hanging down to her ankles were completely soaked through. She hung her head but carried on clinging to him as though she were not doing it just to amuse herself. “Is that you, little Esti? What do you want?” The little girl made no reply. “What are you doing out here at this hour of the night?” The doctor was shocked for a moment then tried impatiently to free himself, but little Esti clung on to him as though her life depended on it and would not let him go. “Let go of me! What’s the matter with you! Where’s your mother?!” The doctor seized the girl who suddenly pulled her hand away only to grab hold of his sleeve and to continue standing there in silence, looking down at the ground. The doctor nervously struck her on the arm to free himself but stumbled on the mud scraper and, however he waved his arms, finished up full length in the mud. The little girl was frightened and ran to the bar window, watching him, ready to run as the vast body rose and moved towards her. “Come here. Come here at once!” Esti leaned against the windowsill then pushed away and ran off down the metalled road on little duck feet. “That’s all I need!” the doctor muttered furiously to himself, then shouted after the little girl. “That’s all I needed! Where are you rushing off to?! Stop now, stop! Come back here at once!” He stood before the bar door not knowing what to do, to go about his errand or to go after the child. “Her mother is in there drinking, her sisters are whoring at the mill, her brother, well . . . who knows which store he is robbing in town right at this minute, and she is running around in the rain with only a thin dress on . . . the sky should fall in on the lot of them!” He stepped onto the metalled road and shouted out in the darkness. “Esti! I won’t harm you! Have you gone mad?! Come back here at once!” There was no answer. He set off after her and cursed himself for leaving his house in the first place. He was soaked to the skin, he wasn’t feeling well anyway, and now this half-wit clinging child! . . . He felt too much had happened to him since he stepped out of his home and that everything was now mixed up in his head. Bitterly, he decided that all the order he had patiently, painstakingly constructed over the years was proving highly fragile, and it gave him even more pain to realize that he himself — despite his big strong constitution — was also on the verge of collapse: look, just one short walk to the bar (“And I took a rest too!”) which really was no great distance, and here he was, out of breath, tight in the chest, his legs weak and all strength gone from his body. And the worst thing was that he had been rushing round mindlessly, swept this way and that without the faintest idea why he should be pelting like a lunatic after a child down the metalled road in the driving rain. He shouted one last time in the direction the child might have been going then stopped, furious, admitting he’d never catch her anyway. It was high time he pulled himself together. He turned back and was astounded to observe that he seemed to have moved a long way from the bar. He started toward it but after a couple of steps the whole world went dark in an instant and he felt his legs sliding in the mud; for a brief moment he was aware that he was falling to the ground and rolling somewhere, then, finally, he lost consciousness. It took him a lot of effort and a long time to come to himself. He couldn’t remember how he had got here. His mouth was full of mud and the earthy taste suddenly made him feel sick. His coat too was covered in mud, his legs had stiffened because of the cold and damp but curiously enough the three cigarettes he had begged from the Horgos girls, that he was firmly gripping in his fist so they should not get wet, were perfectly intact. He quickly tucked them back in his pocket and tried to stand up. His legs, however, kept slipping on the sides of the muddy ditch and it was only after a sustained effort that he managed to get back on the proper road. “My heart! My heart!” The thought flashed through his mind and he grabbed at his chest in fear. He felt extremely weak and he knew he had to get to the hospital as quickly as he could. But the rain made that impossible: ever new waves of it were beating down at an angle to the road with unrelenting power. “I must rest. Find a tree . . . or go on to the bar? No, I have to rest somewhere.” He left the road and took shelter under a nearby old acacia. He drew his legs under him so he shouldn’t have to sit directly on the ground. He tried hard not to think about anything, but stared stiffly ahead of him. A few minutes passed like this, or it might have been hours, he couldn’t tell. In the east, the horizon was slowly brightening. The doctor watched the light’s ruthless progress across the field, his spirit broken but still nursing some vague hope. The light gave him hope but he was afraid of it too. He