He turned his face away with a proud suffering look. What are they looking at? he strained to think. Perhaps they’re waiting for me to stand up so they can form a line behind me, and I won’t be able to take a step without them because they’re scared I might escape. Oh, to be through with all this! To forget! To play something else, some completely different game! Now, when we are free to play what we like…To forget these years, the gang, the thefts, the anxiety, the entire game, this whole crazy painful rebellion…Let them feel some pain. Somewhere at the back of his mind he wondered why it hurt when people loved you. Every nerve in his body, every sinew, bristled and protested against the demands that he felt to be radiating from the others. They all wanted him exclusively to themselves, he thought. They’re jealous. Filled with pride, he broke into a barely visible smile and raised his head.
One of them has cheated, he thought. The whole game is crooked, has been crooked for a long time. The game was serving someone’s interests. He looked straight ahead like a slave owner, disgusted by what he saw. I have to try and find the word, he thought, the word that once pronounced will blow it all to kingdom come, that will explode the whole point of the gang, or lance it like a blister that you only need to touch with a pin, just one word…I loathe you all, he thought. If I stood up now and started screaming, that I’d had enough, I can’t bear it any longer, they would all think something, their thoughts would be of me, and I want no more of this, I’ve had enough. I want to be free of them, alone; I want new friends. This friendship is a pain. I can’t stand it any more.
He looked up almost as if begging.
We shouldn’t have close friendships, he thought. It’s not my fault. I didn’t ask anyone to be my friend.
He raised his hand and they all looked him right in the eyes. Ernõ’s eyes shone with a cold and mocking light. They all hate me, he thought and a hot wave of contrariness ran through him.
He stood up and stretched sensuously.
Come on, he said simply, I’ve had enough.
T
HEY MADE THEIR WAY THROUGH THE CAFÉ,
Tibor at the head, three of them in a single group behind, Lajos bringing up the rear. The bon vivant bowed to the director. People watched them leave. Friends of Amadé, they said at one of the tables. Sniggering laughter followed them out, looks of curiosity. Ábel felt himself blushing. All the tables were talking about them. They stood at the revolving doors. The door was temporarily jammed: someone was pushing the opposite way. There were eyes everywhere. Perhaps books were better after all. They should have stuck to books: people caused you pain, they infected you. I’d never have believed it could hurt so much. I know I’ve been a burden to him. He’s far more stupid than I am. More stupid? What does that mean? He doesn’t feel the excitement I feel when I meet someone, when I search through my memories to locate a voice I once heard. Father will be asleep now. Etelka might be awake, she may be sitting in my room. She loves me. Ernõ told me she was in love with me. What was the cobbler saying about Tibor’s mother? There was no deterioration in her condition overnight. If she should die tonight the colonel would arrive the next day or the day after…I must speak to Havas. Why did he call me as well? We will ask him to hand back the silver and we’ll give him a signed note to promise that, should we survive and grow to be adults, we will settle the debt. I’ll write him a letter and after I’m dead he can give it to Father or to Etelka. Six months or so and I will have forgotten all this. Perhaps I will still be alive and might, one day, write something. That hurts too, but not as much as living with other people does. Here we stand now with everyone staring at us. They look contemptuous: the editor is looking at us, waving us over. Perhaps they know Amadé is waiting for us. There is something disgraceful about going around with Amadé. They don’t like Amadé. They smirk when they see him and whisper when his back is turned. Now they’re smirking at us too. Perhaps they think we are off to the brothel. That’s something of a tradition here. Amadé would lead us. That wouldn’t be too bad, actually. Big Jurák, the bodybuilder, visited the brothel last week and said they had a new blond girl down from the capital, and that she showed him her license in which the police specify what streets they may use for soliciting, where they may smile and invite men over, how at the opera and at the National Theater they may only enter the second circle, and how much of the licensed girl’s income may be deducted by the landlord for rent. That would make good reading. One should read everything, everything people have written, and see everything they have built and constructed, everything. Some time, perhaps quite soon, I want to write down all I’ve ever seen or heard, write it down in a great big book, yes, including everything about this town, Tibor, Amadé, Etelka, and them all; everything I see and hear right up to the beginning of my book. Not a bad thing to do. What’s up now? Why aren’t we moving? Tibor hates me. Ernõ hates me too. I think we all hate each other. I loathe Amadé and Lajos gets on my nerves with his stupid questions. He changes subjects all the time without any warning. He gets the wrong idea about everything. I don’t want Tibor to hate me. I know he’s stupid but I still don’t want it. I’m