Ernõ alone harbored reservations.
“What are you up to?” he asked in a flat voice.
The actor threw the cigarette butt away. “Now to business,” he said and sprang to his feet.
H
E SAT
Á
BEL DOWN AT THE MIRROR, LEANED
back, crossed his arms, one finger to his lips, and examined him carefully. He went over to the window, leaned against the sill, and thought about it a little more. He indicated with a gesture, as a painter might, that Ábel should turn his profile towards him. Then, finally having solved the problem, he leapt over to the table, tore off a tuft of black hemp and held it next to Ábel’s face, shook his head, gave a whistle, and with two fingers turned the boy’s head this way and that in a deeply contemplative mood, sighing
aah
every so often.
“You ask what I’m up to,” he chattered, vaguely distracted. “I’m coming to grips with things, preparing a little party. We do what we can!”
He picked out a grayish wig with a side parting and ran a brush through it.
“You have aged, my child. You have distinctly aged recently. Suffering adds years.”
He carefully brushed the wig into a center parting.
“I thought it might be appropriate as a kind of valedictory gesture,” he said. “We could, of course, go and visit the girls too. Or make our way over to the Petõfi café.”
He wound a little cotton wool round the end of a match and looked for some glasses.
“Now face the mirror. I’m beginning to see what you will look like in thirty years’ time. Remember me then.”
With a sudden movement he clapped the wig onto Ábel’s head the way a hypnotist might put to sleep some volunteer from the audience using no more than a simple hand gesture. Ábel was immediately transformed. An old man stared back at him and the rest of the gang from the mirror. Aged brows clouded over startled eyes. The actor began to attend to the eye region with his stick of charcoal.
“What I’ve imagined is a little celebration…a celebration of us all that you won’t forget. We did once talk of appearing on stage together in full costume, and everyone would say whatever came into his head. A kind of show for art lovers only…with everyone taking responsibility for himself. We’ll give them a proper show all right.”
So saying he stuck a small graying goatee on Ábel’s chin, tore it off again, and tried muttonchop whiskers instead.
“The moment is here. You can have the run of the entire costume cupboard. We have the stage complete with scenery. The auditorium is empty. We are performing only for ourselves. I have ensured that we will be left in peace till the morning.”
He gave a smile of mild amusement. He settled on the muttonchops and stuck two gray streaks of hair next to the ears. The sweet smell of mastic filled the room.
“Well, one could do worse,” he said examining his work on Ábel with satisfaction. “The lips are narrow…let’s add a little disappointment. And some doubt. And here…do excuse me, darling, I’m almost done…a little pride, a little canniness.”
Each time his hand moved Ábel changed a little more, becoming ever less recognizable. They stood behind him and watched.
“It’s not magic, it’s not witchcraft,” the actor declared as with a few very rapid strokes of the brush and the charcoal he emphasized one or two features and blurred some sharp lines.
“We haven’t sold our souls to the devil…”
He ran a brush right through the eyebrows.
“It’s just manual skill and expertise. Wind the clock forward thirty years and…here we are!”
He stuck the towel under his arm and the comb by his ear and made a great bow, like Figaro in the opera.
“My compliments to you, gentlemen. Next please.”
Ábel stood up uncertainly. The little circle behind him backed away. The actor was already considering Ernõ.
“Cold heart, green bile,” he chanted. “Sting of conspirator, serpent’s tongue, you can already see the vague trace of a hump on his back. You will always be freckled.”
He pressed Ernõ into the chair in front of the mirror. Ábel stood in a corner, his arms folded. He felt a great calm. He was wearing a mask and that was reassuring. A man could live behind a mask and think what he liked. Tibor watched him with a superior smile. They laughed and surrounded him, the one-armed one sniffing curiously at Ábel, taking a tour of him. The mask looked solid and reliable. Tibor stared at him with round eyes. Ábel laughed and he could see from his friends’ faces that his laugh had changed too: they were looking at him with serious expressions, with genuine admiration.