would have loved to be lying down in a warm, friendly room, under the tender gaze of pale-skinned young nurses, with a bowl of hot soup before him, spooning it into his mouth, then turning to the wall. He noticed three figures proceeding down the road parallel to the road-sweeper’s house. They were a long way off, hopelessly far off, he couldn’t hear them, only see them, but he could tell that the smallest figure, a child, was passionately explaining something to one of them, while the other adult followed a few strides behind. When they finally came level with him he recognized them: he tried crying out but the wind must have blown his voice away because they took no notice at all but continued on their way to the bar. By the time he started to wonder at seeing these two big-time rogues, people he thought were dead, right in front of him, he had forgotten it all: his leg began to hurt with a sharp pain and his throat was dry. Morning found him on the road heading for town. He had no desire to turn back to the bar. He reeled rather than walked, full of confused thoughts, frightened by voices that broke every so often above him. A crowd of rooks seemed to be hanging around, following him; it distinctly looked like they were on his tracks, never letting him out of their sight. By the afternoon, when he reached the fork to Elek he didn’t have enough strength to get up on the cart, it was left to the homeward-bound Kelemen to haul him onto the thoroughly wet straw behind the seat. He felt light headed and the admonitory words of the driver kept echoing through his skull: “Doctor, sir, you shouldn’t have! You really shouldn’t have!”
The Work of the Spider I
Turn the fire on!” said Kerekes, the farmer. Autumnal horse-flies were buzzing round the cracked lampshade, describing drowsy figures of eight in its weak light, time and again colliding with the filthy porcelain, so that after each dull little thud their bodies fell back into the magnetic paths they themselves had woven, to continue this endless cycle, albeit on a tight closed circuit until the light went out; but the compassionate hand that had the power to undertake such action was still supporting the unshaven face. The landlord’s ears were full of the sounds of the rain that never seemed to want to stop, and he was watching the horseflies through sleepy eyes, blinking and muttering: “Devil take the lot of you.” Halics was sitting in the corner by the door on an iron-framed if rather unsteady chair, his waterproof coat buttoned up to the chin, a coat that, if he wished to sit down at all, he had to raise to groin level because the fact was the rain and wind had not spared either him or his coat, disfiguring and softening them both, Halics’s whole body felt as though it had lost definition and, as for his coat, it had lost whatever resistance to water it once had nor could it protect him from the roaring cataract of fate, or, as he tended to say, “the rain of death in the heart,” a rain that beat, day and night, against both his withered heart and defenseless organs. The pool of water around his boots was growing every wider, the empty glass in his hand was growing heavier, and however he tried not to hear, there, behind him, his elbows propped on the so-called “billiards table” and his sightless eyes turned to the landlord, was Kerekes, slurping his beer slowly through his teeth, then greedily swallowing it with great glugs. “I said turn it on . . .” he repeated, then turned his head slightly to the right so he should not miss a single sound. The smell of mold rising from the floor at the corners of the room surrounded the vanguard cockroaches working their way down the back walls, with the main cockroach army following them to swarm across the oily floor. The landlord responded with an obscene gesture, meeting Halics’s watery eyes with a sly, conspiratorial smile, but hearing the farmer’s words of warning (“Don’t point, shit face!”) he shrank back in the chair with fright. Behind the tin-topped counter a poster spotted with lime bloomed at a crooked angle on the wall while on the far side, beyond the circle of light emanating from the lamp, next to a faded Coca-Cola ad stood an iron clothes-hook with a dusty forgotten hat and work-coat dangling from it, the coat stiff as an airborne statue; anyone glancing at it might have mistaken it for a hanged man. Kerekes started off in the direction of the landlord, an empty bottle in his hand. The floor creaked under him and he pitched slightly forward, his enormous body looming above everything else. For a moment he was like a bull springing over a fence: he seemed to occupy every available inch of space. Halics saw the landlord disappear behind the stockroom door and heard him quickly shoot the bolt and, frightened as he was, because something had actually happened, Halics took some consolation in realizing that, for once, he did not have to take shelter