pálinka
and lit a cigarette. “What a business!” he muttered under his breath. It was getting toward evening so he rose to put the lamp on. Suddenly he felt extremely dizzy but was still capable of making his way over to the light switch. He lit the lamp but was incapable of taking a single step back. He stumbled over something, struck his head forcefully against the wall, and collapsed where he stood, right under the switch. When he recovered consciousness and finally succeeded in hauling himself upright the first thing he noticed was a little trickle of blood from his forehead. He had no idea how much time had passed since he lost consciousness. He returned to his usual place. “It seems I am very drunk,” he thought then drank quite a small measure of
pálinka
because he did not fancy a cigarette. He stared ahead of him with a somewhat foolish expression: recovery was proving difficult. He adjusted the blanket on his shoulders and looked out into the pitch darkness through the gap. Even though his senses were dulled by the
pálinka
he was aware that certain aches and pains were struggling to enter his consciousness, much as he was determined not to acknowledge them. “I have suffered a slight blow, that’s all.” He thought back to the conversation with Mrs. Kráner in the afternoon and tried to decide what to do next. He couldn’t set out now, in this weather, though his
pálinka
needed urgent replenishment. He did not want to think about how he would replace Mrs. Kráner — that was if she did not change her mind — since it was not only the problem of provisions but all those truly insignificant yet necessary little tasks round the house that would have to be addressed, not at all a simple matter, and that was why, for the time being, he concentrated on trying to work out a practical plan regarding what to do in the face of other unexpected events (tomorrow would have been the day for Mrs. Kráner to see the landlord) and get hold of enough drink to see him through until “a proper solution” could be found. Obviously he had to speak with the landlord. But how could he send him a message? through whom? Taking into account his current condition, he did not want to even consider the possibility of setting out for the bar himself. Later, however, he thought it best not to leave the task to anyone else, since the landlord was bound to water the liquor and would later defend himself by claiming that he didn’t know that “the doctor was the customer.” He decided to wait a little, collect himself, and then to make his own way there. He tapped his brow a few times and dabbed at the wound with water from the jug on the table using his handkerchief. This did not relieve his headache in the slightest but he did not dare risk the whole enterprise by looking for medication. He tried, if not to sleep, then at least to snooze a while, but was obliged to keep his eyes open because of the terrible images that rushed in on him once they were closed. He used his feet to push out the ancient old genuine leather suitcase he kept under the table and pulled a few foreign magazines out of it. The magazines — bought at random, much like his books — came from the second-hand bookshop at Kisrománváros, the smaller Romanian borough in town, the one owned by the Swabian, Schwarzenfeld, who boasted of his Jewish ancestors, and who once a year, in the winter months when the tourist season was over and he closed the shop for lack of trade, would set off on a round of business trips to the greater and lesser communities of the area, at which time he never failed to visit the doctor in whom he was delighted to meet “a man of culture it was an honor to know.” The doctor paid no great heed to the names of the magazines preferring to look at the pictures in order — as now — to pass the time. He particularly enjoyed looking through photo spreads of the wars in Asia, at scenes that never seemed very distant or exotic to him, and which, he was convinced, were photographed somewhere nearby, to the extent that one or other face seemed so familiar he would spend a long, anxious time trying to identify it. He arranged and ranked the best pictures, and regular examination made their various pages familiar so he quickly found his favorites. There was one special picture — though the rank of favorites did change in due course — an aerial shot, that greatly appealed to him: an enormous, ragged procession winding over a desert-like terrain leaving behind them the ruins of an embattled town billowing smoke and flames, while ahead, waiting for them, there was only a large, spreading dark area like an admonitory blot. And what made the photograph particularly worthy of note was the equipment appropriate to a military observation post that — redundant at first sight — was just about visible in the bottom left-hand corner. He felt the picture was important enough to deserve close attention because it demonstrated with great confidence, in real depth, the “all but heroic history” of a perfectly conducted piece of research focused on essentials, research in which observer and observed were at an optimal distance from each other and where minuteness of observation was given particular emphasis, to the extent that he often imagined himself behind the lens, waiting for the precise moment when he might press the button on the camera with absolute