utterly unlike him, and yet his beauty sets him apart. He can’t help it that I suffer on his account. If Tibor were my friend I’d go away with him and take great care to discuss everything with him, even if I knew he didn’t understand or wasn’t so much as listening. Perhaps he would help me if I gave him a present, something special. I’ve more or less poured out my heart to him. I have nothing I can give him. What would he say if I told him he was beautiful? Maybe he doesn’t know. I didn’t know it till recently. I must forget the fact that he’s beautiful, and once I do that I’ll be free of them. Everyone can go his own way and we can forget each other. I should pay a visit to the brothel. If I knew, if everything worked out…Perhaps Amadé will take me there now. Get a move on. The prima donna is looking this way too, laughing and beckoning. Maybe she fancies Tibor. What to do if Amadé should introduce us to the prima donna? Tomorrow is free. Everyone finds Tibor attractive. There was an army major in the street yesterday who turned round to look at Tibor. Everyone likes him. Nobody likes me…Well, maybe Etelka. It isn’t good for a person to love somebody. I shall be alone soon. I feel ill in the afternoons. I must find out who cheated. I must be free of Amadé. And of Ernõ and Havas too. I don’t want to dream about him any more. I must be free of Tibor as well. When does a person become an adult? The revolving door turned. They stepped out into the street.
T
HE SQUARE SPREAD OUT BEFORE THEM, FESTIVELY
lit with a thick patina of moonlight, the white walls of a few wide and squat baroque houses swelling and sparkling like the icing on a cake. The music whose rhythm had been swept with them through the revolving doors dissolved and faded in the solemn silence. The church formed one end of the square, oppressing the nearby low houses with its enormous weight. A light was burning behind one of the great casement windows of the bishop’s palace. The chestnut trees around the dried-up fountain in the small park in the middle of the square raised their compact little candles.
The air was mild, as heady as on a summer night. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere. The theater, with its high stage loft and graceless proportions, rose above the park like an abandoned barn, its dark, cobwebbed windows squinting out, half-blind. The town was in the deep first phase of sleep. A train gave a piercing whistle somewhere near the station, as if to remind the populace that it was all very well sleeping and burying your head in the duvet, trains would continue to come and go with their freight of silent passengers. The town was clearly indifferent to such reminders. Before the barracks two hard-helmeted guards went on switching posts at the gate.
The bishop sat by the lighted window in a high-backed armchair reading the paper. A glass of water and a box containing a wafer with antipyrine stood on a little table next to him. Occasionally he extended his bony hand towards the glass and wet his lips with a tiny gulp, then read on distractedly. The bishop slept in an iron camp bed, like the kaiser. Above the simple bed hung an ivory crucifix; by the wall a maroon-colored velvet hassock. The drapes of the window were of the same heavy maroon velvet. The bishop was a poor sleeper. He went to look for a book in one of the bookcases, running his bony finger along the gilt-lettered spines as if touching the keys of an organ, seeking for a note perfectly fitted to the moment. He tipped a number of volumes forward, then pushed them all back, picking out instead a thick black tome that took some effort to lift. The fragile figure took some time conveying the heavy volume to his bedside table, set it down beside the breviary and the prayer beads, opened it, and examined a few illustrations. The book was by Brehm, about the lives of the animals. The bishop was very old. He sat down on the edge of the iron bed with a soft groan and, with a great sigh, removed his buttoned shoes.
Every window of the hospital was lit: it was like a busy, prosperous factory on an industrial estate where work continued through the night. And at the end of the street, under the bridge, the great steam mill was still pumping. They made their slow way across the square, drawing enormous shadows behind them in the bright light. They stopped in the middle of the park where the harsh raw smell of elder from somewhere in the bushes assaulted their senses: it was as if it were physically touching them. They lit cigarettes and stood quietly, without speaking. That sprinkling of houses, lacquered by the yellow light, had been the backdrop to the theater of their childhood. They knew precisely who lived in which house; they knew the sleepers behind the windows. The gilt lettering on the bookseller’s sign had worn away. It was in these shops with their low doors that they had bought pencils, books, collars, hats, sweets, fretsaws, battery-powered flashlights, all on their fathers’ accounts, please chalk it up. They never had to pay for anything here, their fathers enjoyed apparently boundless credit, for it seemed to extend throughout their childhood. Behind the lowered blinds of the chemist’s window, through a small square-shaped aperture, a sharp beam of light showed the chemist to be awake, probably with company, ladies from the officers’ quarters, a few officers, whiling away the small hours with a little
cognac médicinal.