behind the towering sacks of artificial fertilizer that years ago had been piled one on top of another and had never been moved, or between rows of garden implements and containers of foul-smelling pigswill with his back up against the ice-cold steel door, and he even felt a certain flutter of joy, or maybe just a smidgeon of satisfaction at the thought that the master of all that store of glittering wine was now cowering behind locked doors, desperately waiting for some reassuring sound, his life threatened by the powerfully built farmer. “Another bottle!” Kerekes angrily demanded. He pulled a fistful of paper money from his pocket, but having moved too fast he dropped the money — which, after a moment of dignified drifting in the air, landed right next to his enormous boots. Because he was aware — if only briefly — of the rules governing the actions of other persons, the degree to which they were predictable or unpredictable, and knowing what he himself should most certainly do, Halics rose, waited a few seconds to see whether the farmer would bend down to retrieve the cash, cleared his throat, then went over, took out his own last few dimes and opened his palm. The coins clinked as they ran all over the place, then — as the very last one finally settled — he knelt down on the floor to gather them up. “Pick up my hundred too,” Kerekes boomed at him and Halics, knowing the ways of the world (“ . . . I can see right through you!”), silently, obediently, slavishly, picked up the money and handed it over, all the time brimming with hatred. “It was just the denomination he got wrong! . . .” he said to himself, still frightened. “Just the denomination.” Then, at a gruff question from the farmer (“So, where are you?!”) he sprang to his feet, brushed his knees down and hopefully, since he couldn’t be certain whether the farmer was addressing the landlord or him, leaned against the bar at a safe distance from Kerekes, who — was it possible? — appeared to be hesitating, so that when Halics finally spoke his frail, hardly audible voice (“Well, how long do we have to wait?”) reverberated in the silence and could not be retracted. Nevertheless, obliged as he was to be standing near someone as physically powerful as Kerekes and having distanced himself as far as he could from the words he had so carelessly uttered, he felt he had forged some vague comradeship with Kerekes, the only sort of which he was capable, not only because of his easily wounded self-regard but because his very cells protested against the possibility that he should behave differently from any other coward: terrified complicity was the only available option. By the time the farmer slowly turned to him the obligation to remain loyal, something that had long been part of Halics’s character, had given way to something else: he felt oddly moved in discovering that a stray remark of his should have hit the mark. It was so unexpected. He wasn’t prepared to find that his own voice — the voice in which he had just spoken, a voice not in the least prepared — could deflect and, to some degree, neutralize the farmer’s clear surprise, so he quickly, as a sign of immediate and unconditional withdrawal, added: “Though of course, it’s nothing to do with me . . .” Kerekes was beginning to lose his temper again. He lowered his head and registered the fact that there before him on the counter stood a row of washed wine glasses: he had just raised his fist when, at that precise moment, the landlord emerged from the stockroom and stood on the threshold. He rubbed his eyes and leaned against the doorframe, the two minutes spent at the back of his emporium being sufficient to wipe away his sudden and, when you came to consider it, ridiculous, panic (“How aggressive he is! Damn animal!”), so the damage to his self-esteem could be only skin-deep after all, nothing really serious, and, if the big farmer did get under his skin, it was simply “another stone dropped down a bottomless well.” “Another bottle!” Kerekes demanded, and put the money down on the counter. And seeing how the landlord was still keeping a careful distance, added, “Don’t be afraid, you idiot. I won’t hurt you. Just stop pointing.” By the time he returned to his chair at the “billiard table” and sat down carefully for fear of someone pulling the chair out from under him, the landlord’s chin was propped on his other hand, his whey-colored foxy eyes clouded over with uncertainty and a sort of tangible longing, his fingers long, refined, and polished with long years of laboring on the periphery of that same palm, his shoulders fallen in, his belly a conspicuous paunch, not a muscle of his body moving apart from the toes inside his well-worn shoes: all in the close warmth of perpetual servility — the kind of servility that renders the skin torpid and the palm sweaty — shining from his white-as-chalk face. Then the lamp that had been hanging motionless from the ceiling began to sway and its narrow aureole of light — no bigger than a slice of bread — that left most of the ceiling and the tops of the walls in shadow, offering only enough light to see the three men, the cookies, the dried noodles for soup, the counter covered with wine glasses and bottles of