certainty. Even now it was this picture he had picked up almost without thinking: he was familiar with it down to the most minute detail but every time he looked at it he lived in hope of discovering something he hadn’t yet noticed. However, despite wearing his glasses, it all looked a little blurry to him this time. He put the magazines away and took “one last nip” before setting out. He struggled to put on his fur-lined winter coat, folded the blankets and left the house, swaying a little. The cold fresh air hit him hard. He tapped his pocket to check he had his wallet and notebook, adjusted his wide-brimmed hat and started uncertainly in the direction of the mill. He could have chosen a shorter route to the bar but that would have meant passing first the Kráners’ then the Halics’s house, not to mention the fact that he was bound to bump into “some dumb ass” near the Cultural Center or the generator, someone who would detain him against his will and engage him in some crude or sly form of interrogation, disguised with so-called gratitude to satisfy the person’s repulsive curiosity. It was hard making progress in the mud and what was worse he could barely see his way in the darkness, but proceeding through the backyard of his house he found his way to the path that led to the mill and he was more or less familiar with that, though he hadn’t recovered his sense of balance so he swayed and tottered as he went, as a result of which it often happened that he miscalculated a step and bumped into a tree or stumbled over a low bush. He fought for breath, his chest heaving, and there was still that tight feeling around his heart he had endured since the afternoon. He walked faster to reach the mill as quickly as he could so that he might shelter from the rain, and he no longer tried to avoid the lurking puddles along the path, plowing through them ankle-deep if he had to. His boots were clogged with mud, his fur-lined coat was growing ever heavier. He shouldered open the stiff doors of the mill, sank down on a wooden chest and struggled for breath for several minutes. He could feel the blood pulsing through his neck, his legs were numb, his hands trembled. He was on the ground floor of the abandoned building, with two storeys above him. The silence was overwhelming. Ever since anything half-way useful had been removed from here, this vast, dark, dry hangar rang with its own emptiness: to the right of the door there were a few old fruit crates, an iron trough of uncertain function, and a crudely banged-together wooden box saying IN CASE OF FIRE without any sand in it. The doctor removed his boots, took off his socks and squeezed the water from them. He searched for a cigarette but the pack had soaked through and there was not one fit to smoke. The weak light that filtered through the open door was enough to see the floor and the boxes like patches of semi-dark distinguished from the greater darkness. He seemed to hear the scurrying of rats. “Rats? Here?” he marvelled and took a few steps forward into the deep core of the hangar. He put on his glasses and peered, blinking, at the dense darkness. But there was no noise now, so he went back for his hat, socks and boots and put them on. He tried to strike a match by rubbing it against the lining of his coat. It worked and, by its briefly flickering light, he could make out the bottom of the stairs rising three or four yards away by the far wall. For no particular reason he took a few hesitant steps up them. But the match soon burned down and he had neither reason nor desire to repeat the exercise. He stood for a moment in the darkness, felt for the wall, and would have made his way back down to set out for the road to the bar when he heard a quite faint noise. “It must be rats after all.” The scurrying sound seemed to be coming from a long way off, somewhere at the very top of the building. He put his hand to the wall again and, tapping it, began to climb the stairs once more, but he had only climbed a few steps when the noise grew louder. “That’s not rats. It’s like brushwood snapping.” Having reached the first turning of the stair, the noise, though low, was now clearly that of snatches of conversation. Right at the back of the middle storey, about twenty to twenty-five meters away from the stiff statue-like figure of the listening doctor, two girls were sitting on the floor around a flickering brushwood fire. The fire brought their features into sharp relief and produced great vibrating shadows on the high ceiling. The girls were clearly involved in some deep conversation, looking not at each other but into the dancing flames rising from the glowing brushwood. “What are you doing here?” the doctor asked and moved towards them. They leapt up in fright but then one of them gave a relieved laugh. “Oh, is that you, doctor?” The doctor joined them by the fire and sat down. “I’ll warm myself a bit,” he said. “That’s if you don’t mind.” The two girls sat down with him, their legs beneath them and giggled quietly. “I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?” asked the doctor, not looking up from the fire. “Mine have turned to sponge in the rain.” “Of course, take one,” answered one of them. “It’s there, by your feet, next to you.” The doctor lit it and slowly blew out the smoke. “The rain, you know,” one of the girls