“Let us hurry nature on a bit,” said the actor, who was giving his full attention to Ernõ now. “Let us correct her. That’s all it is. I merely bring out what is mature in you,” he said, fitting a red wig on Ernõ’s head. “If he looks like an adult, well, let him be an adult,” and so saying he covered the freckled band above Ernõ’s upper lip with a deep-red mustache.
“Let him bear the consequences of his adulthood. The brush in a master’s hand is led by instinct, but he has his three advisers: Learning, Observation, and Experience. You are a hunchback, I tell you.” With both hands he seized Ernõ’s temples, bent his head back, and stared deep into his eyes.
“The head of a monster. I shall now strip you of your skin and replace it with a new one, the shed skin of a snake.” He pressed down Ernõ’s eyelids with his thumbs and gave the rest of the gang a wink in the mirror.
A
S ONE AFTER ANOTHER THE ACTORS RETIRED TO
the “dressing room,” they examined each other suspiciously, but not one stood in front of the mirror. It is extraordinary how quickly people get used to their new appearances. It was a shame the costumes didn’t quite fit them: some were too big and their hands and feet were lost in the folds of their garments. But within a few moments they had grown taller and fatter. Ernõ stood at the table, leaning on his stick. His sharp hump rose under his ample old-fashioned cloak; his red hair fell in straggly locks across his brow from beneath his tall top hat; his old-fashioned frock coat and silk knee breeches hung awkwardly on his thin frame. Next to his nose a thick, hairy wart sprouted. His heavily ringed tiny eyes danced nervously, blending confusion, resentment, and obstinacy, and his mouth was twisted into a bitter grimace of suffering.
“Life has taught me to prize truth, the truth above all,” said Ábel, his voice low and severe.
“Button your trousers,” replied Ernõ.
They had dressed somewhat carelessly in their hurry. Ábel drew the red robe close around him. Béla, a half-naked Spanish sailor with a headscarf and locks flirtatiously plastered next to his ears, sat on the windowsill, hands on hips. The one-armed one was lost in the folds of his toga. He sat on the table, dangling his bare sandaled feet, a band round his head. He stared straight ahead, with a haughty, wounded look, and the pride of Mucius Scaevola who had sacrificed one arm for the state but had his own independent opinion on everything.
“To me, Rome is…,” he was saying.
They paced restlessly up and down in their narrow cage. They were puzzling out their as yet unknown roles and trying hard not to notice Tibor.
Colonel Prockauer’s son was leaning into the mirror, as charmed by what he saw there as Narcissus had once been. Two long blond bunches of hair hung in front of his shoulders, the high-waisted silk dress tight around him as he raised the long loose train skirt with one hand and crossed his silk-stockinged legs with their lacquer-shod feet. Under the deep décolletage his well-formed breasts, created by the actor out of two towels, heaved and rose with each breath he took. His arms, his neck, and chest were sticky with thick white powder. The actor’s fingers had magically elongated his eyelashes, and his adolescent spots were masked by a pink blusher the actor had gently brushed and puffed across his cheeks.
You couldn’t really tell, not at a glance anyway, whether he was woman or girl. Ernõ circled him warily, raising his top hat and muttering incomprehensible compliments to him. Tibor responded with a smile, then immediately turned back to re-enter the spell of the mirror. He tried a few steps, holding his skirt high. The wig was hot and smelled foul.
“I’m sweating like a pig,” he declared in a deep voice that was not his own.
Ernõ offered his arm. The one-armed one cut in.
“I have only one arm, sweet damsel,” he said, “but it is strong and you can cling to it.”