pálinka,
the chairs, the dead flies — gave the bar the air of a ship in a storm in the early evening dusk. Kerekes opened the bottle, dragged the glass over with his free hand, and sat there for some minutes without moving, bottle in one hand, glass in the other as if he had forgotten what to do next. Now that everything had gone quiet, in the absolute dark of his blindness he felt as if he were deaf too, that everything around him had become weightless, right down to his own body, his ass, his arms, and the legs spread wide below him, and that any capacity he might have had in the realms of touch, or taste, or smell, had also deserted him, leaving nothing but the throbbing of blood and the calm workings of his organs to disturb his utter lack of consciousness, the mysterious core of his anxiety having withdrawn into its own infernal darkness, into the forbidden territories of the imagination, from whence it was obliged, time and again, to break free. Halics didn’t know what to make of the situation, and shifted here and there in his excitement because he sensed Kerekes was watching him. It would have been too presumptuous to interpret his unexpected immobility as a gradually unfolding form of invitation; on the contrary, he suspected that the dead eyes turned towards him constituted a threat, but however he racked his brains he couldn’t remember having committed any offense for which he ought to bear immediate responsibility, all the more so since in the hard hours, when “a man of sorrows” like him was plunged deep into the liberating waters of self-knowledge, he had confessed to himself that his comfortable life, which had slipped uneventfully into his fifty-second year, was as insignificant in the great rank of competing lives as cigarette smoke in a burning train. This brief, unlocated sense of guilt (was it in fact guilt at all? since if it was true, as the saying goes, that “once the flame of guilt has gone out it’s no more than a dead match,” the minimal light remaining is easily identified with some problem in the conscience) vanished just at the moment it might have penetrated his soul more deeply, which had entered on the next phase of hysteria, affecting the roof of his mouth, his throat, his gullet and stomach, all because of something he had prepared himself for far earlier, that being the arrival of the Schmidts and the settling of what was “due to him.” The cold bar only made the situation worse, and a single glance at the wine-racks piled behind the landlord’s low stool set his hysterical imagination spinning into a whirlpool that threatened to swallow him completely, especially now that, finally, he heard the glug of wine being poured into the farmer’s glass, and couldn’t resist looking, some greater power drawing his eyes to the tiny momentary pearls of poured wine. The landlord listened, his eyes cast down, as Halics’s boots creaked across the floor and didn’t even look up when he felt his sour breath, feeling no desire at all to confront the beads of perspiration on Halics’s face, because he knew that, for the third time that evening, he’d give in. “Look friend,” Halics carefully cleared his throat, “just a glass, just one!” and he gave the landlord a perfectly sincere look, even raising a finger. “The Schmidts will be here, you know, very soon. . . .” He raised the newly filled glass with closed eyes, very slowly, and drank in small sips, his head tipped back and, once the glass was empty, he kept a little in his mouth so the very last drop might dribble down his throat. “Neat little wine . . . ,” he smacked his lips in confusion as he gently, somewhat indecisively, put the glass down on the counter like one living in hope right down to the very last moment, then slowly turned away and grumbled to himself (“Pig swill!”) before ambling back to his chair. Kerekes leaned his heavy head on the green baize of the “billiards table,” the landlord, who was bathed in lamplight, scratched his numb ass then started flapping at the spider webs with his dishcloth. “Halics, listen! You hear me? . . . You! What’s going on out there?” Halics stared uncomprehending, straight in front of him. “Where?” The landlord repeated it. “Oh, in the cultural center? Well,” he scratched his head, “nothing in particular.” “OK, but what’s playing there now?” “Ach,” Halics waved, “I’ve seen it at least three times. Actually I just took my wife and left her there and came straight over.” The landlord sat back on his stool, leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “At least tell me what film they’re showing tonight!” “That whatsitsname . . .