explained. “It’s what Mari and I were grumbling about just now: no work alas, business is bad” — she gave a hoarse laugh — “so, you know, we’re stuck here.” The doctor turned to warm his side. He had not met the two Horgos girls since he had dismissed the elder one. He knew they spent the day at the mill, indifferently waiting for a “customer” to appear or for the landlord to summon them. They rarely ventured onto the estate. “We didn’t think it worthwhile to wait,” the elder Horgos girl continued. “There are days, you know, when they turn up one after the other, and other days when there’s no visitors, nothing happens and we just sit here. There are times when we almost leap on each other, the two of us, it’s so cold. And it’s scary being here by ourselves. . . .” The younger Horgos girl gave a raucous laugh. “Oh we’re so scared!” and lisped, like a little girl, “it’s horrible here, just the two of us.” This elicited a brief shriek from both of them. “May I take another cigarette?” the doctor grumbled. “Take one, of course you may take one, why should I say no, especially to you?!” The younger one was falling about with still more laughter and, imitating her sister’s voice, repeated, “Why should I say no, especially to you! That’s good, that’s well said!” Eventually they stopped their giggling and stared, exhausted, into the fire. The doctor was enjoying the heat and thought to stay a little longer, to dry out and warm up, then pull himself together and set out for the bar. He stared dozily into the fire, faintly whistling as he breathed in and out. The elder Horgos girl broke the silence. Her voice was tired, hoarse and bitter. “You know, I am over twenty now, and she will soon be twenty herself. When I think about it — and that’s what we were talking about just now when you turned up — I wonder where all this is leading us. A girl gets fed up. Have you any idea how much we can put away in savings? Can you imagine?! Ah, I could kill people sometimes!” The doctor gazed at the fire in silence. The younger Horgos girl stared indifferently straight ahead of her: her legs were spread and she was leaning back on her hands, nodding. “We have to support the little criminal, the idiot child Esti, not to metion mother, though she can’t do much apart from complain about this or that, or ask where we have stowed the money, and demand we give her the money, the money this and the money that — and what’s with them all!? Believe me, they are quite capable of robbing us of our last pair of panties! And as for us finally going into town and leaving this filthy hole, if you could only have heard the abuse hurled at us! What on earth did we think we were doing, blah, blah, blah? . . . The fact is we are utterly fed up with this life, isn’t that right, Mari, haven’t we had enough of it?” The younger Horgos waved a bored hand. “Forget it! Don’t rock the boat! You either go or stay! You can’t say anyone is keeping you here.” Her older sister immediately rounded on her. “Yes, you’d like it if I pissed off, wouldn’t you? You’d do all right here by yourself! Well, that’s exactly why I’m not going! If I go, you go too!” Baby Horgos made an ugly face, “OK, but don’t moan so much, you’ll make me cry already!” Horgos the elder had a reply ready but could not get to the end of it because her words were lost in a volley of throaty coughing. “No sweat, Mari, there’ll be cash enough here today, cash by the sack full!” she broke the silence. “Just see what’s going to happen here pretty soon, just see if I’m not right!” The other turned to her, annoyed. “They should have been here ages ago. Something doesn’t smell right about this, that’s my feeling.” “Aah, leave off. Don’t bother your head about it. I know Kráner and all the rest. He’ll be here right enough, panting and chasing tail, the same as ever.” “You don’t imagine he’s going to cough up the lot? All that money?” The doctor raised his head. “What money?” he asked. The elder Horgos made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Forget it, doc, just sit there and make yourself warm, and don’t pay any attention to us.” So he sat a while longer then begged two more cigarettes and a dry match and started down the stairs. He got to the door without any trouble: the rain was slanting in through the gap. His headache was a little better and he no longer felt dizzy in the slightest, there was only the tightness in his chest that didn’t want to go away. His feet quickly grew accustomed to the dark and felt perfectly at home knowing which way to go along the path. He made rapid progress in view of his condition, only rarely brushing against a branch or some shrub; so he pressed forward, his head held to one side so the rain wouldn’t beat at it so hard. He stopped for a couple of minutes under the eaves of the shed before the weighbridge but soon went on in a fury, silence and darkness before and behind him. He cursed Mrs. Kráner aloud and dreamed up various forms of revenge all of which he immediately forgot. He was tired again and there were moments he felt he simply had to sit down somewhere or else he would collapse. He turned down the metalled road that led to the bar and decided not to stop until he’d got there. “It’s a hundred steps no more, that’s all that remain,” he chivvied himself. There was a hopeful light filtering from the bar door and through