Ábel opened the window. Hot air poured in along with the heavy milky scent of earth. They stood silently, the open window reminding them of reality, of the houses in the square, and of people who might be spying on them from afar. They looked at each other and couldn’t bring themselves to laugh. They were overwhelmed by the consciousness of their utter complicity, the tremulous joy of belonging, the delight of pulling a huge ridiculous face at the sleeping world, behind its unsuspecting back, perhaps for the last time. For the last time perhaps the actor held together the ropes that bound them. Their shared memories, the spirit of rebellion, everything that united them: their common hatred of a world as incomprehensible and unlikely as their own, as ignorant of itself and as false, all flashed before their eyes. And the ties of friendship too: its anxieties and longings, the sad effects of such anxiety still evident in their eyes. Tibor raised his skirt and spun round, astonished at himself.
“You know,” he said in genuine surprise, “a skirt is not really as uncomfortable as you’d think.”
A sailor entered the room, a fat man whose stomach bulged beneath his striped sleeveless vest, over his wide blue canvas trousers, his shoes of Muscovy leather, and blocked the doorway with his girth. A pipe dangled from his lips and his waxed hair, brushed forward under his loose-fitting cap, was plastered greasily across his forehead. He was squinting. He stood there awkwardly, took the pipe out of his mouth, and waved to them to follow him, then turned off the light.
H
E CLUNKED ABOUT ON THE ECHOING BOARDS
in his noisy shoes and turned on the spots. Light exploded in their eyes, both from below and from the side, and behind the light a deep dense darkness bulged towards them, the impenetrable cavernous darkness of the auditorium accompanied by the funereal mothball smell of canvas sheeting. The actor went here and there, entirely at home, an engineer attending to business, barely noticing them, operating handles, checking resistors, subtly, fascinatingly, modifying the light until eventually it was all concentrated in one area of the stage, merging in a pool of heat and color, a gentle glow at the edges of which ends of ropes, canvases, lighting boards, and stage flats faded into the murk. He tugged one rope and a clutch of other ropes collapsed towards him, of which he grabbed one. Enormous colored sails turned slowly with lazy flaps while the sailor, pipe in mouth again, set about the ropes and colored sails in preparation for the coming storm. A wide terrace complete with palms and steps leading up to it descended before them, blocking their view, and some faded rose bowers followed, swirling with dust. Wait for the storm, the sailor muttered indifferently, then hurried off into the wings, setting a distant wind to screech and whinny through the bowers. A few harsh claps of thunder rang out over the howling storm. The actor solemnly stepped out from behind a dusty cactus, rubbed his hands, lit his pipe, and looked about him shaking his head.
“I don’t think this is quite right either,” he said, and waved away the Riviera scene. “Stand center stage, would you?”
The scenery swam aloft, disappearing in the heights, and the rose bowers jealously followed the sunlit landscape. Plain white walls appeared as if from nowhere. The conjurer threw his rope up towards the ceiling and the stage miraculously narrowed. Suddenly they found themselves prisoners in the cabin of a ship. Behind portholes the wind was still buzzing, but was now joined by the slap of waves. Two low lights appeared in the wall and a narrow door opened beside one of the portholes. A lamp with a faded shade dropped like a stone from above. The sailor dragged at a knot of ropes with both hands and a rhomboid ceiling lowered over the cabin. The shaded lamp came on. Then they were all working, the only sounds being the actor’s brief words of command and the wailing of the wind that Ábel now controlled. It did not take as much skill to whip up a storm as people tended to think. A single movement was enough to induct Ábel into the secret.
“Drive them on, Aeolus!” he said as he pushed a claw-footed table center stage. “You are master of the four great planetary winds.”
It was a surprisingly easy task mastering the four great planetary winds. The one-armed one rolled a barrel up against the wall. They carried sea chests, most probably containing ship biscuits and water. Aeolus whipped his servants on, their painful howling extending over the ocean.
“All hands on deck!” the actor bellowed. “Ladies first! The sea chests go round the table. Secure the portholes!”
He stopped.
“One time the Negroes leapt into the sea…,” he began. “No, I’ve already told you that.”
He kicked a rosebush left over from the previous scene through the cabin door. Loud thunder shook the air, the boards trembled under their feet. Ábel was laying the storm on mercilessly.