Scandal in Soho
.” “Really?” nodded the landlord. The table beside Halics made a creaking noise and the rotting wood of the bar gave a slow sigh like the quiet easy movement of an old carriage wheel over the buzzing chorus of horseflies: it conjured the past but it also spoke of perpetual decay. And as the wood creaked the wind outside, like a helpless hand searching through a dusty book for some vanished main clause, kept asking the same question time and again hoping to give a “cheap imitation of a proper answer” to the banks of solid mud, to establish some common dynamic between tree, air and earth, and to seek through invisible cracks in the door and walls the first and original sound, of Halics belching. The farmer was snoring on the “billiards table,” the saliva trickling from his open mouth. Suddenly, like a distant rumble on the horizon, from a vague shape that is slowly getting closer, though you can’t quite tell whether it’s a herd of cows being driven home, a school bus, or the sound of a marching military band, from the deep pit of Kerekes’s stomach rose a quite unclassifiable grumble that eventually reached his lips and issued in words like “. . . .bitch” and, “really” and “or” and “more” though that was all they could make out. The grumbling culminated in a single movement, a blow aimed at someone or something. His glass tipped over and the pool of wine on the baize cloth assumed the shape of a flattened dog before absorbing various other shapes into itself as it soaked in, ending up in a form of uncertain character (but had it soaked in? or had it simply run between the strands of cloth to lie on the surface of the riven boards to establish a series of isolated and conjoined pools . . . though none of this was of the least significance as far as Halics was concerned because . . . ). In any case Halics made a hissing a noise, “Damn your drunk mug!” and shook his fist in the direction of Kerekes, helpless with rage, as if not wanting to believe his eyes, turning to the landlord to mutter a furious explanation: “Now the bastard spills the stuff!” The latter gave Halics a long significant look before finally glancing over at the farmer, not in fact directly at him, but in his general direction, just enough to register the damage. He appraised the inexperienced Halics with a supercilious smile then, giving several little nods, changed the subject. “What a huge ox of a man, a real animal, eh?” Halics stared in confusion at the mocking light glimmering under the landlord’s half closed eyelids, shook his head and took a long look at the bull-like figure of the prostate farmer. “What do you think?” he numbly asked. “How much does a beast like him need to eat?” “Eat!?” the landlord snorted. “He doesn’t eat, he feeds!” Halics went over to the bar and leaned against it. “He eats half a pig at a sitting. You believe me” “Sure, I believe you.” Kerekes gave a loud snore and that shut them up. They looked at the enormous, immovable body, the big bloodshot head and the muddy boots protruding from under the shadowy reaches of the “billiards table” in astonishment and fear, the way people take stock of a sleeping predator, doubly assured of safety by the bars and by sleep itself. Halics was seeking — and indeed had found! — a minute or a second’s worth of comradeship with the landlord, if only in the way a caged hyena and a freely circling vulture discover a warm, mutual unselfconscious partnership that welcomes any disaster . . . But they were awakened from this reverie by an enormous clap, as if the sky was cracking open above them. Immediately after the bar was lit by a great flash, so you could practically smell the lightning. “That was really close,” Halics would have remarked, but at the same time someone started beating powerfully at the door. The landlord leapt to attention but didn’t immediately rush over because, for a moment, he was sure there must be some connection between the lightning and the knocking at the door. He only gathered himself together and set to open up when whoever was outside started bellowing. “So it’s you and . . . ?” The landlord’s back was in the way so Halics saw nothing at first, then two big heavy boots became visible then a windcheater, and finally Kelemen’s puffy face hove into sight, his soaked driver’s hat perched on top. Halics stared at him, his eyes wide. The new arrival cursed as he shook his coat free of water and threw it angrily on top of the stove before turning on the landlord who was still struggling with the bolt and had his back to him. “Are you all deaf in here! There I am trying to wrestle with that bloody door, almost struck by lightning, and nobody comes to open it!” The landlord retreated behind the counter, poured a glass of