The striking of the clock broke the silence so violently the air was still ringing with its music after it had stopped, as if someone had smashed a very delicate glass. They stood around the elder tree, a cigarette in one hand, the other arranging their clothes as they proceeded about their business. The one-armed one stuck his cigarette between his lips, his hand being required elsewhere.
Tibor started whistling quietly. They walked beside the railings on soft, frail grass. The cobbler was sitting beside a taper in his little hovel, an illustrated almanac in his lap, reading the lives of the generals in a gentle undertone, syllable by syllable. From time to time he stopped reading, looked straight ahead of him, and ran his hand through his beard, moaning quietly. In the civic library, among its thirty thousand volumes, on the moonlit floor of the great hall, the rats were excitedly feasting. The old town had been infested by rats and a rat-catcher was summoned by the council. He locked himself in the theater for a few hours and by the time he had finished there were hundreds of dead rats lying on the stage, in the auditorium, and along the corridors. Ábel could remember the rat-catcher who spent a mere afternoon in town, ridding the main public buildings of rats and mice, then disappeared along with his secrets and the council fee. Someone said he was Italian.
A
GOOD SPRING MOON TENDS TO MAGNIFY WHATEVER
it illuminates. It would be very hard to give a proper scientific explanation for this. All objects—houses, public squares, whole towns—puff themselves up with spring moonlight, swelling and bloating like corpses in the river. The river dragged such corpses through town at a run. The corpses swam naked and traveled great distances down from the mountains, down tiny tributaries that flowed into others greater than themselves in the complex system of connections; they floated rapidly down on the spring flood heading towards their ultimate terminus, the sea. The dead were fast swimmers. Sometimes they kept company, arriving in twos and threes, racing each other through town at night; the river being aware of its obligations to the town, going about its business of transporting the dead at night with the utmost speed. The corpse-swimmers had come a long way and spent the winter hibernating under the frozen river until the melting ice in the spring allowed them to continue down the flood towards the plains. There were many of them and they had been there some time. Their toes and bellies protruded from the water, their heads a few inches under the mirroring surface, the wounds on their bodies, their heads, and their chests, growing ever wider. Sometimes they got caught up on the footings of the bridge where millers fished them out the next morning, examining with curiosity the official death certificates enclosed in waterproof tin capsules hung about their necks. There must have been a lot of them because they kept turning up, every week all through spring. If they happened to wind up in town, the editor of the local paper would publish whatever details the millers had managed to glean from the capsules.
The pine woods surrounding the town had been devastated by a storm at the beginning of the war, but the spring wind still wafted the smell of resin into town, and on warm nights it blended with the air to produce an atmosphere thick like pine-scented bath salts. At the corner of fishmongers’ alley the butcher and his two daughters slept in a single cubicle, the door to the premises left open, the moonlight lying across the sleeping bodies, and all along the wall the great swelling animal carcasses hanging on hooks. On the marble counter lay a calf’s head, its eyes closed, black blood dripping from its nostrils onto the slab. The old solicitor who was the last in town to go to bed each night sat in his study in a cherrywood armchair, the scarlet broadcloth of which was secured at the edges with a speckling of white enameled tacks. He had a clutch of dusty glass cases on his lap and was examining his butterfly collection. Several thousand butterflies lined the walls in similar glass cases, the solicitor himself having captured them with his white butterfly net and put them in a stoppered bottle of potassium cyanide. He carried the cyanide bottle and the butterfly net around with him everywhere, in the back pocket of his long frock coat, into chambers, and into courtrooms too. He had lost two sons in the war. Their photographs stood on his desk in copper frames tied round with black ribbons of mourning. But he did not mourn for them any more because he was old, because it was already two years since they were killed, and because in two years a person can get over everything painful. He was currently examining a row of Cabbage Whites through his magnifying glass, taking great care over the process. A tobacco sieve lay on the table, and a stump pipe. The solicitor had been a lepidopterist for seventy years now: you could see him in the warm seasons of each year at the edge of town, his white beard swaying, the long tails of his frock coat floating behind him as he skipped over furrowed fields holding his net aloft, chasing butterflies.