He reached the high street. The city shimmered with weak light like an invalid’s bedroom. Couples were still strolling in crowds down the avenue: in the theater the performance had just begun. Some officers were standing around in front of Béla’s father’s delicatessen, chatting with the hunchbacked chemist who had an intimate knowledge of the town and its affairs. They were sizing up the girls and the chemist was helping them by revealing their interesting little secrets. Now and then they burst out in a storm of laughter. They were on leave, wounded, each one wearing one of the uniforms of the front. The chemist covered his mouth with his hand.
Opposite the theater, in front of the café, stood the actor leaning on an advertising pillar. The one-armed one was with him, loudly explaining something. When Ábel reached them the actor greeted him with a profound bow.
“We were waiting for you, my angel,” he said.
T
HE ACTOR HAD ARRIVED IN TOWN WITH THE
company in the early autumn, saying he had had a contract in the capital first, but the theater had closed. He was forty-five years old but claimed to be thirty-five. Not even the gang believed this though they eagerly swallowed everything else he told them. He tended to play comic, dancing roles but referred to himself as a ballet instructor. The contract laid down that the company was obliged to supply divas and leading men each season for a few highlights from popular operettas. It was the comedian-dancer’s task to teach them the appropriate elements of ballet.
He had put on weight, developing a proper paunch and jowls, a rare thing in the world of comedians and dancers. The audience liked him because he included a lot of current gossip in his act. He wore a wig of light chestnut color. His head was large and equine. His jaw was thrust forward and he was so near-sighted that he couldn’t see the prompter’s box, but he refused to wear glasses out of vanity, not even in real life, as he put it.
His stage name was Amadé: Amadé Volpay was how they billed him. He spoke with his mouth full as if chewing on a dumpling. He wore generously fitting, light suits that skillfully disguised his fatness as did his corset that was laced so tightly when he was on stage that his face was practically red, so that he didn’t look half as fat as he did in life. It was as if his girth were no more than some kind of misapprehension that existed between him and the world at large, and he never ceased talking about it. He spoke eloquently and at length to both intimates and strangers in the effort to persuade them that he was not fat. He produced precise measurements and medical tables showing average proportions to prove he was as slender as a flamingo and that his figure was in all respects the manly ideal, his belly swelling as he did so because, in his passion, he forgot to hold it in.
Bearing this in mind he would walk down the street like a ballet dancer, practically mincing. He propelled his substantial body along on points, with delicate, genuinely airy steps, as if it weighed nothing, as if he feared being blown away by the next gust of wind. He always shaved his jowls to the same dazzling pale blue sheen. He would then apply powders and creams to them, and arrange them carefully in the space allowed by his folded-over collar as if they were a discrete and separate part of his body. Occasionally he would touch them tenderly with his short, pudgy, remarkably pale fingers to check that nothing was awry, that everything was where it ought to be.
The actor spent all day on the street, on the most frequented stretch of the high street, between the church and the café, from which he could keep an eye on the side entrance to the theater. You could see him there at all hours, patrolling up and down, usually holding forth and surrounded by a gaggle of people. It was only after supper that he retreated to the middle picture window of the café where anyone passing was obliged to acknowledge his presence and from which position he, in his turn, could keep track of everyone. He didn’t play cards. He didn’t drink. He appeared to avoid his fellow actors. His clothes carried the sweet but choking smell of cinnamon. It was this smell that emanated from him to the outside so that anyone passing him would know that Amadé Volpay was around.
He wore two rings on his fleshy fingers, one signet ring with a red stone and a wedding ring. He never denied that he was Jewish and unmarried. The rings were only for show.
T
HE GANG HAD ALREADY FORMED BY THE TIME
the actor first appeared in town. There is in the development of every human association a period of jelling, a process of crystallization of whose laws we remain ignorant. They had in fact been in the same class since fourth grade. Ernõ was the only one who had spent eight full years at the institute. Béla, the grocer’s son, had shuttled between three schools before arriving there; he was a whole year at a school in the capital. He had been educated at boarding establishments, in places where there were thirty boys to a dormitory. Even in childhood he had worn a sword with his house uniform, a ceremonial smallsword to be precise. Tibor arrived in the fourth grade when the colonel was posted to the town. Ábel entered the school in the third grade having been taught at home before that.
There had been fifty of them in the fourth grade. Only seventeen remained to graduate. The war, of which they never spoke, silently took its toll of their numbers, secretly, half-unnoticed, as it tends to do in such remote nooks of life, even in a grade at the middle school of a provincial town. When war broke out they were entering fifth grade and there were still fifty of them. Now, four years later, only seventeen remained to graduate. Many of them simply failed to reappear. The peasant boys went home to take their fathers’ places. Many couldn’t afford the school fees. Many more just failed to attend without telling anyone why. Perhaps they were sick. Perhaps they had died. Many did indeed die, and their bodies were borne out with flags of mourning and wailing choirs. About a million had died on the front in those years, it was said. Or was it two million? There were even some who claimed three million. But they lived their obscure and remote lives behind the lines, among the mountains, the town wrapped in silence as in cotton wool. The war filtered through to them down channels no wider than a hair’s breadth. These hairbreadths sucked the life from the town as if driven by an invisible vast pump that replaced it with the stench of war, a peculiar, pestilent gas that arrived directly from the front, diluted a little, thinned out, but percolated through with enough strength to stiffen limbs, to fry lungs, and to destroy the weak. You couldn’t positively say this or that student was a victim of the war. But when the war broke out there were fifty of them and by the time they posed for the class photograph there were seventeen.
For two years, until seventh grade, the members of the gang took no notice of each other. They lived separate lives in close proximity to each other. Tibor gave himself over to his passion for sport. Ábel devoted himself to literature. Ernõ was wholly absorbed by his studies. It is very hard to say what brought them together, especially at this rather early age when there are no mutual concerns that help to develop friendship. You couldn’t say that the members of the gang ever liked each other. Not even that they felt any common sympathy. Béla sat at the back of the class and was, for some years, one of the low achievers, and had hardly exchanged a word with Ábel or with Tibor. Ábel did occasionally spend time with Ernõ but was always dismissed on a minor trifle, some hardly registered, unspoken rebuff that for a long time separated him from the cobbler’s boy. Generally it is not mutual feeling that unites people. On the contrary, people usually find the process of being thrown together painful and embarrassing. It is not a particularly amusing experience for two people to find themselves in company.
For three years Ábel sat in the middle of the third row from the door. Ernõ was stationed behind him, Tibor to his right in the front row. That’s how they spent three years. One day at the beginning of the fourth year Ábel was staring blankly ahead, bored with physics, slowly surveying the rows of other desks when his gaze settled on Tibor who had his head in his hands oblivious to everything, absorbed, reading a book under the table. It wasn’t that Ábel was particularly taken by the sight, nor was he the subject of some miraculous instantaneous illumination. Indeed, his first response was indifference and he decided to shift his attention elsewhere. But what he found, astonishingly, was that he couldn’t look away for long. His eyes wandered over the room, aware of the sleepy hum of fat autumnal bluebottles trailing their gross little bodies over the window. He couldn’t look away. Once he had convinced himself that it was Tibor’s head that was demanding his attention, he turned round to regard him with renewed interest. Was there something about Tibor he had failed to notice before? Maybe he had combed his hair a little differently today or was wearing a strange new tie. Ábel examined him carefully. He couldn’t see anything particularly different. Tibor’s hair was cropped short in military fashion. He was wearing a khaki-colored outfit and a green bow-tie. His fingers were automatically soothing his brow. He kept reading. At one point he put a finger to his nose, picked something, and rubbed it between his fingers absently while turning the pages with his other hand under the desk. For all Ábel could see he was fully absorbed in his book. He was probably reading the sports annual. Something about horses or football. Ábel watched him, trying to understand what it was that was so fascinating about him. He considered Tibor’s ears. They were small and pointed, close to his head. The fingers with which he was stroking his brow were bent like hooks yet the hand itself was soft and round. Ábel looked at his nose, Tibor’s face in quarter profile. The face had clear angular lines. He was the softer mirror image of Colonel Prockauer, only some thirty years younger and a touch freckled. Ábel gazed at him thoughtfully, and frowned. Later it would seem as if everything he had previously known about Tibor was brought into focus in these few seconds. For instance he knew that he had freckles on his neck as well as his face: they were there where his blond hair made a narrow arch above the topmost vertebra. The marks looked as if flies had dirtied that very pale skin of his.
Now Tibor moved, pushed the book under the desk, and looked around inquiringly, returning to the world. For a moment Ábel could see those fleshy, sulky lips head-on. They indicated a state of bored annoyance. He felt shaken for a second. Out of the blue, without even thinking about it, the words
How beautiful he is!
came to him. These four words decided the matter. Then Tibor bent down again and Ábel could only see the crown of his head, the boy between them hiding him from view. This caused him such pain it was as if someone had forcefully robbed him of a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was a bodily pain occasioning a terrible sense of loss, the kind a dog feels when you snatch his half-eaten dish from him, or what anyone might feel when a breathtaking landscape is suddenly obscured by a tunnel. He felt such pain and fury it made him want to groan out loud. There were practically tears in his eyes as he shifted slightly to one side and rose a little from his seat in order to see Tibor, now, immediately, now while the beauty lasted, for one second too late and it would be gone. And it was true: for when they met at break and he could look calmly, with even a certain curiosity, into Tibor’s eyes, he was disappointed to discover that he felt nothing at all.
But when he was alone in his room that afternoon, while he was drawing something, just as he had pushed away the drawing board and was starting to fiddle with the brush, somewhere between the two movements the feeling returned, much more powerful now than it had been in the morning. It was so strong that his whole body ached as he shifted: it reared up at him as he bent over the desk. He is beautiful, he cried out, half audibly. It was a wholly intangible feeling. It was a kind of happiness he had never even dreamt of. There was a sweetness to it, a taste that brought tears to his eyes. It made him shake. He is beautiful: Tibor is beautiful, he repeated with bloodless lips, feeling a touch chilly. His hand was cold too, bloodless and trembling. He stood up and ran about the room a little, avoiding the furniture. There were tears in his eyes: he felt dizzy and would have liked to hold on to something. A desire for oblivion flooded through him. This was the ultimate thing, this beauty. There was nothing else. The world could offer no more. The tame world he had so far inhabited was split wide open, its contents ran out: he stood naked and shivering.
A week later the gang was formed. It takes hardly a moment to form a crystal from the appropriate miscellaneous elements: you cannot know what process preceded the formation, just as we cannot know what drives certain people together, people who hitherto knew nothing of each other, but who immediately form a solid body under conditions that create more anxiety than guilt ever does: so it is with parents and children, so with lovers, and so with murderers. They launched forth from the four corners of that room, each greedy for the others, as if they had been waiting years for precisely this, as if they had a thousand things to communicate and share. Within a week the four of them were as one though they had hardly said a word to each other before. Béla, on whom they had slightly looked down, was practically breathless in the effort to join them before it was too late. Once all four were together in a nook of the corridor they looked into each other’s eyes and started to speak. Ernõ took off his pince-nez and they suddenly fell silent. Tibor stood in the center. He started to say something but the words stuck in his mouth. The other three were looking at him. They waited, silent a while, then all four slowly shuffled back to their places.